Learning to Ask: Multi-Decoder Fine-Tuning for Multi-Hop Visual Question Generation with External Knowledge

Publications

Learning to Ask: Multi-Decoder Fine-Tuning for Multi-Hop Visual Question Generation with External Knowledge

Author : Dr Arpan Phukan

Year : 2026

Publisher : Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

Source Title : 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Findings of EACL 2026

Document Type :

Abstract

Multi-hop visual question generation (VQG) seeks to create coherent, fluent, and contextually rich questions by integrating knowledge from a structured knowledge graph (KG) with information inferred from image pairs, where at least one reasoning step involves a visual relationship between the images. Traditional supervised QG methods which rely on token-level alignment with fixed gold labels struggle to capture diverse valid question formulations. We propose M3RQG (Multimodal Multi-hop Multi-decoder Retrieval-augmented Question Generation), a model-agnostic framework that integrates multimodal inputs (images, KG facts) with a multi-decoder architecture to optimize for multiple labels per sample to design multi-hop questions. M3RQG addresses these challenges: (1) generating meaningful visually-grounded questions given a pair of images, (2) generating rich questions that require multi-hop reasoning across images and KG facts, and (3) integrating diverse question labels during fine-tuning. We extend the WebQA dataset with multi-hop questions generated by GPT-4V and Gemini, resulting in two complementary silver labels per sample. Our approach integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for accessing external knowledge, a PPO objective with ROUGE-based rewards to prioritize structural correctness, and a named entity overlap loss to improve factual accuracy. Experiments across BART, Phi-3.5, and LLaVA backbones demonstrate significant improvements in fluency, reasoning depth, and relevance. We release our code and dataset to facilitate future research.