# Visual Causal Scene Refinement for Video Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04224 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04224/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [NExT-QA:Next Phase of Question-Answering to Explaining Temporal Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08276/) (2021)
- [Less is More: ClipBERT for Video-and-Language Learning via Sparse Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06183/) (2021)
- [TGIF-QA: Toward Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04497/) (2017)
- [Unbiased Scene Graph Generation from Biased Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11949/) (2020)
- [Counterfactual Visual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07451/) (2019)
- [Right for the Right Reasons: Training Differentiable Models by Constraining their Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03717/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Long-Tailed Classification by Keeping the Good and Removing the Bad Momentum Causal Effect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12991/) (2020)
- [Causal Intervention for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12547/) (2020)
- [Revisiting the "Video" in Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01720/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Conditional Relation Networks for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10698/) (2020)
- [Counterfactual Samples Synthesizing for Robust Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06576/) (2020)
- [Heterogeneous Memory Enhanced Multimodal Attention Model for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04357/) (2019)
- [Causal Attention for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03493/) (2021)
- [Towards Causal VQA: Revealing and Reducing Spurious Correlations by Invariant and Covariant Semantic Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07538/) (2019)
- [The Devil is in Classification: A Simple Framework for Long-tail Object Detection and Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11978/) (2020)
- [Visual Commonsense R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12204/) (2020)
- [Motion-Appearance Co-Memory Networks for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10906/) (2018)
- [Interventional Video Grounding with Dual Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11013/) (2021)
- [Location-aware Graph Convolutional Networks for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09105/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Aligning Cyber Space with Physical World: A Comprehensive Survey on Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06886/) (2024)
- [Towards Long-Horizon Vision-Language Navigation: Platform, Benchmark and Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09082/) (2024)
- [SkeletonMAE: Graph-based Masked Autoencoder for Skeleton Sequence Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08476/) (2023)
- [Robust Disentangled Counterfactual Learning for Physical Audiovisual Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12425/) (2025)
- [Weakly Supervised Gaussian Contrastive Grounding with Large Multimodal Models for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10711/) (2024)
- [Cross-modal Causal Relation Alignment for Video Question Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07635/) (2025)
- [CausalVLR: A Toolbox and Benchmark for Visual-Linguistic Causal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17462/) (2023)
- [MEIA: Multimodal Embodied Perception and Interaction in Unknown Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00290/) (2024)
- [EQ-TAA: Equivariant Traffic Accident Anticipation via Diffusion-Based Accident Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10002/) (2025)
- [Reinforcing Consistency in Video MLLMs with Structured Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01460/) (2026)
- [MCAM: Multimodal Causal Analysis Model for Ego-Vehicle-Level Driving Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06072/) (2025)
- [ChainReaction: Causal Chain-Guided Reasoning for Modular and Explainable Causal-Why Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21010/) (2025)
- [EG-VQA: Benchmarking Verifiable Video Question Answering with Grounded Temporal Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24797/) (2026)
- [Order-based Causal Discovery for Multistage Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03971/) (2026)
- [Video Flow as Time Series: Discovering Temporal Consistency and Variability for VideoQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05783/) (2025)
- [CaFlow: Enhancing Long-Term Action Quality Assessment with Causal Counterfactual Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21653/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing methods for video question answering (VideoQA) often suffer from spurious correlations between different modalities, leading to a failure in identifying the dominant visual evidence and the intended question. Moreover, these methods function as black boxes, making it difficult to interpret the visual scene during the QA process. In this paper, to discover critical video segments and frames that serve as the visual causal scene for generating reliable answers, we present a causal analysis of VideoQA and propose a framework for cross-modal causal relational reasoning, named Visual Causal Scene Refinement (VCSR). Particularly, a set of causal front-door intervention operations is introduced to explicitly find the visual causal scenes at both segment and frame levels. Our VCSR involves two essential modules: i) the Question-Guided Refiner (QGR) module, which refines consecutive video frames guided by the question semantics to obtain more representative segment features for causal front-door intervention; ii) the Causal Scene Separator (CSS) module, which discovers a collection of visual causal and non-causal scenes based on the visual-linguistic causal relevance and estimates the causal effect of the scene-separating intervention in a contrastive learning manner. Extensive experiments on the NExT-QA, Causal-VidQA, and MSRVTT-QA datasets demonstrate the superiority of our VCSR in discovering visual causal scene and achieving robust video question answering. The code is available at https://github.com/YangLiu9208/VCSR.