# Actively Seeking and Learning from Live Data Source: [Actively Seeking and Learning from Live Data]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-25T21:29:43.441Z Authors: Damien Teney, Anton van den Hengel Published: 2019-04-05T04:23:02.000Z ## Abstract One of the key limitations of traditional machine learning methods is their requirement for training data that exemplifies all the information to be learned. This is a particular problem for visual question answering methods, which may be asked questions about virtually anything. The approach we propose is a step toward overcoming this limitation by searching for the information required at test time. The resulting method dynamically utilizes data from an external source, such as a large set of questions/answers or images/captions. Concretely, we learn a set of base weights for a simple VQA model, that are specifically adapted to a given question with the information specifically retrieved for this question. The adaptation process leverages recent advances in gradient-based meta learning and contributions for efficient retrieval and cross-domain adaptation. We surpass the state-of-the-art on the VQA-CP v2 benchmark and demonstrate our approach to be intrinsically more robust to out-of-distribution test data. We demonstrate the use of external non-VQA data using the MS COCO captioning dataset to support the answering process. This approach opens a new avenue for open-domain VQA systems that interface with diverse sources of data. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()