Research map / Vision-language and multimodal
Visual question answering: research map
546 accepted papers on Visual question answering in Vision-language and multimodal, from ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI (2016–2026), grouped into 2 clusters and 7 approaches. The busiest year so far is 2025.
Within Vision-language and multimodal, its share shrank from 7.0% in 2023–24 to 3.6% in 2025–26 (111 → 173 papers at ICML, NeurIPS, CVPR and AAAI, the venues with data for all four years).
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Approaches and key papers
visual question · answering vqa · knowledge · 321 papers
Approaches in this cluster:
- Universal VQA models (100 papers)
Develops general and knowledge-based visual question answering with memory, reasoning transfer, and causal adapters. - Attention and prior-robust VQA (109 papers)
Improves VQA via multi-level attention, bias reduction, decomposition, and cycle consistency. - Vision-language model VQA evaluation (56 papers)
Generates challenging benchmarks and zero-shot prompting for evaluating vision-language models on VQA. - Multimodal LLM question answering (56 papers)
Augments multimodal LLMs for knowledge-based and text-rich VQA and evaluates them dynamically.
Most cited and most cited since 2024:
- Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering (CVPR 2018 · 5,159 citations)
- Making the v in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering (CVPR 2017 · 2,316 citations)
- NuScenes-QA: A Multi-Modal Visual Question Answering Benchmark for Autonomous Driving Scenario (AAAI 2024 · 157 citations)
- Monkey: Image Resolution and Text Label Are Important Things for Large Multi-modal Models (CVPR 2024 · 120 citations)
answer · qa · video question · 225 papers
Approaches in this cluster:
- Multimodal question answering datasets (90 papers)
Creates benchmarks and models for multi-hop, video, and text-based multimodal question answering. - Visual reasoning diagnostics (62 papers)
Diagnoses shortcuts and compositional reasoning in visual reasoning models using synthetic benchmarks. - Open-domain multimodal QA (73 papers)
Answers questions over multiple evidence sources with co-attention, cross-lingual retrieval, and dialog.
Most cited and most cited since 2024:
- Stacked Attention Networks for Image Question Answering (CVPR 2016 · 2,094 citations)
- CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning (CVPR 2017 · 1,831 citations)
- Generative Multimodal Models are In-Context Learners (CVPR 2024 · 97 citations)
- Can I Trust Your Answer? Visually Grounded Video Question Answering (CVPR 2024 · 62 citations)
Related topics in Vision-language and multimodal
- Human and embodied modeling (1,673)
- Multimodal LLMs (2,371)
- Robot action and navigation (630)
- CLIP and zero-shot (959)
- Cross-modal learning (1,303)