Attribute value extraction plays a crucial role in enhancing e-commerce search, filtering, and recommendation systems. However, prior visual attribute value extraction methods typically rely on both product images and textual information such as product descriptions and titles. In practice, text can be ambiguous, inaccurate, or unavailable, which can degrade model performance. We propose Mixture of Image Captioning Experts (MICE), a novel augmentation framework for product attribute value extraction. MICE leverages a curated pool of image captioning models to generate accurate captions from product images, resulting in robust attribute extraction solely from an image. Extensive experiments on the public ImplicitAVE dataset and a proprietary women’s tops dataset demonstrate that MICE significantly improves the performance of state-of-the-art large multimodal models (LMMs) in both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings. An ablation study validates the contribution of each component in the framework. MICE’s modular design offers scalability and adaptability, making it well-suited for diverse industrial applications with varying computational and latency requirements.

Existing zero-shot product attribute value (aspect) extraction approaches in e-Commerce industry rely on uni-modal or multi-modal models, where the sellers are asked to provide detailed textual inputs (product descriptions) for the products. However, manually providing (typing) the product descriptions is time-consuming and frustrating for the sellers. Thus, we propose a cross-modal zero-shot attribute value generation framework (ViOC-AG) based on CLIP, which only requires product images as the inputs. ViOC-AG follows a text-only training process, where a task-customized text decoder is trained with the frozen CLIP text encoder to alleviate the modality gap and task disconnection. During the zero-shot inference, product aspects are generated by the frozen CLIP image encoder connected with the trained task-customized text decoder. OCR tokens and outputs from a frozen prompt-based LLM correct the decoded outputs for out-of-domain attribute values. Experiments show that ViOC-AG significantly outperforms other fine-tuned vision-language models for zero-shot attribute value extraction.