Vision-and-Language or Vision-for-Language? On Cross-Modal Influence in Multimodal Transformers

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Documents

  • Fulltext

    Final published version, 738 KB, PDF document

Pretrained vision-and-language BERTs aim to learn representations that combine information from both modalities. We propose a diagnostic method based on cross-modal input ablation to assess the extent to which these models actually integrate cross-modal information. This method involves ablating inputs from one modality, either entirely or selectively based on cross-modal grounding alignments, and evaluating the model prediction performance on the other modality. Model performance is measured by modality-specific tasks that mirror the model pretraining objectives (e.g. masked language modelling for text). Models that have learned to construct cross-modal representations using both modalities are expected to perform worse when inputs are missing from a modality. We find that recently proposed models have much greater relative difficulty predicting text when visual information is ablated, compared to predicting visual object categories when text is ablated, indicating that these models are not symmetrically cross-modal.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Publication date2021
Pages9847-9857
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Event2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing -
Duration: 7 Nov 202111 Nov 2021

Conference

Conference2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Periode07/11/202111/11/2021

ID: 301491346