# Unveiling Cross Modality Bias in Visual Question Answering: A Causal View with Possible Worlds VQA

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.19664 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19664/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [From Recognition to Cognition: Visual Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10830/) (2018)
- [CLEVRER: CoLlision Events for Video REpresentation and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01442/) (2019)
- [Unbiased Scene Graph Generation from Biased Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11949/) (2020)
- [Don't Just Assume; Look and Answer: Overcoming Priors for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00377/) (2017)
- [Counterfactual Visual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07451/) (2019)
- [Direct and Indirect Effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.2300/) (2013)
- [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)
- [Causal Intervention for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12547/) (2020)
- [Visually Grounded Reasoning across Languages and Cultures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13238/) (2021)
- [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)
- [SituatedQA: Incorporating Extra-Linguistic Contexts into QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06157/) (2021)
- [Taking a HINT: Leveraging Explanations to Make Vision and Language Models More Grounded](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03751/) (2019)
- [Distilling Causal Effect of Data in Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01737/) (2021)
- [Interventional Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13000/) (2020)
- [Human Attention in Visual Question Answering: Do Humans and Deep Networks Look at the Same Regions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03556/) (2016)
- [Causal Attention for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03493/) (2021)
- [Visual Commonsense R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12204/) (2020)
- [Overcoming Language Priors in Visual Question Answering with Adversarial Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03649/) (2018)
- [Counterfactual Zero-Shot and Open-Set Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00887/) (2021)
- [On the Value of Out-of-Distribution Testing: An Example of Goodhart's Law](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09241/) (2020)
- [MUREL: Multimodal Relational Reasoning for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09487/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [MISAR: A Multimodal Instructional System with Augmented Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11699/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To increase the generalization capability of VQA systems, many recent studies have tried to de-bias spurious language or vision associations that shortcut the question or image to the answer. Despite these efforts, the literature fails to address the confounding effect of vision and language simultaneously. As a result, when they reduce bias learned from one modality, they usually increase bias from the other. In this paper, we first model a confounding effect that causes language and vision bias simultaneously, then propose a counterfactual inference to remove the influence of this effect. The model trained in this strategy can concurrently and efficiently reduce vision and language bias. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to reduce biases resulting from confounding effects of vision and language in VQA, leveraging causal explain-away relations. We accompany our method with an explain-away strategy, pushing the accuracy of the questions with numerical answers results compared to existing methods that have been an open problem. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in VQA-CP v2 datasets.