# Few-Shot Visual Question Generation: A Novel Task and Benchmark Datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.07076 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07076/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2022.

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

- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [A Closer Look at Few-shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04232/) (2019)
- [From Recognition to Cognition: Visual Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10830/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Pre-training and Self-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06882/) (2020)
- [Skip-Thought Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06726/) (2015)
- [Visual7W: Grounded Question Answering in Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03416/) (2015)
- [How to train your MAML](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09502/) (2018)
- [Meta-Transfer Learning for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02391/) (2018)
- [RUBi: Reducing Unimodal Biases in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10169/) (2019)
- [Low-Shot Learning from Imaginary Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.05401/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generating natural language questions from visual scenes, known as Visual Question Generation (VQG), has been explored in the recent past where large amounts of meticulously labeled data provide the training corpus. However, in practice, it is not uncommon to have only a few images with question annotations corresponding to a few types of answers. In this paper, we propose a new and challenging Few-Shot Visual Question Generation (FS-VQG) task and provide a comprehensive benchmark to it. Specifically, we evaluate various existing VQG approaches as well as popular few-shot solutions based on meta-learning and self-supervised strategies for the FS-VQG task. We conduct experiments on two popular existing datasets VQG and Visual7w. In addition, we have also cleaned and extended the VQG dataset for use in a few-shot scenario, with additional image-question pairs as well as additional answer categories. We call this new dataset VQG-23. Several important findings emerge from our experiments, that shed light on the limits of current models in few-shot vision and language generation tasks. We find that trivially extending existing VQG approaches with transfer learning or meta-learning may not be enough to tackle the inherent challenges in few-shot VQG. We believe that this work will contribute to accelerating the progress in few-shot learning research.