Ali Asgarov

Ali Asgarov, Samir Rustamov

This research explores the development of multimodal vision-language models for image retrieval in low-resource languages, specifically Azerbaijani. Existing vision-language models primarily support high-resource languages, and fine-tuning them remains computationally demanding. To address challenges in vision-language retrieval for low-resource languages, we integrated the CLIP model architecture and employed several techniques to balance computational efficiency with performance. These techniques include synthetic data generation through machine translation, image augmentation, and further training the attention mechanisms of transformer-based models with domain-specific data. We integrated Multilingual BERT as a text encoder with image encoders like ResNet50, EfficientNet0, Vision Transformer (ViT), and Tiny Swin Transformer. Our study found that models like EfficientNet0 and Tiny Swin Transformer perform best on the datasets they were trained on, such as COCO, Flickr30k, and Flickr8k. Augmentation techniques boosted EfficientNet0 MAP on Flickr30k from 0.84 to 0.87 and ResNet50 MAP on MSCOCO from 0.70 to 0.80, contributing to a new state of the art in vision-language retrieval. We share our configurations and results to support further research. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/aliasgerovs/azclip.

Md. Atabuzzaman, Ali Asgarov, Chris Thomas

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved strong performance on vision-language tasks, particularly Visual Question Answering (VQA). While prior work has explored unimodal biases in VQA, the problem of selection bias in Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA), where models may favor specific option tokens (e.g., "A") or positions, remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate both the presence and nature of selection bias in LVLMs through fine-grained MCQA benchmarks spanning easy, medium, and hard difficulty levels, defined by the semantic similarity of the options. We further propose an inference-time logit-level debiasing method that estimates an ensemble bias vector from general and contextual prompts and applies confidence-adaptive corrections to the model's output. Our method mitigates bias without retraining and is compatible with frozen LVLMs. Extensive experiments across several state-of-the-art models reveal consistent selection biases that intensify with task difficulty, and show that our mitigation approach significantly reduces bias while improving accuracy in challenging settings. This work offers new insights into the limitations of LVLMs in MCQA and presents a practical approach to improve their robustness in fine-grained visual reasoning. Datasets and code are available at: https://github.com/Atabuzzaman/Selection-Bias-of-LVLMs

Hammad Ayyubi, Junzhang Liu, Ali Asgarov et al.

In this paper, we present ENTER, an interpretable Video Question Answering (VideoQA) system based on event graphs. Event graphs convert videos into graphical representations, where video events form the nodes and event-event relationships (temporal/causal/hierarchical) form the edges. This structured representation offers many benefits: 1) Interpretable VideoQA via generated code that parses event-graph; 2) Incorporation of contextual visual information in the reasoning process (code generation) via event graphs; 3) Robust VideoQA via Hierarchical Iterative Update of the event graphs. Existing interpretable VideoQA systems are often top-down, disregarding low-level visual information in the reasoning plan generation, and are brittle. While bottom-up approaches produce responses from visual data, they lack interpretability. Experimental results on NExT-QA, IntentQA, and EgoSchema demonstrate that not only does our method outperform existing top-down approaches while obtaining competitive performance against bottom-up approaches, but more importantly, offers superior interpretability and explainability in the reasoning process.