CounterCurate: Enhancing Physical and Semantic Visio-Linguistic Compositional Reasoning via Counterfactual Examples

Jianrui Zhang, Mu Cai, Tengyang Xie, Yong Jae Lee


Abstract
We propose CounterCurate, a framework to comprehensively improve the visio-linguistic compositional reasoning capability for both contrastive and generative multimodal models. In particular, we identify two critical under- explored problems: the neglect of physically grounded reasoning (counting and position understanding) and the potential of using highly capable text and image generation models for semantic counterfactual fine-tuning. Our work pioneers an approach in addressing these gaps.We first spotlight the near-chance performance of multimodal models like CLIP and LLaVA in physically grounded compositional reasoning. We then apply simple data augmentation using the grounded image generation model GLIGEN to generate fine-tuning data, resulting in significant performance improvements: +33% and +37% for CLIP and LLaVA, respectively, on our newly curated Flickr30k-Positions benchmark. Moreover, we exploit the capabilities of high-performing text generation and image generation models, specifically GPT-4V and DALLE-3, to curate challenging semantic counterfactuals, thereby further enhancing compositional reasoning capabilities on benchmarks such as SugarCrepe, where CounterCurate outperforms GPT-4V.To facilitate future research, we release ourcode, dataset, benchmark, and checkpoints at https://countercurate.github.io/
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.915
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15481–15495
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.915
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.915
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jianrui Zhang, Mu Cai, Tengyang Xie, and Yong Jae Lee. 2024. CounterCurate: Enhancing Physical and Semantic Visio-Linguistic Compositional Reasoning via Counterfactual Examples. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 15481–15495, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CounterCurate: Enhancing Physical and Semantic Visio-Linguistic Compositional Reasoning via Counterfactual Examples (Zhang et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.915.pdf