Does CLIP Bind Concepts? Probing Compositionality in Large Image Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lewis, Martha, Nayak, Nihal V., Yu, Peilin, Yu, Qinan, Merullo, Jack, Bach, Stephen H., Pavlick, Ellie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
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author Lewis, Martha
Nayak, Nihal V.
Yu, Peilin
Yu, Qinan
Merullo, Jack
Bach, Stephen H.
Pavlick, Ellie
author_facet Lewis, Martha
Nayak, Nihal V.
Yu, Peilin
Yu, Qinan
Merullo, Jack
Bach, Stephen H.
Pavlick, Ellie
contents Large-scale neural network models combining text and images have made incredible progress in recent years. However, it remains an open question to what extent such models encode compositional representations of the concepts over which they operate, such as correctly identifying "red cube" by reasoning over the constituents "red" and "cube". In this work, we focus on the ability of a large pretrained vision and language model (CLIP) to encode compositional concepts and to bind variables in a structure-sensitive way (e.g., differentiating "cube behind sphere" from "sphere behind cube"). To inspect the performance of CLIP, we compare several architectures from research on compositional distributional semantics models (CDSMs), a line of research that attempts to implement traditional compositional linguistic structures within embedding spaces. We benchmark them on three synthetic datasets - single-object, two-object, and relational - designed to test concept binding. We find that CLIP can compose concepts in a single-object setting, but in situations where concept binding is needed, performance drops dramatically. At the same time, CDSMs also perform poorly, with best performance at chance level.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2212_10537
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Does CLIP Bind Concepts? Probing Compositionality in Large Image Models
Lewis, Martha
Nayak, Nihal V.
Yu, Peilin
Yu, Qinan
Merullo, Jack
Bach, Stephen H.
Pavlick, Ellie
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Large-scale neural network models combining text and images have made incredible progress in recent years. However, it remains an open question to what extent such models encode compositional representations of the concepts over which they operate, such as correctly identifying "red cube" by reasoning over the constituents "red" and "cube". In this work, we focus on the ability of a large pretrained vision and language model (CLIP) to encode compositional concepts and to bind variables in a structure-sensitive way (e.g., differentiating "cube behind sphere" from "sphere behind cube"). To inspect the performance of CLIP, we compare several architectures from research on compositional distributional semantics models (CDSMs), a line of research that attempts to implement traditional compositional linguistic structures within embedding spaces. We benchmark them on three synthetic datasets - single-object, two-object, and relational - designed to test concept binding. We find that CLIP can compose concepts in a single-object setting, but in situations where concept binding is needed, performance drops dramatically. At the same time, CDSMs also perform poorly, with best performance at chance level.
title Does CLIP Bind Concepts? Probing Compositionality in Large Image Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10537