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Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a multidisciplinary research area that involves developing algorithms and models capable of answering questions about visual content. The goal is to enable machines to comprehend and respond to questions related to images or video data. VQA combines techniques from computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning.

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DWIM: Towards Tool-aware Visual Reasoning via Discrepancy-aware Workflow Generation & Instruct-Masking Tuning

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Visual reasoning (VR), which is crucial in many fields for enabling human-like visual understanding, remains highly challenging. Recently, compositional visual reasoning approaches, which leverage the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) with integrated tools to solve problems, have shown promise as more effective strategies than end-to-end VR methods. However, these approaches face limitations, as frozen LLMs lack tool awareness in VR, leading to performance bottlenecks. While leveraging LLMs for reasoning is widely used in other domains, they are not directly applicable to VR due to limited training data, imperfect tools that introduce errors and reduce data collection efficiency in VR, and challenges in fine-tuning on noisy workflows. To address these challenges, we propose DWIM: i) Discrepancy-aware training Workflow generation, which assesses tool usage and extracts more viable workflows for training; and ii) Instruct-Masking fine-tuning, which guides the model to only clone effective actions, enabling the generation of more practical solutions. Our experiments demonstrate that DWIM achieves state-of-the-art performance across various VR tasks, exhibiting strong generalization on multiple widely used datasets.

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Self-Training Large Language Models for Improved Visual Program Synthesis With Visual Reinforcement

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Visual program synthesis is a promising approach to exploit the reasoning abilities of large language models for compositional computer vision tasks. Previous work has used few-shot prompting with frozen LLMs to synthesize visual programs. Training an LLM to write better visual programs is an attractive prospect, but it is unclear how to accomplish this. No dataset of visual programs for training exists, and acquisition of a visual program dataset cannot be easily crowdsourced due to the need for expert annotators. To get around the lack of direct supervision, we explore improving the program synthesis abilities of an LLM using feedback from interactive experience. We propose a method where we exploit existing annotations for a vision-language task to improvise a coarse reward signal for that task, treat the LLM as a policy, and apply reinforced self-training to improve the visual program synthesis ability of the LLM for that task. We describe a series of experiments on object detection, compositional visual question answering, and image-text retrieval, and show that in each case, the self-trained LLM outperforms or performs on par with few-shot frozen LLMs that are an order of magnitude larger. Website: https://zaidkhan.me/ViReP/

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Exploring Question Decomposition for Zero-Shot VQA

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Visual question answering (VQA) has traditionally been treated as a single-step task where each question receives the same amount of effort, unlike natural human question-answering strategies. We explore a question decomposition strategy for VQA to overcome this limitation. We probe the ability of recently developed large vision-language models to use human-written decompositions and produce their own decompositions of visual questions, finding they are capable of learning both tasks from demonstrations alone. However, we show that naive application of model-written decompositions can hurt performance. We introduce a model-driven selective decomposition approach for second-guessing predictions and correcting errors, and validate its effectiveness on eight VQA tasks across three domains, showing consistent improvements in accuracy, including improvements of >20% on medical VQA datasets and boosting the zero-shot performance of BLIP-2 above chance on a VQA reformulation of the challenging Winoground task. Project Site: https://zaidkhan.me/decomposition-0shot-vqa/

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Q: How to Specialize Large Vision-Language Models to Data-Scarce VQA Tasks? A: Self-Train on Unlabeled Images!

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Finetuning a large vision language model (VLM) on a target dataset after large scale pretraining is a dominant paradigm in visual question answering (VQA). Datasets for specialized tasks such as knowledge-based VQA or VQA in non natural-image domains are orders of magnitude smaller than those for general-purpose VQA. While collecting additional labels for specialized tasks or domains can be challenging, unlabeled images are often available. We introduce SelTDA (Self-Taught Data Augmentation), a strategy for finetuning large VLMs on small-scale VQA datasets. SelTDA uses the VLM and target dataset to build a teacher model that can generate question-answer pseudolabels directly conditioned on an image alone, allowing us to pseudolabel unlabeled images. SelTDA then finetunes the initial VLM on the original dataset augmented with freshly pseudolabeled images. We describe a series of experiments showing that our self-taught data augmentation increases robustness to adversarially searched questions, counterfactual examples, and rephrasings, it improves domain generalization, and results in greater retention of numerical reasoning skills. The proposed strategy requires no additional annotations or architectural modifications, and is compatible with any modern encoder-decoder multimodal transformer. Code available at https://github.com/codezakh/SelTDA

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Visual Entailment: A Novel Task for Fine-Grained Image Understanding

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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.

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Visual Entailment Task for Visually-Grounded Language Learning

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We introduce a new inference task – Visual Entailment (VE) – which differs from traditional Textual Entailment (TE) tasks whereby a premise is defined by an image, rather than a natural language sentence as in TE tasks. A novel dataset SNLI-VE is proposed for VE tasks based on the Stanford Natural Language Inference corpus and Flickr30K. We introduce a differentiable architecture called the Explainable Visual Entailment model (EVE) to tackle the VE problem. EVE and several other state-of-the-art visual question answering (VQA) based models are evaluated on the SNLI-VE dataset, facilitating grounded language understanding and providing insights on how modern VQA based models perform.

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