To advance models of multimodal context, we introduce a simple yet powerful neural architecture for data that combines vision and natural language. The "Bounding Boxes in Text Transformer" (B2T2) also leverages referential information binding words to portions of the image in a single unified architecture. B2T2 is highly effective on the Visual Commonsense Reasoning benchmark (https://visualcommonsense.com), achieving a new state-of-the-art with a 25% relative reduction in error rate compared to published baselines and obtaining the best performance to date on the public leaderboard (as of May 22, 2019). A detailed ablation analysis shows that the early integration of the visual features into the text analysis is key to the effectiveness of the new architecture. A reference implementation of our models is provided (https://github.com/google-research/language/tree/master/language/question_answering/b2t2).
Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）；Adobe Research（Adobe 研究院）；Paige；Cornell Tech（康奈尔科技校区）
Chart question answering (CQA) is a newly proposed visual question answering (VQA) task where an algorithm must answer questions about data visualizations, e.g. bar charts, pie charts, and line graphs. CQA requires capabilities that natural-image VQA algorithms lack: fine-grained measurements, optical character recognition, and handling out-of-vocabulary words in both questions and answers. Without modifications, state-of-the-art VQA algorithms perform poorly on this task. Here, we propose a novel CQA algorithm called parallel recurrent fusion of image and language (PReFIL). PReFIL first learn…
School of Engineering, University of Guelph（圭尔夫大学工程学院）；Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence（向量人工智能研究所）；Canadian Institute for Advanced Research（加拿大高级研究学院(注：原机构名常译为加拿大高级研究所，此处按原文准确翻译)）
We propose a generalized class of multimodal fusion operators for the task of visual question answering (VQA). We identify generalizations of existing multimodal fusion operators based on the Hadamard product, and show that specific non-trivial instantiations of this generalized fusion operator exhibit superior performance in terms of OpenEnded accuracy on the VQA task. In particular, we introduce Nonlinearity Ensembling, Feature Gating, and post-fusion neural network layers as fusion operator components, culminating in an absolute percentage point improvement of $1.1\%$ on the VQA 2.0 test-de…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Existing Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have explored various visual relationships between objects in the image to answer complex questions, which inevitably introduces irrelevant information brought by inaccurate object detection and text grounding. To address the problem, we propose a Question-Driven Graph Fusion Network (QD-GFN). It first models semantic, spatial, and implicit visual relations in images by three graph attention networks, then question information is utilized to guide the aggregation process of the three graphs, further, our QD-GFN adopts an object filtering mechanis…
Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ Paris 06, CNRS, LIP6 UMR 7606（索邦大学，巴黎第六大学，法国国家科学研究中心，LIP6）；Heuritech；Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers（法国国立工艺学院）
Bilinear models provide an appealing framework for mixing and merging information in Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks. They help to learn high level associations between question meaning and visual concepts in the image, but they suffer from huge dimensionality issues. We introduce MUTAN, a multimodal tensor-based Tucker decomposition to efficiently parametrize bilinear interactions between visual and textual representations. Additionally to the Tucker framework, we design a low-rank matrix-based decomposition to explicitly constrain the interaction rank. With MUTAN, we control the comple…
We present MMFT-BERT(MultiModal Fusion Transformer with BERT encodings), to solve Visual Question Answering (VQA) ensuring individual and combined processing of multiple input modalities. Our approach benefits from processing multimodal data (video and text) adopting the BERT encodings individually and using a novel transformer-based fusion method to fuse them together. Our method decomposes the different sources of modalities, into different BERT instances with similar architectures, but variable weights. This achieves SOTA results on the TVQA dataset. Additionally, we provide TVQA-Visual, an…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；NLPR, CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Learning effective fusion of multi-modality features is at the heart of visual question answering. We propose a novel method of dynamically fusing multi-modal features with intra- and inter-modality information flow, which alternatively pass dynamic information between and across the visual and language modalities. It can robustly capture the high-level interactions between language and vision domains, thus significantly improves the performance of visual question answering. We also show that the proposed dynamic intra-modality attention flow conditioned on the other modality can dynamically m…
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Heuritech（赫瑞泰克公司）；Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers（法国国立工艺学院）
Multimodal representation learning is gaining more and more interest within the deep learning community. While bilinear models provide an interesting framework to find subtle combination of modalities, their number of parameters grows quadratically with the input dimensions, making their practical implementation within classical deep learning pipelines challenging. In this paper, we introduce BLOCK, a new multimodal fusion based on the block-superdiagonal tensor decomposition. It leverages the notion of block-term ranks, which generalizes both concepts of rank and mode ranks for tensors, alrea…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Data61 - CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61部）；Inception Institute of AI（人工智能初創研究所）
Existing attention mechanisms either attend to local image grid or object level features for Visual Question Answering (VQA). Motivated by the observation that questions can relate to both object instances and their parts, we propose a novel attention mechanism that jointly considers reciprocal relationships between the two levels of visual details. The bottom-up attention thus generated is further coalesced with the top-down information to only focus on the scene elements that are most relevant to a given question. Our design hierarchically fuses multi-modal information i.e., language, object…
University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；Key Laboratory of Knowledge Automation for Industrial Processes, Ministry of Education（教育部工业过程知识自动化重点实验室）；Shunde Innovation School, University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学顺德创新学院）
There is a key problem in the medical visual question answering task that how to effectively realize the feature fusion of language and medical images with limited datasets. In order to better utilize multi-scale information of medical images, previous methods directly embed the multi-stage visual feature maps as tokens of same size respectively and fuse them with text representation. However, this will cause the confusion of visual features at different stages. To this end, we propose a simple but powerful multi-stage feature fusion method, MF2-MVQA, which stage-wise fuses multi-level visual …
DDVT: Dynamic Dual-level Vision Transformer Fusion Network for Answer Grounding in Visual Question Answering
National and Local Joint Engineering Laboratory of Computer Aided Design, School of Software Engineering, Dalian University（大连大学软件工程学院计算机辅助设计国家地方联合工程实验室）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学计算机科学与技术学院）
Tohoku University（东北大学）；RIKEN Center for AIP（理化学研究所人工智能研究中心）
A key solution to visual question answering (VQA) exists in how to fuse visual and language features extracted from an input image and question. We show that an attention mechanism that enables dense, bi-directional interactions between the two modalities contributes to boost accuracy of prediction of answers. Specifically, we present a simple architecture that is fully symmetric between visual and language representations, in which each question word attends on image regions and each image region attends on question words. It can be stacked to form a hierarchy for multi-step interactions betw…
Currently nearing human-level performance, Visual Question Answering (VQA) is an emerging area in artificial intelligence. Established as a multi-disciplinary field in machine learning, both computer vision and natural language processing communities are working together to achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. However, there is a gap between the SOTA results and real world applications. This is due to the lack of model generalisation. The RAMEN model \cite{Shrestha2019} aimed to achieve domain generalization by obtaining the highest score across two main types of VQA datasets. This stu…
We present an effective method for fusing visual-and-language representations for several question answering tasks including visual question answering and visual entailment. In contrast to prior works that concatenate unimodal representations or use only cross-attention, we compose multimodal representations via channel fusion. By fusing on the channels, the model is able to more effectively align the tokens compared to standard methods. These multimodal representations, which we call compound tokens are generated with cross-attention transformer layers. First, vision tokens are used as querie…
Beijing Institution of Technology（北京理工大学）；Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）
Answering semantically-complicated questions according to an image is challenging in Visual Question Answering (VQA) task. Although the image can be well represented by deep learning, the question is always simply embedded and cannot well indicate its meaning. Besides, the visual and textual features have a gap for different modalities, it is difficult to align and utilize the cross-modality information. In this paper, we focus on these two problems and propose a Graph Matching Attention (GMA) network. Firstly, it not only builds graph for the image, but also constructs graph for the question …
Efficient Bilinear Attention-based Fusion for Medical Visual Question Answering
Tandon School of Engineering, New York University（纽约大学工程学院）；School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学电子与电气工程学院）；College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Tongji University（同济大学电子与信息工程学院）
Black-box Model Ensembling for Textual and Visual Question Answering via Information Fusion
Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna（维也纳大学计算机科学学院）；UniVie Doctoral School Computer Science, University of Vienna（维也纳大学UniVie计算机科学博士学院）；Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University（奥胡斯大学计算机科学系）；Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna（维也纳大学语文与文化研究学院）
With the new generation of satellite technologies, the archives of remote sensing (RS) images are growing very fast. To make the intrinsic information of each RS image easily accessible, visual question answering (VQA) has been introduced in RS. VQA allows a user to formulate a free-form question concerning the content of RS images to extract generic information. It has been shown that the fusion of the input modalities (i.e., image and text) is crucial for the performance of VQA systems. Most of the current fusion approaches use modality-specific representations in their fusion modules instea…
Hierarchical Modeling for Medical Visual Question Answering with Cross-Attention Fusion
School of Artificial Intelligence, Tiangong University（天津工业大学人工智能学院）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Linying Medical Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.（临影医疗科技（深圳）有限公司）
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul（南里奥格兰德天主教大学）
Recent research advances in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing have introduced novel tasks that are paving the way for solving AI-complete problems. One of those tasks is called Visual Question Answering (VQA). A VQA system must take an image and a free-form, open-ended natural language question about the image, and produce a natural language answer as the output. Such a task has drawn great attention from the scientific community, which generated a plethora of approaches that aim to improve the VQA predictive accuracy. Most of them comprise three major components: (i) independent…
Environmental Computational Science and Earth Observation Laboratory (ECEO), EPFL（环境计算科学与地球观测实验室（ECEO），洛桑联邦理工学院（EPFL））；Laboratoire d’Informatique Paris Descartes (LIPADE), Université de Paris（巴黎笛卡尔大学信息实验室（LIPADE），巴黎大学）
Visual question answering (VQA) has recently been introduced to remote sensing to make information extraction from overhead imagery more accessible to everyone. VQA considers a question (in natural language, therefore easy to formulate) about an image and aims at providing an answer through a model based on computer vision and natural language processing methods. As such, a VQA model needs to jointly consider visual and textual features, which is frequently done through a fusion step. In this work, we study three different fusion methodologies in the context of VQA for remote sensing and analy…
Paragraph-style image captions describe diverse aspects of an image as opposed to the more common single-sentence captions that only provide an abstract description of the image. These paragraph captions can hence contain substantial information of the image for tasks such as visual question answering. Moreover, this textual information is complementary with visual information present in the image because it can discuss both more abstract concepts and more explicit, intermediate symbolic information about objects, events, and scenes that can directly be matched with the textual question and co…
The Earth's surface is continually changing, and identifying changes plays an important role in urban planning and sustainability. Although change detection techniques have been successfully developed for many years, these techniques are still limited to experts and facilitators in related fields. In order to provide every user with flexible access to change information and help them better understand land-cover changes, we introduce a novel task: change detection-based visual question answering (CDVQA) on multi-temporal aerial images. In particular, multi-temporal images can be queried to obt…
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Vector Institute for AI（向量人工智能研究所）
We consider the problem of Visual Question Answering (VQA). Given an image and a free-form, open-ended, question, expressed in natural language, the goal of VQA system is to provide accurate answer to this question with respect to the image. The task is challenging because it requires simultaneous and intricate understanding of both visual and textual information. Attention, which captures intra- and inter-modal dependencies, has emerged as perhaps the most widely used mechanism for addressing these challenges. In this paper, we propose an improved attention-based architecture to solve VQA. We…
Image text carries essential information to understand the scene and perform reasoning. Text-based visual question answering (text VQA) task focuses on visual questions that require reading text in images. Existing text VQA systems generate an answer by selecting from optical character recognition (OCR) texts or a fixed vocabulary. Positional information of text is underused and there is a lack of evidence for the generated answer. As such, this paper proposes a localization-aware answer prediction network (LaAP-Net) to address this challenge. Our LaAP-Net not only generates the answer to the …
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；CUHK（香港中文大学）；Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)（三菱电机研究实验室（MERL））
Multi-modality fusion technologies have greatly improved the performance of neural network-based Video Description/Caption, Visual Question Answering (VQA) and Audio Visual Scene-aware Dialog (AVSD) over the recent years. Most previous approaches only explore the last layers of multiple layer feature fusion while omitting the importance of intermediate layers. To solve the issue for the intermediate layers, we propose an efficient Quaternion Block Network (QBN) to learn interaction not only for the last layer but also for all intermediate layers simultaneously. In our proposed QBN, we use the …
Visual Question Answering (VQA) is of tremendous interest to the research community with important applications such as aiding visually impaired users and image-based search. In this work, we explore the use of scene graphs for solving the VQA task. We conduct experiments on the GQA dataset which presents a challenging set of questions requiring counting, compositionality and advanced reasoning capability, and provides scene graphs for a large number of images. We adopt image + question architectures for use with scene graphs, evaluate various scene graph generation techniques for unseen image…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
We propose a cross-modal attention distillation framework to train a dual-encoder model for vision-language understanding tasks, such as visual reasoning and visual question answering. Dual-encoder models have a faster inference speed than fusion-encoder models and enable the pre-computation of images and text during inference. However, the shallow interaction module used in dual-encoder models is insufficient to handle complex vision-language understanding tasks. In order to learn deep interactions of images and text, we introduce cross-modal attention distillation, which uses the image-to-te…
We present a new pre-training method, Multimodal Inverse Cloze Task, for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering about named Entities (KVQAE). KVQAE is a recently introduced task that consists in answering questions about named entities grounded in a visual context using a Knowledge Base. Therefore, the interaction between the modalities is paramount to retrieve information and must be captured with complex fusion models. As these models require a lot of training data, we design this pre-training task from existing work in textual Question Answering. It consists in considering a sentence as …
Australian National University (ANU)（澳大利亚国立大学）；Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)（联邦科学与工业研究组织）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI)（人工智能初始研究院）
Visual Question Answering (VQA) has emerged as a Visual Turing Test to validate the reasoning ability of AI agents. The pivot to existing VQA models is the joint embedding that is learned by combining the visual features from an image and the semantic features from a given question. Consequently, a large body of literature has focused on developing complex joint embedding strategies coupled with visual attention mechanisms to effectively capture the interplay between these two modalities. However, modelling the visual and semantic features in a high dimensional (joint embedding) space is compu…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Data61, CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织Data61）；Inception Institute of AI（Inception人工智能研究院）
Visual Question Answering (VQA) models employ attention mechanisms to discover image locations that are most relevant for answering a specific question. For this purpose, several multimodal fusion strategies have been proposed, ranging from relatively simple operations (e.g., linear sum) to more complex ones (e.g., Block). The resulting multimodal representations define an intermediate feature space for capturing the interplay between visual and semantic features, that is helpful in selectively focusing on image content. In this paper, we propose a question-agnostic attention mechanism that is…
Visual question answering and visual dialogue tasks have been increasingly studied in the multimodal field towards more practical real-world scenarios. A more challenging task, audio visual scene-aware dialogue (AVSD), is proposed to further advance the technologies that connect audio, vision, and language, which introduces temporal video information and dialogue interactions between a questioner and an answerer. This paper proposes an intuitive mechanism that fuses features and attention in multiple stages in order to well integrate multimodal features, and the results demonstrate its capabil…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；SRI International（SRI国际研究所）
The success of deep learning has enabled advances in multimodal tasks that require non-trivial fusion of multiple input domains. Although multimodal models have shown potential in many problems, their increased complexity makes them more vulnerable to attacks. A Backdoor (or Trojan) attack is a class of security vulnerability wherein an attacker embeds a malicious secret behavior into a network (e.g. targeted misclassification) that is activated when an attacker-specified trigger is added to an input. In this work, we show that multimodal networks are vulnerable to a novel type of attack that …
The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）
Visual question answering (Visual QA) has attracted significant attention these years. While a variety of algorithms have been proposed, most of them are built upon different combinations of image and language features as well as multi-modal attention and fusion. In this paper, we investigate an alternative approach inspired by conventional QA systems that operate on knowledge graphs. Specifically, we investigate the use of scene graphs derived from images for Visual QA: an image is abstractly represented by a graph with nodes corresponding to object entities and edges to object relationships.…
Questions that require counting a variety of objects in images remain a major challenge in visual question answering (VQA). The most common approaches to VQA involve either classifying answers based on fixed length representations of both the image and question or summing fractional counts estimated from each section of the image. In contrast, we treat counting as a sequential decision process and force our model to make discrete choices of what to count. Specifically, the model sequentially selects from detected objects and learns interactions between objects that influence subsequent selecti…
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Amazon（亚马逊）
Outside-knowledge visual question answering (OK-VQA) requires the agent to comprehend the image, make use of relevant knowledge from the entire web, and digest all the information to answer the question. Most previous works address the problem by first fusing the image and question in the multi-modal space, which is inflexible for further fusion with a vast amount of external knowledge. In this paper, we call for a paradigm shift for the OK-VQA task, which transforms the image into plain text, so that we can enable knowledge passage retrieval, and generative question-answering in the natural l…
Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Visual question answering (VQA) is challenging because it requires a simultaneous understanding of both visual content of images and textual content of questions. To support the VQA task, we need to find good solutions for the following three issues: 1) fine-grained feature representations for both the image and the question; 2) multi-modal feature fusion that is able to capture the complex interactions between multi-modal features; 3) automatic answer prediction that is able to consider the complex correlations between multiple diverse answers for the same question. For fine-grained image and…
Visual Question Answering (VQA) is the task of taking as input an image and a free-form natural language question about the image, and producing an accurate answer. In this work we view VQA as a "feature extraction" module to extract image and caption representations. We employ these representations for the task of image-caption ranking. Each feature dimension captures (imagines) whether a fact (question-answer pair) could plausibly be true for the image and caption. This allows the model to interpret images and captions from a wide variety of perspectives. We propose score-level and represent…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国高等科学技术院（KAIST））；Samsung Research（三星研究院）
This paper proposes the progressive attention memory network (PAMN) for movie story question answering (QA). Movie story QA is challenging compared to VQA in two aspects: (1) pinpointing the temporal parts relevant to answer the question is difficult as the movies are typically longer than an hour, (2) it has both video and subtitle where different questions require different modality to infer the answer. To overcome these challenges, PAMN involves three main features: (1) progressive attention mechanism that utilizes cues from both question and answer to progressively prune out irrelevant tem…
University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）；Artificial Intelligence Research Institute（人工智能研究院）
Supporting the current trend in the AI community, we present the AI Journey 2021 Challenge called Fusion Brain, the first competition which is targeted to make the universal architecture which could process different modalities (in this case, images, texts, and code) and solve multiple tasks for vision and language. The Fusion Brain Challenge combines the following specific tasks: Code2code Translation, Handwritten Text recognition, Zero-shot Object Detection, and Visual Question Answering. We have created datasets for each task to test the participants' submissions on it. Moreover, we have co…
Visual question answering (VQA) has witnessed great progress since May, 2015 as a classic problem unifying visual and textual data into a system. Many enlightening VQA works explore deep into the image and question encodings and fusing methods, of which attention is the most effective and infusive mechanism. Current attention based methods focus on adequate fusion of visual and textual features, but lack the attention to where people focus to ask questions about the image. Traditional attention based methods attach a single value to the feature at each spatial location, which losses many usefu…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；The University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Visual question answering (VQA) often requires an understanding of visual concepts and language semantics, which relies on external knowledge. Most existing methods exploit pre-trained language models or/and unstructured text, but the knowledge in these resources are often incomplete and noisy. Some other methods prefer to use knowledge graphs (KGs) which often have intensive structured knowledge, but the research is still quite preliminary. In this paper, we propose LaKo, a knowledge-driven VQA method via Late Knowledge-to-text Injection. To effectively incorporate an external KG, we transfer…
