I-Tuning: Tuning Language Models with Image for Caption Generation

Recently, tuning the pre-trained language model (PLM) in a parameter-efficient manner becomes a popular topic in the natural language processing area. However, most of them focus on tuning the PLM with the text-only information. In this work, we propose a new perspective to tune the frozen PLM with images for caption generation. We denote our method as I-Tuning, which can automatically filter the vision information from images to adjust the output hidden states of PLM. Evaluating on the image captioning tasks (MSCOCO and Flickr30k Captioning), our method achieves comparable or even better performance than the previous models which have 2-4 times more trainable parameters and/or consume a large amount of cross-modal pre-training data.