# NLVR2 Visual Bias Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.10411 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10411/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

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- [Analyze-Prompt-Reason: A Collaborative Agent-Based Framework for Multi-Image Vision-Language Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00356/) (2025)
- [Beyond Single Object: Learning 3D Relations with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15710/) (2026)
- [Assessing Situational and Spatial Awareness of VLMs with Synthetically Generated Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15780/) (2026)
- [FuzzingRL: Reinforcement Fuzz-Testing for Revealing VLM Failures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06600/) (2026)
- [SD-MAR: Multi-image Analytical Reasoning via Synthetic Data and Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14333/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

NLVR2 (Suhr et al., 2019) was designed to be robust for language bias through a data collection process that resulted in each natural language sentence appearing with both true and false labels. The process did not provide a similar measure of control for visual bias. This technical report analyzes the potential for visual bias in NLVR2. We show that some amount of visual bias likely exists. Finally, we identify a subset of the test data that allows to test for model performance in a way that is robust to such potential biases. We show that the performance of existing models (Li et al., 2019; Tan and Bansal 2019) is relatively robust to this potential bias. We propose to add the evaluation on this subset of the data to the NLVR2 evaluation protocol, and update the official release to include it. A notebook including an implementation of the code used to replicate this analysis is available at http://nlvr.ai/NLVR2BiasAnalysis.html.
