# BiVLC: Extending Vision-Language Compositionality Evaluation with Text-to-Image Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09952 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09952/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Pick-a-Pic: An Open Dataset of User Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01569/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Model Alignment Using Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12908/) (2023)
- [When and why vision-language models behave like bags-of-words, and what to do about it?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01936/) (2022)
- [Winoground: Probing Vision and Language Models for Visio-Linguistic Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03162/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Text-to-Visual Generation with Image-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01291/) (2024)
- [PaLI-X: On Scaling up a Multilingual Vision and Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18565/) (2023)
- [OpenChat: Advancing Open-source Language Models with Mixed-Quality Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11235/) (2023)
- [SugarCrepe: Fixing Hackable Benchmarks for Vision-Language Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14610/) (2023)
- [CREPE: Can Vision-Language Foundation Models Reason Compositionally?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07796/) (2022)
- [Image Captioners Are Scalable Vision Learners Too](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07915/) (2023)
- [IGLUE: A Benchmark for Transfer Learning across Modalities, Tasks, and Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11732/) (2022)
- [COLA: A Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03689/) (2023)
- [Equivariant Similarity for Vision-Language Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14465/) (2023)
- [Revisiting the Role of Language Priors in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01879/) (2023)
- [Why is Winoground Hard? Investigating Failures in Visuolinguistic Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00768/) (2022)
- [Vera: A General-Purpose Plausibility Estimation Model for Commonsense Statements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03695/) (2023)
- [Going Beyond Nouns With Vision & Language Models Using Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17590/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Multimodal Compositional Reasoning of Visual Language Models with Generative Negative Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03964/) (2023)
- [No Filter: Cultural and Socioeconomic Diversity in Contrastive Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13777/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [FineLIP: Extending CLIP's Reach via Fine-Grained Alignment with Longer Text Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01916/) (2025)
- [Estimating Commonsense Plausibility through Semantic Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13464/) (2025)
- [Adding simple structure at inference improves Vision-Language Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09691/) (2025)
- [Understanding Space Is Rocket Science -- Only Top Reasoning Models Can Solve Spatial Understanding Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02175/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Compositionality in Dual-Encoder Vision-Language Models: The Role of Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11496/) (2026)
- [Token-level Response-visual Attention Guidance for Multimodal LLMs Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02593/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing Vision-Language Compositionality (VLC) benchmarks like SugarCrepe are formulated as image-to-text retrieval problems, where, given an image, the models need to select between the correct textual description and a synthetic hard negative text. In this work, we present the Bidirectional Vision-Language Compositionality (BiVLC) dataset. The novelty of BiVLC is to add a synthetic hard negative image generated from the synthetic text, resulting in two image-to-text retrieval examples (one for each image) and, more importantly, two text-to-image retrieval examples (one for each text). Human annotators filter out ill-formed examples ensuring the validity of the benchmark. The experiments on BiVLC uncover a weakness of current multimodal models, as they perform poorly in the text-to-image direction. In fact, when considering both retrieval directions, the conclusions obtained in previous works change significantly. In addition to the benchmark, we show that a contrastive model trained using synthetic images and texts significantly improves over the base model in SugarCrepe and in BiVLC for both retrieval directions. The gap to human performance in BiVLC confirms that Vision-Language Compositionality is still a challenging problem. BiVLC and code are available at https://imirandam.github.io/BiVLC_project_page.