ConvBench: A Comprehensive Multi-Turn Conversation Evaluation Benchmark for Assessing Hierarchical Capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models

Core Concepts

ConvBench is a novel multi-turn conversation evaluation benchmark designed to assess the hierarchical capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) in perception, reasoning, and creativity.

Abstract

The paper introduces ConvBench, a comprehensive multi-turn conversation evaluation benchmark for assessing the capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). ConvBench is structured around a three-level hierarchy of multimodal capabilities - perception, reasoning, and creativity.
The key highlights of the paper are:

ConvBench comprises 577 meticulously curated multi-turn conversation samples, covering 215 tasks that reflect real-world demands. Each sample includes an input image, three progressive instructions targeting the three capability levels, and human-verified reference responses.

The benchmark adopts a progressive evaluation approach, where models are assessed on their performance at each level of the capability hierarchy. This enables precise attribution of conversation mistakes to specific capability levels.

Extensive evaluation of 19 publicly available LVLMs, including advanced models like GPT-4V, reveals significant challenges posed by ConvBench. The results show a substantial performance gap between LVLMs and human performance in multi-turn conversations.

The analysis indicates that weak perception capabilities in LVLMs undermine their reasoning and creativity, while limited reasoning capacity also hinders their creative abilities. LVLMs demonstrate particularly weak performance in fine-grained perception tasks.

ConvBench serves as a catalyst for further research aimed at enhancing the visual dialogue capabilities of LVLMs, by providing a comprehensive and challenging benchmark for evaluating their progress.

Stats

"LVLMs demonstrate remarkable success in various multimodal applications such as open-world visual question answering, visual dialogue, and medical service."
"ConvBench comprises 577 meticulously curated multi-turn QA samples, spanning 71, 65, and 79 distinct types of perception, reasoning, and creation tasks, respectively."
"GPT-4V, with the help of instruction-conditioned captions, only achieves 39.51% overall score in pairwise evaluation."

Quotes

"ConvBench poses a substantial challenge for current LVLMs, notably GPT4-V [42], which only achieves 39.51% overall score in pairwise evaluation."
"Through extensive ablative evaluation, we conclude that weak perception capability undermines LVLMs' reasoning and creativity and limited reasoning capacity also hinders creativity."
"LVLMs demonstrate weak performance in perception, particularly in fine-grained recognition, object detection, and tasks related to detailed descriptions."

Key Insights Distilled From

ConvBench

by Shuo Liu,Kai... at arxiv.org 04-01-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.20194.pdf

Deeper Inquiries

How can the hierarchical capability assessment framework of ConvBench be extended to evaluate other modalities beyond vision-language, such as audio-language or multi-modal reasoning?

The hierarchical capability assessment framework of ConvBench can be extended to evaluate other modalities beyond vision-language by adapting the structure to accommodate the specific characteristics and requirements of the new modalities. For audio-language evaluation, the framework can be modified to include auditory input and linguistic output, focusing on tasks that require understanding and generating spoken language. The hierarchy can be adjusted to assess auditory perception, linguistic reasoning, and creative language generation in a similar progressive manner as in ConvBench.
For multi-modal reasoning, the framework can be expanded to incorporate multiple modalities such as text, images, and audio. Each modality can be evaluated for its perception, reasoning, and creative capabilities, with an emphasis on how these modalities interact and complement each other in multi-modal tasks. The assessment can involve tasks that require integrating information from different modalities to solve complex problems or generate comprehensive responses.
Overall, the extension of the hierarchical capability assessment framework of ConvBench to other modalities would involve tailoring the structure to suit the specific characteristics and requirements of each modality, while maintaining the progressive evaluation approach to assess perception, reasoning, and creativity in a multi-modal context.

What are the potential implications of the performance gap between LVLMs and humans observed in ConvBench, and how can it inform the development of more advanced and versatile AI assistants?

The performance gap between LVLMs and humans observed in ConvBench has several potential implications for the development of more advanced and versatile AI assistants:

Identification of Weaknesses: The gap highlights specific weaknesses in LVLMs, particularly in perception and reasoning capabilities. Understanding these weaknesses can guide the development of targeted improvements in AI models.

Enhanced Training Strategies: The performance difference can inform the design of more effective training strategies to address the identified limitations. This may involve incorporating additional data sources, refining model architectures, or implementing specialized training techniques.

Focus on Multi-Modal Understanding: To bridge the performance gap, future AI assistants may need to prioritize multi-modal understanding and integration. This could involve training models to effectively combine information from different modalities to enhance overall comprehension and response generation.

Human-AI Collaboration: Recognizing the gap can emphasize the importance of human-AI collaboration in tasks where AI systems currently fall short. AI assistants could be designed to work more seamlessly with human users, leveraging the strengths of both parties to achieve optimal outcomes.

In conclusion, the performance gap identified in ConvBench can serve as a roadmap for the development of more advanced and versatile AI assistants by guiding improvements in perception, reasoning, and multi-modal capabilities.

Given the identified weaknesses in perception and reasoning capabilities of LVLMs, what novel architectural designs or training strategies could be explored to address these limitations and enhance their overall multi-modal understanding and generation abilities?

To address the weaknesses in perception and reasoning capabilities of LVLMs and enhance their overall multi-modal understanding and generation abilities, several novel architectural designs and training strategies could be explored:

Attention Mechanisms: Implementing more sophisticated attention mechanisms that can effectively capture and integrate information from different modalities to improve perception and reasoning capabilities.

Multi-Task Learning: Training LVLMs on a diverse set of tasks that require multi-modal understanding, reasoning, and creative generation to enhance their overall capabilities across different domains.

Adversarial Training: Incorporating adversarial training techniques to improve the robustness and generalization of LVLMs in handling complex multi-modal tasks.

Graph Neural Networks: Utilizing graph neural networks to model relationships between different modalities and enhance reasoning abilities by capturing complex dependencies in multi-modal data.

Transfer Learning: Leveraging transfer learning from pre-trained models on large-scale multi-modal datasets to improve performance on specific perception and reasoning tasks.

Curriculum Learning: Implementing a curriculum learning strategy to gradually expose LVLMs to increasingly complex multi-modal tasks, allowing them to learn hierarchical representations and improve reasoning skills.

By exploring these novel architectural designs and training strategies, LVLMs can address their weaknesses in perception and reasoning capabilities, leading to enhanced multi-modal understanding and generation abilities for more versatile and advanced AI assistants.