Visual Question Answering (VQA) methods have made incredible progress, but suffer from a failure to generalize. This is visible in the fact that they are vulnerable to learning coincidental correlations in the data rather than deeper relations between image content and ideas expressed in language. We present a dataset that takes a step towards addressing this problem in that it contains questions expressed in two languages, and an evaluation process that co-opts a well understood image-based metric to reflect the method's ability to reason. Measuring reasoning directly encourages generalization by penalizing answers that are coincidentally correct. The dataset reflects the scene-text version of the VQA problem, and the reasoning evaluation can be seen as a text-based version of a referring expression challenge. Experiments and analysis are provided that show the value of the dataset.
We propose a new 3D spatial understanding task of 3D Question Answering (3D-QA). In the 3D-QA task, models receive visual information from the entire 3D scene of the rich RGB-D indoor scan and answer the given textual questions about the 3D scene. Unlike the 2D-question answering of VQA, the conventional 2D-QA models suffer from problems with spatial understanding of object alignment and directions and fail the object identification from the textual questions in 3D-QA. We propose a baseline model for 3D-QA, named ScanQA model, where the model learns a fused descriptor from 3D object proposals …
Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）；Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）
This paper presents a new model for the task of scene text visual question answering, in which questions about a given image can only be answered by reading and understanding scene text that is present in it. The proposed model is based on an attention mechanism that attends to multi-modal features conditioned to the question, allowing it to reason jointly about the textual and visual modalities in the scene. The output weights of this attention module over the grid of multi-modal spatial features are interpreted as the probability that a certain spatial location of the image contains the answ…
Siemens AG（西门子股份公司）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich（慕尼黑大学）
Visual Question Answering (VQA) is concerned with answering free-form questions about an image. Since it requires a deep semantic and linguistic understanding of the question and the ability to associate it with various objects that are present in the image, it is an ambitious task and requires multi-modal reasoning from both computer vision and natural language processing. We propose Graphhopper, a novel method that approaches the task by integrating knowledge graph reasoning, computer vision, and natural language processing techniques. Concretely, our method is based on performing context-dr…
Computer Vision Center, UAB（巴塞罗那自治大学计算机视觉中心）；IIIT Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）
Current visual question answering datasets do not consider the rich semantic information conveyed by text within an image. In this work, we present a new dataset, ST-VQA, that aims to highlight the importance of exploiting high-level semantic information present in images as textual cues in the VQA process. We use this dataset to define a series of tasks of increasing difficulty for which reading the scene text in the context provided by the visual information is necessary to reason and generate an appropriate answer. We propose a new evaluation metric for these tasks to account both for reaso…
Computer Vision Center, UAB（巴塞罗那自治大学计算机视觉中心）；CVIT, IIIT Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术研究所计算机视觉与智能技术中心）
This paper presents final results of ICDAR 2019 Scene Text Visual Question Answering competition (ST-VQA). ST-VQA introduces an important aspect that is not addressed by any Visual Question Answering system up to date, namely the incorporation of scene text to answer questions asked about an image. The competition introduces a new dataset comprising 23,038 images annotated with 31,791 question/answer pairs where the answer is always grounded on text instances present in the image. The images are taken from 7 different public computer vision datasets, covering a wide range of scenarios. The com…
Comprehensive Visual Question Answering on Point Clouds through Compositional Scene Manipulation
The Future Network of Intelligence Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳）未来智能网络研究院）；School of Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳）理工学院）
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）；Nvidia（英伟达）
We introduce Interactive Question Answering (IQA), the task of answering questions that require an autonomous agent to interact with a dynamic visual environment. IQA presents the agent with a scene and a question, like: "Are there any apples in the fridge?" The agent must navigate around the scene, acquire visual understanding of scene elements, interact with objects (e.g. open refrigerators) and plan for a series of actions conditioned on the question. Popular reinforcement learning approaches with a single controller perform poorly on IQA owing to the large and diverse state space. We propo…
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…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Amazon Web Services (AWS)（亚马逊云科技）
We introduce the task of Image-Set Visual Question Answering (ISVQA), which generalizes the commonly studied single-image VQA problem to multi-image settings. Taking a natural language question and a set of images as input, it aims to answer the question based on the content of the images. The questions can be about objects and relationships in one or more images or about the entire scene depicted by the image set. To enable research in this new topic, we introduce two ISVQA datasets - indoor and outdoor scenes. They simulate the real-world scenarios of indoor image collections and multiple ca…
Korea University（高丽大学）；Kyungpook National University（庆北国立大学）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Visual question answering requires a deep understanding of both images and natural language. However, most methods mainly focus on visual concept; such as the relationships between various objects. The limited use of object categories combined with their relationships or simple question embedding is insufficient for representing complex scenes and explaining decisions. To address this limitation, we propose the use of text expressions generated for images, because such expressions have few structural constraints and can provide richer descriptions of images. The generated expressions can be in…
With the expressed goal of improving system transparency and visual grounding in the reasoning process in VQA, we present a modular system for the task of compositional VQA based on scene graphs. Our system is called "Adventurer's Treasure Hunt" (or ATH), named after an analogy we draw between our model's search procedure for an answer and an adventurer's search for treasure. We developed ATH with three characteristic features in mind: 1. By design, ATH allows us to explicitly quantify the impact of each of the sub-components on overall VQA performance, as well as their performance on their in…
Siemens AG（西门子股份公司）；Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich（慕尼黑大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Visual question answering is concerned with answering free-form questions about an image. Since it requires a deep linguistic understanding of the question and the ability to associate it with various objects that are present in the image, it is an ambitious task and requires techniques from both computer vision and natural language processing. We propose a novel method that approaches the task by performing context-driven, sequential reasoning based on the objects and their semantic and spatial relationships present in the scene. As a first step, we derive a scene graph which describes the ob…
We introduce a novel privacy-preserving methodology for performing Visual Question Answering on the edge. Our method constructs a symbolic representation of the visual scene, using a low-complexity computer vision model that jointly predicts classes, attributes and predicates. This symbolic representation is non-differentiable, which means it cannot be used to recover the original image, thereby keeping the original image private. Our proposed hybrid solution uses a vision model which is more than 25 times smaller than the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) vision models, and 100 times smaller th…
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.…
University of Florence（佛罗伦萨大学）；Computer Vision Center, UAB（巴塞罗那自治大学计算机视觉中心）
In this paper, we present a framework for Multilingual Scene Text Visual Question Answering that deals with new languages in a zero-shot fashion. Specifically, we consider the task of Scene Text Visual Question Answering (STVQA) in which the question can be asked in different languages and it is not necessarily aligned to the scene text language. Thus, we first introduce a natural step towards a more generalized version of STVQA: MUST-VQA. Accounting for this, we discuss two evaluation scenarios in the constrained setting, namely IID and zero-shot and we demonstrate that the models can perform…
ViConsFormer: Constituting Meaningful Phrases of Scene Texts using Transformer-based Method in Vietnamese Text-based Visual Question Answering
Ho Chi Minh city University of Technology（胡志明市理工大学）；Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh city（越南国家大学胡志明市分校）；University of Information Technology（信息技术大学）
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；West China Hospital of Sichuan University（四川大学华西医院）；Sichuan Academy of Medical Sciences（四川省医学科学院）；Sichuan Provincial People's Hospital（四川省人民医院）
Medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) has tremendous potential in healthcare. However, the development of this technology is hindered by the lacking of publicly-available and high-quality labeled datasets for training and evaluation. In this paper, we present a large bilingual dataset, SLAKE, with comprehensive semantic labels annotated by experienced physicians and a new structural medical knowledge base for Med-VQA. Besides, SLAKE includes richer modalities and covers more human body parts than the currently available dataset. We show that SLAKE can be used to facilitate the developmen…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）
One of the key issues of Visual Question Answering (VQA) is to reason with semantic clues in the visual content under the guidance of the question, how to model relational semantics still remains as a great challenge. To fully capture visual semantics, we propose to reason over a structured visual representation - scene graph, with embedded objects and inter-object relationships. This shows great benefit over vanilla vector representations and implicit visual relationship learning. Based on existing visual relationship models, we propose a visual relationship encoder that projects visual relat…
Hierarchical Question-Answering for Driving Scene Understanding Using Vision-Language Models
Center for ICT and Automotive Convergence, Kyungpook National University（信息与汽车融合研究中心，庆北国立大学）；School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Kyungpook National University（电子电气工程学院，庆北国立大学）
Visual question answering (VQA) task not only bridges the gap between images and language, but also requires that specific contents within the image are understood as indicated by linguistic context of the question, in order to generate the accurate answers. Thus, it is critical to build an efficient embedding of images and texts. We implement DualNet, which fully takes advantage of discriminative power of both image and textual features by separately performing two operations. Building an ensemble of DualNet further boosts the performance. Contrary to common belief, our method proved effectiv…
DisasterVQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Dataset for Disaster Scenes
Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·卡伊夫大学）；College of Science & Engineering（科学与工程学院）；Qatar University（卡塔尔大学）
Images are more than a collection of objects or attributes -- they represent a web of relationships among interconnected objects. Scene Graph has emerged as a new modality for a structured graphical representation of images. Scene Graph encodes objects as nodes connected via pairwise relations as edges. To support question answering on scene graphs, we propose GraphVQA, a language-guided graph neural network framework that translates and executes a natural language question as multiple iterations of message passing among graph nodes. We explore the design space of GraphVQA framework, and discu…
Modeling visual question answering(VQA) through scene graphs can significantly improve the reasoning accuracy and interpretability. However, existing models answer poorly for complex reasoning questions with attributes or relations, which causes false attribute selection or missing relation in Figure 1(a). It is because these models cannot balance all kinds of information in scene graphs, neglecting relation and attribute information. In this paper, we introduce a novel Dual Message-passing enhanced Graph Neural Network (DM-GNN), which can obtain a balanced representation by properly encoding …
Object Tokens as a Bridge Between Segmentation and Visual Question Answering in Robotic Surgery
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学生物医学工程系）；Department of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学电气工程系）；Department of Surgery, University Medical Center Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心外科）
The correct interpretation of quantifier statements in the context of a visual scene requires non-trivial inference mechanisms. For the example of "most", we discuss two strategies which rely on fundamentally different cognitive concepts. Our aim is to identify what strategy deep learning models for visual question answering learn when trained on such questions. To this end, we carefully design data to replicate experiments from psycholinguistics where the same question was investigated for humans. Focusing on the FiLM visual question answering model, our experiments indicate that a form of ap…
University of Maryland, Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩县分校）
Visual Question Answering system integrated with Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has a lot of potentials to advance the post-disaster damage assessment purpose. Providing assistance to affected areas is highly dependent on real-time data assessment and analysis. Scope of the Visual Question Answering is to understand the scene and provide query related answer which certainly faster the recovery process after any disaster. In this work, we address the importance of \textit{visual question answering (VQA)} task for post-disaster damage assessment by presenting our recently developed VQA dataset ca…
Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models for Ophthalmic Visual Question Answering with OphthalWeChat
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）；PolyU-Wuhan Technology and Innovation Research Institute（香港理工大学武汉技术创新研究院）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Centre for Eye and Vision Research (CEVR)（眼科视觉研究中心）
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Answering questions that require reading texts in an image is challenging for current models. One key difficulty of this task is that rare, polysemous, and ambiguous words frequently appear in images, e.g., names of places, products, and sports teams. To overcome this difficulty, only resorting to pre-trained word embedding models is far from enough. A desired model should utilize the rich information in multiple modalities of the image to help understand the meaning of scene texts, e.g., the prominent text on a bottle is most likely to be the brand. Following this idea, we propose a novel VQA…
We present a neuro-symbolic visual question answering (VQA) pipeline for CLEVR, which is a well-known dataset that consists of pictures showing scenes with objects and questions related to them. Our pipeline covers (i) training neural networks for object classification and bounding-box prediction of the CLEVR scenes, (ii) statistical analysis on the distribution of prediction values of the neural networks to determine a threshold for high-confidence predictions, and (iii) a translation of CLEVR questions and network predictions that pass confidence thresholds into logic programs so that we can…
Australian Centre for Visual Technologies（澳大利亚视觉技术中心）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
This paper proposes to improve visual question answering (VQA) with structured representations of both scene contents and questions. A key challenge in VQA is to require joint reasoning over the visual and text domains. The predominant CNN/LSTM-based approach to VQA is limited by monolithic vector representations that largely ignore structure in the scene and in the form of the question. CNN feature vectors cannot effectively capture situations as simple as multiple object instances, and LSTMs process questions as series of words, which does not reflect the true complexity of language structur…
KG-ViP: Bridging Knowledge Grounding and Visual Perception in Multi-modal LLMs for Visual Question Answering
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Data Darkness Lab, MIRACLE Center, USTC（数据黑暗实验室，MIRACLE中心，中国科学技术大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学计算机科学与技术学院）
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli（蒂鲁吉拉伯利国家理工学院）；Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shun Hing Institute of Advanced Engineering（信兴高等工程研究所）
Visual question answering (VQA) in surgery is largely unexplored. Expert surgeons are scarce and are often overloaded with clinical and academic workloads. This overload often limits their time answering questionnaires from patients, medical students or junior residents related to surgical procedures. At times, students and junior residents also refrain from asking too many questions during classes to reduce disruption. While computer-aided simulators and recording of past surgical procedures have been made available for them to observe and improve their skills, they still hugely rely on medic…
Visual Query Answering (VQA) is of great significance in offering people convenience: one can raise a question for details of objects, or high-level understanding about the scene, over an image. This paper proposes a novel method to address the VQA problem. In contrast to prior works, our method that targets single scene VQA, replies on graph-based techniques and involves reasoning. In a nutshell, our approach is centered on three graphs. The first graph, referred to as inference graph GI , is constructed via learning over labeled data. The other two graphs, referred to as query graph Q and en…
Different types of mental rotation tests have been used extensively in psychology to understand human visual reasoning and perception. Understanding what an object or visual scene would look like from another viewpoint is a challenging problem that is made even harder if it must be performed from a single image. We explore a controlled setting whereby questions are posed about the properties of a scene if that scene was observed from another viewpoint. To do this we have created a new version of the CLEVR dataset that we call CLEVR Mental Rotation Tests (CLEVR-MRT). Using CLEVR-MRT we examine …
As an important task in multimodal context understanding, Text-VQA (Visual Question Answering) aims at question answering through reading text information in images. It differentiates from the original VQA task as Text-VQA requires large amounts of scene-text relationship understanding, in addition to the cross-modal grounding capability. In this paper, we propose Localize, Group, and Select (LOGOS), a novel model which attempts to tackle this problem from multiple aspects. LOGOS leverages two grounding tasks to better localize the key information of the image, utilizes scene text clustering t…
SKLCCSE, School of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University, Beijing, China（北京航空航天大学人工智能学院）；Hangzhou International Innovation Institute, Beihang University, Hangzhou, China（北京航空航天大学杭州国际创新研究院）
