{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/do-vision-language-models-understand-compound","title":"Do Vision-Language Models Understand Compound Nouns?","arxiv_id":"2404.00419","date":"2024-03-30","proceeding":null,"authors":["Sonal Kumar","Sreyan Ghosh","S Sakshi","Utkarsh Tyagi","Dinesh Manocha"],"abstract":"Open-vocabulary vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP, trained using contrastive loss, have emerged as a promising new paradigm for text-to-image retrieval. However, do VLMs understand compound nouns (CNs) (e.g., lab coat) as well as they understand nouns (e.g., lab)? We curate Compun, a novel benchmark with 400 unique and commonly used CNs, to evaluate the effectiveness of VLMs in interpreting CNs. The Compun benchmark challenges a VLM for text-to-image retrieval where, given a text prompt with a CN, the task is to select the correct image that shows the CN among a pair of distractor images that show the constituent nouns that make up the CN. Next, we perform an in-depth analysis to highlight CLIPs' limited understanding of certain types of CNs. Finally, we present an alternative framework that moves beyond hand-written templates for text prompts widely used by CLIP-like models. We employ a Large Language Model to generate multiple diverse captions that include the CN as an object in the scene described by the caption. Our proposed method improves CN understanding of CLIP by 8.25% on Compun. Code and benchmark are available at: https://github.com/sonalkum/Compun","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00419v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.00419v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"do-vision-language-models-understand-compound","repo_url":"https://github.com/sonalkum/compun","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-retrieval","task_name":"Image Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"large-language-model","task_name":"Large Language Model"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"clip","method_name":"CLIP"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2404.00419","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2404.00419"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/sonalkum/compun","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"summary":{"ran":1,"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":2,"ran":2,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":2,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"d0904001703f1b95","entry":"generate_prompt","repo":"sonalkum/compun","repo_kind":"official","path":"generate_captions.py","file_url":"https://github.com/sonalkum/compun/blob/HEAD/generate_captions.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"d0904001703f1b95"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"46062947cf3ab0e6","entry":"stringtolist","repo":"sonalkum/compun","repo_kind":"official","path":"generate_captions.py","file_url":"https://github.com/sonalkum/compun/blob/HEAD/generate_captions.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"46062947cf3ab0e6"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}