Quantifiers in a Multimodal World: Hallucinating Vision with Language and Sound

Abstract

Inspired by the literature on multisensory integration, we develop a computational model to ground quantifiers in perception. The model learns to pick, out of nine quantifiers (‘few’, ‘many’, ‘all’, etc.), the one that is more likely to describe the percent of animals in a visual-auditory input containing both animals and artifacts. We show that relying on concurrent sensory inputs increases model performance on the quantification task. Moreover, we evaluate the model in a situation in which only the auditory modality is given, while the visual one is ‘hallucinanted’ either from the auditory input itself or from a linguistic caption describing the quantity of entities in the auditory input. This way, the model exploits prior associations between modalities. We show that the model profits from the prior knowledge and outperforms the auditory-only setting.