Improving Commonsense in Vision-Language Models via Knowledge Graph Riddles

This paper focuses on analyzing and improving the commonsense ability of recent popular vision-language (VL) models. Despite the great success, we observe that existing VL-models still lack commonsense knowledge/reasoning ability (e.g., “Lemons are sour”), which is a vital component towards artificial general intelligence. Through our analysis, we find one important reason is that existing large-scale VL datasets do not contain much commonsense knowledge, which motivates us to improve the commonsense of VL-models from the data perspective. Rather than collecting a new VL training dataset, we propose a more scalable strategy, i.e., “Data Augmentation with kNowledge graph linearization for CommonsensE capability” (DANCE). It can be viewed as one type of data augmentation technique, which can inject commonsense knowledge into existing VL datasets on the fly during training. More specifically, we leverage the commonsense knowledge graph (e.g., ConceptNet) and create variants of text description in VL datasets via bidirectional sub-graph sequentialization. For better commonsense evaluation, we further propose the first retrieval-based commonsense diagnostic benchmark. By conducting extensive experiments on some representative VL-models, we demonstrate that our DANCE technique is able to significantly improve the commonsense ability while maintaining the performance on vanilla retrieval tasks.