bibtext: @inproceedings{
  fu2024isobench,
  title={IsoBench: Benchmarking Multimodal Foundation Models on Isomorphic Representations},
  author={Deqing Fu and Ruohao Guo and Ghazal Khalighinejad and Ollie Liu and Bhuwan Dhingra and Dani Yogatama and Robin Jia and Willie Neiswanger},
  booktitle={First Conference on Language Modeling},
  year={2024},
  url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=KZd1EErRJ1}
  }
abstract: Current foundation models exhibit impressive capabilities when prompted either with text only or with both image and text inputs. But do their capabilities change depending on the input modality? In this work, we propose **IsoBench**, a benchmark dataset containing problems from four major areas: math, science, algorithms, and games. Each example is presented with multiple **isomorphic representations** of inputs, such as visual, textual, and mathematical presentations. IsoBench provides fine-grained feedback to diagnose performance gaps caused by the form of the representation. Across various foundation models, we observe that on the same problem, models have a consistent preference towards textual representations. Most prominently, when evaluated on all IsoBench problems, Claude-3 Opus performs 28.66 points worse when provided with images instead of text; similarly, GPT-4 Turbo is 18.71 points worse and Gemini Pro is 14.87 points worse. Finally, we present two prompting techniques, *IsoCombination* and *IsoScratchPad*, which improve model performance by considering combinations of, and translations between, different input representations.
title: IsoBench: Benchmarking Multimodal Foundation Models on Isomorphic Representations
authors: Deqing Fu Ruohao Guo Ghazal Khalighinejad Ollie Liu Bhuwan Dhingra Dani Yogatama Robin Jia Willie Neiswanger