Evaluating the Capabilities of Multi-modal Reasoning Models with
  Synthetic Task Data
Nathan Vaska Victoria Helus
The impressive advances and applications of large language and joint
language-and-visual understanding models has led to an increased need for
methods of probing their potential reasoning capabilities. However, the
difficulty of gather naturally-occurring data for complex multi-modal reasoning
tasks bottlenecks the evaluation of AI methods on tasks which are not already
covered by an academic dataset. In this work, we leverage recent advances in
high resolution text-to-image generation to develop a framework for generating
evaluation data for multi-modal reasoning tasks. We apply this framework to
generate context-dependent anomaly data, creating a synthetic dataset on a
challenging task which is not well covered by existing datasets. We benchmark
the performance of a state-of-the-art visual question answering (VQA) model
against data generated with this method, and demonstrate that while the task is
tractable, the model performs significantly worse on the context-dependent
anomaly detection task than on standard VQA tasks.