Benchmarking VLMs' Reasoning About Persuasive Atypical Images

Vision language models (VLMs) have shown strong zero-shot generalization across various tasks, especially when integrated with large language models (LLMs). However, their ability to comprehend rhetorical and persuasive visual media, such as advertisements, remains understudied. Ads often employ atypical imagery, using surprising object juxtapositions to convey shared properties. For example, Fig. 1 (e) shows a beer with a feather-like texture. This requires advanced reasoning to deduce that this atypical representation signifies the beer's lightness. We introduce three novel tasks, Multi-label Atypicality Classification, Atypicality Statement Retrieval, and Aypical Object Recognition, to benchmark VLMs' understanding of atypicality in persuasive images. We evaluate how well VLMs use atypicality to infer an ad's message and test their reasoning abilities by employing semantically challenging negatives. Finally, we pioneer atypicality-aware verbalization by extracting comprehensive image descriptions sensitive to atypical elements. Our findings reveal that: (1) VLMs lack advanced reasoning capabilities compared to LLMs; (2) simple, effective strategies can extract atypicality-aware information, leading to comprehensive image verbalization; (3) atypicality aids persuasive advertisement understanding. Code and data will be made available.

Large Content And Behavior Models To Understand, Simulate, And Optimize Content And Behavior

Shannon, in his seminal paper introducing information theory, divided the communication into three levels: technical, semantic, and effectivenss. While the technical level is concerned with accurate reconstruction of transmitted symbols, the semantic and effectiveness levels deal with the inferred meaning and its effect on the receiver. Thanks to telecommunications, the first level problem has produced great advances like the internet. Large Language Models (LLMs) make some progress towards the second goal, but the third level still remains largely untouched. The third problem deals with predicting and optimizing communication for desired receiver behavior. LLMs, while showing wide generalization capabilities across a wide range of tasks, are unable to solve for this. One reason for the underperformance could be a lack of "behavior tokens" in LLMs' training corpora. Behavior tokens define receiver behavior over a communication, such as shares, likes, clicks, purchases, retweets, etc. While preprocessing data for LLM training, behavior tokens are often removed from the corpora as noise. Therefore, in this paper, we make some initial progress towards reintroducing behavior tokens in LLM training. The trained models, other than showing similar performance to LLMs on content understanding tasks, show generalization capabilities on behavior simulation, content simulation, behavior understanding, and behavior domain adaptation. Using a wide range of tasks on two corpora, we show results on all these capabilities. We call these models Large Content and Behavior Models (LCBMs). Further, to spur more research on LCBMs, we release our new Content Behavior Corpus (CBC), a repository containing communicator, message, and corresponding receiver behavior.