Image-to-Text Translation for Interactive Image Recognition: A Comparative User Study with Non-Expert Users

Interactive machine learning (IML) allows users to build their custom machine learning models without expert knowledge. While most existing IML systems are designed with classification algorithms, they sometimes oversimplify the capabilities of machine learning algorithms and restrict the user's task definition. On the other hand, as recent large-scale language models have shown, natural language representation has the potential to enable more flexible and generic task descriptions. Models that take images as input and output text have the potential to represent a variety of tasks by providing appropriate text labels for training. However, the effect of introducing text labels to IML system design has never been investigated. In this work, we aim to investigate the difference between image-to-text translation and image classification for IML systems. Using our prototype systems, we conducted a comparative user study with non-expert users, where participants solved various tasks. Our results demonstrate the underlying difficulty for users in properly defining image recognition tasks while highlighting the potential and challenges of interactive image-to-text translation systems.