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Main Authors: Wu, Te-Lin, Spangher, Alex, Alipoormolabashi, Pegah, Freedman, Marjorie, Weischedel, Ralph, Peng, Nanyun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.08486
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author Wu, Te-Lin
Spangher, Alex
Alipoormolabashi, Pegah
Freedman, Marjorie
Weischedel, Ralph
Peng, Nanyun
author_facet Wu, Te-Lin
Spangher, Alex
Alipoormolabashi, Pegah
Freedman, Marjorie
Weischedel, Ralph
Peng, Nanyun
contents The ability to sequence unordered events is an essential skill to comprehend and reason about real world task procedures, which often requires thorough understanding of temporal common sense and multimodal information, as these procedures are often communicated through a combination of texts and images. Such capability is essential for applications such as sequential task planning and multi-source instruction summarization. While humans are capable of reasoning about and sequencing unordered multimodal procedural instructions, whether current machine learning models have such essential capability is still an open question. In this work, we benchmark models' capability of reasoning over and sequencing unordered multimodal instructions by curating datasets from popular online instructional manuals and collecting comprehensive human annotations. We find models not only perform significantly worse than humans but also seem incapable of efficiently utilizing the multimodal information. To improve machines' performance on multimodal event sequencing, we propose sequentiality-aware pretraining techniques that exploit the sequential alignment properties of both texts and images, resulting in > 5% significant improvements.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2110_08486
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Understanding Multimodal Procedural Knowledge by Sequencing Multimodal Instructional Manuals
Wu, Te-Lin
Spangher, Alex
Alipoormolabashi, Pegah
Freedman, Marjorie
Weischedel, Ralph
Peng, Nanyun
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The ability to sequence unordered events is an essential skill to comprehend and reason about real world task procedures, which often requires thorough understanding of temporal common sense and multimodal information, as these procedures are often communicated through a combination of texts and images. Such capability is essential for applications such as sequential task planning and multi-source instruction summarization. While humans are capable of reasoning about and sequencing unordered multimodal procedural instructions, whether current machine learning models have such essential capability is still an open question. In this work, we benchmark models' capability of reasoning over and sequencing unordered multimodal instructions by curating datasets from popular online instructional manuals and collecting comprehensive human annotations. We find models not only perform significantly worse than humans but also seem incapable of efficiently utilizing the multimodal information. To improve machines' performance on multimodal event sequencing, we propose sequentiality-aware pretraining techniques that exploit the sequential alignment properties of both texts and images, resulting in > 5% significant improvements.
title Understanding Multimodal Procedural Knowledge by Sequencing Multimodal Instructional Manuals
topic Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.08486