Counterfactual examples have proven to be valuable in the field of natural
language processing (NLP) for both evaluating and improving the robustness of
language models to spurious correlations in datasets. Despite their
demonstrated utility for NLP, multimodal counterfactual examples have been
relatively unexplored due to the difficulty of creating paired image-text data
with minimal counterfactual changes. To address this challenge, we introduce a
scalable framework for automatic generation of counterfactual examples using
text-to-image diffusion models. We use our framework to create
COCO-Counterfactuals, a multimodal counterfactual dataset of paired image and
text captions based on the MS-COCO dataset. We validate the quality of
COCO-Counterfactuals through human evaluations and show that existing
multimodal models are challenged by our counterfactual image-text pairs.
Additionally, we demonstrate the usefulness of COCO-Counterfactuals for
improving out-of-domain generalization of multimodal vision-language models via
training data augmentation.Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2023 Datasets and Benchmarks Trac