Plug-and-Play VQA: Zero-shot VQA by Conjoining Large Pretrained Models with Zero Training

Abstract

Visual question answering (VQA) is a hallmark of vision and language reasoningand a challenging task under the zero-shot setting.We propose Plug-and-Play VQA (PNP-VQA),a modular framework for zero-shot VQA.In contrast to most existing works, which require substantial adaptation of pretrained language models (PLMs) for the vision modality,PNP-VQA requires no additional training of the PLMs.Instead, we propose to use natural language and network interpretation as an intermediate representation that glues pretrained models together. We first generate question-guided informative image captions,and pass the captions to a PLM as context for question answering.Surpassing end-to-end trained baselines, PNP-VQA achieves state-of-the-art results on zero-shot VQAv2 and GQA. With 11B parameters, it outperforms the 80B-parameter Flamingo model by 8.5% on VQAv2. With 738M PLM parameters, PNP-VQA achieves an improvement of 9.1% on GQA over FewVLM with 740M PLM parameters.