Reassessing Evaluation Practices in Visual Question Answering: A Case Study on Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Aishwarya Agrawal, Ivana Kajic, Emanuele Bugliarello, Elnaz Davoodi, Anita Gergely, Phil Blunsom, Aida Nematzadeh


Abstract
Vision-and-language (V&L) models pretrained on large-scale multimodal data have demonstrated strong performance on various tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering (VQA). The quality of such models is commonly assessed by measuring their performance on unseen data that typically comes from the same distribution as the training data. However, when evaluated under out-of-distribution (out-of-dataset) settings for VQA, we observe that these models exhibit poor generalization. We comprehensively evaluate two pretrained V&L models under different settings (i.e. classification and open-ended text generation) by conducting cross-dataset evaluations. We find that these models tend to learn to solve the benchmark, rather than learning the high-level skills required by the VQA task. We also find that in most cases generative models are less susceptible to shifts in data distribution compared to discriminative ones, and that multimodal pretraining is generally helpful for OOD generalization. Finally, we revisit assumptions underlying the use of automatic VQA evaluation metrics, and empirically show that their stringent nature repeatedly penalizes models for correct responses.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-eacl.90
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1201–1226
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.90
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-eacl.90
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aishwarya Agrawal, Ivana Kajic, Emanuele Bugliarello, Elnaz Davoodi, Anita Gergely, Phil Blunsom, and Aida Nematzadeh. 2023. Reassessing Evaluation Practices in Visual Question Answering: A Case Study on Out-of-Distribution Generalization. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023, pages 1201–1226, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Reassessing Evaluation Practices in Visual Question Answering: A Case Study on Out-of-Distribution Generalization (Agrawal et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.90.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.90.mp4