# Discovering the Unknown Knowns: Turning Implicit Knowledge in the Dataset into Explicit Training Examples for Visual Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.06122 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06122/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [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)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [Don't Just Assume; Look and Answer: Overcoming Priors for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00377/) (2017)
- [Visual7W: Grounded Question Answering in Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03416/) (2015)
- [Don't Take the Easy Way Out: Ensemble Based Methods for Avoiding Known Dataset Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03683/) (2019)
- [Counterfactual VQA: A Cause-Effect Look at Language Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04315/) (2020)
- [RUBi: Reducing Unimodal Biases in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10169/) (2019)
- [Counterfactual Samples Synthesizing for Robust Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06576/) (2020)
- [Inferring and Executing Programs for Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03633/) (2017)
- [Taking a HINT: Leveraging Explanations to Make Vision and Language Models More Grounded](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03751/) (2019)
- [Analyzing the Behavior of Visual Question Answering Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07356/) (2016)
- [Human Attention in Visual Question Answering: Do Humans and Deep Networks Look at the Same Regions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03556/) (2016)
- [Towards Causal VQA: Revealing and Reducing Spurious Correlations by Invariant and Covariant Semantic Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07538/) (2019)
- [Overcoming Language Priors in Visual Question Answering with Adversarial Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03649/) (2018)
- [Cycle-Consistency for Robust Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.05660/) (2019)
- [Explainable and Explicit Visual Reasoning over Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01855/) (2018)
- [Beyond Bilinear: Generalized Multimodal Factorized High-order Pooling for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03619/) (2017)
- [On the Value of Out-of-Distribution Testing: An Example of Goodhart's Law](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09241/) (2020)
- [MUTANT: A Training Paradigm for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08566/) (2020)
- [Self-Critical Reasoning for Robust Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09998/) (2019)
- [Removing Bias in Multi-modal Classifiers: Regularization by Maximizing Functional Entropies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10802/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [From Images to Textual Prompts: Zero-shot VQA with Frozen Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10846/) (2022)
- [All You May Need for VQA are Image Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01883/) (2022)
- [Robust Visual Question Answering: Datasets, Methods, and Future Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11471/) (2023)
- [Counterfactual Samples Synthesizing and Training for Robust Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01013/) (2021)
- [Q: How to Specialize Large Vision-Language Models to Data-Scarce VQA Tasks? A: Self-Train on Unlabeled Images!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03932/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Data Augmentation for Robust Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08739/) (2022)
- [VQA-GEN: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00807/) (2023)
- [Task Formulation Matters When Learning Continually: A Case Study in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00044/) (2022)
- [Enhancing Vision-Language Pre-Training with Jointly Learned Questioner and Dense Captioner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11769/) (2023)
- [Improving Data Augmentation for Robust Visual Question Answering with Effective Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15646/) (2024)
- [Overcoming Language Priors for Visual Question Answering Based on Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05690/) (2025)
- [TPCL: Task Progressive Curriculum Learning for Robust Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17292/) (2024)
- [When Big Models Train Small Ones: Label-Free Model Parity Alignment for Efficient Visual Question Answering using Small VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16633/) (2025)
- [Not Another Text Benchmark: Putting the "Visual" Back in Visual Question Answering for Large Video Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17112/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual question answering (VQA) is challenging not only because the model has to handle multi-modal information, but also because it is just so hard to collect sufficient training examples -- there are too many questions one can ask about an image. As a result, a VQA model trained solely on human-annotated examples could easily over-fit specific question styles or image contents that are being asked, leaving the model largely ignorant about the sheer diversity of questions. Existing methods address this issue primarily by introducing an auxiliary task such as visual grounding, cycle consistency, or debiasing. In this paper, we take a drastically different approach. We found that many of the "unknowns" to the learned VQA model are indeed "known" in the dataset implicitly. For instance, questions asking about the same object in different images are likely paraphrases; the number of detected or annotated objects in an image already provides the answer to the "how many" question, even if the question has not been annotated for that image. Building upon these insights, we present a simple data augmentation pipeline SimpleAug to turn this "known" knowledge into training examples for VQA. We show that these augmented examples can notably improve the learned VQA models' performance, not only on the VQA-CP dataset with language prior shifts but also on the VQA v2 dataset without such shifts. Our method further opens up the door to leverage weakly-labeled or unlabeled images in a principled way to enhance VQA models. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/heendung/simpleAUG.