Measuring Compositional Consistency for Video Question Answering
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Abstract (arXiv)
Recent video question answering benchmarks indicate that state-of-the-art models struggle to answer compositional questions. However, it remains unclear which types of compositional reasoning cause models to mispredict. Furthermore, it is difficult to discern whether models arrive at answers using compositional reasoning or by leveraging data biases. In this paper, we develop a question decomposition engine that programmatically deconstructs a compositional question into a directed acyclic graph of sub-questions. The graph is designed such that each parent question is a composition of its children. We present AGQA-Decomp, a benchmark containing 2.3M question graphs, with an average of 11.49 sub-questions per graph, and 4.55M total new sub-questions. Using question graphs, we evaluate three state-of-the-art models with a suite of novel compositional consistency metrics. We find that models either cannot reason correctly through most compositions or are reliant on incorrect reasoning to reach answers, frequently contradicting themselves or achieving high accuracies when failing at intermediate reasoning steps.
Key facts. Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 39 of its 57 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Apr 2022.
Builds on
39 of 57 references.
References · 39
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27 more
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 4; 2024: 6; 2025: 2; 2026: 2.
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- 2023TIFA: Accurate and Interpretable Text-to-Image Faithfulness Evaluation with Question Answeringcited by 416
- 2022CREPE: Can Vision-Language Foundation Models Reason Compositionally?cited by 177
- 2023COLA: A Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-image Retrievalcited by 53
- 2023SPOT! Revisiting Video-Language Models for Event Understandingcited by 20
- 2024Referring Atomic Video Action Recognitioncited by 16
- 2024Align and Aggregate: Compositional Reasoning with Video Alignment and Answer Aggregation for Video Question-Answeringcited by 9
- 2024Neural-Symbolic VideoQA: Learning Compositional Spatio-Temporal Reasoning for Real-world Video Question Answeringcited by 6
- 2026Staying VIGILant: Mitigating Visual Laziness via Counterfactual Visual Alignment in MLLMscited by 6
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- 2025POQD: Performance-Oriented Query Decomposer for Multi-vector retrievalcited by 5
- 2023ICSVR: Investigating Compositional and Syntactic Understanding in Video Retrieval Modelscited by 4
- 2024SHINE: Saliency-aware HIerarchical NEgative Ranking for Compositional Temporal Groundingcited by 3
3 more
- 2024Multi-granularity Contrastive Cross-modal Collaborative Generation for End-to-End Long-term Video Question Answeringcited by 3
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- 2026Staying VIGILant: Mitigating Visual Laziness via Counterfactual Visual Alignment in MLLMs24 Jun 2026
- 2026Reinforcing Consistency in Video MLLMs with Structured Rewards1 Apr 2026
- 2025RefAtomNet++: Advancing Referring Atomic Video Action Recognition using Semantic Retrieval based Multi-Trajectory Mamba18 Oct 2025
- 2025POQD: Performance-Oriented Query Decomposer for Multi-vector retrieval25 May 2025
- 2024Prompting Video-Language Foundation Models with Domain-specific Fine-grained Heuristics for Video Question Answering12 Oct 2024
- 2024Multi-granularity Contrastive Cross-modal Collaborative Generation for End-to-End Long-term Video Question Answering12 Oct 2024
- 2024SHINE: Saliency-aware HIerarchical NEgative Ranking for Compositional Temporal Grounding6 Jul 2024
- 2024Align and Aggregate: Compositional Reasoning with Video Alignment and Answer Aggregation for Video Question-Answering3 Jul 2024
- 2024Referring Atomic Video Action Recognition2 Jul 2024
- 2024Neural-Symbolic VideoQA: Learning Compositional Spatio-Temporal Reasoning for Real-world Video Question Answering5 Apr 2024
- 2023SPOT! Revisiting Video-Language Models for Event Understanding21 Nov 2023
- 2023ICSVR: Investigating Compositional and Syntactic Understanding in Video Retrieval Models28 Jun 2023
- 2022CREPE: Can Vision-Language Foundation Models Reason Compositionally?cited by 177
- 2023COLA: A Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-image Retrievalcited by 53
- 2026Staying VIGILant: Mitigating Visual Laziness via Counterfactual Visual Alignment in MLLMscited by 6
- 2026Reinforcing Consistency in Video MLLMs with Structured Rewardscited by 2
- 2026Staying VIGILant: Mitigating Visual Laziness via Counterfactual Visual Alignment in MLLMs24 Jun 2026
- 2026Reinforcing Consistency in Video MLLMs with Structured Rewards1 Apr 2026
- 2023COLA: A Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-image Retrieval5 May 2023
- 2022CREPE: Can Vision-Language Foundation Models Reason Compositionally?13 Dec 2022
- 2023TIFA: Accurate and Interpretable Text-to-Image Faithfulness Evaluation with Question Answeringcited by 416
- 2023SPOT! Revisiting Video-Language Models for Event Understandingcited by 20
- 2024Referring Atomic Video Action Recognitioncited by 16
- 2024Prompting Video-Language Foundation Models with Domain-specific Fine-grained Heuristics for Video Question Answeringcited by 5
- 2023ICSVR: Investigating Compositional and Syntactic Understanding in Video Retrieval Modelscited by 4
- 2024SHINE: Saliency-aware HIerarchical NEgative Ranking for Compositional Temporal Groundingcited by 3
- 2024Multi-granularity Contrastive Cross-modal Collaborative Generation for End-to-End Long-term Video Question Answeringcited by 3
- 2024Prompting Video-Language Foundation Models with Domain-specific Fine-grained Heuristics for Video Question Answering12 Oct 2024
- 2024Multi-granularity Contrastive Cross-modal Collaborative Generation for End-to-End Long-term Video Question Answering12 Oct 2024
- 2024SHINE: Saliency-aware HIerarchical NEgative Ranking for Compositional Temporal Grounding6 Jul 2024
- 2024Referring Atomic Video Action Recognition2 Jul 2024
- 2023SPOT! Revisiting Video-Language Models for Event Understanding21 Nov 2023
- 2023ICSVR: Investigating Compositional and Syntactic Understanding in Video Retrieval Models28 Jun 2023
- 2023TIFA: Accurate and Interpretable Text-to-Image Faithfulness Evaluation with Question Answering21 Mar 2023
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