University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Damo Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团达摩院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）
Tan Wang, Jianqiang Huang, Hanwang Zhang, Qianru Sun
We present a novel unsupervised feature representation learning method, Visual Commonsense Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (VC R-CNN), to serve as an improved visual region encoder for high-level tasks such as captioning and VQA. Given a set of detected object regions in an image (e.g., using Faster R-CNN), like any other unsupervised feature learning methods (e.g., word2vec), the proxy training objective of VC R-CNN is to predict the contextual objects of a region. However, they are fundamentally different: the prediction of VC R-CNN is by using causal intervention: P(Y|do(X)), while others are by using the conventional likelihood: P(Y|X). This is also the core reason why VC R-CNN can learn "sense-making" knowledge like chair can be sat -- while not just "common" co-occurrences such as chair is likely to exist if table is observed. We extensively apply VC R-CNN features in prevailing models of three popular tasks: Image Captioning, VQA, and VCR, and observe consistent performance boosts across them, achieving many new state-of-the-arts. Code and feature are available at https://github.com/Wangt-CN/VC-R-CNN.
Cognitive Visual Commonsense Reasoning Using Dynamic Working Memory
Leibniz University of Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）；University of Maryland, Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩县分校）；China Europe International Business School（中欧国际工商学院）；Auburn University（奥本大学）；Guangdong Pharmaceutical University（广东药科大学）；University of Southern Queensland（南昆士兰大学）
Visual Commonsense based Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Learning
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hong Kong Institute of Science & Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院香港创新研究院人工智能与机器人创新中心）
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）
There has been a growing interest in solving Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks that require the model to reason beyond the content present in the image. In this work, we focus on questions that require commonsense reasoning. In contrast to previous methods which inject knowledge from static knowledge bases, we investigate the incorporation of contextualized knowledge using Commonsense Transformer (COMET), an existing knowledge model trained on human-curated knowledge bases. We propose a method to generate, select, and encode external commonsense knowledge alongside visual and textual cues …
CDH-Bench: A Commonsense-Driven Hallucination Benchmark for Evaluating Visual Fidelity in Vision-Language Models
Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Novel Security Intelligence Technologies, Institute of Cyberspace Security, School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（广东省新型安全智能技术重点实验室，网络空间安全研究院，计算机科学与技术学院，哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）；Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington（华盛顿大学保罗·G·艾伦计算机科学与工程学院）
Natural language rationales could provide intuitive, higher-level explanations that are easily understandable by humans, complementing the more broadly studied lower-level explanations based on gradients or attention weights. We present the first study focused on generating natural language rationales across several complex visual reasoning tasks: visual commonsense reasoning, visual-textual entailment, and visual question answering. The key challenge of accurate rationalization is comprehensive image understanding at all levels: not just their explicit content at the pixel level, but their co…
Humans can naturally identify, reason about, and explain anomalies in their environment. In computer vision, this long-standing challenge remains limited to industrial defects or unrealistic, synthetically generated anomalies, failing to capture the richness and unpredictability of real-world anomalies. In this work, we introduce CAVE, the first benchmark of real-world visual anomalies. CAVE supports three open-ended tasks: anomaly description, explanation, and justification; with fine-grained annotations for visual grounding and categorizing anomalies based on their visual manifestations, the…
Not Blind but Silenced: Rebalancing Vision and Language via Adversarial Counter-Commonsense Equilibrium
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Institute for Super Robotics (Huangpu)（机器人研究所（黄埔））；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Changsha University of Science and Technology（长沙理工大学）
SCO-VIST: Social Interaction Commonsense Knowledge-based Visual Storytelling
School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学计算机科学学院）；School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学计算与信息系统学院）
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Conventional referring expression comprehension (REF) assumes people to query something from an image by describing its visual appearance and spatial location, but in practice, we often ask for an object by describing its affordance or other non-visual attributes, especially when we do not have a precise target. For example, sometimes we say 'Give me something to eat'. In this case, we need to use commonsense knowledge to identify the objects in the image. Unfortunately, these is no existing referring expression dataset reflecting this requirement, not to mention a model to tackle this challen…
Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所）
Alternatively inferring on the visual facts and commonsense is fundamental for an advanced VQA system. This ability requires models to go beyond the literal understanding of commonsense. The system should not just treat objects as the entrance to query background knowledge, but fully ground commonsense to the visual world and imagine the possible relationships between objects, e.g., "fork, can lift, food". To comprehensively evaluate such abilities, we propose a VQA benchmark, CRIC, which introduces new types of questions about Compositional Reasoning on vIsion and Commonsense, and an evaluati…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Reasoning is an important ability that we learn from a very early age. Yet, reasoning is extremely hard for algorithms. Despite impressive recent progress that has been reported on tasks that necessitate reasoning, such as visual question answering and visual dialog, models often exploit biases in datasets. To develop models with better reasoning abilities, recently, the new visual commonsense reasoning (VCR) task has been introduced. Not only do models have to answer questions, but also do they have to provide a reason for the given answer. The proposed baseline achieved compelling results, l…
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）
The task of Visual Commonsense Reasoning is extremely challenging in the sense that the model has to not only be able to answer a question given an image, but also be able to learn to reason. The baselines introduced in this task are quite limiting because two networks are trained for predicting answers and rationales separately. Question and image is used as input to train answer prediction network while question, image and correct answer are used as input in the rationale prediction network. As rationale is conditioned on the correct answer, it is based on the assumption that we can solve Vi…
Improving Generalization in Visual Reasoning via Self-Ensemble
University of Information Technology（信息技术大学）；Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市越南国家大学）；Ho Chi Minh City Open University（胡志明市开放大学）；LPL Financial（LPL金融公司）
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）；UCLA（加州大学洛杉矶分校）
We propose a novel attention based deep learning architecture for visual question answering task (VQA). Given an image and an image related natural language question, VQA generates the natural language answer for the question. Generating the correct answers requires the model's attention to focus on the regions corresponding to the question, because different questions inquire about the attributes of different image regions. We introduce an attention based configurable convolutional neural network (ABC-CNN) to learn such question-guided attention. ABC-CNN determines an attention map for an ima…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Shandong University（山东大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯AI实验室）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Visual attention has been successfully applied in structural prediction tasks such as visual captioning and question answering. Existing visual attention models are generally spatial, i.e., the attention is modeled as spatial probabilities that re-weight the last conv-layer feature map of a CNN encoding an input image. However, we argue that such spatial attention does not necessarily conform to the attention mechanism --- a dynamic feature extractor that combines contextual fixations over time, as CNN features are naturally spatial, channel-wise and multi-layer. In this paper, we introduce a …
Despite recent advances in Visual QuestionAnswering (VQA), it remains a challenge todetermine how much success can be attributedto sound reasoning and comprehension ability.We seek to investigate this question by propos-ing a new task ofrationale generation. Es-sentially, we task a VQA model with generat-ing rationales for the answers it predicts. Weuse data from the Visual Commonsense Rea-soning (VCR) task, as it contains ground-truthrationales along with visual questions and an-swers. We first investigate commonsense un-derstanding in one of the leading VCR mod-els, ViLBERT, by generating ra…
Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
The Visual Question Answering (VQA) task aspires to provide a meaningful testbed for the development of AI models that can jointly reason over visual and natural language inputs. Despite a proliferation of VQA datasets, this goal is hindered by a set of common limitations. These include a reliance on relatively simplistic questions that are repetitive in both concepts and linguistic structure, little world knowledge needed outside of the paired image, and limited reasoning required to arrive at the correct answer. We introduce A-OKVQA, a crowdsourced dataset composed of a diverse set of about …
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）
Generating consecutive descriptions for videos, i.e., Video Captioning, requires taking full advantage of visual representation along with the generation process. Existing video captioning methods focus on making an exploration of spatial-temporal representations and their relationships to produce inferences. However, such methods only exploit the superficial association contained in the video itself without considering the intrinsic visual commonsense knowledge that existed in a video dataset, which may hinder their capabilities of knowledge cognitive to reason accurate descriptions. To addre…
Visual commonsense reasoning task aims at leading the research field into solving cognition-level reasoning with the ability of predicting correct answers and meanwhile providing convincing reasoning paths, resulting in three sub-tasks i.e., Q->A, QA->R and Q->AR. It poses great challenges over the proper semantic alignment between vision and linguistic domains and knowledge reasoning to generate persuasive reasoning paths. Existing works either resort to a powerful end-to-end network that cannot produce interpretable reasoning paths or solely explore intra-relationship of visual objects (homo…
Mila（米拉）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；Polytechnique Montréal（蒙特利尔高等理工学院）
There has been a rapid progress in the task of Visual Question Answering with improved model architectures. Unfortunately, these models are usually computationally intensive due to their sheer size which poses a serious challenge for deployment. We aim to tackle this issue for the specific task of Visual Question Answering (VQA). A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is an integral part of the visual processing pipeline of a VQA model (assuming the CNN is trained along with entire VQA model). In this project, we propose an efficient and modular neural architecture for the VQA task with focus on…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）
From a visual scene containing multiple people, human is able to distinguish each individual given the context descriptions about what happened before, their mental/physical states or intentions, etc. Above ability heavily relies on human-centric commonsense knowledge and reasoning. For example, if asked to identify the "person who needs healing" in an image, we need to first know that they usually have injuries or suffering expressions, then find the corresponding visual clues before finally grounding the person. We present a new commonsense task, Human-centric Commonsense Grounding, that tes…
Shandong University（山东大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））
Visual Commonsense Reasoning (VCR) remains a significant yet challenging research problem in the realm of visual reasoning. A VCR model generally aims at answering a textual question regarding an image, followed by the rationale prediction for the preceding answering process. Though these two processes are sequential and intertwined, existing methods always consider them as two independent matching-based instances. They, therefore, ignore the pivotal relationship between the two processes, leading to sub-optimal model performance. This paper presents a novel visual attention alignment method t…
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；The MOE Key Laboratory of Computational Linguistics, Peking University（北京大学计算语言学教育部重点实验室）；Artificial Intelligence Institute of Peking University（北京大学人工智能研究院）；State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence Production Technology and Systems（媒体融合生产技术与系统国家重点实验室）
Spatial commonsense, the knowledge about spatial position and relationship between objects (like the relative size of a lion and a girl, and the position of a boy relative to a bicycle when cycling), is an important part of commonsense knowledge. Although pretrained language models (PLMs) succeed in many NLP tasks, they are shown to be ineffective in spatial commonsense reasoning. Starting from the observation that images are more likely to exhibit spatial commonsense than texts, we explore whether models with visual signals learn more spatial commonsense than text-based PLMs. We propose a spa…
Our commonsense knowledge about objects includes their typical visual attributes; we know that bananas are typically yellow or green, and not purple. Text and image corpora, being subject to reporting bias, represent this world-knowledge to varying degrees of faithfulness. In this paper, we investigate to what degree unimodal (language-only) and multimodal (image and language) models capture a broad range of visually salient attributes. To that end, we create the Visual Commonsense Tests (ViComTe) dataset covering 5 property types (color, shape, material, size, and visual co-occurrence) for ov…
Visual Dialog requires an agent to engage in a conversation with humans grounded in an image. Many studies on Visual Dialog focus on the understanding of the dialog history or the content of an image, while a considerable amount of commonsense-required questions are ignored. Handling these scenarios depends on logical reasoning that requires commonsense priors. How to capture relevant commonsense knowledge complementary to the history and the image remains a key challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel model by Reasoning with Multi-structure Commonsense Knowledge (RMK). In our model, the e…
Korea University（高丽大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Artificial intelligence is currently powering diverse real-world applications. These applications have shown promising performance, but raise complicated ethical issues, i.e. how to embed ethics to make AI applications behave morally. One way toward moral AI systems is by imitating human prosocial behavior and encouraging some form of good behavior in systems. However, learning such normative ethics (especially from images) is challenging mainly due to a lack of data and labeling complexity. Here, we propose a model that predicts visual commonsense immorality in a zero-shot manner. We train ou…
Scene graph generation models understand the scene through object and predicate recognition, but are prone to mistakes due to the challenges of perception in the wild. Perception errors often lead to nonsensical compositions in the output scene graph, which do not follow real-world rules and patterns, and can be corrected using commonsense knowledge. We propose the first method to acquire visual commonsense such as affordance and intuitive physics automatically from data, and use that to improve the robustness of scene understanding. To this end, we extend Transformer models to incorporate the…
Generative Visual Commonsense Answering and Explaining with Generative Scene Graph Constructing
College of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学人工智能学院）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University（开放大学知识媒体研究所）
Service robots are expected to reliably make sense of complex, fast-changing environments. From a cognitive standpoint, they need the appropriate reasoning capabilities and background knowledge required to exhibit human-like Visual Intelligence. In particular, our prior work has shown that the ability to reason about spatial relations between objects in the world is a key requirement for the development of Visually Intelligent Agents. In this paper, we present a framework for commonsense spatial reasoning which is tailored to real-world robotic applications. Differently from prior approaches t…
Commonsense is defined as the knowledge that is shared by everyone. However, certain types of commonsense knowledge are correlated with culture and geographic locations and they are only shared locally. For example, the scenarios of wedding ceremonies vary across regions due to different customs influenced by historical and religious factors. Such regional characteristics, however, are generally omitted in prior work. In this paper, we construct a Geo-Diverse Visual Commonsense Reasoning dataset (GD-VCR) to test vision-and-language models' ability to understand cultural and geo-location-specif…
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）；Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering（保罗·G·艾伦计算机科学与工程学院）
Even from a single frame of a still image, people can reason about the dynamic story of the image before, after, and beyond the frame. For example, given an image of a man struggling to stay afloat in water, we can reason that the man fell into the water sometime in the past, the intent of that man at the moment is to stay alive, and he will need help in the near future or else he will get washed away. We propose VisualComet, the novel framework of visual commonsense reasoning tasks to predict events that might have happened before, events that might happen next, and the intents of the people …
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）
Answering complex questions about images is an ambitious goal for machine intelligence, which requires a joint understanding of images, text, and commonsense knowledge, as well as a strong reasoning ability. Recently, multimodal Transformers have made great progress in the task of Visual Commonsense Reasoning (VCR), by jointly understanding visual objects and text tokens through layers of cross-modality attention. However, these approaches do not utilize the rich structure of the scene and the interactions between objects which are essential in answering complex commonsense questions. We propo…
School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Software Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学软件学院）
