# IQA: Visual Question Answering in Interactive Environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.03316 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.03316/

## Key facts

- Cited by 155 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Dec 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 155)

- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12168/) (2024)
- [LERF: Language Embedded Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09553/) (2023)
- [LangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16084/) (2023)
- [ProcTHOR: Large-Scale Embodied AI Using Procedural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06994/) (2022)
- [ScanQA: 3D Question Answering for Spatial Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10482/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14093/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Embodied AI: From Simulators to Research Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04918/) (2021)
- [Aligning Cyber Space with Physical World: A Comprehensive Survey on Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06886/) (2024)
- [PONI: Potential Functions for ObjectGoal Navigation with Interaction-free Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10029/) (2022)
- [FILM: Following Instructions in Language with Modular Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07342/) (2021)
- [SOON: Scenario Oriented Object Navigation with Graph-based Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17138/) (2021)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12667/) (2022)
- [Habitat-Web: Learning Embodied Object-Search Strategies from Human Demonstrations at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03514/) (2022)
- [Navigating to Objects in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00922/) (2022)
- [Visual Room Rearrangement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16544/) (2021)
- [Skill Induction and Planning with Latent Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01517/) (2021)
- [A Persistent Spatial Semantic Representation for High-level Natural Language Instruction Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05612/) (2021)
- [QA Dataset Explosion: A Taxonomy of NLP Resources for Question Answering and Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12708/) (2021)
- [Do Embodied Agents Dream of Pixelated Sheep: Embodied Decision Making using Language Guided World Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12050/) (2023)
- [Pano-AVQA: Grounded Audio-Visual Question Answering on 360^circ Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05122/) (2021)
- [FMGS: Foundation Model Embedded 3D Gaussian Splatting for Holistic 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01970/) (2024)
- [An Outlook into the Future of Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07123/) (2023)
- [Explore until Confident: Efficient Exploration for Embodied Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15941/) (2024)
- [Large VLM-based Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13073/) (2025)
- [The ThreeDWorld Transport Challenge: A Visually Guided Task-and-Motion Planning Benchmark for Physically Realistic Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14025/) (2021)
- [DialFRED: Dialogue-Enabled Agents for Embodied Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13330/) (2022)
- [Mind Your Outliers! Investigating the Negative Impact of Outliers on Active Learning for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02331/) (2021)
- [A Dataset for Interactive Vision-Language Navigation with Unknown Command Feasibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02312/) (2022)
- [3D Concept Learning and Reasoning from Multi-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11327/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Interactive Question Answering (IQA), the task of answering questions that require an autonomous agent to interact with a dynamic visual environment. IQA presents the agent with a scene and a question, like: "Are there any apples in the fridge?" The agent must navigate around the scene, acquire visual understanding of scene elements, interact with objects (e.g. open refrigerators) and plan for a series of actions conditioned on the question. Popular reinforcement learning approaches with a single controller perform poorly on IQA owing to the large and diverse state space. We propose the Hierarchical Interactive Memory Network (HIMN), consisting of a factorized set of controllers, allowing the system to operate at multiple levels of temporal abstraction. To evaluate HIMN, we introduce IQUAD V1, a new dataset built upon AI2-THOR, a simulated photo-realistic environment of configurable indoor scenes with interactive objects (code and dataset available at https://github.com/danielgordon10/thor-iqa-cvpr-2018). IQUAD V1 has 75,000 questions, each paired with a unique scene configuration. Our experiments show that our proposed model outperforms popular single controller based methods on IQUAD V1. For sample questions and results, please view our video: https://youtu.be/pXd3C-1jr98