Visual Commonsense Causal Reasoning From a Still Image

Even from a still image, humans exhibit the ability to ratiocinate diverse visual cause-and-effect relationships of events preceding, succeeding, and extending beyond the given image scope. Previous work on commonsense causal reasoning (CCR) aimed at understanding general causal dependencies among c...

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Main Authors: Xiaojing Wu, Rui Guo, Qin Li, Ning Zhu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2025-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
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Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10950140/
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author Xiaojing Wu
Rui Guo
Qin Li
Ning Zhu
author_facet Xiaojing Wu
Rui Guo
Qin Li
Ning Zhu
author_sort Xiaojing Wu
collection DOAJ
description Even from a still image, humans exhibit the ability to ratiocinate diverse visual cause-and-effect relationships of events preceding, succeeding, and extending beyond the given image scope. Previous work on commonsense causal reasoning (CCR) aimed at understanding general causal dependencies among common events in natural language descriptions. However, in real-world scenarios, CCR is fundamentally a multisensory task and is more susceptible to spurious correlations, given that commonsense causal relationships manifest in various modalities and involve multiple sources of confounders. In this work, to the best of our knowledge, we present the first comprehensive study focusing on visual commonsense causal reasoning (VCCR) within the potential outcomes framework. By drawing parallels between vision-language data and human subjects in the observational study, we tailor a foundational framework, VCC-Reasoner, for detecting implicit visual commonsense causation. It combines inverse propensity score weighting and outcome regression, offering dual robust estimates of the average treatment effect. Empirical evidence underscores the efficacy and superiority of VCC-Reasoner, showcasing its outstanding VCCR capabilities.
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spelling doaj-art-99064251dfd64449885571d292f44f2f2025-08-20T03:47:28ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362025-01-0113850848509710.1109/ACCESS.2025.355842910950140Visual Commonsense Causal Reasoning From a Still ImageXiaojing Wu0https://orcid.org/0009-0002-4064-9720Rui Guo1Qin Li2Ning Zhu3School of Undergraduate Education, Shenzhen Polytechnic University, Shenzhen, ChinaSchool of Information Engineering, Beijing Polytechnic College, Beijing, ChinaSchool of Information Engineering, Weifang Engineering Vocational College, Qingzhou, Shandong, ChinaShangyu Technology (Beijing) Company Ltd., Beijing, ChinaEven from a still image, humans exhibit the ability to ratiocinate diverse visual cause-and-effect relationships of events preceding, succeeding, and extending beyond the given image scope. Previous work on commonsense causal reasoning (CCR) aimed at understanding general causal dependencies among common events in natural language descriptions. However, in real-world scenarios, CCR is fundamentally a multisensory task and is more susceptible to spurious correlations, given that commonsense causal relationships manifest in various modalities and involve multiple sources of confounders. In this work, to the best of our knowledge, we present the first comprehensive study focusing on visual commonsense causal reasoning (VCCR) within the potential outcomes framework. By drawing parallels between vision-language data and human subjects in the observational study, we tailor a foundational framework, VCC-Reasoner, for detecting implicit visual commonsense causation. It combines inverse propensity score weighting and outcome regression, offering dual robust estimates of the average treatment effect. Empirical evidence underscores the efficacy and superiority of VCC-Reasoner, showcasing its outstanding VCCR capabilities.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10950140/Visual commonsense reasoningcommonsense reasoningvisual event reasoningmultimodal large language model
spellingShingle Xiaojing Wu
Rui Guo
Qin Li
Ning Zhu
Visual Commonsense Causal Reasoning From a Still Image
IEEE Access
Visual commonsense reasoning
commonsense reasoning
visual event reasoning
multimodal large language model
title Visual Commonsense Causal Reasoning From a Still Image
title_full Visual Commonsense Causal Reasoning From a Still Image
title_fullStr Visual Commonsense Causal Reasoning From a Still Image
title_full_unstemmed Visual Commonsense Causal Reasoning From a Still Image
title_short Visual Commonsense Causal Reasoning From a Still Image
title_sort visual commonsense causal reasoning from a still image
topic Visual commonsense reasoning
commonsense reasoning
visual event reasoning
multimodal large language model
url https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10950140/
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AT qinli visualcommonsensecausalreasoningfromastillimage
AT ningzhu visualcommonsensecausalreasoningfromastillimage