Improving Vision and Language Concepts Understanding with Multimodal Counterfactual Samples

Vision and Language (VL) models have achieved remarkable performance in a variety of multimodal learning tasks. The success of these models is attributed to learning a joint and aligned representation space of visual and text. However, recent popular VL models still struggle with concepts understanding beyond bag-of-objects in images & texts, suffering from compositional reasoning about relationship between objects & attributes and word order. To address the above issues, we create a synthetic multimodal counterfactual dataset (COCO-CF) and propose a novel contrastive learning framework (COMO). We contribute the COCO-CF dataset which is automatically generated from MS-COCO by injecting concepts from off-the-shelf language models and diffusion models to reduce the bias of bag-of-objects. We contribute the COMO framework for effectively leveraging COCO-CF to treat the counterfactual samples as hard negatives and reweight their importance during contrastive learning. Extensive experiments and ablations show COMO achieved a significant improvement of VL concept understanding on the two VL-Checklist and Winoground benchmarks over five strong VL baselines in their zero-shot setting evaluations.