Mass-Producing Failures of Multimodal Systems with Language Models

Deployed multimodal systems can fail in ways that evaluators did not anticipate. In order to find these failures before deployment, we introduce MULTIMON, a system that automatically identifies systematic failures-generalizable, naturallanguage descriptions of patterns of model failures. To uncover systematic failures, MULTIMON scrapes a corpus for examples of erroneous agreement: inputs that produce the same output, but should not. It then prompts a language model (e.g., GPT-4) to find systematic patterns of failure and describe them in natural language. We use MULTIMON to find 14 systematic failures (e.g., "ignores quantifiers") of the CLIP text-encoder, each comprising hundreds of distinct inputs (e.g., "a shelf with a few/many books"). Because CLIP is the backbone for most state-of-the-art multimodal models, these inputs produce failures in Midjourney 5.1, DALL-E, VideoFusion, and others. MULTIMON can also steer towards failures relevant to specific use cases, such as self-driving cars. We see MULTIMON as a step towards evaluation that autonomously explores the long tail of potential system failures. 2 * Equal contribution 2 Code for MULTIMON is available at https://github.com/tsb0601/MultiMon 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023).