Papers › MUREL: Multimodal Relational Reasoning for Visual Question Answering
MUREL: Multimodal Relational Reasoning for Visual Question Answering
Remi Cadene, Hedi Ben-Younes, Matthieu Cord, Nicolas Thome
Multimodal attentional networks are currently state-of-the-art models for Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks involving real images. Although attention allows to focus on the visual content relevant to the question, this simple mechanism is arguably insufficient to model complex reasoning features required for VQA or other high-level tasks. In this paper, we propose MuRel, a multimodal relational network which is learned end-to-end to reason over real images. Our first contribution is the introduction of the MuRel cell, an atomic reasoning primitive representing interactions between question and image regions by a rich vectorial representation, and modeling region relations with pairwise combinations. Secondly, we incorporate the cell into a full MuRel network, which progressively refines visual and question interactions, and can be leveraged to define visualization schemes finer than mere attention maps. We validate the relevance of our approach with various ablation studies, and show its superiority to attention-based methods on three datasets: VQA 2.0, VQA-CP v2 and TDIUC. Our final MuRel network is competitive to or outperforms state-of-the-art results in this challenging context. Our code is available: https://github.com/Cadene/murel.bootstrap.pytorch
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Visual Question Answering (VQA) | TDIUC | Accuracy | Accuracy | 88.2 | #1 of 2 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Visual Question Answering (VQA) | VQA v2 test-dev | MuRel | Accuracy | 68.03 | #37 of 56 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Visual Question Answering (VQA) | VQA v2 test-std | MuRel | overall | 68.4 | #31 of 38 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Visual Question Answering (VQA) | VQA-CP | MuRel | Score | 39.54 | #9 of 10 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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