{"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/learning-to-answer-visual-questions-from-web","title":"Learning to Answer Visual Questions from Web Videos","arxiv_id":"2205.05019","date":"2022-05-10","proceeding":null,"authors":["Antoine Yang","Antoine Miech","Josef Sivic","Ivan Laptev","Cordelia Schmid"],"abstract":"Recent methods for visual question answering rely on large-scale annotated datasets. Manual annotation of questions and answers for videos, however, is tedious, expensive and prevents scalability. In this work, we propose to avoid manual annotation and generate a large-scale training dataset for video question answering making use of automatic cross-modal supervision. We leverage a question generation transformer trained on text data and use it to generate question-answer pairs from transcribed video narrations. Given narrated videos, we then automatically generate the HowToVQA69M dataset with 69M video-question-answer triplets. To handle the open vocabulary of diverse answers in this dataset, we propose a training procedure based on a contrastive loss between a video-question multi-modal transformer and an answer transformer. We introduce the zero-shot VideoQA task and the VideoQA feature probe evaluation setting and show excellent results, in particular for rare answers. Furthermore, our method achieves competitive results on MSRVTT-QA, ActivityNet-QA, MSVD-QA and How2QA datasets. We also show that our VideoQA dataset generation approach generalizes to another source of web video and text data. We use our method to generate the WebVidVQA3M dataset from the WebVid dataset, i.e., videos with alt-text annotations, and show its benefits for training VideoQA models. Finally, for a detailed evaluation we introduce iVQA, a new VideoQA dataset with reduced language bias and high-quality manual annotations. Code, datasets and trained models are available at https://antoyang.github.io/just-ask.html","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.05019v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.05019v2.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":"learning-to-answer-visual-questions-from-web","repo_url":"https://github.com/antoyang/just-ask","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"dataset-generation","task_name":"Dataset Generation"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"question-generation","task_name":"Question Generation"},{"task_slug":"question-generation","task_name":"Question-Generation"},{"task_slug":"video-question-answering","task_name":"Video 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":"zero-shot-learning","task_name":"Zero-Shot Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[{"slug":"webvidvqa3m","name":"WebVidVQA3M","full_name":"WebVidVQA3M"}],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2205.05019","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2205.05019"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/antoyang/just-ask","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"summary":{"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"f38467b4f7f8236f","entry":"videoqa_collate_fn","repo":"antoyang/just-ask","repo_kind":"official","path":"eval_videoqa_cm.py","file_url":"https://github.com/antoyang/just-ask/blob/HEAD/eval_videoqa_cm.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"f38467b4f7f8236f"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}