# Human-Adversarial Visual Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.02280 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02280/

## Key facts

- Cited by 57 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00067/) (2019)
- [VizWiz Grand Challenge: Answering Visual Questions from Blind People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08218/) (2018)
- [Adversarial NLI: A New Benchmark for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14599/) (2019)
- [The Hateful Memes Challenge: Detecting Hate Speech in Multimodal Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04790/) (2020)
- [Dynabench: Rethinking Benchmarking in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14337/) (2021)
- [Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09457/) (2017)
- [Don't Just Assume; Look and Answer: Overcoming Priors for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00377/) (2017)
- [Deep Modular Co-Attention Networks for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10770/) (2019)
- [Scene Text Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13648/) (2019)
- [Large-Scale Adversarial Training for Vision-and-Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06195/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [On Evaluating Adversarial Robustness of Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16934/) (2023)
- [NaturalBench: Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Natural Adversarial Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14669/) (2024)
- [MTVQA: Benchmarking Multilingual Text-Centric Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11985/) (2024)
- [Findings of the BabyLM Challenge: Sample-Efficient Pretraining on Developmentally Plausible Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08165/) (2025)
- [Video Question Answering: Datasets, Algorithms and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01225/) (2022)
- [Negative Object Presence Evaluation (NOPE) to Measure Object Hallucination in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05338/) (2023)
- [Surgical-VQA: Visual Question Answering in Surgical Scenes using Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11053/) (2022)
- [An Image Is Worth 1000 Lies: Adversarial Transferability across Prompts on Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09766/) (2024)
- [Surgical-VQLA: Transformer with Gated Vision-Language Embedding for Visual Question Localized-Answering in Robotic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11692/) (2023)
- [Break the Visual Perception: Adversarial Attacks Targeting Encoded Visual Tokens of Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06699/) (2024)
- [Improving Selective Visual Question Answering by Learning from Your Peers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08751/) (2023)
- [UNK-VQA: A Dataset and a Probe into the Abstention Ability of Multi-modal Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10942/) (2023)
- [Are Deep Neural Networks SMARTer than Second Graders?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09993/) (2022)
- [Generalized but not Robust? Comparing the Effects of Data Modification Methods on Out-of-Domain Generalization and Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07653/) (2022)
- [What's the Meaning of Superhuman Performance in Today's NLU?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08414/) (2023)
- [Robust Visual Question Answering: Datasets, Methods, and Future Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11471/) (2023)
- [Reassessing Evaluation Practices in Visual Question Answering: A Case Study on Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12191/) (2022)
- [WinoGAViL: Gamified Association Benchmark to Challenge Vision-and-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12576/) (2022)
- [MirrorCheck: Efficient Adversarial Defense for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09250/) (2024)
- [Look, Listen, and Answer: Overcoming Biases for Audio-Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12020/) (2024)
- [Dynatask: A Framework for Creating Dynamic AI Benchmark Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01906/) (2022)
- [Rephrase, Augment, Reason: Visual Grounding of Questions for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05861/) (2023)
- [SK-VQA: Synthetic Knowledge Generation at Scale for Training Context-Augmented Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19593/) (2024)
- [What makes a good metric? Evaluating automatic metrics for text-to-image consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13989/) (2024)
- [Learning to Rematch Mismatched Pairs for Robust Cross-Modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05105/) (2024)
- [Directional Gradient Projection for Robust Fine-Tuning of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15895/) (2025)
- [Semantically Distributed Robust Optimization for Vision-and-Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07165/) (2021)
- [MaXM: Towards Multilingual Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05401/) (2022)
- [Improving Visual Question Answering Models through Robustness Analysis and In-Context Learning with a Chain of Basic Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03147/) (2023)
- [Correlation Information Bottleneck: Towards Adapting Pretrained Multimodal Models for Robust Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06954/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Performance on the most commonly used Visual Question Answering dataset (VQA v2) is starting to approach human accuracy. However, in interacting with state-of-the-art VQA models, it is clear that the problem is far from being solved. In order to stress test VQA models, we benchmark them against human-adversarial examples. Human subjects interact with a state-of-the-art VQA model, and for each image in the dataset, attempt to find a question where the model's predicted answer is incorrect. We find that a wide range of state-of-the-art models perform poorly when evaluated on these examples. We conduct an extensive analysis of the collected adversarial examples and provide guidance on future research directions. We hope that this Adversarial VQA (AdVQA) benchmark can help drive progress in the field and advance the state of the art.