Paper ID: 2112.07566

VALSE: A Task-Independent Benchmark for Vision and Language Models Centered on Linguistic Phenomena

Letitia Parcalabescu, Michele Cafagna, Lilitta Muradjan, Anette Frank, Iacer Calixto, Albert Gatt

We propose VALSE (Vision And Language Structured Evaluation), a novel benchmark designed for testing general-purpose pretrained vision and language (V&L) models for their visio-linguistic grounding capabilities on specific linguistic phenomena. VALSE offers a suite of six tests covering various linguistic constructs. Solving these requires models to ground linguistic phenomena in the visual modality, allowing more fine-grained evaluations than hitherto possible. We build VALSE using methods that support the construction of valid foils, and report results from evaluating five widely-used V&L models. Our experiments suggest that current models have considerable difficulty addressing most phenomena. Hence, we expect VALSE to serve as an important benchmark to measure future progress of pretrained V&L models from a linguistic perspective, complementing the canonical task-centred V&L evaluations.

Submitted: Dec 14, 2021