What if the TV Was Off? Examining Counterfactual Reasoning Abilities of Multi-Modal Language Models

Abstract

Counterfactual reasoning a fundamental aspect of human cognition involves contemplating alternatives to established facts or past events significantly enhancing our abilities in planning and decision-making. In light of the advancements in current multi-modal large language models we explore their effectiveness in counterfactual reasoning. To facilitate this investigation we introduce a novel dataset C-VQA specifically designed to examine the counterfactual reasoning capabilities of modern multi-modal large language models. This dataset is constructed by infusing original questions with counterfactual presuppositions spanning various types such as numerical and boolean queries. It encompasses a mix of real and synthetic data representing a wide range of difficulty levels. Our thorough evaluations of contemporary vision-language models using this dataset have revealed substantial performance drops with some models showing up to a 40% decrease highlighting a significant gap between current models and human-like vision reasoning capabilities. We hope our dataset will serve as a vital benchmark for evaluating the counterfactual reasoning capabilities of models. Code and dataset are publicly available at https://bzhao.me/C-VQA/.