DAM-QA: Describe Anything Model for Visual Question Answering on Text-rich Images

This repository contains the official implementation of DAM-QA, a framework that enhances Visual Question Answering (VQA) performance on text-rich images. Our approach extends the Describe Anything Model (DAM) by integrating a sliding-window mechanism with a weighted voting scheme to aggregate predictions from both global and local views.

This method enables more effective grounding and reasoning over fine-grained textual information, leading to significant performance gains on challenging VQA benchmarks.

Quick Start

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/Linvyl/DAM-QA.git

2. Install the required dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

   Optional: Create a conda environment:

   conda create -n dam-qa python=3.10
   conda activate dam-qa
   pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Data Preparation:

   • All required annotation .jsonl files are already included in the repository under the data/ directory.
   • We also provide these unified annotation files in our 🤗 Hugging Face dataset repository for convenience and reproducibility.
   • You only need to download the image files for each dataset. Follow the instructions in data/dataset_guide.md to download and place the images in the correct subfolders.

   ⚠️ Important Note: The annotation files are standardized conversions of existing public datasets (DocVQA, InfographicVQA, TextVQA, ChartQA, ChartQAPro, VQAv2) into a unified JSONL format following our experimental setup. These annotations preserve the original dataset content without modification. Please cite the original datasets appropriately when using them in your research.

Repository Structure

DAM-QA/
├── src/                   # Core DAM-QA implementation
│   ├── config.py          # Dataset configs, prompts, parameters
│   ├── core.py            # Main inference classes
│   └── utils.py           # Utility functions
├── vlms/                  # VLM baseline implementations
│   ├── run_inference.py   # VLM inference runner
│   ├── config.py          # VLM dataset configurations
│   └── models/            # Individual VLM model implementations
│       ├── internvl.py    # InternVL3 model
│       ├── minicpm.py     # MiniCPM-o2.6 model
│       ├── molmo.py       # MolmoD model
│       ├── ovis.py        # OVIS2 model  
│       ├── phi.py         # Phi-4-Vision model
│       ├── qwenvl.py      # Qwen2.5-VL model
│       └── videollama.py  # VideoLLaMA3 model
├── evaluation/            # Evaluation framework
│   ├── metrics.py         # VQA scoring metrics
│   └── evaluator.py       # Main evaluation runner
├── run_experiment.py      # Main DAM-QA experiment runner
├── requirements.txt       # Python dependencies
├── data/                  # Datasets and annotation files (see below)
└── outputs/               # Results directory
    ├── full_image_default/
    ├── sliding_window_default/
    └── vlm_results/

Datasets

Our implementation has been rigorously evaluated on the following benchmarks:

Dataset	Task	Metric	Config Key
DocVQA	Document Question Answering	ANLS	docvqa_val
InfographicVQA	Infographic Understanding	ANLS	infographicvqa_val
TextVQA	Scene-Text VQA	VQA Score	textvqa_val
ChartQA	Chart Interpretation	Relaxed Accuracy	chartqa_test_human, chartqa_test_augmented
ChartQAPro	Advanced Chart QA	Relaxed Accuracy	chartqapro_test
VQAv2 (restval)	General-Purpose VQA	VQA Score	vqav2_restval

Data Preparation

Dataset Structure

After downloading images as instructed in data/dataset_guide.md, your data/ directory should look like this:

data/
├── docvqa/
│   ├── val.jsonl
│   └── images/
├── infographicvqa/
│   ├── infographicvqa_val.jsonl
│   └── images/
├── textvqa/
│   ├── textvqa_val_updated.jsonl
│   └── images/
├── chartqa/
│   ├── test_human.jsonl
│   ├── test_augmented.jsonl
│   └── images/
├── chartqapro/
│   ├── test.jsonl
│   └── images/
└── vqav2/
    ├── vqav2_restval.jsonl
    └── images/

• For detailed image download instructions, see data/dataset_guide.md.

Running DAM-QA Experiments

Basic Usage

Use run_experiment.py to run DAM-QA experiments:

Full Image Baseline:

python run_experiment.py --method full_image --dataset chartqapro_test --gpu 0

Sliding Window (Our Method):

python run_experiment.py --method sliding_window --dataset chartqapro_test --gpu 0

Run on All Datasets:

python run_experiment.py --method sliding_window --dataset all --gpu 0

Ablation Studies

Granularity Parameter Sweep:

python run_experiment.py --method granularity_sweep --dataset chartqapro_test --gpu 0

Prompt Design Ablation:

python run_experiment.py --method prompt_ablation --dataset chartqapro_test --gpu 0

Unanswerable Vote Weight Sweep:

python run_experiment.py --method unanswerable_weight_sweep --dataset chartqapro_test --gpu 0

Custom Parameters:

python run_experiment.py \
    --method sliding_window \
    --dataset docvqa_val \
    --window_size 768 \
    --stride 384 \
    --unanswerable_weight 0.0 \
    --gpu 0

Available Options

• --method: Choose from full_image, sliding_window, granularity_sweep, prompt_ablation, unanswerable_weight_sweep
• --dataset: Choose from chartqapro_test, chartqa_test_human, docvqa_val, infographicvqa_val, etc., or all
• --window_size: Sliding window size (default: 512)
• --stride: Sliding window stride (default: 256)
• --unanswerable_weight: Weight for unanswerable votes (default: 0.0)
• --use_visibility_rule/--no_visibility_rule: Control visibility constraint
• --use_unanswerable_rule/--no_unanswerable_rule: Control unanswerable instruction

Running VLM Baselines

VLM Inference

Use vlms/run_inference.py to run VLM baseline models:

InternVL:

python vlms/run_inference.py --model internvl --dataset chartqapro_test

Other supported models: minicpm, molmo, ovis, phi, qwenvl, videollama

Note: If you encounter errors when running VLM models, install the required dependencies for each model:

• Follow installation instructions from the official HuggingFace or GitHub repositories of each VLM
• Each model may require specific versions of transformers, torch, or additional packages

Evaluation

Automatic Evaluation

Results are automatically saved to CSV files. Use the evaluation framework to compute metrics:

python evaluation/evaluator.py --folder ./outputs/sliding_window_default --use_llm

Manual Score Calculation

python evaluation/metrics.py --file ./outputs/sliding_window_default/chartqapro_test/results.csv --use_llm

Results

Main Results

DAM-QA consistently outperforms the baseline DAM across multiple text-rich VQA benchmarks:

Method	DocVQA (ANLS)	InfographicVQA (ANLS)	TextVQA (VQA Score)	ChartQA (Relaxed Acc.)	ChartQAPro (Relaxed Acc.)	VQAv2 (VQA Score)
DAM (Baseline)	35.22	19.27	57.86	46.52	18.90	79.25
DAM-QA (Ours)	42.34	20.25	59.67	47.72	14.88	79.20

Key Findings

• Window Granularity: Window size of 512 pixels with 50% overlap (stride=256) provides optimal performance
• Prompt Design: Both visibility constraint and unanswerable instruction are crucial
• Vote Weighting: Setting unanswerable weight to 0.0 significantly improves performance

Configuration

Main Configuration (config.py)

• Model parameters: Adjust DEFAULT_INFERENCE_PARAMS and DEFAULT_IMAGE_PARAMS
• Experiment settings: Modify GRANULARITY_MODES and UNANSWERABLE_WEIGHTS

VLM Configuration

• Dataset configurations: Uses DATASET_CONFIGS from root config.py
• Model-specific settings: Configured in individual model files under vlms/models/

Citation

@misc{vu2025modelvisualquestionanswering,
      title={Describe Anything Model for Visual Question Answering on Text-rich Images}, 
      author={Yen-Linh Vu and Dinh-Thang Duong and Truong-Binh Duong and Anh-Khoi Nguyen and Thanh-Huy Nguyen and Le Thien Phuc Nguyen and Jianhua Xing and Xingjian Li and Tianyang Wang and Ulas Bagci and Min Xu},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2507.12441},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12441}, 
}