Jared Claypoole

Madeline Schiappa, Raiyaan Abdullah, Shehreen Azad et al.

In recent years large visual-language (V+L) models have achieved great success in various downstream tasks. However, it is not well studied whether these models have a conceptual grasp of the visual content. In this work we focus on conceptual understanding of these large V+L models. To facilitate this study, we propose novel benchmarking datasets for probing three different aspects of content understanding, 1) \textit{relations}, 2) \textit{composition}, and 3) \textit{context}. Our probes are grounded in cognitive science and help determine if a V+L model can, for example, determine if snow garnished with a man is implausible, or if it can identify beach furniture by knowing it is located on a beach. We experimented with many recent state-of-the-art V+L models and observe that these models mostly \textit{fail to demonstrate} a conceptual understanding. This study reveals several interesting insights such as that \textit{cross-attention} helps learning conceptual understanding, and that CNNs are better with \textit{texture and patterns}, while Transformers are better at \textit{color and shape}. We further utilize some of these insights and investigate a \textit{simple finetuning technique} that rewards the three conceptual understanding measures with promising initial results. The proposed benchmarks will drive the community to delve deeper into conceptual understanding and foster advancements in the capabilities of large V+L models. The code and dataset is available at: \url{https://tinyurl.com/vlm-robustness}

Jared Claypoole, Steven Cheung, Ashish Gehani et al.

We analyze two open source deep reinforcement learning agents submitted to the CAGE Challenge 2 cyber defense challenge, where each competitor submitted an agent to defend a simulated network against each of several provided rules-based attack agents. We demonstrate that one can gain interpretability of agent successes and failures by simplifying the complex state and action spaces and by tracking important events, shedding light on the fine-grained behavior of both the defense and attack agents in each experimental scenario. By analyzing important events within an evaluation episode, we identify patterns in infiltration and clearing events that tell us how well the attacker and defender played their respective roles; for example, defenders were generally able to clear infiltrations within one or two timesteps of a host being exploited. By examining transitions in the environment's state caused by the various possible actions, we determine which actions tended to be effective and which did not, showing that certain important actions are between 40% and 99% ineffective. We examine how decoy services affect exploit success, concluding for instance that decoys block up to 94% of exploits that would directly grant privileged access to a host. Finally, we discuss the realism of the challenge and ways that the CAGE Challenge 4 has addressed some of our concerns.

Raiyaan Abdullah, Jared Claypoole, Michael Cogswell et al.

Action recognition models demonstrate strong generalization, but can they effectively transfer high-level motion concepts across diverse contexts, even within similar distributions? For example, can a model recognize the broad action "punching" when presented with an unseen variation such as "punching person"? To explore this, we introduce a motion transferability framework with three datasets: (1) Syn-TA, a synthetic dataset with 3D object motions; (2) Kinetics400-TA; and (3) Something-Something-v2-TA, both adapted from natural video datasets. We evaluate 13 state-of-the-art models on these benchmarks and observe a significant drop in performance when recognizing high-level actions in novel contexts. Our analysis reveals: 1) Multimodal models struggle more with fine-grained unknown actions than with coarse ones; 2) The bias-free Syn-TA proves as challenging as real-world datasets, with models showing greater performance drops in controlled settings; 3) Larger models improve transferability when spatial cues dominate but struggle with intensive temporal reasoning, while reliance on object and background cues hinders generalization. We further explore how disentangling coarse and fine motions can improve recognition in temporally challenging datasets. We believe this study establishes a crucial benchmark for assessing motion transferability in action recognition. Datasets and relevant code: https://github.com/raiyaan-abdullah/Motion-Transfer.

Jared Claypoole, Yunye Gong, Noson S. Yanofsky et al.

We apply category theory to extract multimodal document structure which leads us to develop information theoretic measures, content summarization and extension, and self-supervised improvement of large pretrained models. We first develop a mathematical representation of a document as a category of question-answer pairs. Second, we develop an orthogonalization procedure to divide the information contained in one or more documents into non-overlapping pieces. The structures extracted in the first and second steps lead us to develop methods to measure and enumerate the information contained in a document. We also build on those steps to develop new summarization techniques, as well as to develop a solution to a new problem viz. exegesis resulting in an extension of the original document. Our question-answer pair methodology enables a novel rate distortion analysis of summarization techniques. We implement our techniques using large pretrained models, and we propose a multimodal extension of our overall mathematical framework. Finally, we develop a novel self-supervised method using RLVR to improve large pretrained models using consistency constraints such as composability and closure under certain operations that stem naturally from our category theoretic framework.

Yunye Gong, Robik Shrestha, Jared Claypoole et al.

We propose a novel VQA dataset, BloomVQA, to facilitate comprehensive evaluation of large vision-language models on comprehension tasks. Unlike current benchmarks that often focus on fact-based memorization and simple reasoning tasks without theoretical grounding, we collect multiple-choice samples based on picture stories that reflect different levels of comprehension, as laid out in Bloom's Taxonomy, a classic framework for learning assessment widely adopted in education research. Our data maps to a novel hierarchical graph representation which enables automatic data augmentation and novel measures characterizing model consistency. We perform graded evaluation and reliability analysis on recent multi-modal models. In comparison to low-level tasks, we observe decreased performance on tasks requiring advanced comprehension and cognitive skills with up to 38.0\% drop in VQA accuracy. In comparison to earlier models, GPT-4V demonstrates improved accuracy over all comprehension levels and shows a tendency of bypassing visual inputs especially for higher-level tasks. Current models also show consistency patterns misaligned with human comprehension in various scenarios, demonstrating the need for improvement based on theoretically-grounded criteria.