Cited by 4,487Multimodal Machine Learning ApplicationsVisual Attention and Saliency DetectionImage Retrieval and Classification Techniques

VQA: Visual Question Answering

Antol, Stanislaw, Agrawal, Aishwarya, Lu, Jiasen, Mitchell, Margaret, Batra, Dhruv, Zitnick, C. Lawrence, Parikh, Devi·2015·2015 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)

Abstract

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 for VQA are provided and compared with human performance.

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Crossref · 10.1109/iccv.2015.279

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  • This level of expert disagreement is in line with what is observed in other well-known machine learning benchmarks.

    “This level of expert disagreement is in line with what is observed in other well-known machine learning benchmarks59–62.”
  • VQA models are able to give a visual answer to a verbal question.

    “VQA models (e.g., Antol et al., 2015) are able to give a visual answer to a verbal question; for example, in response to the question “How many giraffes are drinking water?” and a given image, the network would respond by drawing bounding boxes around all the giraffes drinking from the water hole (but not the other ones, even if they are standing by the water hole).”
  • Although VQA has traditionally been treated as a task with a single ground-truth label, recent work highlights the inherent subjectivity in visual information seeking, showing that blind users integrate multiple perspectives to shape their visual understanding, whether with AI tools or humans.

    “Although VQA has traditionally been treated as a task with a single ground-truth label [4], recent work highlights the inherent subjectivity in visual information seeking, showing that blind users integrate multiple perspectives to shape their visual understanding, whether with AI tools or humans [94].”
  • Most currently available datasets for training question generation systems are crowd-sourced, which largely affects the quality of generated questions.

    “Most datasets that are currently available for training question generation systems are crowd-sourced [42, 47, 84, 92, 114, 115, 119, 120, 122, 123], which largely impacts the quality of generated questions.”

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Authors
Antol, S., Agrawal, A., Lu, J., Mitchell, M., Batra, D., Zitnick, C. L., & Parikh, D.
Affiliations
  • Virginia Tech (US)
  • Microsoft (United States) (US)
  • Georgia Institute of Technology (US)
Venue
2015 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2015-12
Pages
2425-2433
OpenAlex
W1933349210
Cited by
4,487
References
65
Citations by year
2026: 260 · 2025: 519 · 2024: 532 · 2023: 560 · 2022: 518 · 2021: 620 · 2020: 485 · 2019: 432 · 2018: 293 · 2017: 183 · 2016: 76 · 2015: 9
FWCI
76.70
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Image Retrieval and Classification Techniques
Keywords
visual question answering, open-ended question answering, image understanding, visual reasoning, assistive technology for visually impaired, automated assessment, image captioning

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