A Benchmark for Compositional Visual Reasoning

Aimen Zerroug, Mohit Vaishnav, Julien Colin, Sebastian Musslick, Thomas Serre

Keywords: Abstract Visual Reasoning, Compositionality, Data Efficiency, Transfer learning

TL;DR: A visual reasoning benchmark that incorporates a large number of novel relations and focuses on evaluating compositionality and sample efficiency.

Abstract: A fundamental component of human vision is our ability to parse complex visual scenes and judge the relations between their constituent objects. AI benchmarks for visual reasoning have driven rapid progress in recent years with state-of-the-art systems now reaching human accuracy on some of these benchmarks. Yet, there remains a major gap between humans and AI systems in terms of the sample efficiency with which they learn new visual reasoning tasks. Humans' remarkable efficiency at learning has been at least partially attributed to their ability to harness compositionality -- allowing them to efficiently take advantage of previously gained knowledge when learning new tasks. Here, we introduce a novel visual reasoning benchmark, Compositional Visual Relations (CVR), to drive progress towards the development of more data-efficient learning algorithms. We take inspiration from fluidic intelligence and non-verbal reasoning tests and describe a novel method for creating compositions of abstract rules and generating image datasets corresponding to these rules at scale. Our proposed benchmark includes measures of sample efficiency, generalization, compositionality, and transfer across task rules. We systematically evaluate modern neural architectures and find that convolutional architectures surpass transformer-based architectures across all performance measures in most data regimes. However, all computational models are much less data efficient than humans, even after learning informative visual representations using self-supervision. Overall, we hope our challenge will spur interest in developing neural architectures that can learn to harness compositionality for more efficient learning.

Author Statement: Yes

URL: https://github.com/serre-lab/CVR

Dataset Url: https://github.com/serre-lab/CVR

License: The dataset CVR and the dataset generation method are published under the Apache License 2.0.

Contribution Process Agreement: Yes

In Person Attendance: Yes

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2206.05379/code)