Papers › Human Attention in Visual Question Answering: Do Humans and Deep Networks Look at the...

Human Attention in Visual Question Answering: Do Humans and Deep Networks Look at the Same Regions?

17 Jun 2016arXiv:1606.05589archive 2025-07-28

Abhishek Das, Harsh Agrawal, C. Lawrence Zitnick, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra

We conduct large-scale studies on `human attention' in Visual Question Answering (VQA) to understand where humans choose to look to answer questions about images. We design and test multiple game-inspired novel attention-annotation interfaces that require the subject to sharpen regions of a blurred image to answer a question. Thus, we introduce the VQA-HAT (Human ATtention) dataset. We evaluate attention maps generated by state-of-the-art VQA models against human attention both qualitatively (via visualizations) and quantitatively (via rank-order correlation). Overall, our experiments show that current attention models in VQA do not seem to be looking at the same regions as humans.

PaperPDF

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Question AnsweringVisual Question AnsweringVisual Question Answering (VQA)

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

VQA-HAT

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections