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Arjun Akula

7 accepted papers

2025

Seeing Beyond: Enhancing Visual Question Answering with Multi-Modal Retrieval

COLING 2025industry

Multi-modal Large language models (MLLMs) have made significant strides in complex content understanding and reasoning. However, they still suffer from model hallucination and lack of specific knowledge when facing challenging questions. To address these limitations, retrieval augmented generation (…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Visual Intention Grounding for Egocentric Assistants

ICCV 2025poster

Visual grounding associates textual descriptions with objects in an image. Conventional methods target third-person image inputs and named object queries. In applications such as AI assistants, the perspective shifts -- inputs are egocentric, and objects may be referred to implicitly through needs a…

2023

KAFA: Rethinking Image Ad Understanding with Knowledge-Augmented Feature Adaptation of Vision-Language Models

ACL 2023industry

Image ad understanding is a crucial task with wide real-world applications. Although highly challenging with the involvement of diverse atypical scenes, real-world entities, and reasoning over scene-texts, how to interpret image ads is relatively under-explored, especially in the era of foundational…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2022

ALFRED-L: Investigating the Role of Language for Action Learning in Interactive Visual Environments

EMNLP 2022main

Embodied Vision and Language Task Completion requires an embodied agent to interpret natural language instructions and egocentric visual observations to navigate through and interact with environments. In this work, we examine ALFRED, a challenging benchmark for embodied task completion, with the go…

2022

CPL: Counterfactual Prompt Learning for Vision and Language Models

EMNLP 2022main

Prompt tuning is a new few-shot transfer learning technique that only tunes the learnable prompt for pre-trained vision and language models such as CLIP. However, existing prompt tuning methods tend to learn spurious or entangled representations, which leads to poor generalization to unseen concepts…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2021

CrossVQA: Scalably Generating Benchmarks for Systematically Testing VQA Generalization

EMNLP 2021main

One challenge in evaluating visual question answering (VQA) models in the cross-dataset adaptation setting is that the distribution shifts are multi-modal, making it difficult to identify if it is the shifts in visual or language features that play a key role. In this paper, we propose a semi-automa…

Cited by 30SourcePDFScholar
2021

Mind the Context: The Impact of Contextualization in Neural Module Networks for Grounding Visual Referring Expressions

EMNLP 2021main

Neural module networks (NMN) are a popular approach for grounding visual referring expressions. Prior implementations of NMN use pre-defined and fixed textual inputs in their module instantiation. This necessitates a large number of modules as they lack the ability to share weights and exploit assoc…