Are Diffusion Models Vision-And-Language Reasoners?

Text-conditioned image generation models have recently shown immense qualitative success using denoising diffusion processes. However, unlike discriminative vision-and-language models, it is a non-trivial task to subject these diffusion-based generative models to automatic fine-grained quantitative evaluation of high-level phenomena such as compositionality. Towards this goal, we perform two innovations. First, we transform diffusion-based models (in our case, Stable Diffusion) for any image-text matching (ITM) task using a novel method called DiffusionITM. Second, we introduce the Generative-Discriminative Evaluation Benchmark (GDBench) benchmark with 7 complex vision-and-language tasks, bias evaluation and detailed analysis. We find that Stable Diffusion + DiffusionITM is competitive on many tasks and outperforms CLIP on compositional tasks like like CLEVR and Winoground. We further boost its compositional performance with a transfer setup by fine-tuning on MS-COCO while retaining generative capabilities. We also measure the stereotypical bias in diffusion models, and find that Stable Diffusion 2.1 is, for the most part, less biased than Stable Diffusion 1.5. Overall, our results point in an exciting direction bringing discriminative and generative model evaluation closer. We will release code and benchmark setup soon.

An Empirical Survey of the Effectiveness of Debiasing Techniques for Pre-Trained Language Models

Recent work has shown that pre-trained language models capture social biases from the text corpora they are trained on. This has attracted attention to developing techniques that mitigate such biases. In this work, we perform a empirical survey of five recently proposed debiasing techniques: Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA), Dropout, Iterative Nullspace Projection, Self-Debias, and SentenceDebias. We quantify the effectiveness of each technique using three different bias benchmarks while also measuring the impact of these techniques on a model's language modeling ability, as well as its performance on downstream NLU tasks. We experimentally find that: (1) CDA and Self-Debias are the strongest of the debiasing techniques, obtaining improved scores on most of the bias benchmarks (2) Current debiasing techniques do not generalize well beyond gender bias; And (3) improvements on bias benchmarks such as StereoSet and CrowS-Pairs by using debiasing strategies are usually accompanied by a decrease in language modeling ability, making it difficult to determine whether the bias mitigation is effective.