Understanding Figurative Meaning through Explainable Visual Entailment
This addresses a gap in AI's ability to understand figurative language and humor, which is crucial for more human-like interaction, but it is incremental as it builds on existing visual entailment frameworks.
The paper tackled the problem of large vision-language models struggling with figurative meaning in images and text, proposing a new explainable visual entailment task and creating the V-FLUTE dataset with 6,027 instances, finding that models fail to generalize from literal to figurative meaning, especially in images.
Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in tasks requiring a fine-grained understanding of literal meaning in images and text, such as visual question-answering or visual entailment. However, there has been little exploration of the capabilities of these models when presented with images and captions containing figurative meaning, such as metaphors or humor. To close this gap, we propose a new task framing the figurative meaning understanding problem as an explainable visual entailment task, where the model has to predict whether the image (premise) entails a caption (hypothesis) and justify the predicted label with a textual explanation. The figurative phenomena can be present in the image, in the caption, or both. Using a human-AI collaboration approach, we build the accompanying expert-verified dataset V-FLUTE, containing 6,027 {image, caption, label, explanation} instances spanning five diverse figurative phenomena: metaphors, similes, idioms, sarcasm, and humor. Through automatic evaluation, we find that VLMs struggle to generalize from literal to figurative meaning, particularly when it is present in images. Further, we identify common types of errors in VLM reasoning (hallucination and incomplete or unsound reasoning) across classes of models via human evaluation.