# QIRL: Boosting Visual Question Answering via Optimized Question-Image Relation Learning Source: [QIRL: Boosting Visual Question Answering via Optimized Question-Image Relation Learning]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T04:26:29.946Z Authors: Quanxing Xu, Ling Zhou, Xian Zhong, Feifei Zhang, Rubing Huang, Chia-Wen Lin Published: 2025-04-04T10:38:28.000Z ## Abstract Existing debiasing approaches in Visual Question Answering (VQA) primarily focus on enhancing visual learning, integrating auxiliary models, or employing data augmentation strategies. However, these methods exhibit two major drawbacks. First, current debiasing techniques fail to capture the superior relation between images and texts because prevalent learning frameworks do not enable models to extract deeper correlations from highly contrasting samples. Second, they do not assess the relevance between the input question and image during inference, as no prior work has examined the degree of input relevance in debiasing studies. Motivated by these limitations, we propose a novel framework, Optimized Question-Image Relation Learning (QIRL), which employs a generation-based self-supervised learning strategy. Specifically, two modules are introduced to address the aforementioned issues. The Negative Image Generation (NIG) module automatically produces highly irrelevant question-image pairs during training to enhance correlation learning, while the Irrelevant Sample Identification (ISI) module improves model robustness by detecting and filtering irrelevant inputs, thereby reducing prediction errors. Furthermore, to validate our concept of reducing output errors through filtering unrelated question-image inputs, we propose a specialized metric to evaluate the performance of the ISI module. Notably, our approach is model-agnostic and can be integrated with various VQA models. Extensive experiments on VQA-CPv2 and VQA-v2 demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of our method. Among data augmentation strategies, our approach achieves state-of-the-art results. ## 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]()