Muffin or Chihuahua? Challenging Multimodal Large Language Models with Multipanel VQA

Yue Fan, Jing Gu, Kaiwen Zhou, Qianqi Yan, Shan Jiang, Ching-Chen Kuo, Yang Zhao, Xinze Guan, Xin Wang


Abstract
Multipanel images, commonly seen as web screenshots, posters, etc., pervade our daily lives. These images, characterized by their composition of multiple subfigures in distinct layouts, effectively convey information to people. Toward building advanced multimodal AI applications, such as agents that understand complex scenes and navigate through webpages, the skill of multipanel visual reasoning is essential, and a comprehensive evaluation of models in this regard is important. Therefore, we introduce Multipanel Visual Question Answering (MultipanelVQA), a novel benchmark comprising 6,600 triplets of questions, answers, and multipanel images that specifically challenge models in comprehending multipanel images. Our evaluation shows that questions in the MultipanelVQA benchmark pose significant challenges to the state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) tested, even though humans can attain approximately 99% accuracy on these questions. Distinctively, the MultipanelVQA benchmark features synthetically generated multipanel images specifically crafted to isolate and assess the impact of various factors, such as the layout, on MLLMs’ multipanel image comprehension abilities. As a result, in addition to benchmarking the capabilities of MLLMs in understanding multipanel images, we analyze various factors of the multipanel image that affect MLLMs’ performance with synthetic data and offer insights for enhancement.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.370
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6845–6863
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.370
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yue Fan, Jing Gu, Kaiwen Zhou, Qianqi Yan, Shan Jiang, Ching-Chen Kuo, Yang Zhao, Xinze Guan, and Xin Wang. 2024. Muffin or Chihuahua? Challenging Multimodal Large Language Models with Multipanel VQA. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6845–6863, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Muffin or Chihuahua? Challenging Multimodal Large Language Models with Multipanel VQA (Fan et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.370.pdf