Large-scale Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) process both images and text, excelling in multimodal tasks such as image captioning and description generation. However, while these models excel at generating factual content, their ability to generate and evaluate texts reflecting perspectives on the same image, depending on the context, has not been sufficiently explored. To address this, we propose IRR: Image Review Rank, a novel evaluation framework designed to assess critic review texts from multiple perspectives. IRR evaluates LVLMs by measuring how closely their judgments align with human interpretations. We validate it using a dataset of images from 15 categories, each with five critic review texts and annotated rankings in both English and Japanese, totaling over 2,000 data instances. Our results indicate that, although LVLMs exhibited consistent performance across languages, their correlation with human annotations was insufficient, highlighting the need for further advancements. These findings highlight the limitations of current evaluation methods and the need for approaches that better capture human reasoning in Vision & Language tasks.

As the performance of Large-scale Vision Language Models (LVLMs) improves, they are increasingly capable of responding in multiple languages, and there is an expectation that the demand for explanations generated by LVLMs will grow. However, pre-training of Vision Encoder and the integrated training of LLMs with Vision Encoder are mainly conducted using English training data, leaving it uncertain whether LVLMs can completely handle their potential when generating explanations in languages other than English. In addition, multilingual QA benchmarks that create datasets using machine translation have cultural differences and biases, remaining issues for use as evaluation tasks. To address these challenges, this study created an extended dataset in multiple languages without relying on machine translation. This dataset that takes into account nuances and country-specific phrases was then used to evaluate the generation explanation abilities of LVLMs. Furthermore, this study examined whether Instruction-Tuning in resource-rich English improves performance in other languages. Our findings indicate that LVLMs perform worse in languages other than English compared to English. In addition, it was observed that LVLMs struggle to effectively manage the knowledge learned from English data.

The proportion of responses to a question and its options, known as the response distribution, enables detailed analysis of human society. Recent studies highlight the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for predicting response distributions as a cost-effective survey method. However, the reliability of these predictions remains unclear. LLMs often generate answers by blindly following instructions rather than applying rational reasoning based on pretraining-acquired knowledge. This study investigates whether LLMs can rationally estimate distributions when presented with explanations of “artificially generated distributions” that are against commonsense. Specifically, we assess whether LLMs recognize counterintuitive explanations and adjust their predictions or simply follow these inconsistent explanations. Results indicate that smaller or less human-optimized LLMs tend to follow explanations uncritically, while larger or more optimized models are better at resisting counterintuitive explanations by leveraging their pretraining-acquired knowledge. These findings shed light on factors influencing distribution prediction performance in LLMs and are crucial for developing reliable distribution predictions using language models.

Large-scale Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) output text from images and instructions, demonstrating advanced capabilities in text generation and comprehension. However, it has not been clarified to what extent LVLMs understand the knowledge necessary for explaining images, the complex relationships between various pieces of knowledge, and how they integrate these understandings into their explanations. To address this issue, we propose a new task: the artwork explanation generation task, along with its evaluation dataset and metric for quantitatively assessing the understanding and utilization of knowledge about artworks. This task is apt for image description based on the premise that LVLMs are expected to have pre-existing knowledge of artworks, which are often subjects of wide recognition and documented information.It consists of two parts: generating explanations from both images and titles of artworks, and generating explanations using only images, thus evaluating the LVLMs’ language-based and vision-based knowledge.Alongside, we release a training dataset for LVLMs to learn explanations that incorporate knowledge about artworks.Our findings indicate that LVLMs not only struggle with integrating language and visual information but also exhibit a more pronounced limitation in acquiring knowledge from images alone. The datasets ExpArt=Explain Artworks are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/naist-nlp/ExpArt