How to Understand “Support”? An Implicit-enhanced Causal Inference Approach for Weakly-supervised Phrase Grounding

Jiamin Luo, Jianing Zhao, Jingjing Wang, Guodong Zhou


Abstract
Weakly-supervised Phrase Grounding (WPG) is an emerging task of inferring the fine-grained phrase-region matching, while merely leveraging the coarse-grained sentence-image pairs for training. However, existing studies on WPG largely ignore the implicit phrase-region matching relations, which are crucial for evaluating the capability of models in understanding the deep multimodal semantics. To this end, this paper proposes an Implicit-Enhanced Causal Inference (IECI) approach to address the challenges of modeling the implicit relations and highlighting them beyond the explicit. Specifically, this approach leverages both the intervention and counterfactual techniques to tackle the above two challenges respectively. Furthermore, a high-quality implicit-enhanced dataset is annotated to evaluate IECI and detailed evaluations show the great advantages of IECI over the state-of-the-art baselines. Particularly, we observe an interesting finding that IECI outperforms the advanced multimodal LLMs by a large margin on this implicit-enhanced dataset, which may facilitate more research to evaluate the multimodal LLMs in this direction.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.730
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
8323–8333
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.730
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiamin Luo, Jianing Zhao, Jingjing Wang, and Guodong Zhou. 2024. How to Understand “Support”? An Implicit-enhanced Causal Inference Approach for Weakly-supervised Phrase Grounding. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 8323–8333, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
How to Understand “Support”? An Implicit-enhanced Causal Inference Approach for Weakly-supervised Phrase Grounding (Luo et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.730.pdf