We propose VALSE (Vision And Language Structured Evaluation), a novel benchmark designed for testing general-purpose pretrained vision and language (V&L) models for their visio-linguistic grounding capabilities on specific linguistic phenomena. VALSE offers a suite of six tests covering various linguistic constructs. Solving these requires models to ground linguistic phenomena in the visual modality, allowing more fine-grained evaluations than hitherto possible. We build VALSE using methods that support the construction of valid foils, and report results from evaluating five widely-used V&L models. Our experiments suggest that current models have considerable difficulty addressing most phenomena. Hence, we expect VALSE to serve as an important benchmark to measure future progress of pretrained V&L models from a linguistic perspective, complementing the canonical task-centred V&L evaluations.
Unsupervised image captioning is a challenging task that aims at generating captions without the supervision of image-sentence pairs, but only with images and sentences drawn from different sources and object labels detected from the images. In previous work, pseudo-captions, i.e., sentences that contain the detected object labels, were assigned to a given image. The focus of the previous work was on the alignment of input images and pseudo-captions at the sentence level. However, pseudo-captions contain many words that are irrelevant to a given image. In this work, we investigate the effect of removing mismatched words from image-sentence alignment to determine how they make this task difficult. We propose a simple gating mechanism that is trained to align image features with only the most reliable words in pseudo-captions: the detected object labels. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the previous methods without introducing complex sentence-level learning objectives. Combined with the sentence-level alignment method of previous work, our method further improves its performance. These results confirm the importance of careful alignment in word-level details.
In this paper we propose the construction of linguistic descriptions of images. This is achieved through the extraction of scene description graphs (SDGs) from visual scenes using an automatically constructed knowledge base. SDGs are constructed using both vision and reasoning. Specifically, commonsense reasoning is applied on (a) detections obtained from existing perception methods on given images, (b) a "commonsense" knowledge base constructed using natural language processing of image annotations and (c) lexical ontological knowledge from resources such as WordNet. Amazon Mechanical Turk(AMT)-based evaluations on Flickr8k, Flickr30k and MS-COCO datasets show that in most cases, sentences auto-constructed from SDGs obtained by our method give a more relevant and thorough description of an image than a recent state-of-the-art image caption based approach. Our Image-Sentence Alignment Evaluation results are also comparable to that of the recent state-of-the art approaches.