Calibrating Concepts and Operations: Towards Symbolic Reasoning on Real Images

While neural symbolic methods demonstrate impressive performance in visual question answering on synthetic images, their performance suffers on real images. We identify that the long-tail distribution of visual concepts and unequal importance of reasoning steps in real data are the two key obstacles that limit the models' real-world potentials. To address these challenges, we propose a new paradigm, Calibrating Concepts and Operations (CCO), which enables neural symbolic models to capture underlying data characteristics and to reason with hierarchical importance. Specifically, we introduce an executor with learnable concept embedding magnitudes for handling distribution imbalance, and an operation calibrator for highlighting important operations and suppressing redundant ones. Our experiments show CCO substantially boosts the performance of neural symbolic methods on real images. By evaluating models on the real world dataset GQA, CCO helps the neural symbolic method NSCL outperforms its vanilla counterpart by 9.1% (from 47.0% to 56.1%); this result also largely reduces the performance gap between symbolic and non-symbolic methods. Additionally, we create a perturbed test set for better understanding and analyzing model performance on real images. Code is available at https://lizw14.github.io/project/ccosr.

Automated summary

Neural symbolic methods demonstrate strong performance in synthetic images but struggle in real images, mainly due to the long-tail distribution of visual concepts and unequal importance of reasoning steps. The proposed CCO paradigm addresses these challenges by enabling models to capture underlying data characteristics and reason with hierarchical importance, significantly boosting their performance on real images and reducing the performance gap between symbolic and non-symbolic methods.