  In this report, we introduce NICE (New frontiers for zero-shot Image
Captioning Evaluation) project and share the results and outcomes of 2023
challenge. This project is designed to challenge the computer vision community
to develop robust image captioning models that advance the state-of-the-art
both in terms of accuracy and fairness. Through the challenge, the image
captioning models were tested using a new evaluation dataset that includes a
large variety of visual concepts from many domains. There was no specific
training data provided for the challenge, and therefore the challenge entries
were required to adapt to new types of image descriptions that had not been
seen during training. This report includes information on the newly proposed
NICE dataset, evaluation methods, challenge results, and technical details of
top-ranking entries. We expect that the outcomes of the challenge will
contribute to the improvement of AI models on various vision-language tasks.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition