OK-VQA
Models answer over 14,000 visual questions that need outside knowledge beyond the image. Scoring is VQA accuracy against human answers.
- Made by
- Allen Institute for AI and Carnegie Mellon University
- Released
- May 2019
- Kind
- General visual questions
- Level
- Everyday
- Scored
- Checked automatically
- Answers
- Short answer
- Tasks
- All public
- Strongest model tested
-
Gemma 3 27B #164 on the capability index
- Last in a launch post
- March 2025, dropped before it saturated
- Last model added
- March 2025
In the authors’ words
Visual Question Answering (VQA) in its ideal form lets us study reasoning in the joint space of vision and language and serves as a proxy for the AI task of scene understanding. However, most VQA benchmarks to date are focused on questions such as simple counting, visual attributes, and object detection that do not require reasoning or knowledge beyond what is in the image. In this paper, we address the task of knowledge-based visual question answering and provide a benchmark, called OK-VQA, where the image content is not sufficient to answer the questions, encouraging methods that rely on external knowledge resources. Our new dataset includes more than 14,000 questions that require external knowledge to answer. We show that the performance of the state-of-the-art VQA models degrades drastically in this new setting. Our analysis shows that our knowledge-based VQA task is diverse, difficult, and large compared to previous knowledge-based VQA datasets. We hope that this dataset enables researchers to open up new avenues for research in this domain. See http://okvqa.allenai.org to download and browse the dataset.
Gemma 3 27B leads with 60.2% among models released by March 2025
Best score per model as labs report them in their own cards. Labs pick their own settings, so these compare less cleanly than independent runs.
The newest model with a score here came out in March 2025, and nobody has reported a newer one. Among the 20 highest-ranked models on the capability index, these have no score yet:
- Claude Fable 5.2
-
Gemini 4 Carbon
- GPT-6 Astra
- Claude Opus 5.5
- and 16 more
- 1
Gemma 3 27B 60.2%
- 2
Gemma 3 12B 58.7%
- 3
Gemma 3 4B 51%
Source: Labs’ model cards
| # | Model | Score | Setting | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | | 60.2% | Mar 2025 | Lab model card | |
| 2 | | 58.7% | Mar 2025 | Lab model card | |
| 3 | | 51% | Mar 2025 | Lab model card |
Number one over time
Lab claims count from the day the card came out, independent runs from the model’s release.
Source: Labs’ model cards
Scores over time
All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.
Source: Labs’ model cards
No launch post has listed it since March 2025
Launch posts from every lab that has listed it, one tick per post. Tall colored ticks include it, and short gray ones leave it out.
| Date | Launch post | Score | As the post writes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 12, 2025 | 60.2 | OKVQA (PT) |
3 system cards report it, from 1 lab
Besides launch posts, we read the system cards, model cards and technical reports labs publish with a release. They report far more, including safety and frontier-risk tests.
| Date | Document | Score | As the document writes it | Section |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 25, 2025 | | 51 | OK-VQA, PT, 4-shot (Table 11) | Capabilities |
| Mar 25, 2025 | | 60.2 | OK-VQA, PT, 4-shot (Table 11) | Capabilities |
| Mar 25, 2025 | | 58.7 | OK-VQA, PT, 4-shot (Table 11) | Capabilities |
More in Vision
- MMMU In use 11.5K college-level multimodal questions across 30 subjects. Multiple-choice and open accuracy. GPT-5.1 85.4%
- MMMU-Pro In use Harder MMMU: college-level multimodal questions with more options and vision-only inputs to remove text shortcuts. GPT-5.6 Sol 84.6%
- CharXiv In use Chart understanding on real arXiv figures. Reasoning questions require synthesizing information from complex charts. Claude Fable 5 93.5%
- MATH-Vision (MathVision) In use 3,040 competition math problems with visual context. Answer accuracy.
Qwen 3.8 Max 97.7%
- MMStar In use Models answer 1,500 human-curated image questions that cannot be solved without the image, across 6 core capabilities. Scored by accuracy.
Qwen 3.8 Max 85.9%
- ChartQA In use Models answer human-written and generated questions about chart images that need visual and arithmetic reasoning. Scored by relaxed accuracy with a 5 percent numeric tolerance.
Command A Vision 90.9%