Papers › VQA-E: Explaining, Elaborating, and Enhancing Your Answers for Visual Questions

VQA-E: Explaining, Elaborating, and Enhancing Your Answers for Visual Questions

20 Mar 2018ECCV 2018 9arXiv:1803.07464archive 2025-07-28

Qing Li, Qingyi Tao, Shafiq Joty, Jianfei Cai, Jiebo Luo

Most existing works in visual question answering (VQA) are dedicated to improving the accuracy of predicted answers, while disregarding the explanations. We argue that the explanation for an answer is of the same or even more importance compared with the answer itself, since it makes the question and answering process more understandable and traceable. To this end, we propose a new task of VQA-E (VQA with Explanation), where the computational models are required to generate an explanation with the predicted answer. We first construct a new dataset, and then frame the VQA-E problem in a multi-task learning architecture. Our VQA-E dataset is automatically derived from the VQA v2 dataset by intelligently exploiting the available captions. We have conducted a user study to validate the quality of explanations synthesized by our method. We quantitatively show that the additional supervision from explanations can not only produce insightful textual sentences to justify the answers, but also improve the performance of answer prediction. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin on the VQA v2 dataset.

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Tasks

Explanatory Visual Question AnsweringMulti-Task LearningQuestion AnsweringVisual Question AnsweringVisual Question Answering (VQA)

Datasets

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VQA-E

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Explanatory Visual Question Answering GQA-REX VQAE BLEU-4 42.56 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Explanatory Visual Question Answering GQA-REX VQAE CIDEr 358.20 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Explanatory Visual Question Answering GQA-REX VQAE GQA-test 57.24 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Explanatory Visual Question Answering GQA-REX VQAE GQA-val 65.19 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Explanatory Visual Question Answering GQA-REX VQAE Grounding 31.29 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Explanatory Visual Question Answering GQA-REX VQAE METEOR 34.51 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Explanatory Visual Question Answering GQA-REX VQAE ROUGE-L 73.59 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Explanatory Visual Question Answering GQA-REX VQAE SPICE 40.39 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report

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