# Generate then Select: Open-ended Visual Question Answering Guided by World Knowledge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18842 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18842/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2023.

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

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00067/) (2019)
- [PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06794/) (2022)
- [A-OKVQA: A Benchmark for Visual Question Answering using World Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01718/) (2022)
- [FLAVA: A Foundational Language And Vision Alignment Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04482/) (2021)
- [ClipCap: CLIP Prefix for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09734/) (2021)
- [From Recognition to Cognition: Visual Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10830/) (2018)
- [UnifiedQA: Crossing Format Boundaries With a Single QA System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00700/) (2020)
- [Unified-IO: A Unified Model for Vision, Language, and Multi-Modal Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08916/) (2022)
- [Deep Modular Co-Attention Networks for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10770/) (2019)
- [An Empirical Study of GPT-3 for Few-Shot Knowledge-Based VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05014/) (2021)
- [UL2: Unifying Language Learning Paradigms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05131/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Question-Image Co-Attention for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00061/) (2016)
- [FVQA: Fact-based Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05433/) (2016)
- [In Defense of Grid Features for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03615/) (2020)
- [MUTAN: Multimodal Tucker Fusion for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06676/) (2017)

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

- [BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12390/) (2024)
- [Don't Hallucinate, Abstain: Identifying LLM Knowledge Gaps via Multi-LLM Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00367/) (2024)
- [Commonsense-T2I Challenge: Can Text-to-Image Generation Models Understand Commonsense?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07546/) (2024)
- [Guiding Vision-Language Model Selection for Visual Question-Answering Across Tasks, Domains, and Knowledge Types](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09269/) (2024)
- [Knowledge Acquisition Disentanglement for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15346/) (2024)
- [Battle of the Large Language Models: Dolly vs LLaMA vs Vicuna vs Guanaco vs Bard vs ChatGPT -- A Text-to-SQL Parsing Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10190/) (2023)
- [FilterRAG: Zero-Shot Informed Retrieval-Augmented Generation to Mitigate Hallucinations in VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18536/) (2025)
- [ZeShot-VQA: Zero-Shot Visual Question Answering Framework with Answer Mapping for Natural Disaster Damage Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00238/) (2025)
- [CIVET: Systematic Evaluation of Understanding in VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05146/) (2025)
- [Difficult Task Yes but Simple Task No: Unveiling the Laziness in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11437/) (2024)
- [GETReason: Enhancing Image Context Extraction through Hierarchical Multi-Agent Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21863/) (2025)
- [Court of LLMs: Evidence-Augmented Generation via Multi-LLM Collaboration for Text-Attributed Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00507/) (2025)
- [LLM-based Hierarchical Concept Decomposition for Interpretable Fine-Grained Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18672/) (2024)
- [Augmented Vision-Language Models: A Systematic Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22933/) (2025)
- [HLTCOE Evaluation Team at TREC 2025: VQA Track](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07738/) (2025)
- [ECA: Efficient Continual Alignment for Open-Ended Image-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12633/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The open-ended Visual Question Answering (VQA) task requires AI models to jointly reason over visual and natural language inputs using world knowledge. Recently, pre-trained Language Models (PLM) such as GPT-3 have been applied to the task and shown to be powerful world knowledge sources. However, these methods suffer from low knowledge coverage caused by PLM bias -- the tendency to generate certain tokens over other tokens regardless of prompt changes, and high dependency on the PLM quality -- only models using GPT-3 can achieve the best result. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose RASO: a new VQA pipeline that deploys a generate-then-select strategy guided by world knowledge for the first time. Rather than following the de facto standard to train a multi-modal model that directly generates the VQA answer, RASO first adopts PLM to generate all the possible answers, and then trains a lightweight answer selection model for the correct answer. As proved in our analysis, RASO expands the knowledge coverage from in-domain training data by a large margin. We provide extensive experimentation and show the effectiveness of our pipeline by advancing the state-of-the-art by 4.1% on OK-VQA, without additional computation cost. Code and models are released at http://cogcomp.org/page/publication_view/1010