# Psycholinguistics meets Continual Learning: Measuring Catastrophic Forgetting in Visual Question Answering Source: [Psycholinguistics meets Continual Learning: Measuring Catastrophic Forgetting in Visual Question Answering]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-25T21:38:30.146Z Authors: Claudio Greco, Barbara Plank, Raquel Fern\\'andez, Raffaella Bernardi Published: 2019-06-10T19:00:59.000Z ## Abstract We study the issue of catastrophic forgetting in the context of neural multimodal approaches to Visual Question Answering (VQA). Motivated by evidence from psycholinguistics, we devise a set of linguistically-informed VQA tasks, which differ by the types of questions involved (Wh-questions and polar questions). We test what impact task difficulty has on continual learning, and whether the order in which a child acquires question types facilitates computational models. Our results show that dramatic forgetting is at play and that task difficulty and order matter. Two well-known current continual learning methods mitigate the problem only to a limiting degree. ## 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]()