# Generative Bias for Robust Visual Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.00690 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00690/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (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)
- [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)
- [VL-BERT: Pre-training of Generic Visual-Linguistic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08530/) (2019)
- [VizWiz Grand Challenge: Answering Visual Questions from Blind People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08218/) (2018)
- [Don't Just Assume; Look and Answer: Overcoming Priors for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00377/) (2017)
- [Bilinear Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07932/) (2018)
- [Don't Take the Easy Way Out: Ensemble Based Methods for Avoiding Known Dataset Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03683/) (2019)
- [Stacked Attention Networks for Image Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02274/) (2015)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Yin and Yang: Balancing and Answering Binary Visual Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05099/) (2015)
- [Overcoming Language Priors in Visual Question Answering with Adversarial Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03649/) (2018)
- [On the Value of Out-of-Distribution Testing: An Example of Goodhart's Law](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09241/) (2020)
- [Detecting Human-Object Interactions with Action Co-occurrence Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08728/) (2020)
- [Beyond Question-Based Biases: Assessing Multimodal Shortcut Learning in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03149/) (2021)
- [Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue... but Should Vqa Expect Them To?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05121/) (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)
- [DASO: Distribution-Aware Semantics-Oriented Pseudo-label for Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05682/) (2021)
- [Overcoming Language Priors with Self-supervised Learning for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11528/) (2020)
- [Dense Relational Captioning: Triple-Stream Networks for Relationship-Based Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05942/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Benchmark Designers Should "Train on the Test Set" to Expose Exploitable Non-Visual Shortcuts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04655/) (2025)
- [Robust Visual Question Answering: Datasets, Methods, and Future Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11471/) (2023)
- [HumaniBench: A Human-Centric Framework for Large Multimodal Models Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11454/) (2025)
- [Look, Listen, and Answer: Overcoming Biases for Audio-Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12020/) (2024)
- [Quantifying Bias in Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13053/) (2023)
- [Memory-Augmented Multimodal LLMs for Surgical VQA via Self-Contained Inquiry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10937/) (2024)
- [Semi-Supervised Image Captioning by Adversarially Propagating Labeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11174/) (2023)
- [Overcoming Language Priors for Visual Question Answering Based on Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05690/) (2025)
- [Computed Tomography Visual Question Answering with Cross-modal Feature Graphing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04333/) (2025)
- [TPCL: Task Progressive Curriculum Learning for Robust Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17292/) (2024)
- [Integrating Object Interaction Self-Attention and GAN-Based Debiasing for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20884/) (2025)
- [Counterfactual Reasoning for Robust Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16567/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The task of Visual Question Answering (VQA) is known to be plagued by the issue of VQA models exploiting biases within the dataset to make its final prediction. Various previous ensemble based debiasing methods have been proposed where an additional model is purposefully trained to be biased in order to train a robust target model. However, these methods compute the bias for a model simply from the label statistics of the training data or from single modal branches. In this work, in order to better learn the bias a target VQA model suffers from, we propose a generative method to train the bias model directly from the target model, called GenB. In particular, GenB employs a generative network to learn the bias in the target model through a combination of the adversarial objective and knowledge distillation. We then debias our target model with GenB as a bias model, and show through extensive experiments the effects of our method on various VQA bias datasets including VQA-CP2, VQA-CP1, GQA-OOD, and VQA-CE, and show state-of-the-art results with the LXMERT architecture on VQA-CP2.