Disentanglement-Based Equivariant Learning for Compositional VQA

2026-06-01

AI Summary

Existing compositional visual question answering methods struggle to effectively disentangle visual and linguistic concepts and often rely on additional supervisory signals, which limits their generalization to novel compositions. This work proposes a disentangled equivariant learning framework that requires only standard answer-level supervision, uniquely integrating causal intervention with equivariance principles. By leveraging a causally inspired intervention mechanism, the model achieves concept disentanglement, while equivariant transformation constraints on the output space enhance compositional reasoning. Notably, the approach operates without any extra training cues and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models on the CLEVR-CoGenT and GQA-SGL benchmarks, demonstrating superior compositional generalization at both visual and linguistic levels.

Abstract

Compositional visual question answering (VQA) represents a challenging yet fundamental task that requires models to comprehend novel combinations of previously learned concepts. The current methods often overlook the disentanglement of underlying concepts and are restricted in terms of their ability to effectively capture the compositional variation mechanism. Moreover, the state-of-the-art techniques depend on additional clues for training, which is not feasible in real-world VQA scenarios. To address these issues, in this paper, we introduce a novel Disentanglement-based EquivAriant Learning (DEAL) framework for compositional VQA, which is guided exclusively by ground-truth answers. In DEAL, we employ causality-inspired interventions to disentangle concepts derived from visual and textual inputs within a re-encoding framework. Based on the principle of equivariance, we subsequently perform a compositional transformation on the inference input and impose the equivariant constraint on the output to augment the compositional reasoning capacity of the model. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the benchmark CLEVR-CoGenT and GQA-SGL datasets validate the superiority of our proposed DEAL approach over the existing state-of-the-art methods for compositional VQA tasks in both visual and linguistic generalization settings.

Problem

• Compositional VQA
• disentanglement
• compositional generalization
• visual question answering
• equivariance

Innovation

• disentanglement
• equivariant learning
• compositional VQA
• causal intervention
• visual reasoning