@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2024-countercurate,
    title = "{C}ounter{C}urate: Enhancing Physical and Semantic Visio-Linguistic Compositional Reasoning via Counterfactual Examples",
    author = "Zhang, Jianrui  and
      Cai, Mu  and
      Xie, Tengyang  and
      Lee, Yong Jae",
    editor = "Ku, Lun-Wei  and
      Martins, Andre  and
      Srikumar, Vivek",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024",
    month = aug,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2024.findings-acl.915/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.915",
    pages = "15481--15495",
    abstract = "We propose CounterCurate, a framework to comprehensively improve the visio-linguistic compositional reasoning capability for both contrastive and generative multimodal models. In particular, we identify two critical under- explored problems: the neglect of physically grounded reasoning (counting and position understanding) and the potential of using highly capable text and image generation models for semantic counterfactual fine-tuning. Our work pioneers an approach in addressing these gaps.We first spotlight the near-chance performance of multimodal models like CLIP and LLaVA in physically grounded compositional reasoning. We then apply simple data augmentation using the grounded image generation model GLIGEN to generate fine-tuning data, resulting in significant performance improvements: +33{\%} and +37{\%} for CLIP and LLaVA, respectively, on our newly curated Flickr30k-Positions benchmark. Moreover, we exploit the capabilities of high-performing text generation and image generation models, specifically GPT-4V and DALLE-3, to curate challenging semantic counterfactuals, thereby further enhancing compositional reasoning capabilities on benchmarks such as SugarCrepe, where CounterCurate outperforms GPT-4V.To facilitate future research, we release ourcode, dataset, benchmark, and checkpoints at https://countercurate.github.io/"
}