Daily Papers

In many reasoning problems, the premises are not observed as discrete symbols, but must be inferred from high-dimensional inputs. Further, the predicate vocabulary, argument structure, and trusted evidence are supplied by a Knowledge Graph (KG), or rule definitions. Classical neuro-symbolic pipelines have a discrete interface between perception and deduction. We present a neuro-soft-symbolic architecture for differentiable deductive reasoning over latent perceptual facts and knowledge-provided predicates. SoftReason removes the gradient gap by representing the deductive state as a local soft interpretation tensor over candidate constants and predicates. Perception proposes probabilistic base facts, KG triples enter as high-confidence soft evidence, and every query anchor, predicate choice, and closure update remains differentiable. Our core innovation is a learned differentiable lift of the immediate-consequence operator. It uses predicate-definition embeddings and latent composition channels to form soft body-predicate mixtures, aggregate over all possible witnesses, propose query-conditioned head facts, and update the interpretation through a monotone probabilistic OR. We instantiate the framework on Knowledge-aware Visual Question Answering (KVQA), and demonstrates how SoftReason supports end-to-end perceptual grounding, KG evidence injection, and differentiable deductive closure in one trainable architecture.

We revisit knowledge-aware text-based visual question answering, also known as Text-KVQA, in the light of modern advancements in large multimodal models (LMMs), and make the following contributions: (i) We propose VisTEL - a principled approach to perform visual text entity linking. The proposed VisTEL module harnesses a state-of-the-art visual text recognition engine and the power of a large multimodal model to jointly reason using textual and visual context obtained using surrounding cues in the image to link the visual text entity to the correct knowledge base entity. (ii) We present KaLMA - a knowledge-aware large multimodal assistant that augments an LMM with knowledge associated with visual text entity in the image to arrive at an accurate answer. Further, we provide a comprehensive experimental analysis and comparison of our approach with traditional visual question answering, pre-large multimodal models, and large multimodal models, as well as prior top-performing approaches. Averaging over three splits of Text-KVQA, our proposed approach surpasses the previous best approach by a substantial 23.3% on an absolute scale and establishes a new state of the art. We make our implementation publicly available.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmarks have largely emphasized perception-based tasks that can be solved from visual content alone. In contrast, many real-world scenarios require external knowledge that is not directly observable in the image to answer correctly. We introduce WikiVQABench, a human-curated knowledge-grounded VQA benchmark constructed by systematically combining Wikipedia images, their associated article captions, and structured knowledge from Wikidata. Our pipeline uses large language models (LLMs) to generate candidate multiple-choice image-question-answer sets. All generated instances are subsequently reviewed and curated by human annotators to ensure factual correctness, visual-text consistency, and that each question requires external knowledge in addition to visual evidence for correct resolution. WikiVQABench comprises a substantial collection of Wikipedia images with curated multiple-choice questions designed to benchmark knowledge-aware vision-language models (VLMs). Evaluation of fifteen VLMs (256M-90B parameters) reveals a wide performance range (24.7%-75.6% accuracy), demonstrating that the benchmark effectively discriminates model capabilities on knowledge-intensive reasoning. The dataset and benchmarking code are publicly available.

This work explores knowledge distillation (KD) for visually-rich document (VRD) applications such as document layout analysis (DLA) and document image classification (DIC). While VRD research is dependent on increasingly sophisticated and cumbersome models, the field has neglected to study efficiency via model compression. Here, we design a KD experimentation methodology for more lean, performant models on document understanding (DU) tasks that are integral within larger task pipelines. We carefully selected KD strategies (response-based, feature-based) for distilling knowledge to and from backbones with different architectures (ResNet, ViT, DiT) and capacities (base, small, tiny). We study what affects the teacher-student knowledge gap and find that some methods (tuned vanilla KD, MSE, SimKD with an apt projector) can consistently outperform supervised student training. Furthermore, we design downstream task setups to evaluate covariate shift and the robustness of distilled DLA models on zero-shot layout-aware document visual question answering (DocVQA). DLA-KD experiments result in a large mAP knowledge gap, which unpredictably translates to downstream robustness, accentuating the need to further explore how to efficiently obtain more semantic document layout awareness.

Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) demonstrates significant potential for handling knowledge-intensive tasks. However, conflicts arise between static parametric knowledge in vision language models (VLMs) and dynamically retrieved information due to the static model knowledge from pre-training. The outputs either ignore retrieved contexts or exhibit inconsistent integration with parametric knowledge, posing substantial challenges for KB-VQA. Current knowledge conflict mitigation methods primarily adapted from language-based approaches, focusing on context-level conflicts through engineered prompting strategies or context-aware decoding mechanisms. However, these methods neglect the critical role of visual information in conflicts and suffer from redundant retrieved contexts, which impair accurate conflict identification and effective mitigation. To address these limitations, we propose CC-VQA: a novel training-free, conflict- and correlation-aware method for KB-VQA. Our method comprises two core components: (1) Vision-Centric Contextual Conflict Reasoning, which performs visual-semantic conflict analysis across internal and external knowledge contexts; and (2) Correlation-Guided Encoding and Decoding, featuring positional encoding compression for low-correlation statements and adaptive decoding using correlation-weighted conflict scoring. Extensive evaluations on E-VQA, InfoSeek, and OK-VQA benchmarks demonstrate that CC-VQA achieves state-of-the-art performance, yielding absolute accuracy improvements of 3.3\% to 6.4\% compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/cqu-student/CC-VQA.

Contemporary Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems remain constrained when confronted with culturally specific content, largely because cultural knowledge is under-represented in training corpora and the reasoning process is not rendered interpretable to end users. This paper introduces VietMEAgent, a multimodal explainable framework engineered for Vietnamese cultural understanding. The method integrates a cultural object detection backbone with a structured program generation layer, yielding a pipeline in which answer prediction and explanation are tightly coupled. A curated knowledge base of Vietnamese cultural entities serves as an explicit source of background information, while a dual-modality explanation module combines attention-based visual evidence with structured, human-readable textual rationales. We further construct a Vietnamese Cultural VQA dataset sourced from public repositories and use it to demonstrate the practicality of programming-based methodologies for cultural AI. The resulting system provides transparent explanations that disclose both the computational rationale and the underlying cultural context, supporting education and cultural preservation with an emphasis on interpretability and cultural sensitivity.

Knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA) requires external knowledge beyond the image to answer the question. Early studies retrieve required knowledge from explicit knowledge bases (KBs), which often introduces irrelevant information to the question, hence restricting the performance of their models. Recent works have sought to use a large language model (i.e., GPT-3) as an implicit knowledge engine to acquire the necessary knowledge for answering. Despite the encouraging results achieved by these methods, we argue that they have not fully activated the capacity of GPT-3 as the provided input information is insufficient. In this paper, we present Prophet -- a conceptually simple framework designed to prompt GPT-3 with answer heuristics for knowledge-based VQA. Specifically, we first train a vanilla VQA model on a specific knowledge-based VQA dataset without external knowledge. After that, we extract two types of complementary answer heuristics from the model: answer candidates and answer-aware examples. Finally, the two types of answer heuristics are encoded into the prompts to enable GPT-3 to better comprehend the task thus enhancing its capacity. Prophet significantly outperforms all existing state-of-the-art methods on two challenging knowledge-based VQA datasets, OK-VQA and A-OKVQA, delivering 61.1% and 55.7% accuracies on their testing sets, respectively.

Modern operating room is becoming increasingly complex, requiring innovative intra-operative support systems. While the focus of surgical data science has largely been on video analysis, integrating surgical computer vision with language capabilities is emerging as a necessity. Our work aims to advance Visual Question Answering (VQA) in the surgical context with scene graph knowledge, addressing two main challenges in the current surgical VQA systems: removing question-condition bias in the surgical VQA dataset and incorporating scene-aware reasoning in the surgical VQA model design. First, we propose a Surgical Scene Graph-based dataset, SSG-QA, generated by employing segmentation and detection models on publicly available datasets. We build surgical scene graphs using spatial and action information of instruments and anatomies. These graphs are fed into a question engine, generating diverse QA pairs. Our SSG-QA dataset provides a more complex, diverse, geometrically grounded, unbiased, and surgical action-oriented dataset compared to existing surgical VQA datasets. We then propose SSG-QA-Net, a novel surgical VQA model incorporating a lightweight Scene-embedded Interaction Module (SIM), which integrates geometric scene knowledge in the VQA model design by employing cross-attention between the textual and the scene features. Our comprehensive analysis of the SSG-QA dataset shows that SSG-QA-Net outperforms existing methods across different question types and complexities. We highlight that the primary limitation in the current surgical VQA systems is the lack of scene knowledge to answer complex queries. We present a novel surgical VQA dataset and model and show that results can be significantly improved by incorporating geometric scene features in the VQA model design. The source code and the dataset will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/CAMMA-public/SSG-QA

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) play a pivotal role in advancing various AI applications, with the semantic web community's exploration into multi-modal dimensions unlocking new avenues for innovation. In this survey, we carefully review over 300 articles, focusing on KG-aware research in two principal aspects: KG-driven Multi-Modal (KG4MM) learning, where KGs support multi-modal tasks, and Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph (MM4KG), which extends KG studies into the MMKG realm. We begin by defining KGs and MMKGs, then explore their construction progress. Our review includes two primary task categories: KG-aware multi-modal learning tasks, such as Image Classification and Visual Question Answering, and intrinsic MMKG tasks like Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Completion and Entity Alignment, highlighting specific research trajectories. For most of these tasks, we provide definitions, evaluation benchmarks, and additionally outline essential insights for conducting relevant research. Finally, we discuss current challenges and identify emerging trends, such as progress in Large Language Modeling and Multi-modal Pre-training strategies. This survey aims to serve as a comprehensive reference for researchers already involved in or considering delving into KG and multi-modal learning research, offering insights into the evolving landscape of MMKG research and supporting future work.

Surgical procedures are inherently complex and risky, requiring extensive expertise and constant focus to navigate evolving intraoperative scenes. Computer-assisted systems such as surgical visual question answering (VQA) offer promises for education and intraoperative support. Current surgical VQA research largely focuses on static frame analysis, overlooking rich temporal semantics. Surgical video question answering is further challenged by low visual contrast, its highly knowledge-driven nature, diverse analytical needs spanning scattered temporal windows, and the hierarchy from basic perception to high-level intraoperative assessment. To address these challenges, we propose SurgTEMP, a multimodal LLM framework featuring (i) a query-guided token selection module that builds hierarchical visual memory (spatial and temporal memory banks) and (ii) a Surgical Competency Progression (SCP) training scheme. Together, they enable effective modeling of variable-length surgical videos while preserving procedure-relevant cues and temporal coherence, and better support diverse downstream assessment tasks. To support model development, we introduce CholeVidQA-32K, a surgical video question answering dataset comprising 32K open-ended QA pairs and 3,855 video segments (approximately 128 h total) from laparoscopic cholecystectomy. The dataset is organized into a three-level hierarchy -- Perception, Assessment, and Reasoning -- spanning 11 tasks from instrument/action/anatomy perception to Critical View of Safety (CVS), intraoperative difficulty, skill proficiency, and adverse event assessment. In comprehensive evaluations against state-of-the-art open-source multimodal and video LLMs (fine-tuned and zero-shot), SurgTEMP achieves substantial performance improvements, advancing the state of video-based surgical VQA. The project page is available at: https://camma-public.github.io/SurgTEMP/

Visual Question Answering (VQA) in its ideal form lets us study reasoning in the joint space of vision and language and serves as a proxy for the AI task of scene understanding. However, most VQA benchmarks to date are focused on questions such as simple counting, visual attributes, and object detection that do not require reasoning or knowledge beyond what is in the image. In this paper, we address the task of knowledge-based visual question answering and provide a benchmark, called OK-VQA, where the image content is not sufficient to answer the questions, encouraging methods that rely on external knowledge resources. Our new dataset includes more than 14,000 questions that require external knowledge to answer. We show that the performance of the state-of-the-art VQA models degrades drastically in this new setting. Our analysis shows that our knowledge-based VQA task is diverse, difficult, and large compared to previous knowledge-based VQA datasets. We hope that this dataset enables researchers to open up new avenues for research in this domain. See http://okvqa.allenai.org to download and browse the dataset.

This paper revisits visual representation in knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA) and demonstrates that using regional information in a better way can significantly improve the performance. While visual representation is extensively studied in traditional VQA, it is under-explored in knowledge-based VQA even though these two tasks share the common spirit, i.e., rely on visual input to answer the question. Specifically, we observe that in most state-of-the-art knowledge-based VQA methods: 1) visual features are extracted either from the whole image or in a sliding window manner for retrieving knowledge, and the important relationship within/among object regions is neglected; 2) visual features are not well utilized in the final answering model, which is counter-intuitive to some extent. Based on these observations, we propose a new knowledge-based VQA method REVIVE, which tries to utilize the explicit information of object regions not only in the knowledge retrieval stage but also in the answering model. The key motivation is that object regions and inherent relationship are important for knowledge-based VQA. We perform extensive experiments on the standard OK-VQA dataset and achieve new state-of-the-art performance, i.e., 58.0% accuracy, surpassing previous state-of-the-art method by a large margin (+3.6%). We also conduct detailed analysis and show the necessity of regional information in different framework components for knowledge-based VQA. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/yzleroy/REVIVE.

Current Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems can answer intelligent questions about `Known' visual content. However, their performance drops significantly when questions about visually and linguistically `Unknown' concepts are presented during inference (`Open-world' scenario). A practical VQA system should be able to deal with novel concepts in real world settings. To address this problem, we propose an exemplar-based approach that transfers learning (i.e., knowledge) from previously `Known' concepts to answer questions about the `Unknown'. We learn a highly discriminative joint embedding space, where visual and semantic features are fused to give a unified representation. Once novel concepts are presented to the model, it looks for the closest match from an exemplar set in the joint embedding space. This auxiliary information is used alongside the given Image-Question pair to refine visual attention in a hierarchical fashion. Since handling the high dimensional exemplars on large datasets can be a significant challenge, we introduce an efficient matching scheme that uses a compact feature description for search and retrieval. To evaluate our model, we propose a new split for VQA, separating Unknown visual and semantic concepts from the training set. Our approach shows significant improvements over state-of-the-art VQA models on the proposed Open-World VQA dataset and standard VQA datasets.

We present a simple method that achieves unexpectedly superior performance for Complex Reasoning involved Visual Question Answering. Our solution collects statistical features from high-frequency words of all the questions asked about an image and use them as accurate knowledge for answering further questions of the same image. We are fully aware that this setting is not ubiquitously applicable, and in a more common setting one should assume the questions are asked separately and they cannot be gathered to obtain a knowledge base. Nonetheless, we use this method as an evidence to demonstrate our observation that the bottleneck effect is more severe on the feature extraction part than it is on the knowledge reasoning part. We show significant gaps when using the same reasoning model with 1) ground-truth features; 2) statistical features; 3) detected features from completely learned detectors, and analyze what these gaps mean to researches on visual reasoning topics. Our model with the statistical features achieves the 2nd place in the GQA Challenge 2019.

Knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA) involves answering questions that require external knowledge not present in the image. Existing methods first retrieve knowledge from external resources, then reason over the selected knowledge, the input image, and question for answer prediction. However, this two-step approach could lead to mismatches that potentially limit the VQA performance. For example, the retrieved knowledge might be noisy and irrelevant to the question, and the re-embedded knowledge features during reasoning might deviate from their original meanings in the knowledge base (KB). To address this challenge, we propose PICa, a simple yet effective method that Prompts GPT3 via the use of Image Captions, for knowledge-based VQA. Inspired by GPT-3's power in knowledge retrieval and question answering, instead of using structured KBs as in previous work, we treat GPT-3 as an implicit and unstructured KB that can jointly acquire and process relevant knowledge. Specifically, we first convert the image into captions (or tags) that GPT-3 can understand, then adapt GPT-3 to solve the VQA task in a few-shot manner by just providing a few in-context VQA examples. We further boost performance by carefully investigating: (i) what text formats best describe the image content, and (ii) how in-context examples can be better selected and used. PICa unlocks the first use of GPT-3 for multimodal tasks. By using only 16 examples, PICa surpasses the supervised state of the art by an absolute +8.6 points on the OK-VQA dataset. We also benchmark PICa on VQAv2, where PICa also shows a decent few-shot performance.

The Visual Question Answering (VQA) task aspires to provide a meaningful testbed for the development of AI models that can jointly reason over visual and natural language inputs. Despite a proliferation of VQA datasets, this goal is hindered by a set of common limitations. These include a reliance on relatively simplistic questions that are repetitive in both concepts and linguistic structure, little world knowledge needed outside of the paired image, and limited reasoning required to arrive at the correct answer. We introduce A-OKVQA, a crowdsourced dataset composed of a diverse set of about 25K questions requiring a broad base of commonsense and world knowledge to answer. In contrast to the existing knowledge-based VQA datasets, the questions generally cannot be answered by simply querying a knowledge base, and instead require some form of commonsense reasoning about the scene depicted in the image. We demonstrate the potential of this new dataset through a detailed analysis of its contents and baseline performance measurements over a variety of state-of-the-art vision-language models. Project page: http://a-okvqa.allenai.org/

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a popular approach for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) by addressing their limitations in verifying facts and answering knowledge-intensive questions. As the research in LLM extends their capability to handle input modality other than text, e.g. image, several multimodal RAG benchmarks are proposed. Nonetheless, they mainly use textual knowledge bases as the primary source of evidences for augmentation. There still lack benchmarks designed to evaluate images as augmentation in RAG systems and how they leverage visual knowledge. We propose Visual-RAG, a novel Question Answering benchmark that emphasizes visual knowledge intensive questions. Unlike prior works relying on text-based evidence, Visual-RAG necessitates text-to-image retrieval and integration of relevant clue images to extract visual knowledge as evidence. With Visual-RAG, we evaluate 5 open-sourced and 3 proprietary Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), revealing that images can serve as good evidence in RAG; however, even the SoTA models struggle with effectively extracting and utilizing visual knowledge

Knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA) involves questions that require world knowledge beyond the image to yield the correct answer. Large language models (LMs) like GPT-3 are particularly helpful for this task because of their strong knowledge retrieval and reasoning capabilities. To enable LM to understand images, prior work uses a captioning model to convert images into text. However, when summarizing an image in a single caption sentence, which visual entities to describe are often underspecified. Generic image captions often miss visual details essential for the LM to answer visual questions correctly. To address this challenge, we propose PromptCap (Prompt-guided image Captioning), a captioning model designed to serve as a better connector between images and black-box LMs. Different from generic captions, PromptCap takes a natural-language prompt to control the visual entities to describe in the generated caption. The prompt contains a question that the caption should aid in answering. To avoid extra annotation, PromptCap is trained by examples synthesized with GPT-3 and existing datasets. We demonstrate PromptCap's effectiveness on an existing pipeline in which GPT-3 is prompted with image captions to carry out VQA. PromptCap outperforms generic captions by a large margin and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on knowledge-based VQA tasks (60.4% on OK-VQA and 59.6% on A-OKVQA). Zero-shot results on WebQA show that PromptCap generalizes well to unseen domains.

We propose Encyclopedic-VQA, a large scale visual question answering (VQA) dataset featuring visual questions about detailed properties of fine-grained categories and instances. It contains 221k unique question+answer pairs each matched with (up to) 5 images, resulting in a total of 1M VQA samples. Moreover, our dataset comes with a controlled knowledge base derived from Wikipedia, marking the evidence to support each answer. Empirically, we show that our dataset poses a hard challenge for large vision+language models as they perform poorly on our dataset: PaLI [14] is state-of-the-art on OK-VQA [37], yet it only achieves 13.0% accuracy on our dataset. Moreover, we experimentally show that progress on answering our encyclopedic questions can be achieved by augmenting large models with a mechanism that retrieves relevant information from the knowledge base. An oracle experiment with perfect retrieval achieves 87.0% accuracy on the single-hop portion of our dataset, and an automatic retrieval-augmented prototype yields 48.8%. We believe that our dataset enables future research on retrieval-augmented vision+language models. It is available at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/encyclopedic_vqa .

With the breakthrough of multi-modal large language models, answering complex visual questions that demand advanced reasoning abilities and world knowledge has become a much more important testbed for developing AI models than ever. However, equipping AI models with robust cross-modality reasoning ability remains challenging since the cognition scheme of humans has not been understood systematically. In this paper, we believe that if we can collect visual clues in the given image as much as possible, we will recognize the image more accurately, understand the question better, recall relevant knowledge more easily, and finally reason out the answer. We discover these rich visual clues by mining question-answer pairs in images and sending them into multi-modal large language models as prompts. We call the proposed method Q&A Prompts. Specifically, we first use the image-answer pairs and the corresponding questions in the training set as inputs and outputs to train a visual question generation model. Then, we use an image tagging model to identify various instances and send packaged image-tag pairs into the visual question generation model to generate relevant questions with the extracted image tags as answers. Finally, we encode these generated question-answer pairs as prompts with a visual-aware prompting module and send them into pre-trained multi-modal large language models to reason out the final answers. Experimental results show that, compared with state-of-the-art methods, our Q&A Prompts achieves substantial improvements on the challenging visual question answering datasets requiring reasoning over diverse world knowledge, such as OK-VQA and A-OKVQA.

There has been an explosion of work in the vision & language community during the past few years from image captioning to video transcription, and answering questions about images. These tasks have focused on literal descriptions of the image. To move beyond the literal, we choose to explore how questions about an image are often directed at commonsense inference and the abstract events evoked by objects in the image. In this paper, we introduce the novel task of Visual Question Generation (VQG), where the system is tasked with asking a natural and engaging question when shown an image. We provide three datasets which cover a variety of images from object-centric to event-centric, with considerably more abstract training data than provided to state-of-the-art captioning systems thus far. We train and test several generative and retrieval models to tackle the task of VQG. Evaluation results show that while such models ask reasonable questions for a variety of images, there is still a wide gap with human performance which motivates further work on connecting images with commonsense knowledge and pragmatics. Our proposed task offers a new challenge to the community which we hope furthers interest in exploring deeper connections between vision & language.

Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires models to answer questions about an image by integrating external knowledge, posing significant challenges due to noisy retrieval and the structured, encyclopedic nature of the knowledge base. These characteristics create a distributional gap from pretrained multimodal large language models (MLLMs), making effective reasoning and domain adaptation difficult in the post-training stage. In this work, we propose Wiki-R1, a data-generation-based curriculum reinforcement learning framework that systematically incentivizes reasoning in MLLMs for KB-VQA. Wiki-R1 constructs a sequence of training distributions aligned with the model's evolving capability, bridging the gap from pretraining to the KB-VQA target distribution. We introduce controllable curriculum data generation, which manipulates the retriever to produce samples at desired difficulty levels, and a curriculum sampling strategy that selects informative samples likely to yield non-zero advantages during RL updates. Sample difficulty is estimated using observed rewards and propagated to unobserved samples to guide learning. Experiments on two KB-VQA benchmarks, Encyclopedic VQA and InfoSeek, demonstrate that Wiki-R1 achieves new state-of-the-art results, improving accuracy from 35.5\% to 37.1\% on Encyclopedic VQA and from 40.1\% to 44.1\% on InfoSeek. The project page is available at https://artanic30.github.io/project_pages/WikiR1/.

Visual question answering (VQA) often requires an understanding of visual concepts and language semantics, which relies on external knowledge. Most existing methods exploit pre-trained language models or/and unstructured text, but the knowledge in these resources are often incomplete and noisy. Some other methods prefer to use knowledge graphs (KGs) which often have intensive structured knowledge, but the research is still quite preliminary. In this paper, we propose LaKo, a knowledge-driven VQA method via Late Knowledge-to-text Injection. To effectively incorporate an external KG, we transfer triples into textual format and propose a late injection mechanism for knowledge fusion. Finally we address VQA as a text generation task with an effective encoder-decoder paradigm, which achieves state-of-the-art results on OKVQA dataset.

Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) requires visual language models (VLMs) to integrate visual understanding with external knowledge retrieval. Although retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) achieves significant advances in this task by combining knowledge-base querying, it still struggles with the quality of multimodal queries and the relevance of retrieved results. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel three-stage method, termed Wiki-PRF, including Processing, Retrieval and Filtering stages. The processing stage dynamically invokes visual tools to extract precise multimodal information for retrieval. The retrieval stage integrates visual and text features to achieve multimodal knowledge retrieval. The filtering stage performs relevance filtering and concentration on retrieval results. To this end, we introduce a visual language model trained with answer accuracy and format consistency as reward signals via a reinforcement learning manner. This enhances the model's reasoning, tool invocation for accurate queries, and filtering of irrelevant content. Experiments on benchmark datasets (E-VQA and InfoSeek) show significant improvements~(36.0 and 42.8) in answer quality, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/cqu-student/Wiki-PRF

Evaluating and Rethinking the current landscape of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), we observe that widely-used visual-language projection approaches (e.g., Q-former or MLP) focus on the alignment of image-text descriptions yet ignore the visual knowledge-dimension alignment, i.e., connecting visuals to their relevant knowledge. Visual knowledge plays a significant role in analyzing, inferring, and interpreting information from visuals, helping improve the accuracy of answers to knowledge-based visual questions. In this paper, we mainly explore improving LMMs with visual-language knowledge alignment, especially aimed at challenging knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA). To this end, we present a Cognitive Visual-Language Mapper (CVLM), which contains a pretrained Visual Knowledge Aligner (VKA) and a Fine-grained Knowledge Adapter (FKA) used in the multimodal instruction tuning stage. Specifically, we design the VKA based on the interaction between a small language model and a visual encoder, training it on collected image-knowledge pairs to achieve visual knowledge acquisition and projection. FKA is employed to distill the fine-grained visual knowledge of an image and inject it into Large Language Models (LLMs). We conduct extensive experiments on knowledge-based VQA benchmarks and experimental results show that CVLM significantly improves the performance of LMMs on knowledge-based VQA (average gain by 5.0%). Ablation studies also verify the effectiveness of VKA and FKA, respectively.

Despite recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs), many still over-rely on visual language priors present in their training data rather than true visual reasoning. To examine the situation, we introduce ViLP, a visual question answering (VQA) benchmark that pairs each question with three potential answers and three corresponding images: one image whose answer can be inferred from text alone, and two images that demand visual reasoning. By leveraging image generative models, we ensure significant variation in texture, shape, conceptual combinations, hallucinated elements, and proverb-based contexts, making our benchmark images distinctly out-of-distribution. While humans achieve near-perfect accuracy, modern VLMs falter; for instance, GPT-4 achieves only 66.17% on ViLP. To alleviate this, we propose a self-improving framework in which models generate new VQA pairs and images, then apply pixel-level and semantic corruptions to form "good-bad" image pairs for self-training. Our training objectives compel VLMs to focus more on actual visual inputs and have demonstrated their effectiveness in enhancing the performance of open-source VLMs, including LLaVA-v1.5 and Cambrian.

Commonsense visual-question answering often hinges on knowledge that is missing from the image or the question. Small vision-language models (sVLMs) such as ViLT, VisualBERT and FLAVA therefore lag behind their larger generative counterparts. To study the effect of careful commonsense knowledge integration on sVLMs, we present an end-to-end framework (NLKI) that (i) retrieves natural language facts, (ii) prompts an LLM to craft natural language explanations, and (iii) feeds both signals to sVLMs respectively across two commonsense VQA datasets (CRIC, AOKVQA) and a visual-entailment dataset (e-SNLI-VE). Facts retrieved using a fine-tuned ColBERTv2 and an object information-enriched prompt yield explanations that largely cut down hallucinations, while lifting the end-to-end answer accuracy by up to 7% (across 3 datasets), making FLAVA and other models in NLKI match or exceed medium-sized VLMs such as Qwen-2 VL-2B and SmolVLM-2.5B. As these benchmarks contain 10-25% label noise, additional finetuning using noise-robust losses (such as symmetric cross entropy and generalised cross entropy) adds another 2.5% in CRIC, and 5.5% in AOKVQA. Our findings expose when LLM-based commonsense knowledge beats retrieval from commonsense knowledge bases, how noise-aware training stabilises small models in the context of external knowledge augmentation, and why parameter-efficient commonsense reasoning is now within reach for 250M models.

This paper presents stacked attention networks (SANs) that learn to answer natural language questions from images. SANs use semantic representation of a question as query to search for the regions in an image that are related to the answer. We argue that image question answering (QA) often requires multiple steps of reasoning. Thus, we develop a multiple-layer SAN in which we query an image multiple times to infer the answer progressively. Experiments conducted on four image QA data sets demonstrate that the proposed SANs significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art approaches. The visualization of the attention layers illustrates the progress that the SAN locates the relevant visual clues that lead to the answer of the question layer-by-layer.

We propose a novel video understanding task by fusing knowledge-based and video question answering. First, we introduce KnowIT VQA, a video dataset with 24,282 human-generated question-answer pairs about a popular sitcom. The dataset combines visual, textual and temporal coherence reasoning together with knowledge-based questions, which need of the experience obtained from the viewing of the series to be answered. Second, we propose a video understanding model by combining the visual and textual video content with specific knowledge about the show. Our main findings are: (i) the incorporation of knowledge produces outstanding improvements for VQA in video, and (ii) the performance on KnowIT VQA still lags well behind human accuracy, indicating its usefulness for studying current video modelling limitations.

Incorporating external knowledge to Visual Question Answering (VQA) has become a vital practical need. Existing methods mostly adopt pipeline approaches with different components for knowledge matching and extraction, feature learning, etc.However, such pipeline approaches suffer when some component does not perform well, which leads to error propagation and poor overall performance. Furthermore, the majority of existing approaches ignore the answer bias issue -- many answers may have never appeared during training (i.e., unseen answers) in real-word application. To bridge these gaps, in this paper, we propose a Zero-shot VQA algorithm using knowledge graphs and a mask-based learning mechanism for better incorporating external knowledge, and present new answer-based Zero-shot VQA splits for the F-VQA dataset. Experiments show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance in Zero-shot VQA with unseen answers, meanwhile dramatically augment existing end-to-end models on the normal F-VQA task.

Vision and language understanding has emerged as a subject undergoing intense study in Artificial Intelligence. Among many tasks in this line of research, visual question answering (VQA) has been one of the most successful ones, where the goal is to learn a model that understands visual content at region-level details and finds their associations with pairs of questions and answers in the natural language form. Despite the rapid progress in the past few years, most existing work in VQA have focused primarily on images. In this paper, we focus on extending VQA to the video domain and contribute to the literature in three important ways. First, we propose three new tasks designed specifically for video VQA, which require spatio-temporal reasoning from videos to answer questions correctly. Next, we introduce a new large-scale dataset for video VQA named TGIF-QA that extends existing VQA work with our new tasks. Finally, we propose a dual-LSTM based approach with both spatial and temporal attention, and show its effectiveness over conventional VQA techniques through empirical evaluations.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) task has showcased a new stage of interaction between language and vision, two of the most pivotal components of artificial intelligence. However, it has mostly focused on generating short and repetitive answers, mostly single words, which fall short of rich linguistic capabilities of humans. We introduce Full-Sentence Visual Question Answering (FSVQA) dataset, consisting of nearly 1 million pairs of questions and full-sentence answers for images, built by applying a number of rule-based natural language processing techniques to original VQA dataset and captions in the MS COCO dataset. This poses many additional complexities to conventional VQA task, and we provide a baseline for approaching and evaluating the task, on top of which we invite the research community to build further improvements.

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Retrieval-Augmented Visual Language Model (REVEAL) that learns to encode world knowledge into a large-scale memory, and to retrieve from it to answer knowledge-intensive queries. REVEAL consists of four key components: the memory, the encoder, the retriever and the generator. The large-scale memory encodes various sources of multimodal world knowledge (e.g. image-text pairs, question answering pairs, knowledge graph triplets, etc) via a unified encoder. The retriever finds the most relevant knowledge entries in the memory, and the generator fuses the retrieved knowledge with the input query to produce the output. A key novelty in our approach is that the memory, encoder, retriever and generator are all pre-trained end-to-end on a massive amount of data. Furthermore, our approach can use a diverse set of multimodal knowledge sources, which is shown to result in significant gains. We show that REVEAL achieves state-of-the-art results on visual question answering and image captioning.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) methods have made incredible progress, but suffer from a failure to generalize. This is visible in the fact that they are vulnerable to learning coincidental correlations in the data rather than deeper relations between image content and ideas expressed in language. We present a dataset that takes a step towards addressing this problem in that it contains questions expressed in two languages, and an evaluation process that co-opts a well understood image-based metric to reflect the method's ability to reason. Measuring reasoning directly encourages generalization by penalizing answers that are coincidentally correct. The dataset reflects the scene-text version of the VQA problem, and the reasoning evaluation can be seen as a text-based version of a referring expression challenge. Experiments and analysis are provided that show the value of the dataset.

Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires models to combine image understanding with external knowledge. Most prior methods use a fixed retrieve-then-generate pipeline with a pre-selected retriever and a static top-k setting, which is not adaptive during reasoning. We propose ProMSA, a progressive multimodal search agent for KB-VQA. Given an image-question pair, the agent iteratively chooses image search, text search, or stop, under explicit tool-call budgets and with deduplication to avoid redundant retrieval. For training, we first use rejection-sampling SFT to learn valid tool-use formats, then optimize the agent with TN-GSPO, a sequence-level RL objective that normalizes updates by both generation length and tool-interaction depth. Experiments on E-VQA and InfoSeek show consistent gains over strong RAG and agent baselines, and improved retrieval and end-to-end accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/DingWu1021/Promsa.

Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires grounding visual queries to external knowledge beyond directly observable content in images. While recent multi modal large language models (MLLMs) show strong perceptual abilities, they struggle on KB-VQA tasks requiring groundings from both fine-grained entity and evidence levels. Most existing multi-modal retrieval augmented generation (MM-RAG) methods tightly couple entity discrimination and section-level evidence ranking into a single re-ranking stage, leading to high cost and limited generalization. In this work, we revisit existing MM-RAG solutions from a workflow perspective and argue both entity-level and fact-level groundings are key bottlenecks. We observe that although MLLMs often fail under open-ended entity naming, they can better identify the correct entity when selecting from a small set of candidate names. Based on this insight, we propose a simple and training-free identify-before-answer IBA framework that decouples entity identification from section-level re-ranking. Our approach prompts an MLLM to select high-confidence entities using only candidate names, followed by an off-the-shelf textual re-ranker for evidence selection. Experiments on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek show that our method consistently outperforms fine-tuned multi-modal re-ranking baselines while reducing training and inference complexity. Additional analyses reveal that the improvements arise not only from better entity identification, but also from selecting more informative evidence once correct entity is fixed. Our implementation is made public to ease reproducibility.

Current visual question answering datasets do not consider the rich semantic information conveyed by text within an image. In this work, we present a new dataset, ST-VQA, that aims to highlight the importance of exploiting high-level semantic information present in images as textual cues in the VQA process. We use this dataset to define a series of tasks of increasing difficulty for which reading the scene text in the context provided by the visual information is necessary to reason and generate an appropriate answer. We propose a new evaluation metric for these tasks to account both for reasoning errors as well as shortcomings of the text recognition module. In addition we put forward a series of baseline methods, which provide further insight to the newly released dataset, and set the scene for further research.

Current visual question answering (VQA) tasks mainly consider answering human-annotated questions for natural images. However, aside from natural images, abstract diagrams with semantic richness are still understudied in visual understanding and reasoning research. In this work, we introduce a new challenge of Icon Question Answering (IconQA) with the goal of answering a question in an icon image context. We release IconQA, a large-scale dataset that consists of 107,439 questions and three sub-tasks: multi-image-choice, multi-text-choice, and filling-in-the-blank. The IconQA dataset is inspired by real-world diagram word problems that highlight the importance of abstract diagram understanding and comprehensive cognitive reasoning. Thus, IconQA requires not only perception skills like object recognition and text understanding, but also diverse cognitive reasoning skills, such as geometric reasoning, commonsense reasoning, and arithmetic reasoning. To facilitate potential IconQA models to learn semantic representations for icon images, we further release an icon dataset Icon645 which contains 645,687 colored icons on 377 classes. We conduct extensive user studies and blind experiments and reproduce a wide range of advanced VQA methods to benchmark the IconQA task. Also, we develop a strong IconQA baseline Patch-TRM that applies a pyramid cross-modal Transformer with input diagram embeddings pre-trained on the icon dataset. IconQA and Icon645 are available at https://iconqa.github.io.

Vision-Language (VL) models have gained significant research focus, enabling remarkable advances in multimodal reasoning. These architectures typically comprise a vision encoder, a Large Language Model (LLM), and a projection module that aligns visual features with the LLM's representation space. Despite their success, a critical limitation persists: the vision encoding process remains decoupled from user queries, often in the form of image-related questions. Consequently, the resulting visual features may not be optimally attuned to the query-specific elements of the image. To address this, we introduce QA-ViT, a Question Aware Vision Transformer approach for multimodal reasoning, which embeds question awareness directly within the vision encoder. This integration results in dynamic visual features focusing on relevant image aspects to the posed question. QA-ViT is model-agnostic and can be incorporated efficiently into any VL architecture. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of applying our method to various multimodal architectures, leading to consistent improvement across diverse tasks and showcasing its potential for enhancing visual and scene-text understanding.

Visual question answering (VQA) is a challenging task that requires the ability to comprehend and reason with visual information. While recent vision-language models have made strides, they continue to struggle with zero-shot VQA, particularly in handling complex compositional questions and adapting to new domains i.e. knowledge-based reasoning. This paper explores the use of various prompting strategies, focusing on the BLIP2 model, to enhance zero-shot VQA performance. We conduct a comprehensive investigation across several VQA datasets, examining the effectiveness of different question templates, the role of few-shot exemplars, the impact of chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, and the benefits of incorporating image captions as additional visual cues. Despite the varied outcomes, our findings demonstrate that carefully designed question templates and the integration of additional visual cues, like image captions, can contribute to improved VQA performance, especially when used in conjunction with few-shot examples. However, we also identify a limitation in the use of chain-of-thought rationalization, which negatively affects VQA accuracy. Our study thus provides critical insights into the potential of prompting for improving zero-shot VQA performance.

We propose Visual-only Question Answering (VoQA), a novel multimodal task in which questions are visually embedded within images, without any accompanying textual input. This requires models to locate, recognize, and reason over visually embedded textual questions, posing challenges for existing large vision-language models (LVLMs), which show notable performance drops even with carefully designed prompts. To bridge this gap, we introduce Guided Response Triggering Supervised Fine-tuning (GRT-SFT), a structured fine-tuning strategy that guides the model to perform step-by-step reasoning purely based on visual input, significantly improving model performance. Our work enhances models' capacity for human-like visual understanding in complex multimodal scenarios, where information, including language, is perceived visually.

We propose the task of free-form and open-ended Visual Question Answering (VQA). Given an image and a natural language question about the image, the task is to provide an accurate natural language answer. Mirroring real-world scenarios, such as helping the visually impaired, both the questions and answers are open-ended. Visual questions selectively target different areas of an image, including background details and underlying context. As a result, a system that succeeds at VQA typically needs a more detailed understanding of the image and complex reasoning than a system producing generic image captions. Moreover, VQA is amenable to automatic evaluation, since many open-ended answers contain only a few words or a closed set of answers that can be provided in a multiple-choice format. We provide a dataset containing ~0.25M images, ~0.76M questions, and ~10M answers (www.visualqa.org), and discuss the information it provides. Numerous baselines and methods for VQA are provided and compared with human performance. Our VQA demo is available on CloudCV (http://cloudcv.org/vqa).

Large language models have demonstrated an emergent capability in answering knowledge intensive questions. With recent progress on web-scale visual and language pre-training, do these models also understand how to answer visual information seeking questions? To answer this question, we present InfoSeek, a Visual Question Answering dataset that focuses on asking information-seeking questions, where the information can not be answered by common sense knowledge. We perform a multi-stage human annotation to collect a natural distribution of high-quality visual information seeking question-answer pairs. We also construct a large-scale, automatically collected dataset by combining existing visual entity recognition datasets and Wikidata, which provides over one million examples for model fine-tuning and validation. Based on InfoSeek, we analyzed various pre-trained Visual QA systems to gain insights into the characteristics of different pre-trained models. Our analysis shows that it is challenging for the state-of-the-art multi-modal pre-trained models to answer visual information seeking questions, but this capability is improved through fine-tuning on the automated InfoSeek dataset. We hope our analysis paves the way to understand and develop the next generation of multi-modal pre-training.

Pre-trained vision-language models, e.g., CLIP, working with manually designed prompts have demonstrated great capacity of transfer learning. Recently, learnable prompts achieve state-of-the-art performance, which however are prone to overfit to seen classes, failing to generalize to unseen classes. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge-Aware Prompt Tuning (KAPT) framework for vision-language models. Our approach takes inspiration from human intelligence in which external knowledge is usually incorporated into recognizing novel categories of objects. Specifically, we design two complementary types of knowledge-aware prompts for the text encoder to leverage the distinctive characteristics of category-related external knowledge. The discrete prompt extracts the key information from descriptions of an object category, and the learned continuous prompt captures overall contexts. We further design an adaptation head for the visual encoder to aggregate salient attentive visual cues, which establishes discriminative and task-aware visual representations. We conduct extensive experiments on 11 widely-used benchmark datasets and the results verify the effectiveness in few-shot image classification, especially in generalizing to unseen categories. Compared with the state-of-the-art CoCoOp method, KAPT exhibits favorable performance and achieves an absolute gain of 3.22% on new classes and 2.57% in terms of harmonic mean.

Growing interest in conversational agents promote twoway human-computer communications involving asking and answering visual questions have become an active area of research in AI. Thus, generation of visual questionanswer pair(s) becomes an important and challenging task. To address this issue, we propose a weakly-supervised visual question answer generation method that generates a relevant question-answer pairs for a given input image and associated caption. Most of the prior works are supervised and depend on the annotated question-answer datasets. In our work, we present a weakly supervised method that synthetically generates question-answer pairs procedurally from visual information and captions. The proposed method initially extracts list of answer words, then does nearest question generation that uses the caption and answer word to generate synthetic question. Next, the relevant question generator converts the nearest question to relevant language question by dependency parsing and in-order tree traversal, finally, fine-tune a ViLBERT model with the question-answer pair(s) generated at end. We perform an exhaustive experimental analysis on VQA dataset and see that our model significantly outperform SOTA methods on BLEU scores. We also show the results wrt baseline models and ablation study.

Multimodal LLMs are the natural evolution of LLMs, and enlarge their capabilities so as to work beyond the pure textual modality. As research is being carried out to design novel architectures and vision-and-language adapters, in this paper we concentrate on endowing such models with the capability of answering questions that require external knowledge. Our approach, termed Wiki-LLaVA, aims at integrating an external knowledge source of multimodal documents, which is accessed through a hierarchical retrieval pipeline. Relevant passages, using this approach, are retrieved from the external knowledge source and employed as additional context for the LLM, augmenting the effectiveness and precision of generated dialogues. We conduct extensive experiments on datasets tailored for visual question answering with external data and demonstrate the appropriateness of our approach.

We study visual question answering in a setting where the answer has to be mined from a pool of relevant and irrelevant images given as a context. For such a setting, a model must first retrieve relevant images from the pool and answer the question from these retrieved images. We refer to this problem as retrieval-based visual question answering (or RETVQA in short). The RETVQA is distinctively different and more challenging than the traditionally-studied Visual Question Answering (VQA), where a given question has to be answered with a single relevant image in context. Towards solving the RETVQA task, we propose a unified Multi Image BART (MI-BART) that takes a question and retrieved images using our relevance encoder for free-form fluent answer generation. Further, we introduce the largest dataset in this space, namely RETVQA, which has the following salient features: multi-image and retrieval requirement for VQA, metadata-independent questions over a pool of heterogeneous images, expecting a mix of classification-oriented and open-ended generative answers. Our proposed framework achieves an accuracy of 76.5% and a fluency of 79.3% on the proposed dataset, namely RETVQA and also outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 4.9% and 11.8% on the image segment of the publicly available WebQA dataset on the accuracy and fluency metrics, respectively.

Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) relies on retrieving external information to answer queries involving long-tail entities. However, existing retrieval pipelines predominantly employ CLIP-style dual encoders, which prioritize surface-level visual similarity over entity-level semantic alignment. This paradigm often fails when semantically identical concepts exhibit large visual variations or when distinct entities appear visually similar. To address this, we propose KBMR, the first MLLM-based embedding retriever tailored for KB-VQA. Leveraging the robust autoregressive capabilities of MLLMs, KBMR maps images into a semantic space that better preserves concept identity. To tackle the challenge of noisy supervision in Wikipedia-scale retrieval, we introduce an MLLM-based semantic discriminator that generates continuous entity-consistency weights. These weights guide a novel continuous semantic distillation objective, enabling effective hard negative sampling and soft supervision beyond rigid binary labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KBMR significantly outperforms CLIP baselines, yielding up to a 14.7% improvement in retrieval Recall@1 and a 9.4% gain in end-to-end VQA accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/realHarryX/KBMR.

One characteristic that makes humans superior to modern artificially intelligent models is the ability to interpret images beyond what is visually apparent. Consider the following two natural language search queries - (i) "a queue of customers patiently waiting to buy ice cream" and (ii) "a queue of tourists going to see a famous Mughal architecture in India." Interpreting these queries requires one to reason with (i) Commonsense such as interpreting people as customers or tourists, actions as waiting to buy or going to see; and (ii) Fact or world knowledge associated with named visual entities, for example, whether the store in the image sells ice cream or whether the landmark in the image is a Mughal architecture located in India. Such reasoning goes beyond just visual recognition. To enable both commonsense and factual reasoning in the image search, we present a unified framework, namely Knowledge Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Transformer (KRAMT), that treats the named visual entities in an image as a gateway to encyclopedic knowledge and leverages them along with natural language query to ground relevant knowledge. Further, KRAMT seamlessly integrates visual content and grounded knowledge to learn alignment between images and search queries. This unified framework is then used to perform image search requiring commonsense and factual reasoning. The retrieval performance of KRAMT is evaluated and compared with related approaches on a new dataset we introduce - namely COFAR. We make our code and dataset available at https://vl2g.github.io/projects/cofar

Recent advancements in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have significantly improved performance in Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks through multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). However, existing methods still face challenges, such as the scarcity of knowledge with reasoning examples and erratic responses from retrieved knowledge. To address these issues, in this study, we propose a multimodal RAG framework, termed RCTS, which enhances LVLMs by constructing a Reasoning Context-enriched knowledge base and a Tree Search re-ranking method. Specifically, we introduce a self-consistent evaluation mechanism to enrich the knowledge base with intrinsic reasoning patterns. We further propose a Monte Carlo Tree Search with Heuristic Rewards (MCTS-HR) to prioritize the most relevant examples. This ensures that LVLMs can leverage high-quality contextual reasoning for better and more consistent responses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple VQA datasets, significantly outperforming In-Context Learning (ICL) and Vanilla-RAG methods. It highlights the effectiveness of our knowledge base and re-ranking method in improving LVLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/yannqi/RCTS-RAG.

Visual understanding goes well beyond object recognition. With one glance at an image, we can effortlessly imagine the world beyond the pixels: for instance, we can infer people's actions, goals, and mental states. While this task is easy for humans, it is tremendously difficult for today's vision systems, requiring higher-order cognition and commonsense reasoning about the world. We formalize this task as Visual Commonsense Reasoning. Given a challenging question about an image, a machine must answer correctly and then provide a rationale justifying its answer. Next, we introduce a new dataset, VCR, consisting of 290k multiple choice QA problems derived from 110k movie scenes. The key recipe for generating non-trivial and high-quality problems at scale is Adversarial Matching, a new approach to transform rich annotations into multiple choice questions with minimal bias. Experimental results show that while humans find VCR easy (over 90% accuracy), state-of-the-art vision models struggle (~45%). To move towards cognition-level understanding, we present a new reasoning engine, Recognition to Cognition Networks (R2C), that models the necessary layered inferences for grounding, contextualization, and reasoning. R2C helps narrow the gap between humans and machines (~65%); still, the challenge is far from solved, and we provide analysis that suggests avenues for future work.

We present ViLBERT (short for Vision-and-Language BERT), a model for learning task-agnostic joint representations of image content and natural language. We extend the popular BERT architecture to a multi-modal two-stream model, pro-cessing both visual and textual inputs in separate streams that interact through co-attentional transformer layers. We pretrain our model through two proxy tasks on the large, automatically collected Conceptual Captions dataset and then transfer it to multiple established vision-and-language tasks -- visual question answering, visual commonsense reasoning, referring expressions, and caption-based image retrieval -- by making only minor additions to the base architecture. We observe significant improvements across tasks compared to existing task-specific models -- achieving state-of-the-art on all four tasks. Our work represents a shift away from learning groundings between vision and language only as part of task training and towards treating visual grounding as a pretrainable and transferable capability.

In this paper, we propose an autonomous information seeking visual question answering framework, AVIS. Our method leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) to dynamically strategize the utilization of external tools and to investigate their outputs, thereby acquiring the indispensable knowledge needed to provide answers to the posed questions. Responding to visual questions that necessitate external knowledge, such as "What event is commemorated by the building depicted in this image?", is a complex task. This task presents a combinatorial search space that demands a sequence of actions, including invoking APIs, analyzing their responses, and making informed decisions. We conduct a user study to collect a variety of instances of human decision-making when faced with this task. This data is then used to design a system comprised of three components: an LLM-powered planner that dynamically determines which tool to use next, an LLM-powered reasoner that analyzes and extracts key information from the tool outputs, and a working memory component that retains the acquired information throughout the process. The collected user behavior serves as a guide for our system in two key ways. First, we create a transition graph by analyzing the sequence of decisions made by users. This graph delineates distinct states and confines the set of actions available at each state. Second, we use examples of user decision-making to provide our LLM-powered planner and reasoner with relevant contextual instances, enhancing their capacity to make informed decisions. We show that AVIS achieves state-of-the-art results on knowledge-intensive visual question answering benchmarks such as Infoseek and OK-VQA.

Infographics are documents designed to effectively communicate information using a combination of textual, graphical and visual elements. In this work, we explore the automatic understanding of infographic images by using Visual Question Answering technique.To this end, we present InfographicVQA, a new dataset that comprises a diverse collection of infographics along with natural language questions and answers annotations. The collected questions require methods to jointly reason over the document layout, textual content, graphical elements, and data visualizations. We curate the dataset with emphasis on questions that require elementary reasoning and basic arithmetic skills. Finally, we evaluate two strong baselines based on state of the art multi-modal VQA models, and establish baseline performance for the new task. The dataset, code and leaderboard will be made available at http://docvqa.org

Visual Question Answering (VQA) has emerged as a pivotal task in the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing, requiring models to understand and reason about visual content in response to natural language questions. Analyzing VQA datasets is essential for developing robust models that can handle the complexities of multimodal reasoning. Several approaches have been developed to examine these datasets, each offering distinct perspectives on question diversity, answer distribution, and visual-textual correlations. Despite significant progress, existing VQA models face challenges related to dataset bias, limited model complexity, commonsense reasoning gaps, rigid evaluation methods, and generalization to real world scenarios. This paper offers a detailed study of the original VQA dataset, baseline models and methods along with a comparative study of five advanced VQA models, ABC-CNN, KICNLE, Masked Vision and Language Modeling, BLIP-2, and OFA, each employing distinct methods to address these ongoing challenges.

The current research direction in generative models, such as the recently developed GPT4, aims to find relevant knowledge information for multimodal and multilingual inputs to provide answers. Under these research circumstances, the demand for multilingual evaluation of visual question answering (VQA) tasks, a representative task of multimodal systems, has increased. Accordingly, we propose a bilingual outside-knowledge VQA (BOK-VQA) dataset in this study that can be extended to multilingualism. The proposed data include 17K images, 17K question-answer pairs for both Korean and English and 280K instances of knowledge information related to question-answer content. We also present a framework that can effectively inject knowledge information into a VQA system by pretraining the knowledge information of BOK-VQA data in the form of graph embeddings. Finally, through in-depth analysis, we demonstrated the actual effect of the knowledge information contained in the constructed training data on VQA.

We introduce GQA, a new dataset for real-world visual reasoning and compositional question answering, seeking to address key shortcomings of previous VQA datasets. We have developed a strong and robust question engine that leverages scene graph structures to create 22M diverse reasoning questions, all come with functional programs that represent their semantics. We use the programs to gain tight control over the answer distribution and present a new tunable smoothing technique to mitigate question biases. Accompanying the dataset is a suite of new metrics that evaluate essential qualities such as consistency, grounding and plausibility. An extensive analysis is performed for baselines as well as state-of-the-art models, providing fine-grained results for different question types and topologies. Whereas a blind LSTM obtains mere 42.1%, and strong VQA models achieve 54.1%, human performance tops at 89.3%, offering ample opportunity for new research to explore. We strongly hope GQA will provide an enabling resource for the next generation of models with enhanced robustness, improved consistency, and deeper semantic understanding for images and language.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in multimodal tasks, but their performance is often constrained by the lack of external knowledge integration, limiting their ability to handle knowledge-intensive tasks such as visual question answering and reasoning. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method, Adaptive Knowledge-Guided Pretraining for Large Vision-Language Models (AKGP-LVLM), which dynamically incorporates structured and unstructured knowledge into LVLMs during pretraining and fine-tuning. Our approach employs a knowledge encoder to represent external knowledge, a retrieval mechanism to select task-relevant information, and a dynamic adaptor to align multimodal and knowledge representations effectively. We evaluate our method on four benchmark datasets, demonstrating significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, human evaluations highlight the superior correctness and relevance of our model's outputs. Extensive analyses confirm the robustness, efficiency, and scalability of AKGP-LVLM, making it a compelling solution for real-world knowledge-intensive tasks.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is of tremendous interest to the research community with important applications such as aiding visually impaired users and image-based search. In this work, we explore the use of scene graphs for solving the VQA task. We conduct experiments on the GQA dataset which presents a challenging set of questions requiring counting, compositionality and advanced reasoning capability, and provides scene graphs for a large number of images. We adopt image + question architectures for use with scene graphs, evaluate various scene graph generation techniques for unseen images, propose a training curriculum to leverage human-annotated and auto-generated scene graphs, and build late fusion architectures to learn from multiple image representations. We present a multi-faceted study into the use of scene graphs for VQA, making this work the first of its kind.

Existing visual reasoning datasets such as Visual Question Answering (VQA), often suffer from biases conditioned on the question, image or answer distributions. The recently proposed CLEVR dataset addresses these limitations and requires fine-grained reasoning but the dataset is synthetic and consists of similar objects and sentence structures across the dataset. In this paper, we introduce a new inference task, Visual Entailment (VE) - consisting of image-sentence pairs whereby a premise is defined by an image, rather than a natural language sentence as in traditional Textual Entailment tasks. The goal of a trained VE model is to predict whether the image semantically entails the text. To realize this task, we build a dataset SNLI-VE based on the Stanford Natural Language Inference corpus and Flickr30k dataset. We evaluate various existing VQA baselines and build a model called Explainable Visual Entailment (EVE) system to address the VE task. EVE achieves up to 71% accuracy and outperforms several other state-of-the-art VQA based models. Finally, we demonstrate the explainability of EVE through cross-modal attention visualizations. The SNLI-VE dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/ necla-ml/SNLI-VE.

Visual Question Answering requires models to generate accurate answers by integrating visual and textual understanding. However, VQA models still struggle with hallucinations, producing convincing but incorrect answers, particularly in knowledge-driven and Out-of-Distribution scenarios. We introduce FilterRAG, a retrieval-augmented framework that combines BLIP-VQA with Retrieval-Augmented Generation to ground answers in external knowledge sources like Wikipedia and DBpedia. FilterRAG achieves 36.5% accuracy on the OK-VQA dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing hallucinations and improving robustness in both in-domain and Out-of-Distribution settings. These findings highlight the potential of FilterRAG to improve Visual Question Answering systems for real-world deployment.

In an effort to create a more efficient AI system, we introduce a new multi-modality learning framework that leverages a modality-agnostic concept space possessing abstract knowledge and a set of modality-specific projection models tailored to process distinct modality inputs and map them onto the concept space. Decoupled from specific modalities and their associated projection models, the concept space focuses on learning abstract knowledge that is universally applicable across modalities. Subsequently, the knowledge embedded into the concept space streamlines the learning processes of modality-specific projection models. We evaluate our framework on two popular tasks: Image-Text Matching and Visual Question Answering. Our framework achieves performance on par with benchmark models while demonstrating more efficient learning curves.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) excel in natural language and visual understanding but are challenged by exacting tasks such as Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) which involve the retrieval of relevant information from document collections to use in shaping answers to questions. We present an extensive training and evaluation framework, M2KR, for KB-VQA. M2KR contains a collection of vision and language tasks which we have incorporated into a single suite of benchmark tasks for training and evaluating general-purpose multi-modal retrievers. We use M2KR to develop PreFLMR, a pre-trained version of the recently developed Fine-grained Late-interaction Multi-modal Retriever (FLMR) approach to KB-VQA, and we report new state-of-the-art results across a range of tasks. We also present investigations into the scaling behaviors of PreFLMR intended to be useful in future developments in general-purpose multi-modal retrievers.

Visual question answering is fundamentally compositional in nature---a question like "where is the dog?" shares substructure with questions like "what color is the dog?" and "where is the cat?" This paper seeks to simultaneously exploit the representational capacity of deep networks and the compositional linguistic structure of questions. We describe a procedure for constructing and learning *neural module networks*, which compose collections of jointly-trained neural "modules" into deep networks for question answering. Our approach decomposes questions into their linguistic substructures, and uses these structures to dynamically instantiate modular networks (with reusable components for recognizing dogs, classifying colors, etc.). The resulting compound networks are jointly trained. We evaluate our approach on two challenging datasets for visual question answering, achieving state-of-the-art results on both the VQA natural image dataset and a new dataset of complex questions about abstract shapes.

Visual question answering is a task of predicting the answer to a question about an image. Given that different people can provide different answers to a visual question, we aim to better understand why with answer groundings. We introduce the first dataset that visually grounds each unique answer to each visual question, which we call VQAAnswerTherapy. We then propose two novel problems of predicting whether a visual question has a single answer grounding and localizing all answer groundings. We benchmark modern algorithms for these novel problems to show where they succeed and struggle. The dataset and evaluation server can be found publicly at https://vizwiz.org/tasks-and-datasets/vqa-answer-therapy/.

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models~(MLLMs) have significantly enhanced the ability of these models in multimodal understanding and reasoning. However, the performance of MLLMs for knowledge-intensive visual questions, which require external knowledge beyond the visual content of an image, still remains limited. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a promising solution to provide models with external knowledge, its conventional single-pass framework often fails to gather sufficient knowledge. To overcome this limitation, we propose MI-RAG, a Multimodal Iterative RAG framework that leverages reasoning to enhance retrieval and incorporates knowledge synthesis to refine its understanding. At each iteration, the model formulates a reasoning-guided multi-query to explore multiple facets of knowledge. Subsequently, these queries drive a joint search across heterogeneous knowledge bases, retrieving diverse knowledge. This retrieved knowledge is then synthesized to enrich the reasoning record, progressively deepening the model's understanding. Experiments on challenging benchmarks, including Encyclopedic VQA, InfoSeek, and OK-VQA, show that MI-RAG significantly improves both retrieval recall and answer accuracy, establishing a scalable approach for compositional reasoning in knowledge-intensive VQA.

This work explores enabling Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to link visual cues across multiple images. A straightforward solution is to adapt rule-based reinforcement learning for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, such methods typically rely on manually curated question-answer pairs, which can be particularly challenging when dealing with fine grained visual details and complex logic across images. Inspired by self-supervised visual representation learning, we observe that images contain inherent constraints that can serve as supervision. Based on this insight, we construct image triplets comprising two augmented views of the same image and a third, similar but distinct image. During training, the model is prompted to generate a reasoning process to compare these images (i.e., determine same or different). Then we optimize the model with rule-based reinforcement learning. Due to the high visual similarity and the presence of augmentations, the model must attend to subtle visual changes and perform logical reasoning to succeed. Experiments show that, although trained solely on visual comparison tasks, the learned reasoning ability generalizes effectively to a wide range of questions. Without relying on any human-annotated question-answer pairs, our method achieves significant improvements on multi-image reasoning benchmarks and shows strong performance on general vision tasks.

We present M^3-VQA, a novel knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmark, to enhance the evaluation of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in fine-grained multimodal entity understanding and complex multi-hop reasoning. Unlike existing VQA datasets that focus on coarse-grained categories and simple reasoning over single entities, M^3-VQA introduces diverse multi-entity questions involving multiple distinct entities from both visual and textual sources. It requires models to perform both sequential and parallel multi-hop reasoning across multiple documents, supported by traceable, detailed evidence and a curated multimodal knowledge base. We evaluate 16 leading MLLMs under three settings: without external knowledge, with gold evidence, and with retrieval-augmented input. The poor results reveal significant challenges for MLLMs in knowledge acquisition and reasoning. Models perform poorly without external information but improve markedly when provided with precise evidence. Furthermore, reasoning-aware agentic retrieval surpasses heuristic methods, highlighting the importance of structured reasoning for complex multimodal understanding. M^3-VQA presents a more challenging evaluation for advancing the multimodal reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/M3VQA.

Synthetic datasets have successfully been used to probe visual question-answering datasets for their reasoning abilities. CLEVR (johnson2017clevr), for example, tests a range of visual reasoning abilities. The questions in CLEVR focus on comparisons of shapes, colors, and sizes, numerical reasoning, and existence claims. This paper introduces a minimally biased, diagnostic visual question-answering dataset, QLEVR, that goes beyond existential and numerical quantification and focus on more complex quantifiers and their combinations, e.g., asking whether there are more than two red balls that are smaller than at least three blue balls in an image. We describe how the dataset was created and present a first evaluation of state-of-the-art visual question-answering models, showing that QLEVR presents a formidable challenge to our current models. Code and Dataset are available at https://github.com/zechenli03/QLEVR

The evaluation of text-generative vision-language models is a challenging yet crucial endeavor. By addressing the limitations of existing Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmarks and proposing innovative evaluation methodologies, our research seeks to advance our understanding of these models' capabilities. We propose a novel VQA benchmark based on well-known visual classification datasets which allows a granular evaluation of text-generative vision-language models and their comparison with discriminative vision-language models. To improve the assessment of coarse answers on fine-grained classification tasks, we suggest using the semantic hierarchy of the label space to ask automatically generated follow-up questions about the ground-truth category. Finally, we compare traditional NLP and LLM-based metrics for the problem of evaluating model predictions given ground-truth answers. We perform a human evaluation study upon which we base our decision on the final metric. We apply our benchmark to a suite of vision-language models and show a detailed comparison of their abilities on object, action, and attribute classification. Our contributions aim to lay the foundation for more precise and meaningful assessments, facilitating targeted progress in the exciting field of vision-language modeling.

The emergence of multimodal large models (MLMs) has significantly advanced the field of visual understanding, offering remarkable capabilities in the realm of visual question answering (VQA). Yet, the true challenge lies in the domain of knowledge-intensive VQA tasks, which necessitate not just recognition of visual elements, but also a deep comprehension of the visual information in conjunction with a vast repository of learned knowledge. To uncover such capabilities of MLMs, particularly the newly introduced GPT-4V and Gemini, we provide an in-depth evaluation from three perspectives: 1) Commonsense Knowledge, which assesses how well models can understand visual cues and connect to general knowledge; 2) Fine-grained World Knowledge, which tests the model's skill in reasoning out specific knowledge from images, showcasing their proficiency across various specialized fields; 3) Comprehensive Knowledge with Decision-making Rationales, which examines model's capability to provide logical explanations for its inference, facilitating a deeper analysis from the interpretability perspective. Additionally, we utilize a visual knowledge-enhanced training strategy and multimodal retrieval-augmented generation approach to enhance MLMs, highlighting the future need for advancements in this research direction. Extensive experiments indicate that: a) GPT-4V demonstrates enhanced explanation generation when using composite images as few-shots; b) GPT-4V and other MLMs produce severe hallucinations when dealing with world knowledge; c) Visual knowledge enhanced training and prompting technicals present potential to improve performance. Codes: https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/Cognitive-Visual-Language-Mapper

Does the prior knowledge of the vision encoder constrain the capability boundary of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs)? While most existing research treats MLLMs as unified systems optimized through end-to-end training, the impact of vision encoder's prior knowledge is seldom investigated. In this work, we introduce a novel metric, Rank_e, to quantify the effect of the vision encoder's prior knowledge on MLLM performance. Our analysis reveals a positive correlation between prior knowledge and MLLM performance. Moreover, we find that domain-specific fine-tuning using solely end-to-end visual question answering (VQA) data is insufficient--particularly for entities with low inherent visual prior knowledge. To address this issue, we propose VisPRE (Vision Prior Remediation), a two-stage training framework that explicitly incorporates prior knowledge at the vision encoder level. Experimental results demonstrate that augmenting vision encoder's prior knowledge substantially boosts the visual understanding capabilities of MLLMs, offering a novel and effective strategy for improving performance, especially in scenarios involving uncommon visual entities.

Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answering (KI-VQA) refers to answering a question about an image whose answer does not lie in the image. This paper presents a new pipeline for KI-VQA tasks, consisting of a retriever and a reader. First, we introduce DEDR, a symmetric dual encoding dense retrieval framework in which documents and queries are encoded into a shared embedding space using uni-modal (textual) and multi-modal encoders. We introduce an iterative knowledge distillation approach that bridges the gap between the representation spaces in these two encoders. Extensive evaluation on two well-established KI-VQA datasets, i.e., OK-VQA and FVQA, suggests that DEDR outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 11.6% and 30.9% on OK-VQA and FVQA, respectively. Utilizing the passages retrieved by DEDR, we further introduce MM-FiD, an encoder-decoder multi-modal fusion-in-decoder model, for generating a textual answer for KI-VQA tasks. MM-FiD encodes the question, the image, and each retrieved passage separately and uses all passages jointly in its decoder. Compared to competitive baselines in the literature, this approach leads to 5.5% and 8.5% improvements in terms of question answering accuracy on OK-VQA and FVQA, respectively.

Museums serve as vital repositories of cultural heritage and historical artifacts spanning diverse epochs, civilizations, and regions, preserving well-documented collections. Data reveal key attributes such as age, origin, material, and cultural significance. Understanding museum exhibits from their images requires reasoning beyond visual features. In this work, we facilitate such reasoning by (a) collecting and curating a large-scale dataset of 65M images and 200M question-answer pairs in the standard museum catalog format for exhibits from all around the world; (b) training large vision-language models on the collected dataset; (c) benchmarking their ability on five visual question answering tasks. The complete dataset is labeled by museum experts, ensuring the quality as well as the practical significance of the labels. We train two VLMs from different categories: the BLIP model, with vision-language aligned embeddings, but lacking the expressive power of large language models, and the LLaVA model, a powerful instruction-tuned LLM enriched with vision-language reasoning capabilities. Through exhaustive experiments, we provide several insights on the complex and fine-grained understanding of museum exhibits. In particular, we show that some questions whose answers can often be derived directly from visual features are well answered by both types of models. On the other hand, questions that require the grounding of the visual features in repositories of human knowledge are better answered by the large vision-language models, thus demonstrating their superior capacity to perform the desired reasoning. Find our dataset, benchmarks, and source code at: https://github.com/insait-institute/Museum-65

Visual Question Generation (VQG) is a task to generate questions from images. When humans ask questions about an image, their goal is often to acquire some new knowledge. However, existing studies on VQG have mainly addressed question generation from answers or question categories, overlooking the objectives of knowledge acquisition. To introduce a knowledge acquisition perspective into VQG, we constructed a novel knowledge-aware VQG dataset called K-VQG. This is the first large, humanly annotated dataset in which questions regarding images are tied to structured knowledge. We also developed a new VQG model that can encode and use knowledge as the target for a question. The experiment results show that our model outperforms existing models on the K-VQG dataset.

This paper reveals that many state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) lack hierarchical knowledge about our visual world, unaware of even well-established biology taxonomies. This shortcoming makes LLMs a bottleneck for vision LLMs' hierarchical visual understanding (e.g., recognizing Anemone Fish but not Vertebrate). We arrive at these findings using about one million four-choice visual question answering (VQA) tasks constructed from six taxonomies and four image datasets. Interestingly, finetuning a vision LLM using our VQA tasks reaffirms LLMs' bottleneck effect to some extent because the VQA tasks improve the LLM's hierarchical consistency more than the vision LLM's. We conjecture that one cannot make vision LLMs understand visual concepts fully hierarchical until LLMs possess corresponding taxonomy knowledge.

We introduce a novel sequential modeling approach which enables learning a Large Vision Model (LVM) without making use of any linguistic data. To do this, we define a common format, "visual sentences", in which we can represent raw images and videos as well as annotated data sources such as semantic segmentations and depth reconstructions without needing any meta-knowledge beyond the pixels. Once this wide variety of visual data (comprising 420 billion tokens) is represented as sequences, the model can be trained to minimize a cross-entropy loss for next token prediction. By training across various scales of model architecture and data diversity, we provide empirical evidence that our models scale effectively. Many different vision tasks can be solved by designing suitable visual prompts at test time.

Visual question answering (VQA) is known as an AI-complete task as it requires understanding, reasoning, and inferring about the vision and the language content. Over the past few years, numerous neural architectures have been suggested for the VQA problem. However, achieving success in zero-shot VQA remains a challenge due to its requirement for advanced generalization and reasoning skills. This study explores the impact of incorporating image captioning as an intermediary process within the VQA pipeline. Specifically, we explore the efficacy of utilizing image captions instead of images and leveraging large language models (LLMs) to establish a zero-shot setting. Since image captioning is the most crucial step in this process, we compare the impact of state-of-the-art image captioning models on VQA performance across various question types in terms of structure and semantics. We propose a straightforward and efficient question-driven image captioning approach within this pipeline to transfer contextual information into the question-answering (QA) model. This method involves extracting keywords from the question, generating a caption for each image-question pair using the keywords, and incorporating the question-driven caption into the LLM prompt. We evaluate the efficacy of using general-purpose and question-driven image captions in the VQA pipeline. Our study highlights the potential of employing image captions and harnessing the capabilities of LLMs to achieve competitive performance on GQA under the zero-shot setting. Our code is available at https://github.com/ovguyo/captions-in-VQA.

In Visual Question Answering (VQA), answers have a great correlation with question meaning and visual contents. Thus, to selectively utilize image, question and answer information, we propose a novel trilinear interaction model which simultaneously learns high level associations between these three inputs. In addition, to overcome the interaction complexity, we introduce a multimodal tensor-based PARALIND decomposition which efficiently parameterizes trilinear interaction between the three inputs. Moreover, knowledge distillation is first time applied in Free-form Opened-ended VQA. It is not only for reducing the computational cost and required memory but also for transferring knowledge from trilinear interaction model to bilinear interaction model. The extensive experiments on benchmarking datasets TDIUC, VQA-2.0, and Visual7W show that the proposed compact trilinear interaction model achieves state-of-the-art results when using a single model on all three datasets.

The quest for algorithms that enable cognitive abilities is an important part of machine learning. A common trait in many recently investigated cognitive-like tasks is that they take into account different data modalities, such as visual and textual input. In this paper we propose a novel and generally applicable form of attention mechanism that learns high-order correlations between various data modalities. We show that high-order correlations effectively direct the appropriate attention to the relevant elements in the different data modalities that are required to solve the joint task. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our high-order attention mechanism on the task of visual question answering (VQA), where we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the standard VQA dataset.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to dynamically access external information, which is powerful for answering questions over previously unseen documents. Nonetheless, they struggle with high-level conceptual understanding and holistic comprehension due to limited context windows, which constrain their ability to perform deep reasoning over long-form, domain-specific content such as full-length books. To solve this problem, knowledge graphs (KGs) have been leveraged to provide entity-centric structure and hierarchical summaries, offering more structured support for reasoning. However, existing KG-based RAG solutions remain restricted to text-only inputs and fail to leverage the complementary insights provided by other modalities such as vision. On the other hand, reasoning from visual documents requires textual, visual, and spatial cues into structured, hierarchical concepts. To address this issue, we introduce a multimodal knowledge graph-based RAG that enables cross-modal reasoning for better content understanding. Our method incorporates visual cues into the construction of knowledge graphs, the retrieval phase, and the answer generation process. Experimental results across both global and fine-grained question answering tasks show that our approach consistently outperforms existing RAG-based approaches on both textual and multimodal corpora.

Visual reasoning refers to the task of solving questions about visual information. Current visual reasoning methods typically employ pre-trained vision-language model (VLM) strategies or deep neural network approaches. However, existing efforts are constrained by limited reasoning interpretability, while hindering by the phenomenon of underspecification in the question text. Additionally, the absence of fine-grained visual knowledge limits the precise understanding of subject behavior in visual reasoning tasks. To address these issues, we propose VIKSER (Visual Knowledge-Driven Self-Reinforcing Reasoning Framework). Specifically, VIKSER, trained using knowledge distilled from large language models, extracts fine-grained visual knowledge with the assistance of visual relationship detection techniques. Subsequently, VIKSER utilizes fine-grained visual knowledge to paraphrase the question with underspecification. Additionally, we design a novel prompting method called Chain-of-Evidence (CoE), which leverages the power of ``evidence for reasoning'' to endow VIKSER with interpretable reasoning capabilities. Meanwhile, the integration of self-reflection technology empowers VIKSER with the ability to learn and improve from its mistakes. Experiments conducted on widely used datasets demonstrate that VIKSER achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in relevant tasks.

Teaching Visual Question Answering (VQA) models to abstain from unanswerable questions is indispensable for building a trustworthy AI system. Existing studies, though have explored various aspects of VQA, yet marginally ignored this particular attribute. This paper aims to bridge the research gap by contributing a comprehensive dataset, called UNK-VQA. The dataset is specifically designed to address the challenge of questions that can be unanswerable. To this end, we first augment the existing data via deliberate perturbations on either the image or question. In specific, we carefully ensure that the question-image semantics remain close to the original unperturbed distribution. By means of this, the identification of unanswerable questions becomes challenging, setting our dataset apart from others that involve mere image replacement. We then extensively evaluate the zero- and few-shot performance of several emerging multi-modal large models and discover significant limitations of them when applied to our dataset. Additionally, we also propose a straightforward method to tackle these unanswerable questions. This dataset, we believe, will serve as a valuable benchmark for enhancing the abstention capability of VQA models, thereby leading to increased trustworthiness of AI systems.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in jointly understanding text, images, and videos, often evaluated via Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, even state-of-the-art MLLMs struggle with domain-specific or knowledge-intensive queries, where relevant information is underrepresented in pre-training data. Knowledge-based VQA (KB-VQA) addresses this by retrieving external documents to condition answer generation, but current retrieval-augmented approaches suffer from low precision, noisy passages, and limited reasoning. To address this, we propose ReAG, a novel Reasoning-Augmented Multimodal RAG approach that combines coarse- and fine-grained retrieval with a critic model that filters irrelevant passages, ensuring high-quality additional context. The model follows a multi-stage training strategy leveraging reinforcement learning to enhance reasoning over retrieved content, while supervised fine-tuning serves only as a cold start. Extensive experiments on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek demonstrate that ReAG significantly outperforms prior methods, improving answer accuracy and providing interpretable reasoning grounded in retrieved evidence.

Recent advances in vision-language models have shown notable generalization in broad tasks through visual instruction tuning. However, bridging the gap between the pre-trained vision encoder and the large language models (LLMs) becomes the whole network's bottleneck. To improve cross-modality alignment, existing works usually consider more visual instruction data covering a broader range of vision tasks to fine-tune the model for question-answering, which, however, is costly to obtain and has not thoroughly explored the rich contextual information contained in images. This paper first attempts to harness the overlooked context within visual instruction data, training the model to self-supervised "learning" how to ask high-quality questions. In this way, we introduce a novel framework named SQ-LLaVA: Self-Questioning for Large Vision-Language Assistant. SQ-LLaVA exhibits proficiency in generating flexible and meaningful image-related questions while analyzing the visual clue and prior language knowledge, signifying an advanced level of generalized visual understanding. Moreover, fine-tuning SQ-LLaVA on higher-quality instruction data shows a performance improvement compared with traditional visual-instruction tuning methods. This improvement highlights the efficacy of self-questioning techniques in achieving a deeper and more nuanced comprehension of visual content across various contexts.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a core task for evaluating the capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Existing VQA benchmarks primarily feature clear and unambiguous image-question pairs, whereas real-world scenarios often involve varying degrees of ambiguity that require nuanced reasoning and context-appropriate response strategies. Although recent studies have begun to address ambiguity in VQA, they lack (1) a systematic categorization of ambiguity levels and (2) datasets and models that support strategy-aware responses. In this paper, we introduce Ambiguous Visual Question Answering (AQuA), a fine-grained dataset that classifies ambiguous VQA instances into four levels according to the nature and degree of ambiguity, along with the optimal response strategy for each case. Our evaluation of diverse open-source and proprietary VLMs shows that most models fail to adapt their strategy to the ambiguity type, frequently producing overconfident answers rather than seeking clarification or acknowledging uncertainty. To address this challenge, we fine-tune VLMs on AQuA, enabling them to adaptively choose among multiple response strategies, such as directly answering, inferring intent from contextual cues, listing plausible alternatives, or requesting clarification. VLMs trained on AQuA achieve strategic response generation for ambiguous VQA, demonstrating the ability to recognize ambiguity, manage uncertainty, and respond with context-appropriate strategies, while outperforming both open-source and closed-source baselines.

In this paper, we present a framework for Multilingual Scene Text Visual Question Answering that deals with new languages in a zero-shot fashion. Specifically, we consider the task of Scene Text Visual Question Answering (STVQA) in which the question can be asked in different languages and it is not necessarily aligned to the scene text language. Thus, we first introduce a natural step towards a more generalized version of STVQA: MUST-VQA. Accounting for this, we discuss two evaluation scenarios in the constrained setting, namely IID and zero-shot and we demonstrate that the models can perform on a par on a zero-shot setting. We further provide extensive experimentation and show the effectiveness of adapting multilingual language models into STVQA tasks.

Dramatic progress has been witnessed in basic vision tasks involving low-level perception, such as object recognition, detection, and tracking. Unfortunately, there is still an enormous performance gap between artificial vision systems and human intelligence in terms of higher-level vision problems, especially ones involving reasoning. Earlier attempts in equipping machines with high-level reasoning have hovered around Visual Question Answering (VQA), one typical task associating vision and language understanding. In this work, we propose a new dataset, built in the context of Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) and aimed at lifting machine intelligence by associating vision with structural, relational, and analogical reasoning in a hierarchical representation. Unlike previous works in measuring abstract reasoning using RPM, we establish a semantic link between vision and reasoning by providing structure representation. This addition enables a new type of abstract reasoning by jointly operating on the structure representation. Machine reasoning ability using modern computer vision is evaluated in this newly proposed dataset. Additionally, we also provide human performance as a reference. Finally, we show consistent improvement across all models by incorporating a simple neural module that combines visual understanding and structure reasoning.

Recent advancements in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have made significant progress in the field of single-image visual question answering. However, these models face substantial challenges when tasked with queries that span extensive collections of images, similar to real-world scenarios like searching through large photo albums, finding specific information across the internet, or monitoring environmental changes through satellite imagery. This paper explores the task of Multi-Image Visual Question Answering (MIQA): given a large set of images and a natural language query, the task is to generate a relevant and grounded response. We propose a new public benchmark, dubbed "Visual Haystacks (VHs)," specifically designed to evaluate LMMs' capabilities in visual retrieval and reasoning over sets of unrelated images, where we perform comprehensive evaluations demonstrating that even robust closed-source models struggle significantly. Towards addressing these shortcomings, we introduce MIRAGE (Multi-Image Retrieval Augmented Generation), a novel retrieval/QA framework tailored for LMMs that confronts the challenges of MIQA with marked efficiency and accuracy improvements over baseline methods. Our evaluation shows that MIRAGE surpasses closed-source GPT-4o models by up to 11% on the VHs benchmark and offers up to 3.4x improvements in efficiency over text-focused multi-stage approaches.

Recent advances in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have significantly improve performance in image comprehension tasks, such as formatted charts and rich-content images. Yet, Graphical User Interface (GUI) pose a greater challenge due to their structured format and detailed textual information. Existing LVLMs often overly depend on internal knowledge and neglect image content, resulting in hallucinations and incorrect responses in GUI comprehension. To address these issues, we introduce VGA, a fine-tuned model designed for comprehensive GUI understanding. Our model aims to enhance the interpretation of visual data of GUI and reduce hallucinations. We first construct a Vision Question Answering (VQA) dataset of 63.8k high-quality examples with our propose Referent Method, which ensures the model's responses are highly depend on visual content within the image. We then design a two-stage fine-tuning method called Foundation and Advanced Comprehension (FAC) to enhance both the model's ability to extract information from image content and alignment with human intent. Experiments show that our approach enhances the model's ability to extract information from images and achieves state-of-the-art results in GUI understanding tasks. Our dataset and fine-tuning script will be released soon.

Verifying a question's validity before answering is crucial in real-world applications, where users may provide imperfect instructions. In this scenario, an ideal model should address the discrepancies in the query and convey them to the users rather than generating the best possible answer. Addressing this requirement, we introduce a new compositional visual question-answering dataset, VISREAS, that consists of answerable and unanswerable visual queries formulated by traversing and perturbing commonalities and differences among objects, attributes, and relations. VISREAS contains 2.07M semantically diverse queries generated automatically using Visual Genome scene graphs. The unique feature of this task, validating question answerability with respect to an image before answering, and the poor performance of state-of-the-art models inspired the design of a new modular baseline, LOGIC2VISION that reasons by producing and executing pseudocode without any external modules to generate the answer. LOGIC2VISION outperforms generative models in VISREAS (+4.82% over LLaVA-1.5; +12.23% over InstructBLIP) and achieves a significant gain in performance against the classification models.

Multi-modal reasoning systems rely on a pre-trained object detector to extract regions of interest from the image. However, this crucial module is typically used as a black box, trained independently of the downstream task and on a fixed vocabulary of objects and attributes. This makes it challenging for such systems to capture the long tail of visual concepts expressed in free form text. In this paper we propose MDETR, an end-to-end modulated detector that detects objects in an image conditioned on a raw text query, like a caption or a question. We use a transformer-based architecture to reason jointly over text and image by fusing the two modalities at an early stage of the model. We pre-train the network on 1.3M text-image pairs, mined from pre-existing multi-modal datasets having explicit alignment between phrases in text and objects in the image. We then fine-tune on several downstream tasks such as phrase grounding, referring expression comprehension and segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art results on popular benchmarks. We also investigate the utility of our model as an object detector on a given label set when fine-tuned in a few-shot setting. We show that our pre-training approach provides a way to handle the long tail of object categories which have very few labelled instances. Our approach can be easily extended for visual question answering, achieving competitive performance on GQA and CLEVR. The code and models are available at https://github.com/ashkamath/mdetr.

The evolution of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) has progressed from single to multi-image reasoning. Despite this advancement, our findings indicate that LVLMs struggle to robustly utilize information across multiple images, with predictions significantly affected by the alteration of image positions. To further explore this issue, we introduce Position-wise Question Answering (PQA), a meticulously designed task to quantify reasoning capabilities at each position. Our analysis reveals a pronounced position bias in LVLMs: open-source models excel in reasoning with images positioned later but underperform with those in the middle or at the beginning, while proprietary models show improved comprehension for images at the beginning and end but struggle with those in the middle. Motivated by this, we propose SoFt Attention (SoFA), a simple, training-free approach that mitigates this bias by employing linear interpolation between inter-image causal attention and bidirectional counterparts. Experimental results demonstrate that SoFA reduces position bias and enhances the reasoning performance of existing LVLMs.

Despite progress on general tasks, VLMs struggle with challenges demanding both detailed visual grounding and deliberate knowledge-based reasoning, a synergy not captured by existing benchmarks that evaluate these skills separately. To close this gap, we introduce Pix2Fact, a new visual question-answering benchmark designed to evaluate expert-level perception and knowledge-intensive multi-hop reasoning. Pix2Fact contains 1,000 high-resolution (4K+) images spanning 8 daily-life scenarios and situations, with questions and answers meticulously crafted by annotators holding PhDs from top global universities working in partnership with a professional data annotation firm. Each question requires detailed visual grounding, multi-hop reasoning, and the integration of external knowledge to answer. Our evaluation of 9 state-of-the-art VLMs, including proprietary models like Gemini-3-Pro and GPT-5, reveals the substantial challenge posed by Pix2Fact: the most advanced model achieves only 24.0% average accuracy, in stark contrast to human performance of 56%. This significant gap underscores the limitations of current models in replicating human-level visual comprehension. We believe Pix2Fact will serve as a critical benchmark to drive the development of next-generation multimodal agents that combine fine-grained perception with robust, knowledge-based reasoning.

Large language models have recently shown human level performance on a variety of reasoning tasks. However, the ability of these models to perform complex visual reasoning has not been studied in detail yet. A key challenge in many visual reasoning tasks is that the visual information needs to be tightly integrated in the reasoning process. We propose to address this challenge by drawing inspiration from human visual problem solving which depends on a variety of low-level visual capabilities. It can often be cast as the three step-process of ``Look, Remember, Reason'': visual information is incrementally extracted using low-level visual routines in a step-by-step fashion until a final answer is reached. We follow the same paradigm to enable existing large language models, with minimal changes to the architecture, to solve visual reasoning problems. To this end, we introduce rationales over the visual input that allow us to integrate low-level visual capabilities, such as object recognition and tracking, as surrogate tasks. We show competitive performance on diverse visual reasoning tasks from the CLEVR, CATER, and ACRE datasets over state-of-the-art models designed specifically for these tasks.

We introduce FigureQA, a visual reasoning corpus of over one million question-answer pairs grounded in over 100,000 images. The images are synthetic, scientific-style figures from five classes: line plots, dot-line plots, vertical and horizontal bar graphs, and pie charts. We formulate our reasoning task by generating questions from 15 templates; questions concern various relationships between plot elements and examine characteristics like the maximum, the minimum, area-under-the-curve, smoothness, and intersection. To resolve, such questions often require reference to multiple plot elements and synthesis of information distributed spatially throughout a figure. To facilitate the training of machine learning systems, the corpus also includes side data that can be used to formulate auxiliary objectives. In particular, we provide the numerical data used to generate each figure as well as bounding-box annotations for all plot elements. We study the proposed visual reasoning task by training several models, including the recently proposed Relation Network as a strong baseline. Preliminary results indicate that the task poses a significant machine learning challenge. We envision FigureQA as a first step towards developing models that can intuitively recognize patterns from visual representations of data.

Video text-based visual question answering (Video TextVQA) is a practical task that aims to answer questions by jointly reasoning textual and visual information in a given video. Inspired by the development of TextVQA in image domain, existing Video TextVQA approaches leverage a language model (e.g. T5) to process text-rich multiple frames and generate answers auto-regressively. Nevertheless, the spatio-temporal relationships among visual entities (including scene text and objects) will be disrupted and models are susceptible to interference from unrelated information, resulting in irrational reasoning and inaccurate answering. To tackle these challenges, we propose the TEA (stands for ``Track thE Answer'') method that better extends the generative TextVQA framework from image to video. TEA recovers the spatio-temporal relationships in a complementary way and incorporates OCR-aware clues to enhance the quality of reasoning questions. Extensive experiments on several public Video TextVQA datasets validate the effectiveness and generalization of our framework. TEA outperforms existing TextVQA methods, video-language pretraining methods and video large language models by great margins.

Aligning the recent large language models (LLMs) with computer vision models leads to large vision-language models (LVLMs), which have paved the way for zero-shot image reasoning tasks. However, LVLMs are usually trained on short high-level captions only referring to sparse focus regions in images. Such a ``tunnel vision'' limits LVLMs to exploring other relevant contexts in complex scenes. To address this challenge, we introduce Question-Driven Visual Exploration (QVix), a novel prompting strategy that enhances the exploratory capabilities of LVLMs in zero-shot reasoning tasks. QVix leverages LLMs' strong language prior to generate input-exploratory questions with more details than the original query, guiding LVLMs to explore visual content more comprehensively and uncover subtle or peripheral details. QVix enables a wider exploration of visual scenes, improving the LVLMs' reasoning accuracy and depth in tasks such as visual question answering and visual entailment. Our evaluations on various challenging zero-shot vision-language benchmarks, including ScienceQA and fine-grained visual classification, demonstrate that QVix significantly outperforms existing methods, highlighting its effectiveness in bridging the gap between complex visual data and LVLMs' exploratory abilities.

We propose the VLR-Bench, a visual question answering (VQA) benchmark for evaluating vision language models (VLMs) based on retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Unlike existing evaluation datasets for external knowledge-based VQA, the proposed VLR-Bench includes five input passages. This allows testing of the ability to determine which passage is useful for answering a given query, a capability lacking in previous research. In this context, we constructed a dataset of 32,000 automatically generated instruction-following examples, which we denote as VLR-IF. This dataset is specifically designed to enhance the RAG capabilities of VLMs by enabling them to learn how to generate appropriate answers based on input passages. We evaluated the validity of the proposed benchmark and training data and verified its performance using the state-of-the-art Llama3-based VLM, the Llava-Llama-3 model. The proposed VLR-Bench and VLR-IF datasets are publicly available online.

This paper presents a state-of-the-art model for visual question answering (VQA), which won the first place in the 2017 VQA Challenge. VQA is a task of significant importance for research in artificial intelligence, given its multimodal nature, clear evaluation protocol, and potential real-world applications. The performance of deep neural networks for VQA is very dependent on choices of architectures and hyperparameters. To help further research in the area, we describe in detail our high-performing, though relatively simple model. Through a massive exploration of architectures and hyperparameters representing more than 3,000 GPU-hours, we identified tips and tricks that lead to its success, namely: sigmoid outputs, soft training targets, image features from bottom-up attention, gated tanh activations, output embeddings initialized using GloVe and Google Images, large mini-batches, and smart shuffling of training data. We provide a detailed analysis of their impact on performance to assist others in making an appropriate selection.

We present a framework that formulates visual question answering as modular code generation. In contrast to prior work on modular approaches to VQA, our approach requires no additional training and relies on pre-trained language models (LMs), visual models pre-trained on image-caption pairs, and fifty VQA examples used for in-context learning. The generated Python programs invoke and compose the outputs of the visual models using arithmetic and conditional logic. Our approach improves accuracy on the COVR dataset by at least 3% and on the GQA dataset by roughly 2% compared to the few-shot baseline that does not employ code generation.

Large language models have demonstrated impressive performance when integrated with vision models even enabling video understanding. However, evaluating these video models presents its own unique challenges, for which several benchmarks have been proposed. In this paper, we show that the currently most used video-language benchmarks can be solved without requiring much temporal reasoning. We identified three main issues in existing datasets: (i) static information from single frames is often sufficient to solve the tasks (ii) the text of the questions and candidate answers is overly informative, allowing models to answer correctly without relying on any visual input (iii) world knowledge alone can answer many of the questions, making the benchmarks a test of knowledge replication rather than visual reasoning. In addition, we found that open-ended question-answering benchmarks for video understanding suffer from similar issues while the automatic evaluation process with LLMs is unreliable, making it an unsuitable alternative. As a solution, we propose TVBench, a novel open-source video multiple-choice question-answering benchmark, and demonstrate through extensive evaluations that it requires a high level of temporal understanding. Surprisingly, we find that most recent state-of-the-art video-language models perform similarly to random performance on TVBench, with only Gemini-Pro and Tarsier clearly surpassing this baseline.

Learning general-purpose reasoning capabilities has long been a challenging problem in AI. Recent research in large language models (LLMs), such as DeepSeek-R1, has shown that reinforcement learning techniques like GRPO can enable pre-trained LLMs to develop reasoning capabilities using simple question-answer pairs. In this paper, we aim to train visual language models (VLMs) to perform reasoning on image data through reinforcement learning and visual question-answer pairs, without any explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision. Our findings indicate that simply applying reinforcement learning to a VLM -- by prompting the model to produce a reasoning chain before providing an answer -- can lead the model to develop shortcuts from easy questions, thereby reducing its ability to generalize across unseen data distributions. We argue that the key to mitigating shortcut learning is to encourage the model to interpret images prior to reasoning. Therefore, we train the model to adhere to a caption-reason-answer output format: initially generating a detailed caption for an image, followed by constructing an extensive reasoning chain. When trained on 273K CoT-free visual question-answer pairs and using only reinforcement learning, our model, named Visionary-R1, outperforms strong multimodal models, such as GPT-4o, Claude3.5-Sonnet, and Gemini-1.5-Pro, on multiple visual reasoning benchmarks.

We present the task of Spatio-Temporal Video Question Answering, which requires intelligent systems to simultaneously retrieve relevant moments and detect referenced visual concepts (people and objects) to answer natural language questions about videos. We first augment the TVQA dataset with 310.8K bounding boxes, linking depicted objects to visual concepts in questions and answers. We name this augmented version as TVQA+. We then propose Spatio-Temporal Answerer with Grounded Evidence (STAGE), a unified framework that grounds evidence in both spatial and temporal domains to answer questions about videos. Comprehensive experiments and analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and how the rich annotations in our TVQA+ dataset can contribute to the question answering task. Moreover, by performing this joint task, our model is able to produce insightful and interpretable spatio-temporal attention visualizations. Dataset and code are publicly available at: http: //tvqa.cs.unc.edu, https://github.com/jayleicn/TVQAplus

Establishing a clear link between model predictions and the visual evidence that supports them is critical for transparency and reliability in multimodal reasoning, yet current multimodal large language model (MLLM) evaluations do not explicitly enforce this alignment. Existing benchmarks assess either textual answer correctness or pixel-level localization in isolation, leaving the coupling of reasoning and grounding an open challenge. We introduce VISTAQA, a comprehensive benchmark for joint evaluation of free-form answer correctness and pixel-level evidence grounding in visual question answering. VISTAQA comprises 1,157 expert-curated samples spanning six task types and six visual domains, ranging from direct perception to compositional and relational reasoning. VISTAQA requires models to not only answer correctly, but to also provide precise segmentation masks that support their answers. It also includes hallucination-aware examples where no valid visual evidence exists. To support this enhanced evaluation, we introduce GROVE, a unified evaluation metric that enforces joint correctness by combining textual accuracy and grounding quality via a per-sample geometric mean, ensuring neither dimension can compensate for deficiencies in the other. Comprehensive experiments across grounding-aware models and hybrid pipelines with general-purpose MLLMs reveal that even the strongest systems achieve limited performance under GROVE, highlighting a substantial gap between answer accuracy and visual evidence alignment.

Knowledge-based visual question answering (KVQA) task aims to answer questions that require additional external knowledge as well as an understanding of images and questions. Recent studies on KVQA inject an external knowledge in a multi-modal form, and as more knowledge is used, irrelevant information may be added and can confuse the question answering. In order to properly use the knowledge, this study proposes the following: 1) we introduce a novel semantic inconsistency measure computed from caption uncertainty and semantic similarity; 2) we suggest a new external knowledge assimilation method based on the semantic inconsistency measure and apply it to integrate explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge for KVQA; 3) the proposed method is evaluated with the OK-VQA dataset and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Visual reasoning requires multimodal perception and commonsense cognition of the world. Recently, multiple vision-language models (VLMs) have been proposed with excellent commonsense reasoning ability in various domains. However, how to harness the collective power of these complementary VLMs is rarely explored. Existing methods like ensemble still struggle to aggregate these models with the desired higher-order communications. In this work, we propose Cola, a novel paradigm that coordinates multiple VLMs for visual reasoning. Our key insight is that a large language model (LLM) can efficiently coordinate multiple VLMs by facilitating natural language communication that leverages their distinct and complementary capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our instruction tuning variant, Cola-FT, achieves state-of-the-art performance on visual question answering (VQA), outside knowledge VQA, visual entailment, and visual spatial reasoning tasks. Moreover, we show that our in-context learning variant, Cola-Zero, exhibits competitive performance in zero and few-shot settings, without finetuning. Through systematic ablation studies and visualizations, we validate that a coordinator LLM indeed comprehends the instruction prompts as well as the separate functionalities of VLMs; it then coordinates them to enable impressive visual reasoning capabilities.

Vision-language models (VLMs) can follow complex textual instructions, yet they struggle to reason from purely visual context. In particular, current models fail to infer shared concepts from sets of example images and apply them to new inputs. We introduce Visual Concept Inference from Sets (VICIS), a task that evaluates this capability. Given a small context set of images sharing a concept and a query image, the model must generate new images that preserve the context-defined concept while remaining consistent with the query. We show that state-of-the-art VLMs perform poorly on this task, often ignoring the visual context or defaulting to biased generations. To address this gap, we propose a training framework and architecture that learn to infer visual concepts from image sets and extract concept-specific embeddings from queries. Experiments on synthetic data and large-scale ImageNet/WordNet data show that our model generates more accurate and diverse outputs and generalizes to unseen concepts and modalities such as sketches.

With advances in multimodal research and deep learning, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for a wide range of multimodal tasks. As a core problem in vision-language research, Visual Question Answering (VQA) has increasingly employed MLLMs to improve performance, particularly in open-domain settings where external knowledge is essential. In this work, we aim to further enhance retrieval-based VQA by more effectively integrating MLLMs with structured reasoning and knowledge acquisition. We introduce a logical prompting strategy that fuses Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with Visual Question Decomposition (VQD), termed CoVQD, to guide retrieval toward more accurate and relevant knowledge for MLLM inference. Building on this idea, we propose a new framework, CoVQD-guided RAG (CgRAG), which enables MLLMs to access more comprehensive and coherent external knowledge while benefiting from structured visual-text reasoning guidance, thereby improving generalization and reliability in complex cross-domain VQA scenarios. Extensive experiments on E-VQA, InfoSeek, and OKVQA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Complex Visual Question Answering (Complex VQA) tasks, which demand sophisticated multi-modal reasoning and external knowledge integration, present significant challenges for existing large vision-language models (LVLMs) often limited by their reliance on high-level global features. To address this, we propose MV-CoRe (Multimodal Visual-Conceptual Reasoning), a novel model designed to enhance Complex VQA performance through the deep fusion of diverse visual and linguistic information. MV-CoRe meticulously integrates global embeddings from pre-trained Vision Large Models (VLMs) and Language Large Models (LLMs) with fine-grained semantic-aware visual features, including object detection characteristics and scene graph representations. An innovative Multimodal Fusion Transformer then processes and deeply integrates these diverse feature sets, enabling rich cross-modal attention and facilitating complex reasoning. We evaluate MV-CoRe on challenging Complex VQA benchmarks, including GQA, A-OKVQA, and OKVQA, after training on VQAv2. Our experimental results demonstrate that MV-CoRe consistently outperforms established LVLM baselines, achieving an overall accuracy of 77.5% on GQA. Ablation studies confirm the critical contribution of both object and scene graph features, and human evaluations further validate MV-CoRe's superior factual correctness and reasoning depth, underscoring its robust capabilities for deep visual and conceptual understanding.

We introduce a new task, named video corpus visual answer localization (VCVAL), which aims to locate the visual answer in a large collection of untrimmed instructional videos using a natural language question. This task requires a range of skills - the interaction between vision and language, video retrieval, passage comprehension, and visual answer localization. In this paper, we propose a cross-modal contrastive global-span (CCGS) method for the VCVAL, jointly training the video corpus retrieval and visual answer localization subtasks with the global-span matrix. We have reconstructed a dataset named MedVidCQA, on which the VCVAL task is benchmarked. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other competitive methods both in the video corpus retrieval and visual answer localization subtasks. Most importantly, we perform detailed analyses on extensive experiments, paving a new path for understanding the instructional videos, which ushers in further research.

We present VISPROG, a neuro-symbolic approach to solving complex and compositional visual tasks given natural language instructions. VISPROG avoids the need for any task-specific training. Instead, it uses the in-context learning ability of large language models to generate python-like modular programs, which are then executed to get both the solution and a comprehensive and interpretable rationale. Each line of the generated program may invoke one of several off-the-shelf computer vision models, image processing routines, or python functions to produce intermediate outputs that may be consumed by subsequent parts of the program. We demonstrate the flexibility of VISPROG on 4 diverse tasks - compositional visual question answering, zero-shot reasoning on image pairs, factual knowledge object tagging, and language-guided image editing. We believe neuro-symbolic approaches like VISPROG are an exciting avenue to easily and effectively expand the scope of AI systems to serve the long tail of complex tasks that people may wish to perform.

Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in image-based question-answering (QA) tasks. However, due to data limitations, there has been much less work on video-based QA. In this paper, we present TVQA, a large-scale video QA dataset based on 6 popular TV shows. TVQA consists of 152,545 QA pairs from 21,793 clips, spanning over 460 hours of video. Questions are designed to be compositional in nature, requiring systems to jointly localize relevant moments within a clip, comprehend subtitle-based dialogue, and recognize relevant visual concepts. We provide analyses of this new dataset as well as several baselines and a multi-stream end-to-end trainable neural network framework for the TVQA task. The dataset is publicly available at http://tvqa.cs.unc.edu.

We explore multi-step reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs). The problem is challenging, as reasoning data consisting of multiple steps of visual and language processing are barely available. To overcome the challenge, we first introduce a least-to-most visual reasoning paradigm, which interleaves steps of decomposing a question into sub-questions and invoking external tools for resolving sub-questions. Based on the paradigm, we further propose a novel data synthesis approach that can automatically create questions and multi-step reasoning paths for an image in a bottom-up manner. Our approach divides the complex synthesis task into a few simple sub-tasks, and (almost entirely) relies on open-sourced models to accomplish the sub-tasks. Therefore, the entire synthesis process is reproducible and cost-efficient, and the synthesized data is quality guaranteed. With the approach, we construct 50k visual reasoning examples. Then, we develop a visual reasoner through supervised fine-tuning, which is capable of generally enhancing the reasoning abilities of a wide range of existing VLMs in a plug-and-play fashion. Extensive experiments indicate that the visual reasoner can consistently and significantly improve four VLMs on four VQA benchmarks. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/steven-ccq/VisualReasoner.

The Visual Question Answering (VQA) task requires the simultaneous understanding of image content and question semantics. However, existing methods often have difficulty handling complex reasoning scenarios due to insufficient cross-modal interaction and capturing the entity spatial relationships in the image.huang2023adaptiveliu2021comparingguibas2021adaptivezhang2022vsaWe studied a brand-new approach to replace the attention mechanism in order to enhance the reasoning ability of the model and its understanding of spatial relationships.Specifically, we propose a dynamic bidirectional spatial tower, which is divided into four layers to observe the image according to the principle of human gestalt vision. This naturally provides a powerful structural prior for the spatial organization between entities, enabling the model to no longer blindly search for relationships between pixels but make judgments based on more meaningful perceptual units. Change from "seeing images" to "perceiving and organizing image content".A large number of experiments have shown that our module can be used in any other multimodal model and achieve advanced results, demonstrating its potential in spatial relationship processing.Meanwhile, the multimodal visual question-answering model July trained by our method has achieved state-of-the-art results with only 3B parameters, especially on the question-answering dataset of spatial relations.

In this paper, we present Toloka Visual Question Answering, a new crowdsourced dataset allowing comparing performance of machine learning systems against human level of expertise in the grounding visual question answering task. In this task, given an image and a textual question, one has to draw the bounding box around the object correctly responding to that question. Every image-question pair contains the response, with only one correct response per image. Our dataset contains 45,199 pairs of images and questions in English, provided with ground truth bounding boxes, split into train and two test subsets. Besides describing the dataset and releasing it under a CC BY license, we conducted a series of experiments on open source zero-shot baseline models and organized a multi-phase competition at WSDM Cup that attracted 48 participants worldwide. However, by the time of paper submission, no machine learning model outperformed the non-expert crowdsourcing baseline according to the intersection over union evaluation score.

Vision-and-language reasoning requires an understanding of visual concepts, language semantics, and, most importantly, the alignment and relationships between these two modalities. We thus propose the LXMERT (Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers) framework to learn these vision-and-language connections. In LXMERT, we build a large-scale Transformer model that consists of three encoders: an object relationship encoder, a language encoder, and a cross-modality encoder. Next, to endow our model with the capability of connecting vision and language semantics, we pre-train the model with large amounts of image-and-sentence pairs, via five diverse representative pre-training tasks: masked language modeling, masked object prediction (feature regression and label classification), cross-modality matching, and image question answering. These tasks help in learning both intra-modality and cross-modality relationships. After fine-tuning from our pre-trained parameters, our model achieves the state-of-the-art results on two visual question answering datasets (i.e., VQA and GQA). We also show the generalizability of our pre-trained cross-modality model by adapting it to a challenging visual-reasoning task, NLVR2, and improve the previous best result by 22% absolute (54% to 76%). Lastly, we demonstrate detailed ablation studies to prove that both our novel model components and pre-training strategies significantly contribute to our strong results; and also present several attention visualizations for the different encoders. Code and pre-trained models publicly available at: https://github.com/airsplay/lxmert

Visual Question Answering (VQA) entails answering questions about images. We introduce the first VQA dataset in which all contents originate from an authentic use case. Sourced from online question answering community forums, we call it VQAonline. We then characterize our dataset and how it relates to eight other VQA datasets. Observing that answers in our dataset tend to be much longer (e.g., with a mean of 173 words) and thus incompatible with standard VQA evaluation metrics, we next analyze which of the six popular metrics for longer text evaluation align best with human judgments. We then use the best-suited metrics to evaluate six state-of-the-art vision and language foundation models on VQAonline and reveal where they struggle most. We will release the dataset soon to facilitate future extensions.

We present a new dataset for Visual Question Answering (VQA) on document images called DocVQA. The dataset consists of 50,000 questions defined on 12,000+ document images. Detailed analysis of the dataset in comparison with similar datasets for VQA and reading comprehension is presented. We report several baseline results by adopting existing VQA and reading comprehension models. Although the existing models perform reasonably well on certain types of questions, there is large performance gap compared to human performance (94.36% accuracy). The models need to improve specifically on questions where understanding structure of the document is crucial. The dataset, code and leaderboard are available at docvqa.org

Vision-language models (VLMs) are typically trained as passive answerers, while their ability to actively ask diverse, non-trivial, visual-centric and grounded questions remains underexplored. Existing visual questioners' performance is bottlenecked by the availability of high-quality training data or the cost of curating them. We show that a VLM can continuously improve itself as a visual questioner without any external supervision. We propose a self-evolving framework that uses a VLM itself as both a proposer and a filter to produce harder, more informative, and visual-centric questions, while maintaining their exploration diversity to avoid training collapse. These questions are then used to train the VLM in both questioner and answerer modes. To evaluate the questioner, we introduce an agentic protocol that assesses questions along perception, reasoning, and diversity dimensions. Experiments across various backbone VLMs show that our method substantially enhances the quality and substantially expands the difficulty boundary of autonomous question generation. Under the same budget, our self-supervision is more effective than training on the static source data. Moreover, the self-evolving questioner remains a competitive or even better answerer.