Papers › VLC-BERT: Visual Question Answering with Contextualized Commonsense Knowledge

VLC-BERT: Visual Question Answering with Contextualized Commonsense Knowledge

24 Oct 2022arXiv:2210.13626archive 2025-07-28

Sahithya Ravi, Aditya Chinchure, Leonid Sigal, Renjie Liao, Vered Shwartz

There has been a growing interest in solving Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks that require the model to reason beyond the content present in the image. In this work, we focus on questions that require commonsense reasoning. In contrast to previous methods which inject knowledge from static knowledge bases, we investigate the incorporation of contextualized knowledge using Commonsense Transformer (COMET), an existing knowledge model trained on human-curated knowledge bases. We propose a method to generate, select, and encode external commonsense knowledge alongside visual and textual cues in a new pre-trained Vision-Language-Commonsense transformer model, VLC-BERT. Through our evaluation on the knowledge-intensive OK-VQA and A-OKVQA datasets, we show that VLC-BERT is capable of outperforming existing models that utilize static knowledge bases. Furthermore, through a detailed analysis, we explain which questions benefit, and which don't, from contextualized commonsense knowledge from COMET.

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Tasks

Question AnsweringVisual Question AnsweringVisual Question Answering (VQA)

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Visual Question Answering (VQA) A-OKVQA VLC-BERT DA VQA Score 38.05 #15 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering (VQA) OK-VQA VLC-BERT Accuracy 43.1 #25 of 37 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.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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