Performance Gap in Entity Knowledge Extraction Across Modalities in Vision Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cohen, Ido, Gottesman, Daniela, Geva, Mor, Giryes, Raja
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908745243557888
author Cohen, Ido
Gottesman, Daniela
Geva, Mor
Giryes, Raja
author_facet Cohen, Ido
Gottesman, Daniela
Geva, Mor
Giryes, Raja
contents Vision-language models (VLMs) excel at extracting and reasoning about information from images. Yet, their capacity to leverage internal knowledge about specific entities remains underexplored. This work investigates the disparity in model performance when answering factual questions about an entity described in text versus depicted in an image. Our results reveal a significant accuracy drop - reaching 18% for some models - when the entity is presented visually instead of textually. To study this gap we present PopVQA, a dataset which allows separating entity recognition and question answering, and use it to benchmark several models. We hypothesize that this decline arises from limitations in how information flows from image tokens to query tokens. Thus, we use mechanistic interpretability tools to reveal that, although image tokens are preprocessed by the vision encoder, meaningful information flow from these tokens occurs only in the much deeper layers. Furthermore, critical image processing happens in the language model's middle layers, allowing few layers for consecutive reasoning, highlighting a potential inefficiency in how the model utilizes its layers for reasoning. These insights shed light on the internal mechanics of VLMs and offer pathways for enhancing their reasoning capabilities. PopVQA can be found at https://huggingface.co/datasets/idoco/PopVQA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_14133
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Performance Gap in Entity Knowledge Extraction Across Modalities in Vision Language Models
Cohen, Ido
Gottesman, Daniela
Geva, Mor
Giryes, Raja
Computation and Language
Vision-language models (VLMs) excel at extracting and reasoning about information from images. Yet, their capacity to leverage internal knowledge about specific entities remains underexplored. This work investigates the disparity in model performance when answering factual questions about an entity described in text versus depicted in an image. Our results reveal a significant accuracy drop - reaching 18% for some models - when the entity is presented visually instead of textually. To study this gap we present PopVQA, a dataset which allows separating entity recognition and question answering, and use it to benchmark several models. We hypothesize that this decline arises from limitations in how information flows from image tokens to query tokens. Thus, we use mechanistic interpretability tools to reveal that, although image tokens are preprocessed by the vision encoder, meaningful information flow from these tokens occurs only in the much deeper layers. Furthermore, critical image processing happens in the language model's middle layers, allowing few layers for consecutive reasoning, highlighting a potential inefficiency in how the model utilizes its layers for reasoning. These insights shed light on the internal mechanics of VLMs and offer pathways for enhancing their reasoning capabilities. PopVQA can be found at https://huggingface.co/datasets/idoco/PopVQA.
title Performance Gap in Entity Knowledge Extraction Across Modalities in Vision Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14133