A fundamental characteristic common to both human vision and natural language is their compositional nature. Yet, despite the performance gains contributed by large vision and language pretraining, recent investigations find that most-if not all-our state-of-the-art vision-language models struggle at compositionality. They are unable to distinguish between images of " a girl in white facing a man in black" and "a girl in black facing a man in white". Moreover, prior work suggests that compositionality doesn't arise with scale: larger model sizes or training data don't help. This paper develops a new iterated training algorithm that incentivizes compositionality. We draw on decades of cognitive science research that identifies cultural transmission-the need to teach a new generation-as a necessary inductive prior that incentivizes humans to develop compositional languages. Specifically, we reframe vision-language contrastive learning as the Lewis Signaling Game between a vision agent and a language agent, and operationalize cultural transmission by iteratively resetting one of the agent's weights during training. After every iteration, this training paradigm induces representations that become "easier to learn", a property of compositional languages: e.g. our model trained on CC3M and CC12M improves standard CLIP by 4.7%, 4.0% respectfully in the SugarCrepe benchmark.

通过引入一种新的迭代训练算法，以文化传播作为归纳先验，本研究以视觉代理和语言代理之间的Lewis信号游戏重新定义了视觉-语言对比学习，并通过在训练过程中迭代重置代理权重的方式实现文化传播，使得模型对于合成语言的特性变得更易于学习，达到了在SugarCrepe评测中相比标准CLIP模型分别提升4.7%和4.0%的效果。

迭代学习在大型视觉语言模型中提高组合性