Image Retrieval from Contextual Descriptions

Benno Krojer, Vaibhav Adlakha, Vibhav Vineet, Yash Goyal, Edoardo Ponti, Siva Reddy


Abstract
The ability to integrate context, including perceptual and temporal cues, plays a pivotal role in grounding the meaning of a linguistic utterance. In order to measure to what extent current vision-and-language models master this ability, we devise a new multimodal challenge, Image Retrieval from Contextual Descriptions (ImageCoDe). In particular, models are tasked with retrieving the correct image from a set of 10 minimally contrastive candidates based on a contextual description. As such, each description contains only the details that help distinguish between images. Because of this, descriptions tend to be complex in terms of syntax and discourse and require drawing pragmatic inferences. Images are sourced from both static pictures and video frames. We benchmark several state-of-the-art models, including both cross-encoders such as ViLBERT and bi-encoders such as CLIP, on ImageCoDe.Our results reveal that these models dramatically lag behind human performance: the best variant achieves an accuracy of 20.9 on video frames and 59.4 on static pictures, compared with 90.8 in humans. Furthermore, we experiment with new model variants that are better equipped to incorporate visual and temporal context into their representations, which achieve modest gains. Our hope is that ImageCoDE will foster progress in grounded language understanding by encouraging models to focus on fine-grained visual differences.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.241
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3426–3440
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.241
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.241
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Benno Krojer, Vaibhav Adlakha, Vibhav Vineet, Yash Goyal, Edoardo Ponti, and Siva Reddy. 2022. Image Retrieval from Contextual Descriptions. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3426–3440, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Image Retrieval from Contextual Descriptions (Krojer et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.241.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.241.mp4
Code
 mcgill-nlp/imagecode
Data
ImageCoDeSpot-the-diffVideo StorytellingYouCook