In this work, we introduce MultiReflect, a novel multimodal self-reflective Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)-based automated fact-checking pipeline. MultiReflect is designed to address the challenges of rapidly outdated information, limitations in human query capabilities, and expert knowledge barriers in fact-checking. Our proposed pipeline leverages the latest advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to enhance fact verification across text and images. Specifically, by integrating multimodal data processing with RAG-based evidence reflection, our system improves the accuracy of fact-checking by utilizing internet-sourced verification. We evaluate our results on the VERITE benchmarks and using several multimodal LLMs, outperforming baselines in binary classification.

This paper examines gender bias in Estonian, a grammatically genderless Finno-Ugric language, which doesn’t have gendered noun system nor any gendered pronouns, but expresses gender through vocabulary. In this work, we focus on the male-female compound words ending with -tädi ‘aunt’ and -onu ‘uncle’, aiming to pinpoint the occupations these words signify for women and men, and to examine whether they reveal occupational differentiation and gender stereotypes. The findings indicate that these compounds go beyond occupational titles and highlight prevalent gender bias.

In this paper, we investigate the impact of objects on gender bias in image captioning systems. Our results show that only gender-specific objects have a strong gender bias (e.g., women-lipstick). In addition, we propose a visual semantic-based gender score that measures the degree of bias and can be used as a plug-in for any image captioning system. Our experiments demonstrate the utility of the gender score, since we observe that our score can measure the bias relation between a caption and its related gender; therefore, our score can be used as an additional metric to the existing Object Gender Co-Occ approach.

In this work, we focus on improving the captions generated by image-caption generation systems. We propose a novel re-ranking approach that leverages visual-semantic measures to identify the ideal caption that maximally captures the visual information in the image. Our re-ranker utilizes the Belief Revision framework (Blok et al., 2003) to calibrate the original likelihood of the top-n captions by explicitly exploiting semantic relatedness between the depicted caption and the visual context. Our experiments demonstrate the utility of our approach, where we observe that our re-ranker can enhance the performance of a typical image-captioning system without necessity of any additional training or fine-tuning.

Applications such as textual entailment, plagiarism detection or document clustering rely on the notion of semantic similarity, and are usually approached with dimension reduction techniques like LDA or with embedding-based neural approaches. We present a scenario where semantic similarity is not enough, and we devise a neural approach to learn semantic relatedness. The scenario is text spotting in the wild, where a text in an image (e.g. street sign, advertisement or bus destination) must be identified and recognized. Our goal is to improve the performance of vision systems by leveraging semantic information. Our rationale is that the text to be spotted is often related to the image context in which it appears (word pairs such as Delta-airplane, or quarters-parking are not similar, but are clearly related). We show how learning a word-to-word or word-to-sentence relatedness score can improve the performance of text spotting systems up to 2.9 points, outperforming other measures in a benchmark dataset.