{"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/v-flute-visual-figurative-language","title":"Understanding Figurative Meaning through Explainable Visual Entailment","arxiv_id":"2405.01474","date":"2024-05-02","proceeding":null,"authors":["Arkadiy Saakyan","Shreyas Kulkarni","Tuhin Chakrabarty","Smaranda Muresan"],"abstract":"Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in tasks requiring a fine-grained understanding of literal meaning in images and text, such as visual question-answering or visual entailment. However, there has been little exploration of these models' capabilities when presented with images and captions containing figurative meaning, such as metaphors or humor. To close this gap, we propose a new task framing the figurative meaning understanding problem as an explainable visual entailment task, where the model has to predict whether the image (premise) entails a caption (hypothesis) and justify the predicted label with a textual explanation. The figurative phenomena can be present either in the image, the caption, or both. Utilizing a human-AI collaboration approach, we build the accompanying expert-verified dataset V-FLUTE, containing 6,027 {image, caption, label, explanation} instances spanning five diverse figurative phenomena: metaphors, similes, idioms, sarcasm, and humor. Through automatic evaluation, we find that VLMs struggle to generalize from literal to figurative meaning, particularly when it is present in images. Further, we identify common types of errors in VLM reasoning via human evaluation.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.01474v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.01474v2.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":"v-flute-visual-figurative-language","repo_url":"https://github.com/asaakyan/V-FLUTE","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"visual-entailment","task_name":"Visual Entailment"},{"task_slug":"visual-question-answering-1","task_name":"Visual Question Answering"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2405.01474","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}