# COMIC: Towards A Compact Image Captioning Model with Attention Source: [COMIC: Towards A Compact Image Captioning Model with Attention]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-25T21:38:30.146Z Authors: Jia Huei Tan, Chee Seng Chan, Joon Huang Chuah Published: 2019-03-04T05:09:16.000Z ## Abstract Recent works in image captioning have shown very promising raw performance. However, we realize that most of these encoder-decoder style networks with attention do not scale naturally to large vocabulary size, making them difficult to be deployed on embedded system with limited hardware resources. This is because the size of word and output embedding matrices grow proportionally with the size of vocabulary, adversely affecting the compactness of these networks. To address this limitation, this paper introduces a brand new idea in the domain of image captioning. That is, we tackle the problem of compactness of image captioning models which is hitherto unexplored. We showed that, our proposed model, named COMIC for COMpact Image Captioning, achieves comparable results in five common evaluation metrics with state-of-the-art approaches on both MS-COCO and InstaPIC-1.1M datasets despite having an embedding vocabulary size that is 39x - 99x smaller. The source code and models are available at: https://github.com/jiahuei/COMIC-Compact-Image-Captioning-with-Attention ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()