# Co-VQA : Answering by Interactive Sub Question Sequence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.00879 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00879/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [Visual Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08669/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Relation Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11575/) (2017)
- [Bilinear Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07932/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Question-Image Co-Attention for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00061/) (2016)
- [Stacked Attention Networks for Image Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02274/) (2015)
- [MUTAN: Multimodal Tucker Fusion for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06676/) (2017)
- [Relation-Aware Graph Attention Network for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12314/) (2019)
- [Multi-modal Factorized Bilinear Pooling with Co-Attention Learning for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01471/) (2017)
- [Dual Attention Networks for Multimodal Reasoning and Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00471/) (2016)
- [Dynamic Fusion with Intra- and Inter- Modality Attention Flow for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05252/) (2018)
- [GuessWhat?! Visual object discovery through multi-modal dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08481/) (2016)
- [A Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder For Generative Context-Aware Query Suggestion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.02221/) (2015)
- [MUREL: Multimodal Relational Reasoning for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09487/) (2019)
- [Pythia v0.1: the Winning Entry to the VQA Challenge 2018](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09956/) (2018)
- [Improved Fusion of Visual and Language Representations by Dense Symmetric Co-Attention for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00775/) (2018)
- [Learning Visual Question Answering by Bootstrapping Hard Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00300/) (2018)
- [Evaluating Visual Conversational Agents via Cooperative Human-AI Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05122/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [IdealGPT: Iteratively Decomposing Vision and Language Reasoning via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14985/) (2023)
- [Automatic Generation of Socratic Subquestions for Teaching Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12835/) (2022)
- [An X-Ray Is Worth 15 Features: Sparse Autoencoders for Interpretable Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03334/) (2024)
- [Collective Critics for Creative Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02428/) (2024)
- [Can Large Multimodal Models Uncover Deep Semantics Behind Images?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11281/) (2024)
- [Transparent and Coherent Procedural Mistake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11927/) (2024)
- [Beyond Single Frames: Can LMMs Comprehend Temporal and Contextual Narratives in Image Sequences?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13925/) (2025)
- [Multi-granular Training Strategies for Robust Multi-hop Reasoning Over Noisy and Heterogeneous Knowledge Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05944/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most existing approaches to Visual Question Answering (VQA) answer questions directly, however, people usually decompose a complex question into a sequence of simple sub questions and finally obtain the answer to the original question after answering the sub question sequence(SQS). By simulating the process, this paper proposes a conversation-based VQA (Co-VQA) framework, which consists of three components: Questioner, Oracle, and Answerer. Questioner raises the sub questions using an extending HRED model, and Oracle answers them one-by-one. An Adaptive Chain Visual Reasoning Model (ACVRM) for Answerer is also proposed, where the question-answer pair is used to update the visual representation sequentially. To perform supervised learning for each model, we introduce a well-designed method to build a SQS for each question on VQA 2.0 and VQA-CP v2 datasets. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art on VQA-CP v2. Further analyses show that SQSs help build direct semantic connections between questions and images, provide question-adaptive variable-length reasoning chains, and with explicit interpretability as well as error traceability.