English

A Simple Baseline for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2023-10-25 v2

Abstract

This paper is on the problem of Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA). Recent works have emphasized the significance of incorporating both explicit (through external databases) and implicit (through LLMs) knowledge to answer questions requiring external knowledge effectively. A common limitation of such approaches is that they consist of relatively complicated pipelines and often heavily rely on accessing GPT-3 API. Our main contribution in this paper is to propose a much simpler and readily reproducible pipeline which, in a nutshell, is based on efficient in-context learning by prompting LLaMA (1 and 2) using question-informative captions as contextual information. Contrary to recent approaches, our method is training-free, does not require access to external databases or APIs, and yet achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the OK-VQA and A-OK-VQA datasets. Finally, we perform several ablation studies to understand important aspects of our method. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/alexandrosXe/ASimple-Baseline-For-Knowledge-Based-VQA

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.13570,
  title  = {A Simple Baseline for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering},
  author = {Alexandros Xenos and Themos Stafylakis and Ioannis Patras and Georgios Tzimiropoulos},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.13570},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Accepted at EMNLP 2023 (camera-ready version)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:56:57.674Z