WinoViz: Probing Visual Properties of Objects Under Different States
Woojeong Jin Tejas Srinivasan Jesse Thomason Xiang Ren
Humans perceive and comprehend different visual properties of an object based
on specific contexts. For instance, we know that a banana turns brown ``when it
becomes rotten,'' whereas it appears green ``when it is unripe.'' Previous
studies on probing visual commonsense knowledge have primarily focused on
examining language models' understanding of typical properties (e.g., colors
and shapes) of objects. We present WinoViz, a text-only evaluation dataset,
consisting of 1,380 examples that probe the reasoning abilities of language
models regarding variant visual properties of objects under different contexts
or states. Our task is challenging since it requires pragmatic reasoning
(finding intended meanings) and visual knowledge reasoning. We also present
multi-hop data, a more challenging version of our data, which requires
multi-step reasoning chains to solve our task. In our experimental analysis,
our findings are: a) Large language models such as GPT-4 demonstrate effective
performance, but when it comes to multi-hop data, their performance is
significantly degraded. b) Large models perform well on pragmatic reasoning,
but visual knowledge reasoning is a bottleneck in our task. c) Vision-language
models outperform their language-model counterparts. d) A model with
machine-generated images performs poorly in our task. This is due to the poor
quality of the generated images.