VIPHY: Probing “Visible” Physical Commonsense Knowledge

Published: 07 Oct 2023, Last Modified: 01 Dec 2023EMNLP 2023 FindingsEveryoneRevisionsBibTeX
Submission Type: Regular Long Paper
Submission Track: Resources and Evaluation
Submission Track 2: Information Extraction
Keywords: Commonsense, Evaluation, Vision-Language Model
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable performance on visual reasoning tasks (e.g. attributes, location). While such tasks measure the requisite knowledge to ground and reason over a given visual instance, they do not, however, measure the ability of VLMs to retain and generalize such knowledge. In this work, we evaluate VLMs' ability to acquire "visible" physical knowledge -- the information that is easily accessible from images of static scenes, particularly along the dimensions of object color, size, and space. We build an automatic pipeline to derive a comprehensive knowledge resource for calibrating and probing these models. Our results indicate a severe gap between model and human performance across all three dimensions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a caption pretrained LM significantly outperforms VLMs on both size and spatial tasks -- highlighting that despite sufficient access to ground language with visual modality, they struggle to retain such knowledge.
Submission Number: 4520
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