@inproceedings{zhou-etal-2024-mcil,
    title = "{MCIL}: Multimodal Counterfactual Instance Learning for Low-resource Entity-based Multimodal Information Extraction",
    author = "Zhou, Baohang  and
      Zhang, Ying  and
      Song, Kehui  and
      Wang, Hongru  and
      Zhao, Yu  and
      Sui, Xuhui  and
      Yuan, Xiaojie",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Xue, Nianwen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.968",
    pages = "11101--11110",
    abstract = "Multimodal information extraction (MIE) is a challenging task which aims to extract the structural information in free text coupled with the image for constructing the multimodal knowledge graph. The entity-based MIE tasks are based on the entity information to complete the specific tasks. However, the existing methods only investigated the entity-based MIE tasks under supervised learning with adequate labeled data. In the real-world scenario, collecting enough data and annotating the entity-based samples are time-consuming, and impractical. Therefore, we propose to investigate the entity-based MIE tasks under the low-resource settings. The conventional models are prone to overfitting on limited labeled data, which can result in poor performance. This is because the models tend to learn the bias existing in the limited samples, which can lead them to model the spurious correlations between multimodal features and task labels. To provide a more comprehensive understanding of the bias inherent in multimodal features of MIE samples, we decompose the features into image, entity, and context factors. Furthermore, we investigate the causal relationships between these factors and model performance, leveraging the structural causal model to delve into the correlations between the input features and output labels. Based on this, we propose the multimodal counterfactual instance learning framework to generate the counterfactual instances by the interventions on the limited observational samples. In the framework, we analyze the causal effect of the counterfactual instances and exploit it as a supervisory signal to maximize the effect for reducing the bias and improving the generalization of the model. Empirically, we evaluate the proposed method on the two public MIE benchmark datasets and the experimental results verify the effectiveness of it.",
}

Multimodal information extraction (MIE) is a challenging task which aims to extract the structural information in free text coupled with the image for constructing the multimodal knowledge graph. The entity-based MIE tasks are based on the entity information to complete the specific tasks. However, the existing methods only investigated the entity-based MIE tasks under supervised learning with adequate labeled data. In the real-world scenario, collecting enough data and annotating the entity-based samples are time-consuming, and impractical. Therefore, we propose to investigate the entity-based MIE tasks under the low-resource settings. The conventional models are prone to overfitting on limited labeled data, which can result in poor performance. This is because the models tend to learn the bias existing in the limited samples, which can lead them to model the spurious correlations between multimodal features and task labels. To provide a more comprehensive understanding of the bias inherent in multimodal features of MIE samples, we decompose the features into image, entity, and context factors. Furthermore, we investigate the causal relationships between these factors and model performance, leveraging the structural causal model to delve into the correlations between the input features and output labels. Based on this, we propose the multimodal counterfactual instance learning framework to generate the counterfactual instances by the interventions on the limited observational samples. In the framework, we analyze the causal effect of the counterfactual instances and exploit it as a supervisory signal to maximize the effect for reducing the bias and improving the generalization of the model. Empirically, we evaluate the proposed method on the two public MIE benchmark datasets and the experimental results verify the effectiveness of it.
Zhou, Baohang Zhang, Ying Song, Kehui Wang, Hongru Zhao, Yu Sui, Xuhui Yuan, Xiaojie
MCIL: Multimodal Counterfactual Instance Learning for Low-resource Entity-based Multimodal Information Extraction