Yezhou Yang


2023

pdf bib
End-to-end Knowledge Retrieval with Multi-modal Queries
Man Luo | Zhiyuan Fang | Tejas Gokhale | Yezhou Yang | Chitta Baral
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We investigate knowledge retrieval with multi-modal queries, i.e. queries containing information split across image and text inputs, a challenging task that differs from previous work on cross-modal retrieval. We curate a new dataset called ReMuQ for benchmarking progress on this task. ReMuQ requires a system to retrieve knowledge from a large corpus by integrating contents from both text and image queries. We introduce a retriever model “ReViz” that can directly process input text and images to retrieve relevant knowledge in an end-to-end fashion without being dependent on intermediate modules such as object detectors or caption generators. We introduce a new pretraining task that is effective for learning knowledge retrieval with multimodal queries and also improves performance on downstream tasks. We demonstrate superior performance in retrieval on two datasets (ReMuQ and OK-VQA) under zero-shot settings as well as further improvements when finetuned on these datasets.

2022

pdf bib
Semantically Distributed Robust Optimization for Vision-and-Language Inference
Tejas Gokhale | Abhishek Chaudhary | Pratyay Banerjee | Chitta Baral | Yezhou Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Analysis of vision-and-language models has revealed their brittleness under linguistic phenomena such as paraphrasing, negation, textual entailment, and word substitutions with synonyms or antonyms. While data augmentation techniques have been designed to mitigate against these failure modes, methods that can integrate this knowledge into the training pipeline remain under-explored. In this paper, we present SDRO, a model-agnostic method that utilizes a set linguistic transformations in a distributed robust optimization setting, along with an ensembling technique to leverage these transformations during inference.Experiments on benchmark datasets with images (NLVR2) and video (VIOLIN) demonstrate performance improvements as well as robustness to adversarial attacks.Experiments on binary VQA explore the generalizability of this method to other V&L tasks.

pdf bib
Learning Action-Effect Dynamics for Hypothetical Vision-Language Reasoning Task
Shailaja Keyur Sampat | Pratyay Banerjee | Yezhou Yang | Chitta Baral
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

‘Actions’ play a vital role in how humans interact with the world. Thus, autonomous agents that would assist us in everyday tasks also require the capability to perform ‘Reasoning about Actions & Change’ (RAC). This has been an important research direction in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general, but the study of RAC with visual and linguistic inputs is relatively recent. The CLEVR_HYP (Sampat et. al., 2021) is one such testbed for hypothetical vision-language reasoning with actions as the key focus. In this work, we propose a novel learning strategy that can improve reasoning about the effects of actions. We implement an encoder-decoder architecture to learn the representation of actions as vectors. We combine the aforementioned encoder-decoder architecture with existing modality parsers and a scene graph question answering model to evaluate our proposed system on the CLEVR_HYP dataset. We conduct thorough experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach and discuss its advantages over previous baselines in terms of performance, data efficiency, and generalization capability.

pdf bib
To Find Waldo You Need Contextual Cues: Debiasing Who’s Waldo
Yiran Luo | Pratyay Banerjee | Tejas Gokhale | Yezhou Yang | Chitta Baral
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

We present a debiased dataset for the Person-centric Visual Grounding (PCVG) task first proposed by Cui et al. (2021) in the Who’s Waldo dataset. Given an image and a caption, PCVG requires pairing up a person’s name mentioned in a caption with a bounding box that points to the person in the image. We find that the original Who’s Waldo dataset compiled for this task contains a large number of biased samples that are solvable simply by heuristic methods; for instance, in many cases the first name in the sentence corresponds to the largest bounding box, or the sequence of names in the sentence corresponds to an exact left-to-right order in the image. Naturally, models trained on these biased data lead to over-estimation of performance on the benchmark. To enforce models being correct for the correct reasons, we design automated tools to filter and debias the original dataset by ruling out all examples of insufficient context, such as those with no verb or with a long chain of conjunct names in their captions. Our experiments show that our new sub-sampled dataset contains less bias with much lowered heuristic performances and widened gaps between heuristic and supervised methods. We also demonstrate the same benchmark model trained on our debiased training set outperforms that trained on the original biased (and larger) training set on our debiased test set. We argue our debiased dataset offers the PCVG task a more practical baseline for reliable benchmarking and future improvements.

pdf bib
CRIPP-VQA: Counterfactual Reasoning about Implicit Physical Properties via Video Question Answering
Maitreya Patel | Tejas Gokhale | Chitta Baral | Yezhou Yang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Videos often capture objects, their visible properties, their motion, and the interactions between different objects. Objects also have physical properties such as mass, which the imaging pipeline is unable to directly capture. However, these properties can be estimated by utilizing cues from relative object motion and the dynamics introduced by collisions. In this paper, we introduce CRIPP-VQA, a new video question answering dataset for reasoning about the implicit physical properties of objects in a scene. CRIPP-VQA contains videos of objects in motion, annotated with questions that involve counterfactual reasoning about the effect of actions, questions about planning in order to reach a goal, and descriptive questions about visible properties of objects. The CRIPP-VQA test set enables evaluation under several out-of-distribution settings – videos with objects with masses, coefficients of friction, and initial velocities that are not observed in the training distribution. Our experiments reveal a surprising and significant performance gap in terms of answering questions about implicit properties (the focus of this paper) and explicit properties of objects (the focus of prior work).

2021

pdf bib
WeaQA: Weak Supervision via Captions for Visual Question Answering
Pratyay Banerjee | Tejas Gokhale | Yezhou Yang | Chitta Baral
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

pdf bib
CLEVR_HYP: A Challenge Dataset and Baselines for Visual Question Answering with Hypothetical Actions over Images
Shailaja Keyur Sampat | Akshay Kumar | Yezhou Yang | Chitta Baral
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Most existing research on visual question answering (VQA) is limited to information explicitly present in an image or a video. In this paper, we take visual understanding to a higher level where systems are challenged to answer questions that involve mentally simulating the hypothetical consequences of performing specific actions in a given scenario. Towards that end, we formulate a vision-language question answering task based on the CLEVR (Johnson et. al., 2017) dataset. We then modify the best existing VQA methods and propose baseline solvers for this task. Finally, we motivate the development of better vision-language models by providing insights about the capability of diverse architectures to perform joint reasoning over image-text modality. Our dataset setup scripts and codes will be made publicly available at https://github.com/shailaja183/clevr_hyp.

pdf bib
SMURF: SeMantic and linguistic UndeRstanding Fusion for Caption Evaluation via Typicality Analysis
Joshua Feinglass | Yezhou Yang
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The open-ended nature of visual captioning makes it a challenging area for evaluation. The majority of proposed models rely on specialized training to improve human-correlation, resulting in limited adoption, generalizability, and explainabilty. We introduce “typicality”, a new formulation of evaluation rooted in information theory, which is uniquely suited for problems lacking a definite ground truth. Typicality serves as our framework to develop a novel semantic comparison, SPARCS, as well as referenceless fluency evaluation metrics. Over the course of our analysis, two separate dimensions of fluency naturally emerge: style, captured by metric SPURTS, and grammar, captured in the form of grammatical outlier penalties. Through extensive experiments and ablation studies on benchmark datasets, we show how these decomposed dimensions of semantics and fluency provide greater system-level insight into captioner differences. Our proposed metrics along with their combination, SMURF, achieve state-of-the-art correlation with human judgment when compared with other rule-based evaluation metrics.

2020

pdf bib
Video2Commonsense: Generating Commonsense Descriptions to Enrich Video Captioning
Zhiyuan Fang | Tejas Gokhale | Pratyay Banerjee | Chitta Baral | Yezhou Yang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Captioning is a crucial and challenging task for video understanding. In videos that involve active agents such as humans, the agent’s actions can bring about myriad changes in the scene. Observable changes such as movements, manipulations, and transformations of the objects in the scene, are reflected in conventional video captioning. Unlike images, actions in videos are also inherently linked to social aspects such as intentions (why the action is taking place), effects (what changes due to the action), and attributes that describe the agent. Thus for video understanding, such as when captioning videos or when answering questions about videos, one must have an understanding of these commonsense aspects. We present the first work on generating commonsense captions directly from videos, to describe latent aspects such as intentions, effects, and attributes. We present a new dataset “Video-to-Commonsense (V2C)” that contains ~9k videos of human agents performing various actions, annotated with 3 types of commonsense descriptions. Additionally we explore the use of open-ended video-based commonsense question answering (V2C-QA) as a way to enrich our captions. Both the generation task and the QA task can be used to enrich video captions.

pdf bib
MUTANT: A Training Paradigm for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Visual Question Answering
Tejas Gokhale | Pratyay Banerjee | Chitta Baral | Yezhou Yang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

While progress has been made on the visual question answering leaderboards, models often utilize spurious correlations and priors in datasets under the i.i.d. setting. As such, evaluation on out-of-distribution (OOD) test samples has emerged as a proxy for generalization. In this paper, we present MUTANT, a training paradigm that exposes the model to perceptually similar, yet semantically distinct mutations of the input, to improve OOD generalization, such as the VQA-CP challenge. Under this paradigm, models utilize a consistency-constrained training objective to understand the effect of semantic changes in input (question-image pair) on the output (answer). Unlike existing methods on VQA-CP, MUTANT does not rely on the knowledge about the nature of train and test answer distributions. MUTANT establishes a new state-of-the-art accuracy on VQA-CP with a 10.57% improvement. Our work opens up avenues for the use of semantic input mutations for OOD generalization in question answering.

pdf bib
Visuo-Linguistic Question Answering (VLQA) Challenge
Shailaja Keyur Sampat | Yezhou Yang | Chitta Baral
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Understanding images and text together is an important aspect of cognition and building advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. As a community, we have achieved good benchmarks over language and vision domains separately, however joint reasoning is still a challenge for state-of-the-art computer vision and natural language processing (NLP) systems. We propose a novel task to derive joint inference about a given image-text modality and compile the Visuo-Linguistic Question Answering (VLQA) challenge corpus in a question answering setting. Each dataset item consists of an image and a reading passage, where questions are designed to combine both visual and textual information i.e., ignoring either modality would make the question unanswerable. We first explore the best existing vision-language architectures to solve VLQA subsets and show that they are unable to reason well. We then develop a modular method with slightly better baseline performance, but it is still far behind human performance. We believe that VLQA will be a good benchmark for reasoning over a visuo-linguistic context. The dataset, code and leaderboard is available at https://shailaja183.github.io/vlqa/.

2015

pdf bib
Learning the Semantics of Manipulation Action
Yezhou Yang | Yiannis Aloimonos | Cornelia Fermüller | Eren Erdal Aksoy
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2011

pdf bib
Corpus-Guided Sentence Generation of Natural Images
Yezhou Yang | Ching Teo | Hal Daumé III | Yiannis Aloimonos
Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing