Objective: This review explores the trustworthiness of multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) systems, specifically focusing on vision-language tasks. It addresses critical challenges related to fairness, transparency, and ethical implications in these systems, providing a comparative analysis of key tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA), image captioning, and visual dialogue. Background: Multimodal models, particularly vision-language models, enhance artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities by integrating visual and textual data, mimicking human learning processes. Despite significant advancements, the trustworthiness of these models remains a crucial concern, particularly as AI systems increasingly confront issues regarding fairness, transparency, and ethics. Methods: This review examines research conducted from 2017 to 2024 focusing on forenamed core vision-language tasks. It employs a comparative approach to analyze these tasks through the lens of trustworthiness, underlining fairness, explainability, and ethics. This study synthesizes findings from recent literature to identify trends, challenges, and state-of-the-art solutions. Results: Several key findings were highlighted. Transparency: Explainability of vision language tasks is important for user trust. Techniques, such as attention maps and gradient-based methods, have successfully addressed this issue. Fairness: Bias mitigation in VQA and visual dialogue systems is essential for ensuring unbiased outcomes across diverse demographic groups. Ethical Implications: Addressing biases in multilingual models and ensuring ethical data handling is critical for the responsible deployment of vision-language systems. Conclusion: This study underscores the importance of integrating fairness, transparency, and ethical considerations in developing vision-language models within a unified framework.

Connecting text and visual modalities plays an essential role in generative intelligence. For this reason, inspired by the success of large language models, significant research efforts are being devoted to the development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). These models can seamlessly integrate visual and textual modalities, while providing a dialogue-based interface and instruction-following capabilities. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of recent visual-based MLLMs, analyzing their architectural choices, multimodal alignment strategies, and training techniques. We also conduct a detailed analysis of these models across a wide range of tasks, including visual grounding, image generation and editing, visual understanding, and domain-specific applications. Additionally, we compile and describe training datasets and evaluation benchmarks, conducting comparisons among existing models in terms of performance and computational requirements. Overall, this survey offers a comprehensive overview of the current state of the art, laying the groundwork for future MLLMs.

In this paper, we build a visual dialogue dataset, named InfoVisDial, which provides rich informative answers in each round even with external knowledge related to the visual content. Different from existing datasets where the answer is compact and short, InfoVisDial contains long free-form answers with rich information in each round of dialogue. For effective data collection, the key idea is to bridge the large-scale multimodal model (e.g., GIT) and the language models (e.g., GPT-3). GIT can describe the image content even with scene text, while GPT-3 can generate informative dialogue based on the image description and appropriate prompting techniques. With such automatic pipeline, we can readily generate informative visual dialogue data at scale. Then, we ask human annotators to rate the generated dialogues to filter the low-quality conversations.Human analyses show that InfoVisDial covers informative and diverse dialogue topics: $54.4\%$ of the dialogue rounds are related to image scene texts, and $36.7\%$ require external knowledge. Each round's answer is also long and open-ended: $87.3\%$ of answers are unique with an average length of $8.9$, compared with $27.37\%$ and $2.9$ in VisDial. Last, we propose a strong baseline by adapting the GIT model for the visual dialogue task and fine-tune the model on InfoVisDial. Hopefully, our work can motivate more effort on this direction.

Decoding strategies play a crucial role in natural language generation systems. They are usually designed and evaluated in open-ended text-only tasks, and it is not clear how different strategies handle the numerous challenges that goal-oriented multimodal systems face (such as grounding and informativeness). To answer this question, we compare a wide variety of different decoding strategies and hyper-parameter configurations in a Visual Dialogue referential game. Although none of them successfully balance lexical richness, accuracy in the task, and visual grounding, our in-depth analysis allows us to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each decoding strategy. We believe our findings and suggestions may serve as a starting point for designing more effective decoding algorithms that handle the challenges of Visual Dialogue tasks.

Conventional phrase grounding aims to localize noun phrases mentioned in a given caption to their corresponding image regions, which has achieved great success recently. Apparently, sole noun phrase grounding is not enough for cross-modal visual language understanding. Here we extend the task by considering pronouns as well. First, we construct a dataset of phrase grounding with both noun phrases and pronouns to image regions. Based on the dataset, we test the performance of phrase grounding by using a state-of-the-art literature model of this line. Then, we enhance the baseline grounding model with coreference information which should help our task potentially, modeling the coreference structures with graph convolutional networks. Experiments on our dataset, interestingly, show that pronouns are easier to ground than noun phrases, where the possible reason might be that these pronouns are much less ambiguous. Additionally, our final model with coreference information can significantly boost the grounding performance of both noun phrases and pronouns.