International Journal of Engineering
Trends and Technology

Research Article | Open Access | Download PDF
Volume 74 | Issue 3 | Year 2026 | Article Id. IJETT-V74I3P112 | DOI : https://doi.org/10.14445/22315381/IJETT-V74I3P112

ViT-NARCap: Image Captioning with Vision Transformer Context-Aware Nucleus Sampling and Roberta Re-Ranker


Bhargavi Polepalli, Praveen Kumar Sekharamantry, Konda Srinivasa Rao

Received Revised Accepted Published
01 Jul 2025 13 Oct 2025 17 Nov 2025 28 Mar 2026

Citation :

Bhargavi Polepalli, Praveen Kumar Sekharamantry, Konda Srinivasa Rao, "ViT-NARCap: Image Captioning with Vision Transformer Context-Aware Nucleus Sampling and Roberta Re-Ranker," International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT), vol. 74, no. 3, pp. 153-168, 2026. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.14445/22315381/IJETT-V74I3P112

Abstract

Image captioning is a semantically correct and linguistically competent attempt to produce textual captioning based on visual art, but it is difficult as it is restricted by contextual knowledge and language variety. The traditional encoder-decoder systems that are usually founded on CNN encoders and RNN decoders have problems with long-range dependency estimation, exposure bias, and repetitive captioning. In response to these shortcomings, this paper suggests a superior image captioning network that combines a Vision Transformer encoder and a normalized auto-regressive fine-tuned Transformer decoder. The Vision Transformer is one of the better techniques for capturing hierarchical visual representations and global spatial relationships. In contrast, the transformer-based decoder holds together coherent and context-aware sentence generation. To increase further the diversity and fluency of captions, the idea of nucleus sampling is used in the process of decoding, and a reranking mechanism based on the use of RoBERTa is presented to fine-tune the selected captions in accordance with semantic relevance. The results of the experimental Analysis of the benchmark datasets indicate that the offered approach tends to be superior to the current ones in standard measures, such as BLEU, CIDEr, ROUGE-L, and METEOR, which proves its efficiency and strength.

Keywords

Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Image Captioning, Nucleus Sampling, and Vision Transformer.

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