Natural language explanations promise to offer intuitively understandable explanations of a neural network's decision process in complex vision-language tasks, as pursued in recent VL-NLE models. While current models offer impressive performance on task accuracy and explanation plausibility, they suffer from a range of issues: Some models feature a modular design where the explanation generation module is poorly integrated with a separate module for task-answer prediction, employ backbone models trained on limited sets of tasks, or incorporate ad hoc solutions to increase performance on single datasets. We propose to evade these limitations by applying recent advances in large-scale multi-task pretraining of generative Transformer models to the problem of VL-NLE tasks. Our approach outperforms recent models by a large margin, with human annotators preferring the generated explanations over the ground truth in two out of three evaluated datasets. As a novel challenge in VL-NLE research, we propose the problem of multi-task VL-NLE and show that jointly training on multiple tasks can increase the explanation quality. We discuss the ethical implications of high-quality NLE generation and other issues in recent VL-NLE research.

通过应用大规模多任务生成Transformer模型的最新进展，我们提出了一种新的VL-NLE方法，其提供人类更容易理解的解释，并优于当前技术水平。同时，我们还探讨了高质量NLE生成的伦理影响和其他最近VL-NLE研究中存在的问题。

利用多任务预训练技术，提升基础自然语言解释能力