English

Toward Unsupervised Realistic Visual Question Answering

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2023-03-10 v1

Abstract

The problem of realistic VQA (RVQA), where a model has to reject unanswerable questions (UQs) and answer answerable ones (AQs), is studied. We first point out 2 drawbacks in current RVQA research, where (1) datasets contain too many unchallenging UQs and (2) a large number of annotated UQs are required for training. To resolve the first drawback, we propose a new testing dataset, RGQA, which combines AQs from an existing VQA dataset with around 29K human-annotated UQs. These UQs consist of both fine-grained and coarse-grained image-question pairs generated with 2 approaches: CLIP-based and Perturbation-based. To address the second drawback, we introduce an unsupervised training approach. This combines pseudo UQs obtained by randomly pairing images and questions, with an RoI Mixup procedure to generate more fine-grained pseudo UQs, and model ensembling to regularize model confidence. Experiments show that using pseudo UQs significantly outperforms RVQA baselines. RoI Mixup and model ensembling further increase the gain. Finally, human evaluation reveals a performance gap between humans and models, showing that more RVQA research is needed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2303.05068,
  title  = {Toward Unsupervised Realistic Visual Question Answering},
  author = {Yuwei Zhang and Chih-Hui Ho and Nuno Vasconcelos},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.05068},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Yuwei Zhang and Chih-Hui Ho contributed equally to this work

R2 v1 2026-06-28T09:08:44.932Z