# Robust Visual Question Answering: Datasets, Methods, and Future Challenges

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11471 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11471/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 172 of its 234 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 172)

- [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)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (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)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00067/) (2019)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Natural Language Understanding and Inference with MLLM in Visual Question Answering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17558/) (2024)
- [Explain Before You Answer: A Survey on Compositional Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17298/) (2025)
- [Look Before You Leap: A GUI-Critic-R1 Model for Pre-Operative Error Diagnosis in GUI Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04614/) (2025)
- [From Image to Language: A Critical Analysis of Visual Question Answering (VQA) Approaches, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00308/) (2023)
- [When language and vision meet road safety: leveraging multimodal large language models for video-based traffic accident analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10604/) (2025)
- [Has Multimodal Learning Delivered Universal Intelligence in Healthcare? A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12880/) (2024)
- [Look, Listen, and Answer: Overcoming Biases for Audio-Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12020/) (2024)
- [Show Me What and Where has Changed? Question Answering and Grounding for Remote Sensing Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23828/) (2024)
- [Directional Gradient Projection for Robust Fine-Tuning of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15895/) (2025)
- [Do 3D Large Language Models Really Understand 3D Spatial Relationships?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23523/) (2026)
- [CapRL++: Unified Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards for Dense Image and Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09393/) (2026)
- [SHMamba: Structured Hyperbolic State Space Model for Audio-Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09833/) (2024)
- [FRAMES-VQA: Benchmarking Fine-Tuning Robustness across Multi-Modal Shifts in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21755/) (2025)
- [A Hitchhikers Guide to Fine-Grained Face Forgery Detection Using Common Sense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00485/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Easy Option Bias in Multiple-Choice Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13428/) (2025)
- [Listening and Seeing Again: Generative Error Correction for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04038/) (2025)
- [Class-Conditional Distribution Balancing for Group Robust Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17314/) (2025)
- [T2I-ConBench: Text-to-Image Benchmark for Continual Post-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16875/) (2025)
- [MetaRA: Metamorphic Robustness Assessment for Multimodal Large Language Model-based Visual Question Answering Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19307/) (2026)
- [DeepBias: Adaptive In-depth Probing of Social Biases in LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11228/) (2026)
- [TPCL: Task Progressive Curriculum Learning for Robust Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17292/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Application of Visual Question Answering (VQA) for Classroom Activity Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22369/) (2025)
- [Not All Modalities Are Equal: Instruction-Aware Gating for Multimodal Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26232/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual question answering requires a system to provide an accurate natural language answer given an image and a natural language question. However, it is widely recognized that previous generic VQA methods often exhibit a tendency to memorize biases present in the training data rather than learning proper behaviors, such as grounding images before predicting answers. Therefore, these methods usually achieve high in-distribution but poor out-of-distribution performance. In recent years, various datasets and debiasing methods have been proposed to evaluate and enhance the VQA robustness, respectively. This paper provides the first comprehensive survey focused on this emerging fashion. Specifically, we first provide an overview of the development process of datasets from in-distribution and out-of-distribution perspectives. Then, we examine the evaluation metrics employed by these datasets. Thirdly, we propose a typology that presents the development process, similarities and differences, robustness comparison, and technical features of existing debiasing methods. Furthermore, we analyze and discuss the robustness of representative vision-and-language pre-training models on VQA. Finally, through a thorough review of the available literature and experimental analysis, we discuss the key areas for future research from various viewpoints.