Challenge: Existing work suggests that concepts with concrete visual manifestations are easier to learn than abstract ones.
Approach: They propose an algorithm for automatically computing the visual concreteness of words and topics within multimodal datasets.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm predicts the capacity of machine learning algorithms to learn textual/visual relationships.

Similar Papers

ICC : Quantifying Image Caption Concreteness for Multimodal Dataset Curation (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to curation text-image data are noisy and lack the fine-grained ability to isolate the most concrete samples that provide the strongest signal for learning in a noisy dataset.
Approach: They propose a metric that evaluates caption text without an image reference to measure its concreteness and relevancy.
Outcome: The proposed method detects the concreteness of captions without an image reference and correlates with human evaluation of concreteness in both single-word and caption-level texts.
Grounded Concreteness: Human-Like Concreteness Sensitivity in Vision–Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: a long tradition in cognitive science treats concreteness as a graded dimension of conceptual representation . concrete words benefit from richer sensory codes and exhibit robust behavioral advantages over abstract words .
Approach: They compare vision-language models with text-only large language models to test their concreteness . they find that VLMs show more human-like sensitivity to concreteness than LLMs .
Outcome: The proposed model-based training improves on the Llama text backbones and Llma Vision counterparts.
What do Models Learn From Training on More Than Text? Measuring Visual Commonsense Knowledge (2022.acl-srw)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation methods to measure what language models learn from multimodal training are lacking.
Approach: They propose two evaluation tasks to measure commonsense knowledge in language models by using visual data to evaluate multimodal models and unimodal baselines.
Outcome: The proposed evaluation tasks show that training on a visual modality improves on the visual commonsense knowledge in language models.
MCSE: Multimodal Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to learning semantically meaningful sentence embeddings are limited by the complexity of pre-trained models.
Approach: They propose a sentence embedding learning approach that exploits both visual and textual information via a multimodal contrastive objective.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves the state-of-the-art average Spearman’s correlation by 1.7% on a variety of semantic textual similarity tasks.
Unveiling the mystery of visual attributes of concrete and abstract concepts: Variability, nearest neighbors, and challenging categories (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: a recent study examines the visual representation of concrete concepts using images from Bing and YFCC.
Approach: They examine the variability in visual representations by using images of concrete and abstract concepts from Bing and YFCC.
Outcome: The proposed model can distinguish between concrete and abstract concepts using basic visual features, the authors show . their model outperforms other models in the nearest neighbor analysis, but it is more complex and requires more visual features .
Exploring Concreteness Through a Figurative Lens (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Static concreteness ratings are widely used in NLP, yet a word’s concreteness can shift with context, especially in figurative language such as metaphor, where common concrete nouns can take abstract interpretations.
Approach: They conduct a layer-wise and geometric analysis of LLM hidden representations across four model families to examine how models distinguish literal vs. figurative usage.
Outcome: The results show that LLMs separate literal and figurative usage in early layers and that mid-to-late layers compress concreteness into a one-dimensional direction consistent across models.
Multimodality for NLP-Centered Applications: Resources, Advances and Frontiers (2022.lrec-1)

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Challenge: resurgence of multimodal datasets has attracted significant research interest, but there is no comprehensive survey for this task.
Approach: They present a survey of a multimodal dataset with different modalities according to the applications.
Outcome: The proposed datasets are available online and discuss the new frontier and motivate future researches.
MultiSubs: A Large-scale Multimodal and Multilingual Dataset (2022.lrec-1)

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Challenge: a large-scale multimodal and multilingual dataset is used to facilitate research on visual grounding of words to images in their contextual usage in language.
Approach: They propose a large-scale multimodal and multilingual dataset that aims to facilitate research on grounding words to images in their contextual usage in language.
Outcome: The proposed dataset will facilitate research on visual grounding of words in their contextual usage in language.
Unsupervised Discovery of Multimodal Links in Multi-image, Multi-sentence Documents (D19-1)

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Challenge: a structured training objective based on identifying whether collections of images and sentences co-occur in documents can suffice to predict links between specific images and specific sentences.
Approach: They propose algorithms that discover image-sentence relationships without explicit annotation . they experiment on seven datasets of varying difficulty .
Outcome: The proposed algorithms can predict links between images and sentences without explicit multimodal annotation.
Visualizing the Obvious: A Concreteness-based Ensemble Model for Noun Property Prediction (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Neural language models encode rich knowledge about entities and their relationships but common properties of nouns are difficult to extract because they are rarely explicitly stated in texts.
Approach: They propose to extract perceptual properties from images and use them in an ensemble model to complement the information extracted from language models.
Outcome: The proposed model improves noun property prediction compared to powerful text-based language models.

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