Addressing the challenge of adapting pre-trained vision-language models for generating insightful explanations for visual reasoning tasks with limited annotations, we present ReVisE: a Recursive Visual Explanation algorithm. Our method iteratively computes visual features (conditioned on the text input), an answer, and an explanation, to improve the explanation quality step by step until the answer converges. We find that this multi-step approach guides the model to correct its own answers and outperforms single-step explanation generation. Furthermore, explanations generated by ReVisE also serve as valuable annotations for few-shot self-training. Our approach outperforms previous methods while utilizing merely 5% of the human-annotated explanations across 10 metrics, demonstrating up to a 4.2 and 1.3 increase in BLEU-1 score on the VCR and VQA-X datasets, underscoring the efficacy and data-efficiency of our method.

Entailment has been recognized as an important metric for evaluating natural language understanding (NLU) models, and recent studies have found that entailment pretraining benefits weakly supervised fine-tuning. In this work, we design a prompting strategy that formulates a number of different NLU tasks as contextual entailment. This approach improves the zero-shot adaptation of pretrained entailment models. Secondly, we notice that self-training entailment-based models with unlabeled data can significantly improve the adaptation performance on downstream tasks. To achieve more stable improvement, we propose the Simple Pseudo-Label Editing (SimPLE) algorithm for better pseudo-labeling quality in self-training. We also found that both pretrained entailment-based models and the self-trained models are robust against adversarial evaluation data. Experiments on binary and multi-class classification tasks show that SimPLE leads to more robust self-training results, indicating that the self-trained entailment models are more efficient and trustworthy than large language models on language understanding tasks.