Illusory VQA: Benchmarking and Enhancing Multimodal Models on Visual Illusions

In recent years, Visual Question Answering (VQA) has made significant strides, particularly with the advent of multimodal models that integrate vision and language understanding. However, existing VQA datasets often overlook the complexities introduced by image illusions, which pose unique challenges for both human perception and model interpretation. In this study, we introduce a novel task called Illusory VQA, along with four specialized datasets: IllusionMNIST, IllusionFashionMNIST, IllusionAnimals, and IllusionChar. These datasets are designed to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art multimodal models in recognizing and interpreting visual illusions. We assess the zero-shot performance of various models, fine-tune selected models on our datasets, and propose a simple yet effective solution for illusion detection using Gaussian and blur low-pass filters. We show that this method increases the performance of models significantly and in the case of BLIP-2 on IllusionAnimals without any fine-tuning, it outperforms humans. Our findings highlight the disparity between human and model perception of illusions and demonstrate that fine-tuning and specific preprocessing techniques can significantly enhance model robustness. This work contributes to the development of more human-like visual understanding in multimodal models and suggests future directions for adapting filters using learnable parameters.

eagerlearners at SemEval2024 Task 5: The Legal Argument Reasoning Task in Civil Procedure

This study investigates the performance of the zero-shot method in classifying data using three large language models, alongside two models with large input token sizes and the two pre-trained models on legal data. Our main dataset comes from the domain of U.S. civil procedure. It includes summaries of legal cases, specific questions, potential answers, and detailed explanations for why each solution is relevant, all sourced from a book aimed at law students. By comparing different methods, we aimed to understand how effectively they handle the complexities found in legal datasets. Our findings show how well the zero-shot method of large language models can understand complicated data. We achieved our highest F1 score of 64% in these experiments.