Belal Shoer

Whispers from the Neighbors: Rethinking Caption Consensus as Inference-Time Evidence for Vision-Language Retrieval

An image is rarely described only once. Retrieval benchmarks and many collections attach several captions to each picture, yet dual encoders still judge every image-caption pair in isolation. We ask what these neighboring captions contribute when a frozen encoder consults them at inference time. Fusing image similarity...