In this paper, we propose a method to improve the reasoning capabilities of Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems by integrating Dense Passage Retrievers (DPRs) with Vision Language Models (VLMs). While recent works focus on the application of knowledge graphs and chain-of-thought reasoning, we recognize that the complexity of graph neural networks and end-to-end training remain significant challenges. To address these issues, we introduce **R**elevance **G**uided **VQA** (**RG-VQA**), a retriever-generator pipeline that uses DPRs to efficiently extract relevant information from structured knowledge bases. Our approach ensures scalability to large graphs without significant computational overhead. Experiments on the ScienceQA dataset show that RG-VQA achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing human accuracy and outperforming GPT-4 by more than . This demonstrates the effectiveness of RG-VQA in boosting the reasoning capabilities of VQA systems and its potential for practical applications.

Large Vision Language Models (VLMs) like GPT-4, LLaVA, and InstructBLIP exhibit extraordinary capabilities for both knowledge understanding and reasoning. However, the reasoning capabilities of such models on sophisticated problems that require external knowledge of a specific domain have not been assessed well, due to the unavailability of necessary datasets. In this work, we release a first-of-its-kind dataset called IndiFoodVQA with around 16.7k data samples, consisting of explicit knowledge-infused questions, answers, and reasons. We also release IndiFoodKG, a related Knowledge Graph (KG) with 79k triples. The data has been created with minimal human intervention via an automated pipeline based on InstructBlip and GPT-3.5. We also present a methodology to extract knowledge from the KG and use it to both answer and reason upon the questions. We employ different models to report baseline zero-shot and fine-tuned results. Fine-tuned VLMs on our data showed an improvement of ~25% over the corresponding base model, highlighting the fact that current VLMs need domain-specific fine-tuning to excel in specialized settings. Our findings reveal that (1) explicit knowledge infusion during question generation helps in making questions that have more grounded knowledge, and (2) proper knowledge retrieval can often lead to better-answering potential in such cases. The data and code is available at https://github.com/SLSravanthi/IndifoodVQA.