Can Pre-trained Vision and Language Models Answer Visual Information-Seeking Questions?

Yang Chen, Hexiang Hu, Yi Luan, Haitian Sun, Soravit Changpinyo, Alan Ritter, Ming-Wei Chang


Abstract
Pre-trained vision and language models have demonstrated state-of-the-art capabilities over existing tasks involving images and texts, including visual question answering. However, it remains unclear whether these models possess the capability to answer questions that are not only querying visual content but knowledge-intensive and information-seeking. In this study, we introduce InfoSeek, a visual question answering dataset tailored for information-seeking questions that cannot be answered with only common sense knowledge. Using InfoSeek, we analyze various pre-trained visual question answering models and gain insights into their characteristics. Our findings reveal that state-of-the-art pre-trained multi-modal models (e.g., PaLI-X, BLIP2, InstructBLIP) face challenges in answering visual information-seeking questions, but fine-tuning on the InfoSeek dataset elicits models to use fine-grained knowledge that was learned during pre-training. Furthermore, we show that accurate visual entity recognition can be used to improve performance on InfoSeek by retrieving relevant documents, showing a significant space for improvement.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.925
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14948–14968
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.925
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.925
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Chen, Hexiang Hu, Yi Luan, Haitian Sun, Soravit Changpinyo, Alan Ritter, and Ming-Wei Chang. 2023. Can Pre-trained Vision and Language Models Answer Visual Information-Seeking Questions?. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 14948–14968, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can Pre-trained Vision and Language Models Answer Visual Information-Seeking Questions? (Chen et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.925.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.925.mp4