# Natural Language Understanding and Inference with MLLM in Visual Question Answering: A Survey Source: [Natural Language Understanding and Inference with MLLM in Visual Question Answering: A Survey]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T03:43:37.123Z Authors: Jiayi Kuang, Jingyou Xie, Haohao Luo, Ronghao Li, Zhe Xu, Xianfeng Cheng, Yinghui Li, Xika Lin, Ying Shen Published: 2024-11-26T16:21:03.000Z ## Abstract Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a challenge task that combines natural language processing and computer vision techniques and gradually becomes a benchmark test task in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The goal of our survey is to provide an overview of the development of VQA and a detailed description of the latest models with high timeliness. This survey gives an up-to-date synthesis of natural language understanding of images and text, as well as the knowledge reasoning module based on image-question information on the core VQA tasks. In addition, we elaborate on recent advances in extracting and fusing modal information with vision-language pretraining models and multimodal large language models in VQA. We also exhaustively review the progress of knowledge reasoning in VQA by detailing the extraction of internal knowledge and the introduction of external knowledge. Finally, we present the datasets of VQA and different evaluation metrics and discuss possible directions for future work. ## 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]()