Search for: All records

Does language help make sense of the visual world? How important is it to actually see the world rather than having it described with words? These basic questions about the na- ture of intelligence have been difficult to answer because we only had one example of an intelligent system – humans – and limited access to cases that isolated language or vision. How- ever, the development of sophisticated Vision-Language Mod- els (VLMs) by artificial intelligence researchers offers us new opportunities to explore the contributions that language and vi- sion make to learning about the world. We ablate components from the cognitive architecture of these models to identify their contributions to learning new tasks from limited data. We find that a language model leveraging all components recovers a majority of a VLM’s performance, despite its lack of visual in- put, and that language seems to allow this by providing access to prior knowledge and reasoning.