Why context matters in VQA and Reasoning: Semantic interventions for VLM input modalities

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Main Authors: Amara, Kenza, Klein, Lukas, Lüth, Carsten, Jäger, Paul, Strobelt, Hendrik, El-Assady, Mennatallah
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Amara, Kenza
Klein, Lukas
Lüth, Carsten
Jäger, Paul
Strobelt, Hendrik
El-Assady, Mennatallah
author_facet Amara, Kenza
Klein, Lukas
Lüth, Carsten
Jäger, Paul
Strobelt, Hendrik
El-Assady, Mennatallah
contents The various limitations of Generative AI, such as hallucinations and model failures, have made it crucial to understand the role of different modalities in Visual Language Model (VLM) predictions. Our work investigates how the integration of information from image and text modalities influences the performance and behavior of VLMs in visual question answering (VQA) and reasoning tasks. We measure this effect through answer accuracy, reasoning quality, model uncertainty, and modality relevance. We study the interplay between text and image modalities in different configurations where visual content is essential for solving the VQA task. Our contributions include (1) the Semantic Interventions (SI)-VQA dataset, (2) a benchmark study of various VLM architectures under different modality configurations, and (3) the Interactive Semantic Interventions (ISI) tool. The SI-VQA dataset serves as the foundation for the benchmark, while the ISI tool provides an interface to test and apply semantic interventions in image and text inputs, enabling more fine-grained analysis. Our results show that complementary information between modalities improves answer and reasoning quality, while contradictory information harms model performance and confidence. Image text annotations have minimal impact on accuracy and uncertainty, slightly increasing image relevance. Attention analysis confirms the dominant role of image inputs over text in VQA tasks. In this study, we evaluate state-of-the-art VLMs that allow us to extract attention coefficients for each modality. A key finding is PaliGemma's harmful overconfidence, which poses a higher risk of silent failures compared to the LLaVA models. This work sets the foundation for rigorous analysis of modality integration, supported by datasets specifically designed for this purpose.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_01690
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Why context matters in VQA and Reasoning: Semantic interventions for VLM input modalities
Amara, Kenza
Klein, Lukas
Lüth, Carsten
Jäger, Paul
Strobelt, Hendrik
El-Assady, Mennatallah
Artificial Intelligence
The various limitations of Generative AI, such as hallucinations and model failures, have made it crucial to understand the role of different modalities in Visual Language Model (VLM) predictions. Our work investigates how the integration of information from image and text modalities influences the performance and behavior of VLMs in visual question answering (VQA) and reasoning tasks. We measure this effect through answer accuracy, reasoning quality, model uncertainty, and modality relevance. We study the interplay between text and image modalities in different configurations where visual content is essential for solving the VQA task. Our contributions include (1) the Semantic Interventions (SI)-VQA dataset, (2) a benchmark study of various VLM architectures under different modality configurations, and (3) the Interactive Semantic Interventions (ISI) tool. The SI-VQA dataset serves as the foundation for the benchmark, while the ISI tool provides an interface to test and apply semantic interventions in image and text inputs, enabling more fine-grained analysis. Our results show that complementary information between modalities improves answer and reasoning quality, while contradictory information harms model performance and confidence. Image text annotations have minimal impact on accuracy and uncertainty, slightly increasing image relevance. Attention analysis confirms the dominant role of image inputs over text in VQA tasks. In this study, we evaluate state-of-the-art VLMs that allow us to extract attention coefficients for each modality. A key finding is PaliGemma's harmful overconfidence, which poses a higher risk of silent failures compared to the LLaVA models. This work sets the foundation for rigorous analysis of modality integration, supported by datasets specifically designed for this purpose.
title Why context matters in VQA and Reasoning: Semantic interventions for VLM input modalities
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.01690