CVQA: Culturally-diverse Multilingual Visual Question Answering Benchmark

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is an important task in multimodal AI, and it is often used to test the ability of vision-language models to understand and reason on knowledge present in both visual and textual data. However, most of the current VQA models use datasets that are primarily focused on English and a few major world languages, with images that are typically Western-centric. While recent efforts have tried to increase the number of languages covered on VQA datasets, they still lack diversity in low-resource languages. More importantly, although these datasets often extend their linguistic range via translation or some other approaches, they usually keep images the same, resulting in narrow cultural representation. To address these limitations, we construct CVQA, a new Culturally-diverse multilingual Visual Question Answering benchmark, designed to cover a rich set of languages and cultures, where we engage native speakers and cultural experts in the data collection process. As a result, CVQA includes culturally-driven images and questions from across 28 countries on four continents, covering 26 languages with 11 scripts, providing a total of 9k questions. We then benchmark several Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on CVQA, and show that the dataset is challenging for the current state-of-the-art models. This benchmark can serve as a probing evaluation suite for assessing the cultural capability and bias of multimodal models and hopefully encourage more research efforts toward increasing cultural awareness and linguistic diversity in this field.

Selectively Answering Visual Questions

Recently, large multi-modal models (LMMs) have emerged with the capacity to perform vision tasks such as captioning and visual question answering (VQA) with unprecedented accuracy. Applications such as helping the blind or visually impaired have a critical need for precise answers. It is specially important for models to be well calibrated and be able to quantify their uncertainty in order to selectively decide when to answer and when to abstain or ask for clarifications. We perform the first in-depth analysis of calibration methods and metrics for VQA with in-context learning LMMs. Studying VQA on two answerability benchmarks, we show that the likelihood score of visually grounded models is better calibrated than in their text-only counterparts for in-context learning, where sampling based methods are generally superior, but no clear winner arises. We propose Avg BLEU, a calibration score combining the benefits of both sampling and likelihood methods across modalities.

A tool to overcome technical barriers for bias assessment in human language technologies

Automatic processing of language is becoming pervasive in our lives, often taking central roles in our decision making, like choosing the wording for our messages and mails, translating our readings, or even having full conversations with us. Word embeddings are a key component of modern natural language processing systems. They provide a representation of words that has boosted the performance of many applications, working as a semblance of meaning. Word embeddings seem to capture a semblance of the meaning of words from raw text, but, at the same time, they also distill stereotypes and societal biases which are subsequently relayed to the final applications. Such biases can be discriminatory. It is very important to detect and mitigate those biases, to prevent discriminatory behaviors of automated processes, which can be much more harmful than in the case of humans because their of their scale. There are currently many tools and techniques to detect and mitigate biases in word embeddings, but they present many barriers for the engagement of people without technical skills. As it happens, most of the experts in bias, either social scientists or people with deep knowledge of the context where bias is harmful, do not have such skills, and they cannot engage in the processes of bias detection because of the technical barriers. We have studied the barriers in existing tools and have explored their possibilities and limitations with different kinds of users. With this exploration, we propose to develop a tool that is specially aimed to lower the technical barriers and provide the exploration power to address the requirements of experts, scientists and people in general who are willing to audit these technologies.

A recipe for annotating grounded clarifications

In order to interpret the communicative intents of an utterance, it needs to be grounded in something that is outside of language; that is, grounded in world modalities. In this paper, we argue that dialogue clarification mechanisms make explicit the process of interpreting the communicative intents of the speaker's utterances by grounding them in the various modalities in which the dialogue is situated. This paper frames dialogue clarification mechanisms as an understudied research problem and a key missing piece in the giant jigsaw puzzle of natural language understanding. We discuss both the theoretical background and practical challenges posed by this problem and propose a recipe for obtaining grounding annotations. We conclude by highlighting ethical issues that need to be addressed in future work.