Unleashing the Potential of Large Language Model: Zero-shot VQA for Flood Disaster Scenario

Visual question answering (VQA) is a fundamental and essential AI task, and VQA-based disaster scenario understanding is a hot research topic. For instance, we can ask questions about a disaster image by the VQA model and the answer can help identify whether anyone or anything is affected by the disaster. However, previous VQA models for disaster damage assessment have some shortcomings, such as limited candidate answer space, monotonous question types, and limited answering capability of existing models. In this paper, we propose a zero-shot VQA model named Zero-shot VQA for Flood Disaster Damage Assessment (ZFDDA). It is a VQA model for damage assessment without pre-training. Also, with flood disaster as the main research object, we build a Freestyle Flood Disaster Image Question Answering dataset (FFD-IQA) to evaluate our VQA model. This new dataset expands the question types to include free-form, multiple-choice, and yes-no questions. At the same time, we expand the size of the previous dataset to contain a total of 2,058 images and 22,422 question-meta ground truth pairs. Most importantly, our model uses well-designed chain of thought (CoT) demonstrations to unlock the potential of the large language model, allowing zero-shot VQA to show better performance in disaster scenarios. The experimental results show that the accuracy in answering complex questions is greatly improved with CoT prompts. Our study provides a research basis for subsequent research of VQA for other disaster scenarios.