Multi-task prompt-RSVQA to explicitly count objects on aerial images

Introduced to enable a wider use of Earth Observation images using natural language, Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering (RSVQA) remains a challenging task, in particular for questions related to counting. To address this specific challenge, we propose a modular Multi-task prompt-RSVQA model based on object detection and question answering modules. By creating a semantic bottleneck describing the image and providing a visual answer, our model allows users to assess the visual grounding of the answer and better interpret the prediction. A set of ablation studies are designed to consider the contributions of different modules and evaluation metrics are discussed for a finer-grained assessment. Experiments demonstrate competitive results against literature baselines and a zero-shot VQA model. In particular, our proposed model predicts answers for numerical Counting questions that are consistently closer in distance to the ground truth.