  Visual Commonsense Reasoning (VCR) is a cognitive task, challenging models to
answer visual questions requiring human commonsense, and to provide rationales
explaining why the answers are correct. With emergence of Large Language Models
(LLMs), it is natural and imperative to explore their applicability to VCR.
However, VCR task demands more external knowledge to tackle its challenging
questions, necessitating special designs to activate LLMs' commonsense
reasoning abilities. Also, most existing Multimodal LLMs adopted an abstraction
of entire input image, which makes it difficult to comprehend VCR's unique
co-reference tags between image regions and text, posing challenges for
fine-grained alignment. To address these issues, we propose EventLens that
leverages Event-Aware Pretraining and Cross-modal Linking and EnhanceS VCR.
First, by emulating the cognitive process of human reasoning, an Event-Aware
Pretraining auxiliary task is introduced to better activate LLM's global
comprehension of intricate scenarios. Second, during fine-tuning, we further
utilize reference tags to bridge RoI features with texts, while preserving both
modality semantics. Finally, we use instruct-style prompts to narrow the gap
between pretraining and fine-tuning, and task-specific adapters to better
integrate LLM's inherent knowledge with new commonsense. Experimental results
show the effectiveness of our proposed auxiliary task and fine-grained linking
strategy.
