From Superficial to Deep: Language Bias driven Curriculum Learning for Visual Question Answering

The ability of Visual Question Answering (VQA) models to provide insightful responses to images based on their content holds the potential to completely transform machine interpretation and interaction. VQA systems face challenges due to noisy image data, making accurate question answering difficult. Several deep learning algorithms are used for predicting answers from images, but they don’t yield enough outcomes. To get over these problems, this work is suggested. In this manuscript, a visual question–answer model-based Transformer-Based Multi-Head Cross Attention Network with optimized Gold Rush Octave Convolution Network (T-MHCAN-OGRCNN) is proposed. To enhance VQA accuracy, three datasets are taken: VQA v2.0, OK-VQA, and FVQA, which include images with embedded questions and answers. These images often contain noise, necessitating pre-processing for improved results. Then, Task-Oriented Homogenized Automatic (TOHA) method for noise reduction is used. For word embedding, Multiscale Parallel MobileNetV3 (WE-MP-MobileNetV3) is employed. Following that, visual and textual features are extracted using Transformer-Based Multi-Head Cross Attention Network (T-MHCAN). The core VQA task is handled by a Fully Octave Convolution Network (OCNN), whose weight parameters are optimized using Gold Rush Optimizer (GRO). Therefore, this method incorporates cutting-edge strategies to improve precision and resilience of VQA systems. The suggested T-MHCAN-OGRCNN technique is implemented on Python platform. Three datasets were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the suggested T-MHCAN-OGRCNN, which achieves superior results than current techniques with 99.9% accuracy and 99.8% recall. This demonstrates approach’s exceptional effectiveness and room for growth in industry.

Currently, many visual question answering models have bias problems. Specifically, when the question-answer relationship in the training data shows a more obvious mapping relationship, the model shows poor generalization ability. For such biased predictions, existing research work mainly considers language bias, while ignoring the bias information introduced by images. In order to enhance the robustness of visual question answering models, a bias reduction method is proposed, and on this basis, the influence of language and visual information on bias is explored. Furthermore, two bias learning branches are constructed to capture language bias and the bias caused by language and images respectively, and the bias reduction method is used to obtain more robust prediction results. Finally, according to the difference in prediction probability between the standard visual question answering and bias branches, the samples are dynamically weighted, so that the model can dynamically adjust the learning degree for samples with different bias levels. Experiments on datasets such as VQA-CP v2.0 prove the effectiveness of the proposed method and alleviate the influence of bias on the model.

Methodologies for training visual question answering (VQA) models assume the availability of datasets with human-annotated \textit{Image-Question-Answer} (I-Q-A) triplets. This has led to heavy reliance on datasets and a lack of generalization to new types of questions and scenes. Linguistic priors along with biases and errors due to annotator subjectivity have been shown to percolate into VQA models trained on such samples. We study whether models can be trained without any human-annotated Q-A pairs, but only with images and their associated textual descriptions or captions. We present a method to train models with synthetic Q-A pairs generated procedurally from captions. Additionally, we demonstrate the efficacy of spatial-pyramid image patches as a simple but effective alternative to dense and costly object bounding box annotations used in existing VQA models. Our experiments on three VQA benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of this weakly-supervised approach, especially on the VQA-CP challenge, which tests performance under changing linguistic priors.

In this paper, we make a simple observation that questions about images often contain premises – objects and relationships implied by the question – and that reasoning about premises can help Visual Question Answering (VQA) models respond more intelligently to irrelevant or previously unseen questions. When presented with a question that is irrelevant to an image, state-of-the-art VQA models will still answer purely based on learned language biases, resulting in non-sensical or even misleading answers. We note that a visual question is irrelevant to an image if at least one of its premises is false (i.e. not depicted in the image). We leverage this observation to construct a dataset for Question Relevance Prediction and Explanation (QRPE) by searching for false premises. We train novel question relevance detection models and show that models that reason about premises consistently outperform models that do not. We also find that forcing standard VQA models to reason about premises during training can lead to improvements on tasks requiring compositional reasoning.

Visual question answering (VQA) is a prevalent task in real-world, and plays an essential role in helping the blind understand the physical world. However, due to the real-world complexity, VQA test samples may come from a different distribution from the training data, resulting in unavoidable performance degradation. This similar issue also exists in the image recognition field, in which one most recent effective solutions is a test-time adaptation (TTA). TTA adapts a trained model at test time using only test samples, which provides a new idea to alleviate the analogous issue in VQA. However, naively introducing existing TTA methods ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">e.g.,</i> test-time entropy minimisation) into VQA is imperfect and achieves only marginal performance gain. The reason is that prior methods do not consider the special nature of the VQA problem and ignore that 1) the biased samples in the dataset may have negative effects on test-time model adaptation, and 2) the model may have captured the biases in the dataset. In this paper, we propose Test-time Debiased Self-supervised (TDS) learning objectives for VQA model adaptation. Specifically, we minimise the entropy for those unbiased test samples. To identify these samples, we construct a negative sample for each test sample, and regard the test samples as unbiased if the output answers are different when feeding the test sample and the counterpart negative sample into the VQA model. Meanwhile, we also remove those samples with high prediction entropy from adaptation, making the test-time gradients more reliable. To hinder the model from excessively fitting the superficial correlations of the biased sample, we adopt the biased samples and the counterpart negative samples to assist the adaptation. Extensive experiments on the VQA-CP v1 and VQA-CP v2 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our TDS.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) has garnered significant attention as a crucial link between vision and language, aimed at generating accurate responses to visual queries. However, current VQA models still struggle with the challenges of minority class collapse and spurious semantic correlations posed by language bias and imbalanced distributions. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel Prompt-Driven Geometric Harmonization (PDGH) paradigm, which integrates both geometric structure and information entropy principles to enhance the ability of VQA models to generalize effectively across diverse scenarios. Specifically, our PDGH approach is meticulously designed to generate image-generated prompts that are guided by specific question cues, facilitating a more accurate and context-aware understanding of the visual content. Moreover, we project the prompt-visual-question and visual-question joint representations into a unified hypersphere space, applying feature weight self-orthogonality and prompt-information entropy correction constraints to optimize the margin, further alleviating minority class collapse and correcting language bias. To maintain the geometric integrity of the representation space, we introduce multi-space geometric contrast constraints to minimize the impact of spurious priors introduced during training. Finally, a semantic matrix is constructed for the coordinated joint representation to ensure that the learned instances are semantically consistent and improve reasoning ability. Extensive experiments on various general and medical VQA datasets demonstrate the consistent superiority of our PDGH approach over existing state-of-the-art baselines.

Most Visual Question Answering (VQA) models suffer from the language prior problem, which is caused by inherent data biases. Specifically, VQA models tend to answer questions (e.g., what color is the banana?) based on the high-frequency answers (e.g., yellow) ignoring image contents. Existing approaches tackle this problem by creating delicate models or introducing additional visual annotations to reduce question dependency and strengthen image dependency. However, they are still subject to the language prior problem since the data biases have not been fundamentally addressed. In this paper, we introduce a self-supervised learning framework to solve this problem. Concretely, we first automatically generate labeled data to balance the biased data, and then propose a self-supervised auxiliary task to utilize the balanced data to assist the VQA model to overcome language priors. Our method can compensate for the data biases by generating balanced data without introducing external annotations. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving the overall accuracy from 49.50% to 57.59% on the most commonly used benchmark VQA-CP v2. In other words, we can increase the performance of annotation-based methods by 16% without using external annotations. Our code is available on GitHub.

Visual question answering is a complex multimodal task involving images and text, with broad application prospects in human–computer interaction and medical assistance. Therefore, how to deal with the feature interaction and multimodal feature fusion between the critical regions in the image and the keywords in the question is an important issue. To this end, we propose a neural network based on the encoder–decoder structure of the transformer architecture. Specifically, in the encoder, we use multi-head self-attention to mine word–word connections within question features and stack multiple layers of attention to obtain multi-level question features. We propose a mutual attention module to perform information exchange between modalities for better question features and image features representation on the decoder side. Besides, we connect the encoder and decoder in a meshed manner, perform mutual attention operations with multi-level question features, and aggregate information in an adaptive way. We propose a multi-scale fusion module in the fusion stage, which utilizes feature information at different scales to complete modal fusion. We test and validate the model effectiveness on VQA v1 and VQA v2 datasets. Our model achieves better results than state-of-the-art methods.

This paper demonstrates a medical visual question answering (VQA) system to address three challenges: 1) medical VQA often lacks large-scale labeled training data which requires huge efforts to build; 2) it is costly to implement and thoroughly compare medical VQA models on self-created datasets; 3) applying general VQA models to the medical domain by transfer learning is challenging due to various visual concepts between general images and medical images. Our system has three main components: data generation, model library, and model practice. To address the first challenge, we first allow users to upload self-collected clinical data such as electronic medical records (EMRs) to the data generation component and provides an annotating tool for labeling the data. Then, the system semi-automatically generates medical VQAs for users. Second, we develop a model library by implementing VQA models for users to evaluate their datasets. Users can do simple configurations by selecting self-interested models. The system then automatically trains the models, conducts extensive experimental evaluation, and reports comprehensive findings. The reports provide new insights into the strengths and weaknesses of selected models. Third, we provide an online chat module for users to communicate with an AI robots for further evaluating the models. The source codes are shared on https://github.com/shyanneshan/VQA-Demo.

Generalization beyond in-domain experience to out-of-distribution data is of paramount significance in the AI domain. Of late, state-of-the-art Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have shown impressive performance on in-domain data, partially due to the language prior bias which, however, hinders the generalization ability in practice. This paper attempts to provide new insights into the influence of language modality on VQA performance from an empirical study perspective. To achieve this, we conducted a series of experiments on six models. The results of these experiments revealed that, 1) apart from prior bias caused by question types, there is a notable influence of postfix-related bias in inducing biases, and 2) training VQA models with word-sequence-related variant questions demonstrated improved performance on the out-of-distribution benchmark, and the LXMERT even achieved a 10-point gain without adopting any debiasing methods. We delved into the underlying reasons behind these experimental results and put forward some simple proposals to reduce the models' dependency on language priors. The experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method in improving performance on the out-of-distribution benchmark, VQA-CPv2. We hope this study can inspire novel insights for future research on designing bias-reduction approaches.

Albeit progress has been made in Composed Image Retrieval (CIR), we empirically find that a certain percentage of failure retrieval results are not consistent with their relative captions. To address this issue, this work provides a Visual Question Answering (VQA) perspective to boost the performance of CIR. The resulting VQA4CIR is a post-processing approach and can be directly plugged into existing CIR methods. Given the top-C retrieved images by a CIR method, VQA4CIR aims to decrease the adverse effect of the failure retrieval results being inconsistent with the relative caption. To find the retrieved images inconsistent with the relative caption, we resort to the "QA generation → VQA" self-verification pipeline. For QA generation, we suggest fine-tuning LLM (e.g., LLaMA) to generate several pairs of questions and answers from each relative caption. We then fine-tune LVLM (e.g., LLaVA) to obtain the VQA model. By feeding the retrieved image and question to the VQA model, one can find the images inconsistent with relative caption when the answer by VQA is inconsistent with the answer in the QA pair. Consequently, the CIR performance can be boosted by modifying the ranks of inconsistently retrieved images. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art CIR methods on the CIRR and Fashion-IQ datasets.

Recent advances in vision-language models have resulted in improved accuracy in visual question answering (VQA) tasks. However, their robustness remains limited when faced with out-of-distribution data containing unanswerable questions. In this study, we first construct a simple randomised VQA dataset, incorporating unanswerable questions from the VQA v2 dataset, to evaluate the robustness of a state-of-the-art VQA model. Our findings reveal that the model struggles to predict the “unknown” answer or provides inaccurate responses with high confidence scores for irrelevant questions. To address this issue without retraining the large backbone models, we propose Cross Modal Augmentation (CMA), a model-agnostic, test-time-only, multi-modal semantic augmentation technique. CMA generates multiple semantically-consistent but heterogeneous instances from the visual and textual inputs, which are then fed to the model, and the predictions are combined to achieve a more robust output. We demonstrate that implementing CMA enables the VQA model to provide more reliable answers in scenarios involving unanswerable questions, and show that the approach is generalisable across different categories of pre-trained vision language models.

Safety compliance checking of construction behaviors using visual question answering

Counting-based visual question answering with serial cascaded attention deep learning

To increase the generalization capability of VQA systems, many recent studies have tried to de-bias spurious language or vision associations that shortcut the question or image to the answer. Despite these efforts, the literature fails to address the confounding effect of vision and language simultaneously. As a result, when they reduce bias learned from one modality, they usually increase bias from the other. In this paper, we first model a confounding effect that causes language and vision bias simultaneously, then propose a counterfactual inference to remove the influence of this effect. The model trained in this strategy can concurrently and efficiently reduce vision and language bias. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to reduce biases resulting from confounding effects of vision and language in VQA, leveraging causal explain-away relations. We accompany our method with an explain-away strategy, pushing the accuracy of the questions with numerical answers results compared to existing methods that have been an open problem. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in VQA-CP v2 datasets. R2: Providing brief insights into the experimental setup and results would add valuable context for readers. In response to R2, we released the code and documentation for the implementation as follows. Our codes are available at https://github.com/ali-vosoughi/PW-VQA.