Understanding Cross-modal Interactions in V&L Models that Generate Scene Descriptions

Michele Cafagna, Kees van Deemter, Albert Gatt


Abstract
Image captioning models tend to describe images in an object-centric way, emphasising visible objects. But image descriptions can also abstract away from objects and describe the type of scene depicted. In this paper, we explore the potential of a state of the art Vision and Language model, VinVL, to caption images at the scene level using (1) a novel dataset which pairs images with both object-centric and scene descriptions. Through (2) an in-depth analysis of the effect of the fine-tuning, we show (3) that a small amount of curated data suffices to generate scene descriptions without losing the capability to identify object-level concepts in the scene; the model acquires a more holistic view of the image compared to when object-centric descriptions are generated. We discuss the parallels between these results and insights from computational and cognitive science research on scene perception.
Anthology ID:
2022.umios-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Unimodal and Multimodal Induction of Linguistic Structures (UM-IoS)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Wenjuan Han, Zilong Zheng, Zhouhan Lin, Lifeng Jin, Yikang Shen, Yoon Kim, Kewei Tu
Venue:
UM-IoS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
56–72
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.umios-1.6
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.umios-1.6
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michele Cafagna, Kees van Deemter, and Albert Gatt. 2022. Understanding Cross-modal Interactions in V&L Models that Generate Scene Descriptions. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Unimodal and Multimodal Induction of Linguistic Structures (UM-IoS), pages 56–72, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Understanding Cross-modal Interactions in V&L Models that Generate Scene Descriptions (Cafagna et al., UM-IoS 2022)
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