{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/image-captioning-for-effective-use-of","title":"Image Captioning for Effective Use of Language Models in Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering","arxiv_id":"2109.08029","date":"2021-09-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ander Salaberria","Gorka Azkune","Oier Lopez de Lacalle","Aitor Soroa","Eneko Agirre"],"abstract":"Integrating outside knowledge for reasoning in visio-linguistic tasks such as visual question answering (VQA) is an open problem. Given that pretrained language models have been shown to include world knowledge, we propose to use a unimodal (text-only) train and inference procedure based on automatic off-the-shelf captioning of images and pretrained language models. Our results on a visual question answering task which requires external knowledge (OK-VQA) show that our text-only model outperforms pretrained multimodal (image-text) models of comparable number of parameters. In contrast, our model is less effective in a standard VQA task (VQA 2.0) confirming that our text-only method is specially effective for tasks requiring external knowledge. In addition, we show that increasing the language model's size improves notably its performance, yielding results comparable to the state-of-the-art with our largest model, significantly outperforming current multimodal systems, even though augmented with external knowledge. Our qualitative analysis on OK-VQA reveals that automatic captions often fail to capture relevant information in the images, which seems to be balanced by the better inference ability of the text-only language models. Our work opens up possibilities to further improve inference in visio-linguistic tasks","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08029v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.08029v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"image-captioning-for-effective-use-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/salanueva/CBM","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-captioning","task_name":"Image Captioning"},{"task_slug":"knowledge-graphs","task_name":"Knowledge Graphs"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"visual-question-answering-1","task_name":"Visual Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"visual-question-answering","task_name":"Visual Question Answering (VQA)"},{"task_slug":"world-knowledge","task_name":"World Knowledge"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2109.08029","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}