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Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at many multimodal tasks, yet they frequently struggle with tasks requiring precise understanding and handling of fine-grained visual elements. This is mainly due to information loss during image encoding…

Vision-language models (VLMs) are impactful in part because they can be applied to a variety of visual understanding tasks in a zero-shot fashion, without any fine-tuning. We study $\textit{generative VLMs}$ that are trained for next-word…

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong multimodal reasoning performance, yet we identify a recurring failure mode in long-form generation: as outputs grow longer, models progressively drift away from image evidence and fall…

Counterfactual reasoning -- the practice of asking ``what if'' by varying inputs and observing changes in model behavior -- has become central to interpretable and fair AI. This thesis develops frameworks that use counterfactuals to…

Is vision good enough for language? Recent advancements in multimodal models primarily stem from the powerful reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the visual component typically depends only on the instance-level…

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a range of tasks, yet concerns about their potential biases exist. This work investigates the extent to which prominent VLMs exhibit cultural biases by…

Multimodal representation learning, exemplified by multimodal contrastive learning (MMCL) using image-text pairs, aims to learn powerful representations by aligning cues across modalities. This approach relies on the core assumption that…

Vision-language models (VLMs) (e.g. CLIP, LLaVA) are trained on large-scale, lightly curated web datasets, leading them to learn unintended correlations between semantic concepts and unrelated visual signals. These associations degrade…

Humans learn language via multi-modal knowledge. However, due to the text-only pre-training scheme, most existing pre-trained language models (PLMs) are hindered from the multi-modal information. To inject visual knowledge into PLMs,…

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) carry the potential to support humans in processing vast amounts of information. While MLLMs are already being used as a fact-checking tool, their abilities and limitations in this regard are…

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are an extension of Large Language Models (LLMs) that facilitate processing both image and text inputs, expanding AI capabilities. However, LVLMs struggle with object hallucinations due to their reliance…

Vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained on extensive datasets can inadvertently learn biases by correlating gender information with specific objects or scenarios. Current methods, which focus on modifying inputs and monitoring changes in…

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance across a wide range of multimodal reasoning tasks, but they often struggle to disentangle fine-grained visual attributes and reason about underlying causal relationships.…

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) creates new opportunities for recommender systems, especially by exploiting the side information (e.g., descriptions and analyses of items) generated by these models. However, aligning…

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable capabilities by integrating visual perception with language understanding, enabling applications such as image-grounded dialogue, visual question answering, and scientific…

Human language is grounded on multimodal knowledge including visual knowledge like colors, sizes, and shapes. However, current large-scale pre-trained language models rely on text-only self-supervised training with massive text data, which…

Bias in large language models (LLMs) has many forms, from overt discrimination to implicit stereotypes. Counterfactual bias evaluation is a widely used approach to quantifying bias and often relies on template-based probes that explicitly…

Most Visual Question Answering (VQA) models suffer from the language prior problem, which is caused by inherent data biases. Specifically, VQA models tend to answer questions (e.g., what color is the banana?) based on the high-frequency…

Leveraging StyleGAN's expressivity and its disentangled latent codes, existing methods can achieve realistic editing of different visual attributes such as age and gender of facial images. An intriguing yet challenging problem arises: Can…

What is the interplay between semantic representations learned by language models (LM) from surface form alone to those learned from more grounded evidence? We study this question for a scenario where part of the input comes from a…