Abstract
Metrics for Visual Grounding (VG) in Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems primarily aim to measure a system’s reliance on relevant parts of the image when inferring an answer to the given question. Lack of VG has been a common problem among state-of-the-art VQA systems and can manifest in over-reliance on irrelevant image parts or a disregard for the visual modality entirely. Although inference capabilities of VQA models are often illustrated by a few qualitative illustrations, most systems are not quantitatively assessed for their VG properties. We believe, an easily calculated criterion for meaningfully measuring a system’s VG can help remedy this shortcoming, as well as add another valuable dimension to model evaluations and analysis. To this end, we propose a new VG metric that captures if a model a) identifies question-relevant objects in the scene, and b) actually relies on the information contained in the relevant objects when producing its answer, i.e., if its visual grounding is both “faithful” and “plausible”. Our metric, called Faithful & Plausible Visual Grounding (FPVG), is straightforward to determine for most VQA model designs. We give a detailed description of FPVG and evaluate several reference systems spanning various VQA architectures. Code to support the metric calculations on the GQA data set is available on GitHub.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.findings-emnlp.206
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3129–3144
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.206
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.206
- Cite (ACL):
- Daniel Reich, Felix Putze, and Tanja Schultz. 2023. Measuring Faithful and Plausible Visual Grounding in VQA. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 3129–3144, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Measuring Faithful and Plausible Visual Grounding in VQA (Reich et al., Findings 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2023.findings-emnlp.206.pdf