Multi-modal Robustness Analysis Against Language and Visual Perturbations

Joint visual and language modeling on large-scale datasets has recently shown a good progress in multi-modal tasks when compared to single modal learning. However, robustness of these approaches against real-world perturbations has not been studied. In this work, we perform the first extensive robustness study of such models against various real-world perturbations focusing on video and language. We focus on text-to-video retrieval and propose two large-scale benchmark datasets, MSRVTT-P and YouCook2-P, which utilize 90 different visual and 35 different textual perturbations. The study reveals some interesting findings: 1) The studied models are more robust when text is perturbed versus when video is perturbed 2) The transformer text encoder is more robust on non-semantic changing text perturbations and visual perturbations compared to word embedding approaches. 3) Using two-branch encoders in isolation is typically more robust than when architectures use cross-attention. We hope this study will serve as a benchmark and guide future research in robust multimodal learning.