Multi-modal Large Language Model Enhanced Pseudo 3D Perception Framework for Visual Commonsense Reasoning
This work addresses the problem of accurately distinguishing objects and understanding visual relations in VCR for AI systems, representing an incremental improvement by integrating depth and MLLMs into existing frameworks.
The paper tackles the visual commonsense reasoning (VCR) task by introducing a pseudo 3D perception framework that incorporates object depth and uses a multi-modal large language model (MLLM) to improve reasoning, achieving superior performance over state-of-the-art methods on the VCR dataset.
The visual commonsense reasoning (VCR) task is to choose an answer and provide a justifying rationale based on the given image and textural question. Representative works first recognize objects in images and then associate them with key words in texts. However, existing approaches do not consider exact positions of objects in a human-like three-dimensional (3D) manner, making them incompetent to accurately distinguish objects and understand visual relation. Recently, multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have been used as powerful tools for several multi-modal tasks but not for VCR yet, which requires elaborate reasoning on specific visual objects referred by texts. In light of the above, an MLLM enhanced pseudo 3D perception framework is designed for VCR. Specifically, we first demonstrate that the relation between objects is relevant to object depths in images, and hence introduce object depth into VCR frameworks to infer 3D positions of objects in images. Then, a depth-aware Transformer is proposed to encode depth differences between objects into the attention mechanism of Transformer to discriminatively associate objects with visual scenes guided by depth. To further associate the answer with the depth of visual scene, each word in the answer is tagged with a pseudo depth to realize depth-aware association between answer words and objects. On the other hand, BLIP-2 as an MLLM is employed to process images and texts, and the referring expressions in texts involving specific visual objects are modified with linguistic object labels to serve as comprehensible MLLM inputs. Finally, a parameter optimization technique is devised to fully consider the quality of data batches based on multi-level reasoning confidence. Experiments on the VCR dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework over state-of-the-art approaches.