Images in Language Space: Exploring the Suitability of Large Language Models for Vision & Language Tasks

Sherzod Hakimov, David Schlangen


Abstract
Large language models have demonstrated robust performance on various language tasks using zero-shot or few-shot learning paradigms. While being actively researched, multimodal models that can additionally handle images as input have yet to catch up in size and generality with language-only models. In this work, we ask whether language-only models can be utilised for tasks that require visual input – but also, as we argue, often require a strong reasoning component. Similar to some recent related work, we make visual information accessible to the language model using separate verbalisation models. Specifically, we investigate the performance of open-source, open-access language models against GPT-3 on five vision-language tasks when given textually-encoded visual information. Our results suggest that language models are effective for solving vision-language tasks even with limited samples. This approach also enhances the interpretability of a model’s output by providing a means of tracing the output back through the verbalised image content.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.894
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14196–14210
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.894
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.894
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sherzod Hakimov and David Schlangen. 2023. Images in Language Space: Exploring the Suitability of Large Language Models for Vision & Language Tasks. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 14196–14210, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Images in Language Space: Exploring the Suitability of Large Language Models for Vision & Language Tasks (Hakimov & Schlangen, Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.894.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.894.mp4