A Multi-Modal Context Reasoning Approach for Conditional Inference on Joint Textual and Visual Clues

Yunxin Li, Baotian Hu, Chen Xinyu, Yuxin Ding, Lin Ma, Min Zhang


Abstract
Conditional inference on joint textual and visual clues is a multi-modal reasoning task that textual clues provide prior permutation or external knowledge, which are complementary with visual content and pivotal to deducing the correct option. Previous methods utilizing pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performances, yet they show a lack of multimodal context reasoning capability, especially for text-modal information. To address this issue, we propose a Multi-modal Context Reasoning approach, named ModCR. Compared to VLMs performing reasoning via cross modal semantic alignment, it regards the given textual abstract semantic and objective image information as the pre-context information and embeds them into the language model to perform context reasoning. Different from recent vision-aided language models used in natural language processing, ModCR incorporates the multi-view semantic alignment information between language and vision by introducing the learnable alignment prefix between image and text in the pretrained language model. This makes the language model well-suitable for such multi-modal reasoning scenario on joint textual and visual clues. We conduct extensive experiments on two corresponding data sets and experimental results show significantly improved performance (exact gain by 4.8% on PMR test set) compared to previous strong baselines.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.601
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10757–10770
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.601
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.601
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yunxin Li, Baotian Hu, Chen Xinyu, Yuxin Ding, Lin Ma, and Min Zhang. 2023. A Multi-Modal Context Reasoning Approach for Conditional Inference on Joint Textual and Visual Clues. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 10757–10770, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Multi-Modal Context Reasoning Approach for Conditional Inference on Joint Textual and Visual Clues (Li et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.601.pdf