Visual Grounding Helps Learn Word Meanings in Low-Data Regimes

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhuang, Chengxu, Fedorenko, Evelina, Andreas, Jacob
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Zhuang, Chengxu
Fedorenko, Evelina
Andreas, Jacob
author_facet Zhuang, Chengxu
Fedorenko, Evelina
Andreas, Jacob
contents Modern neural language models (LMs) are powerful tools for modeling human sentence production and comprehension, and their internal representations are remarkably well-aligned with representations of language in the human brain. But to achieve these results, LMs must be trained in distinctly un-human-like ways - requiring orders of magnitude more language data than children receive during development, and without perceptual or social context. Do models trained more naturalistically -- with grounded supervision -- exhibit more humanlike language learning? We investigate this question in the context of word learning, a key sub-task in language acquisition. We train a diverse set of LM architectures, with and without auxiliary visual supervision, on datasets of varying scales. We then evaluate these models' learning of syntactic categories, lexical relations, semantic features, word similarity, and alignment with human neural representations. We find that visual supervision can indeed improve the efficiency of word learning. However, these improvements are limited: they are present almost exclusively in the low-data regime, and sometimes canceled out by the inclusion of rich distributional signals from text. The information conveyed by text and images is not redundant -- models mainly driven by visual information yield qualitatively different from those mainly driven by word co-occurrences. However, our results suggest that current multimodal modeling approaches fail to effectively leverage visual information to build human-like word representations from human-scale data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_13257
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Visual Grounding Helps Learn Word Meanings in Low-Data Regimes
Zhuang, Chengxu
Fedorenko, Evelina
Andreas, Jacob
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Modern neural language models (LMs) are powerful tools for modeling human sentence production and comprehension, and their internal representations are remarkably well-aligned with representations of language in the human brain. But to achieve these results, LMs must be trained in distinctly un-human-like ways - requiring orders of magnitude more language data than children receive during development, and without perceptual or social context. Do models trained more naturalistically -- with grounded supervision -- exhibit more humanlike language learning? We investigate this question in the context of word learning, a key sub-task in language acquisition. We train a diverse set of LM architectures, with and without auxiliary visual supervision, on datasets of varying scales. We then evaluate these models' learning of syntactic categories, lexical relations, semantic features, word similarity, and alignment with human neural representations. We find that visual supervision can indeed improve the efficiency of word learning. However, these improvements are limited: they are present almost exclusively in the low-data regime, and sometimes canceled out by the inclusion of rich distributional signals from text. The information conveyed by text and images is not redundant -- models mainly driven by visual information yield qualitatively different from those mainly driven by word co-occurrences. However, our results suggest that current multimodal modeling approaches fail to effectively leverage visual information to build human-like word representations from human-scale data.
title Visual Grounding Helps Learn Word Meanings in Low-Data Regimes
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13257