Probing and Mitigating Intersectional Social Biases in Vision-Language Models with Counterfactual Examples

While vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance improvements recently, there is growing evidence that these models also posses harmful biases with respect to social attributes such as gender and race. Prior studies have primarily focused on probing such bias attributes individually while ignoring biases associated with intersections between social attributes. This could be due to the difficulty of collecting an exhaustive set of image-text pairs for various combinations of social attributes. To address this challenge, we employ text-to-image diffusion models to produce counterfactual examples for probing intserctional social biases at scale. Our approach utilizes Stable Diffusion with cross attention control to produce sets of counterfactual image-text pairs that are highly similar in their depiction of a subject (e.g., a given occupation) while differing only in their depiction of intersectional social attributes (e.g., race & gender). Through our over-generate-then-filter methodology, we produce SocialCounterfactuals, a high-quality dataset containing over 171k image-text pairs for probing intersectional biases related to gender, race, and physical characteristics. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the usefulness of our generated dataset for probing and mitigating intersectional social biases in state-of-the-art VLMs.

Analyzing Zero-Shot Abilities of Vision-Language Models on Video Understanding Tasks

Foundational multimodal models pre-trained on large scale image-text pairs or video-text pairs or both have shown strong generalization abilities on downstream tasks. However unlike image-text models, pretraining video-text models is always not feasible due to the difficulty in collecting large-scale clean and aligned data, and exponential computational costs involved in the pretraining phase. Therefore, the pertinent question to ask is: Can image-text models be adapted to video tasks and is there any benefit to using these models over pretraining directly on videos? In this work, we focus on this question by proposing a detailed study on the generalization abilities of image-text models when evaluated on video understanding tasks in a zero-shot setting. We investigate 9 foundational image-text models on a diverse set of video tasks that include video action recognition (video AR), video retrieval (video RT), video question answering (video QA), video multiple choice (video MC) and video captioning (video CP). Our experiments show that image-text models exhibit impressive performance on video AR, video RT and video MC. Furthermore, they perform moderately on video captioning and poorly on video QA. These findings shed a light on the benefits of adapting foundational image-text models to an array of video tasks while avoiding the costly pretraining step.

Probing Intersectional Biases in Vision-Language Models with Counterfactual Examples

While vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance improvements recently, there is growing evidence that these models also posses harmful biases with respect to social attributes such as gender and race. Prior studies have primarily focused on probing such bias attributes individually while ignoring biases associated with intersections between social attributes. This could be due to the difficulty of collecting an exhaustive set of image-text pairs for various combinations of social attributes from existing datasets. To address this challenge, we employ text-to-image diffusion models to produce counterfactual examples for probing intserctional social biases at scale. Our approach utilizes Stable Diffusion with cross attention control to produce sets of counterfactual image-text pairs that are highly similar in their depiction of a subject (e.g., a given occupation) while differing only in their depiction of intersectional social attributes (e.g., race & gender). We conduct extensive experiments using our generated dataset which reveal the intersectional social biases present in state-of-the-art VLMs.

Affective Visual Dialog: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Emotional Reasoning Based on Visually Grounded Conversations

We introduce Affective Visual Dialog, an emotion explanation and reasoning task as a testbed for research on understanding the formation of emotions in visually grounded conversations. The task involves three skills: (1) Dialog-based Question Answering (2) Dialog-based Emotion Prediction and (3) Affective emotion explanation generation based on the dialog. Our key contribution is the collection of a large-scale dataset, dubbed AffectVisDial, consisting of 50K 10-turn visually grounded dialogs as well as concluding emotion attributions and dialog-informed textual emotion explanations, resulting in a total of 27,180 working hours. We explain our design decisions in collecting the dataset and introduce the questioner and answerer tasks that are associated with the participants in the conversation. We train and demonstrate solid Affective Visual Dialog baselines adapted from state-of-the-art models. Remarkably, the responses generated by our models show promising emotional reasoning abilities in response to visually grounded conversations. Our project page is available at https://affective-visual-dialog.github.io.

ICSVR: Investigating Compositional and Semantic Understanding in Video Retrieval Models

Video retrieval (VR) involves retrieving the ground truth video from the video database given a text caption or vice-versa. The two important components of compositionality: objects \& attributes and actions are joined using correct semantics to form a proper text query. These components (objects \& attributes, actions and semantics) each play an important role to help distinguish among videos and retrieve the correct ground truth video. However, it is unclear what is the effect of these components on the video retrieval performance. We therefore, conduct a systematic study to evaluate the compositional and semantic understanding of video retrieval models on standard benchmarks such as MSRVTT, MSVD and DIDEMO. The study is performed on two categories of video retrieval models: (i) which are pre-trained on video-text pairs and fine-tuned on downstream video retrieval datasets (Eg. Frozen-in-Time, Violet, MCQ etc.) (ii) which adapt pre-trained image-text representations like CLIP for video retrieval (Eg. CLIP4Clip, XCLIP, CLIP2Video etc.). Our experiments reveal that actions and semantics play a minor role compared to objects \& attributes in video understanding. Moreover, video retrieval models that use pre-trained image-text representations (CLIP) have better semantic and compositional understanding as compared to models pre-trained on video-text data.

A Unified Framework for Slot based Response Generation in a Multimodal Dialogue System

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) are the two critical components of every conversational system that handles the task of understanding the user by capturing the necessary information in the form of slots and generating an appropriate response in accordance with the extracted information. Recently, dialogue systems integrated with complementary information such as images, audio, or video have gained immense popularity. In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework with the capability to extract necessary slot values from the utterance and generate a coherent response, thereby assisting the user to achieve their desired goals in a multimodal dialogue system having both textual and visual information. The task of extracting the necessary information is dependent not only on the text but also on the visual cues present in the dialogue. Similarly, for the generation, the previous dialog context comprising multimodal information is significant for providing coherent and informative responses. We employ a multimodal hierarchical encoder using pre-trained DialoGPT and also exploit the knowledge base (Kb) to provide a stronger context for both the tasks. Finally, we design a slot attention mechanism to focus on the necessary information in a given utterance. Lastly, a decoder generates the corresponding response for the given dialogue context and the extracted slot values. Experimental results on the Multimodal Dialogue Dataset (MMD) show that the proposed framework outperforms the baselines approaches in both the tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/avinashsai/slot-gpt.

Is multi-modal vision supervision beneficial to language?

Vision (image and video) - Language (VL) pre-training is the recent popular paradigm that achieved state-of-the-art results on multi-modal tasks like image-retrieval, video-retrieval, visual question answering etc. These models are trained in an unsupervised way and greatly benefit from the complementary modality supervision. In this paper, we explore if the language representations trained using vision supervision perform better than vanilla language representations on Natural Language Understanding and commonsense reasoning benchmarks. We experiment with a diverse set of image-text models such as ALBEF, BLIP, METER and video-text models like ALPRO, Frozen-in-Time (FiT), VIOLET. We compare the performance of language representations of stand-alone text encoders of these models to the language representations of text encoders learnt through vision supervision. Our experiments suggest that vanilla language representations show superior performance on most of the tasks. These results shed light on the current drawbacks of the vision-language models.

Improving video retrieval using multilingual knowledge transfer

Video retrieval has seen tremendous progress with the development of vision-language models. However, further improving these models require additional labelled data which is a huge manual effort. In this paper, we propose a framework MKTVR, that utilizes knowledge transfer from a multilingual model to boost the performance of video retrieval. We first use state-of-the-art machine translation models to construct pseudo ground-truth multilingual video-text pairs. We then use this data to learn a video-text representation where English and non-English text queries are represented in a common embedding space based on pretrained multilingual models. We evaluate our proposed approach on four English video retrieval datasets such as MSRVTT, MSVD, DiDeMo and Charades. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on all datasets outperforming previous models. Finally, we also evaluate our model on a multilingual video-retrieval dataset encompassing six languages and show that our model outperforms previous multilingual video retrieval models in a zero-shot setting.

A Syntax Aware BERT for Identifying Well-Formed Queries in a Curriculum Framework

A well formed query is defined as a query which is formulated in the manner of an inquiry, and with correct interrogatives, spelling and grammar. While identifying well formed queries is an important task, few works have attempted to address it. In this paper we propose transformer based language model - Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to this task. We further imbibe BERT with parts-of-speech information inspired from earlier works. Furthermore, we also train the model in multiple curriculum settings for improvement in performance. Curriculum Learning over the task is experimented with Baby Steps and One Pass techniques. Proposed architecture performs exceedingly well on the task. The best approach achieves accuracy of 83.93%, outperforming previous state-of-the-art at 75.0% and reaching close to the approximate human upper bound of 88.4%.

A Unified Framework for Emotion Identification and Generation in Dialogues

Social chatbots have gained immense popularity, and their appeal lies not just in their capacity to respond to the diverse requests from users, but also in the ability to develop an emotional connection with users. To further develop and promote social chatbots, we need to concentrate on increasing user interaction and take into account both the intellectual and emotional quotient in the conversational agents. In this paper, we propose a multi-task framework that jointly identifies the emotion of a given dialogue and generates response in accordance to the identified emotion. We employ a BERT based network for creating an empathetic system and use a mixed objective function that trains the end-to-end network with both the classification and generation loss. Experimental results show that our proposed framework outperforms current state-of-the-art models