# Toward Unsupervised Realistic Visual Question Answering

Source: [Toward Unsupervised Realistic Visual Question Answering](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6eb31e209131cea4191f>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-26T01:04:50.062Z

Authors: Yuwei Zhang, Chih-Hui Ho, Nuno Vasconcelos

Published: 2023-03-09T06:58:29.000Z

## 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.

## 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](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05068>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.05068.pdf>)
