NTSEBENCH: Cognitive Reasoning Benchmark for Vision Language Models

Cognitive textual and visual reasoning tasks, such as puzzles, series, and analogies, demand the ability to quickly reason, decipher, and evaluate patterns both textually and spatially. While LLMs and VLMs, through extensive training on large amounts of human-curated data, have attained a high level of pseudo-human intelligence in some common sense reasoning tasks, they still struggle with more complex reasoning tasks that require cognitive understanding. In this work, we introduce a new dataset, NTSEBench, designed to evaluate the cognitive multi-modal reasoning and problem-solving skills of large models. The dataset comprises 2,728 multiple-choice questions comprising of a total of 4,642 images across 26 categories sampled from the NTSE examination conducted nationwide in India, featuring both visual and textual general aptitude questions that do not rely on rote learning. We establish baselines on the dataset using state-of-the-art LLMs and VLMs. To facilitate a comparison between open source and propriety models, we propose four distinct modeling strategies to handle different modalities (text and images) in the dataset instances.

FlowVQA: Mapping Multimodal Logic in Visual Question Answering with Flowcharts

Existing benchmarks for visual question answering lack in visual grounding and complexity, particularly in evaluating spatial reasoning skills. We introduce FlowVQA, a novel benchmark aimed at assessing the capabilities of visual question-answering multimodal language models in reasoning with flowcharts as visual contexts. FlowVQA comprises 2,272 carefully generated and human-verified flowchart images from three distinct content sources, along with 22,413 diverse question-answer pairs, to test a spectrum of reasoning tasks, including information localization, decision-making, and logical progression. We conduct a thorough baseline evaluation on a suite of both open-source and proprietary multimodal language models using various strategies, followed by an analysis of directional bias. The results underscore the benchmark's potential as a vital tool for advancing the field of multimodal modeling, providing a focused and challenging environment for enhancing model performance in visual and logical reasoning tasks.

Multi-Set Inoculation: Assessing Model Robustness Across Multiple Challenge Sets

Language models, given their black-box nature, often exhibit sensitivity to input perturbations, leading to trust issues due to hallucinations. To bolster trust, it's essential to understand these models' failure modes and devise strategies to enhance their performance. In this study, we propose a framework to study the effect of input perturbations on language models of different scales, from pre-trained models to large language models (LLMs). We use fine-tuning to train a robust model to perturbations, and we investigate whether exposure to one perturbation improves or degrades the model's performance on other perturbations. To address multi-perturbation robustness, we suggest three distinct training strategies. We also extend the framework to LLMs via a chain of thought(COT) prompting with exemplars. We instantiate our framework for the Tabular-NLI task and show that the proposed strategies train the model robust to different perturbations without losing accuracy on a given dataset.