Vision-Language Models Struggle to Align Entities across Modalities

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Alonso, Iñigo, Azkune, Gorka, Salaberria, Ander, Barnes, Jeremy, de Lacalle, Oier Lopez
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Alonso, Iñigo
Azkune, Gorka
Salaberria, Ander
Barnes, Jeremy
de Lacalle, Oier Lopez
author_facet Alonso, Iñigo
Azkune, Gorka
Salaberria, Ander
Barnes, Jeremy
de Lacalle, Oier Lopez
contents Cross-modal entity linking refers to the ability to align entities and their attributes across different modalities. While cross-modal entity linking is a fundamental skill needed for real-world applications such as multimodal code generation, fake news detection, or scene understanding, it has not been thoroughly studied in the literature. In this paper, we introduce a new task and benchmark to address this gap. Our benchmark, MATE, consists of 5.5k evaluation instances featuring visual scenes aligned with their textual representations. To evaluate cross-modal entity linking performance, we design a question-answering task that involves retrieving one attribute of an object in one modality based on a unique attribute of that object in another modality. We evaluate state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and humans on this task, and find that VLMs struggle significantly compared to humans, particularly as the number of objects in the scene increases. Our analysis also shows that, while chain-of-thought prompting can improve VLM performance, models remain far from achieving human-level proficiency. These findings highlight the need for further research in cross-modal entity linking and show that MATE is a strong benchmark to support that progress.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_03854
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Vision-Language Models Struggle to Align Entities across Modalities
Alonso, Iñigo
Azkune, Gorka
Salaberria, Ander
Barnes, Jeremy
de Lacalle, Oier Lopez
Computation and Language
Cross-modal entity linking refers to the ability to align entities and their attributes across different modalities. While cross-modal entity linking is a fundamental skill needed for real-world applications such as multimodal code generation, fake news detection, or scene understanding, it has not been thoroughly studied in the literature. In this paper, we introduce a new task and benchmark to address this gap. Our benchmark, MATE, consists of 5.5k evaluation instances featuring visual scenes aligned with their textual representations. To evaluate cross-modal entity linking performance, we design a question-answering task that involves retrieving one attribute of an object in one modality based on a unique attribute of that object in another modality. We evaluate state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and humans on this task, and find that VLMs struggle significantly compared to humans, particularly as the number of objects in the scene increases. Our analysis also shows that, while chain-of-thought prompting can improve VLM performance, models remain far from achieving human-level proficiency. These findings highlight the need for further research in cross-modal entity linking and show that MATE is a strong benchmark to support that progress.
title Vision-Language Models Struggle to Align Entities across Modalities
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03854