# GHR-VQA: Graph-guided Hierarchical Relational Reasoning for Video Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20201 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20201/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Neural Motifs: Scene Graph Parsing with Global Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06640/) (2017)
- [Unbiased Scene Graph Generation from Biased Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11949/) (2020)
- [Action Genome: Actions as Composition of Spatio-temporal Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06992/) (2019)
- [Deep Graph Library: A Graph-Centric, Highly-Performant Package for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01315/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Conditional Relation Networks for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10698/) (2020)
- [Heterogeneous Memory Enhanced Multimodal Attention Model for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04357/) (2019)
- [AGQA: A Benchmark for Compositional Spatio-Temporal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16002/) (2021)
- [An Image Grid Can Be Worth a Video: Zero-shot Video Question Answering Using a VLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18406/) (2024)
- [Video as Conditional Graph Hierarchy for Multi-Granular Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06197/) (2021)
- [Language-Conditioned Graph Networks for Relational Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04405/) (2019)
- [(2.5+1)D Spatio-Temporal Scene Graphs for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09277/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Object-oriented Spatio-Temporal Reasoning for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13432/) (2021)
- [Retrieving-to-Answer: Zero-Shot Video Question Answering with Frozen Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11732/) (2023)
- [Learning to Answer Questions From Image Using Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.00333/) (2015)
- [SCENE: Reasoning about Traffic Scenes using Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03512/) (2023)
- [Learning Situation Hyper-Graphs for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08682/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose GHR-VQA, Graph-guided Hierarchical Relational Reasoning for Video Question Answering (Video QA), a novel human-centric framework that incorporates scene graphs to capture intricate human-object interactions within video sequences. Unlike traditional pixel-based methods, each frame is represented as a scene graph and human nodes across frames are linked to a global root, forming the video-level graph and enabling cross-frame reasoning centered on human actors. The video-level graphs are then processed by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), transforming them into rich, context-aware embeddings for efficient processing. Finally, these embeddings are integrated with question features in a hierarchical network operating across different abstraction levels, enhancing both local and global understanding of video content. This explicit human-rooted structure enhances interpretability by decomposing actions into human-object interactions and enables a more profound understanding of spatiotemporal dynamics. We validate our approach on the Action Genome Question Answering (AGQA) dataset, achieving significant performance improvements, including a 7.3% improvement in object-relation reasoning over the state of the art.