Leveraging Author-Specific Context for Scientific Figure Caption Generation: 3rd SciCap Challenge

Abstract

Scientific figure captions require both accuracy and stylistic consistency to convey visual information. Here, we present a domain-specific caption generation system for the 3rd SciCap Challenge that integrates figure-related textual context with author-specific writing styles using the LaMP-Cap dataset. Our approach uses a two-stage pipeline: Stage 1 combines context filtering, category-specific prompt optimization via DSPy's MIPROv2 and SIMBA, and caption candidate selection; Stage 2 applies few-shot prompting with profile figures for stylistic refinement. Our experiments demonstrate that category-specific prompts outperform both zero-shot and general optimized approaches, improving ROUGE-1 recall by +8.3\% while limiting precision loss to -2.8\% and BLEU-4 reduction to -10.9\%. Profile-informed stylistic refinement yields 40--48\% gains in BLEU scores and 25--27\% in ROUGE. Overall, our system demonstrates that combining contextual understanding with author-specific stylistic adaptation can generate captions that are both scientifically accurate and stylistically faithful to the source paper.