Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a challenging multimodal task to answer questions about an image. Many works concentrate on how to reduce language bias which makes models answer questions ignoring visual content and language context. However, reducing language bias also weakens the ability of VQA models to learn context prior. To address this issue, we propose a novel learning strategy named CCB, which forces VQA models to answer questions relying on Content and Context with language Bias. Specifically, CCB establishes Content and Context branches on top of a base VQA model and forces them to focus on local key content and global effective context respectively. Moreover, a joint loss function is proposed to reduce the importance of biased samples and retain their beneficial influence on answering questions. Experiments show that CCB outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy on VQA-CP v2.
Researchers have observed that Visual Question Answering (VQA) models tend to answer questions by learning statistical biases in the data. For example, their answer to the question "What is the color of the grass?" is usually "Green", whereas a question like "What is the title of the book?" cannot be answered by inferring statistical biases. It is of interest to the community to explicitly discover such biases, both for understanding the behavior of such models, and towards debugging them. Our work address this problem. In a database, we store the words of the question, answer and visual words…
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）
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Visual question answering (VQA) is a challenging task, which has attracted more and more attention in the field of computer vision and natural language processing. However, the current visual question answering has the problem of language bias, which reduces the robustness of the model and has an adverse impact on the practical application of visual question answering. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive review and analysis of this field for the first time, and classify the existing methods according to three categories, including enhancing visual information, weakening language priors, …
We propose a method for visual question answering which combines an internal representation of the content of an image with information extracted from a general knowledge base to answer a broad range of image-based questions. This allows more complex questions to be answered using the predominant neural network-based approach than has previously been possible. It particularly allows questions to be asked about the contents of an image, even when the image itself does not contain the whole answer. The method constructs a textual representation of the semantic content of an image, and merges it …
Most existing Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems tend to overly rely on language bias and hence fail to reason from the visual clue. To address this issue, we propose a novel Language-Prior Feedback (LPF) objective function, to re-balance the proportion of each answer's loss value in the total VQA loss. The LPF firstly calculates a modulating factor to determine the language bias using a question-only branch. Then, the LPF assigns a self-adaptive weight to each training sample in the training process. With this reweighting mechanism, the LPF ensures that the total VQA loss can be reshaped…
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）
Much recent progress in Vision-to-Language problems has been achieved through a combination of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). This approach does not explicitly represent high-level semantic concepts, but rather seeks to progress directly from image features to text. In this paper we first propose a method of incorporating high-level concepts into the successful CNN-RNN approach, and show that it achieves a significant improvement on the state-of-the-art in both image captioning and visual question answering. We further show that the same mechanism ca…
Key Lab of Intell. Info. Process., Inst. of Comput. Tech., CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所智能信息处理重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Kingsoft Cloud（金山云）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司）
Language bias is a critical issue in Visual Question Answering (VQA), where models often exploit dataset biases for the final decision without considering the image information. As a result, they suffer from performance drop on out-of-distribution data and inadequate visual explanation. Based on experimental analysis for existing robust VQA methods, we stress the language bias in VQA that comes from two aspects, i.e., distribution bias and shortcut bias. We further propose a new de-bias framework, Greedy Gradient Ensemble (GGE), which combines multiple biased models for unbiased base model lea…
Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）
Recent studies have shown that current VQA models are heavily biased on the language priors in the train set to answer the question, irrespective of the image. E.g., overwhelmingly answer "what sport is" as "tennis" or "what color banana" as "yellow." This behavior restricts them from real-world application scenarios. In this work, we propose a novel model-agnostic question encoder, Visually-Grounded Question Encoder (VGQE), for VQA that reduces this effect. VGQE utilizes both visual and language modalities equally while encoding the question. Hence the question representation itself gets suff…
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；Peking University（北京大学）；Tencent Inc（腾讯公司）
Models for Visual Question Answering (VQA) often rely on the spurious correlations, i.e., the language priors, that appear in the biased samples of training set, which make them brittle against the out-of-distribution (OOD) test data. Recent methods have achieved promising progress in overcoming this problem by reducing the impact of biased samples on model training. However, these models reveal a trade-off that the improvements on OOD data severely sacrifice the performance on the in-distribution (ID) data (which is dominated by the biased samples). Therefore, we propose a novel contrastive l…
The task of Visual Question Answering (VQA) is known to be plagued by the issue of VQA models exploiting biases within the dataset to make its final prediction. Various previous ensemble based debiasing methods have been proposed where an additional model is purposefully trained to be biased in order to train a robust target model. However, these methods compute the bias for a model simply from the label statistics of the training data or from single modal branches. In this work, in order to better learn the bias a target VQA model suffers from, we propose a generative method to train the bias…
Technical University Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Hessian Center for AI（黑森人工智能中心）；Centre for Cognitive Science Darmstadt（达姆施塔特认知科学中心）
Large datasets underlying much of current machine learning raise serious issues concerning inappropriate content such as offensive, insulting, threatening, or might otherwise cause anxiety. This calls for increased dataset documentation, e.g., using datasheets. They, among other topics, encourage to reflect on the composition of the datasets. So far, this documentation, however, is done manually and therefore can be tedious and error-prone, especially for large image datasets. Here we ask the arguably "circular" question of whether a machine can help us reflect on inappropriate content, answer…
Modern Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have been shown to rely heavily on superficial correlations between question and answer words learned during training such as overwhelmingly reporting the type of room as kitchen or the sport being played as tennis, irrespective of the image. Most alarmingly, this shortcoming is often not well reflected during evaluation because the same strong priors exist in test distributions; however, a VQA system that fails to ground questions in image content would likely perform poorly in real-world settings. In this work, we present a novel regularization s…
Vision-and-language tasks have increasingly drawn more attention as a means to evaluate human-like reasoning in machine learning models. A popular task in the field is visual question answering (VQA), which aims to answer questions about images. However, VQA models have been shown to exploit language bias by learning the statistical correlations between questions and answers without looking into the image content: e.g., questions about the color of a banana are answered with yellow, even if the banana in the image is green. If societal bias (e.g., sexism, racism, ableism, etc.) is present in t…
Detecting and Understanding Hateful Contents in Memes Through Captioning and Visual Question-Answering
The University of Sydney, School of Computer Science（悉尼大学计算机科学学院）；University of Technology Sydney, School of Computer Science（新南威尔士大学技术学院）；University of Technology Sydney, TD School（新南威尔士大学TD学院）；Australian Catholic University, Peter Faber Business School（澳大利亚天主教大学彼得·法伯商学院）
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；LIP6（巴黎第六大学计算机科学实验室）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
Visual Question Answering (VQA) is the task of answering questions about an image. Some VQA models often exploit unimodal biases to provide the correct answer without using the image information. As a result, they suffer from a huge drop in performance when evaluated on data outside their training set distribution. This critical issue makes them unsuitable for real-world settings. We propose RUBi, a new learning strategy to reduce biases in any VQA model. It reduces the importance of the most biased examples, i.e. examples that can be correctly classified without looking at the image. It impli…
Unveiling the Ignorance of MLLMs: Seeing Clearly, Answering Incorrectly
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；School of AI, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学人工智能学院）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Everlyn AI；Youtu Lab, Tencent（腾讯优图实验室）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京人工智能研究院）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
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 …
Towards Escaping from Language Bias and OCR Error: Semantics-Centered Text Visual Question Answering
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；School of Information and Communication Engineering, Communication University of China（中国传媒大学信息与通信工程学院）；Heilongjiang Network Space Research Center（黑龙江省网络空间研究中心）
Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Huawei（华为）
Visual Question Answering (VQA) requires a fine-grained and simultaneous understanding of both the visual content of images and the textual content of questions. Therefore, designing an effective `co-attention' model to associate key words in questions with key objects in images is central to VQA performance. So far, most successful attempts at co-attention learning have been achieved by using shallow models, and deep co-attention models show little improvement over their shallow counterparts. In this paper, we propose a deep Modular Co-Attention Network (MCAN) that consists of Modular Co-Atte…
Attention mechanism has gained huge popularity due to its effectiveness in achieving high accuracy in different domains. But attention is opportunistic and is not justified by the content or usability of the content. Transformer like structure creates all/any possible attention(s). We define segregating strategies that can prioritize the contents for the applications for enhancement of performance. We defined two strategies: Self-Segregating Transformer (SST) and Coordinated-Segregating Transformer (CST) and used it to solve visual question answering application. Self-segregation strategy for …
QIRL: Optimized Question-Image Relation Learning for Bias-Robust Visual Question Answering
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Macau University of Science and Technology（澳门科技大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Hubei Key Laboratory of Transportation Internet of Things, School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学计算机科学与人工智能学院）；State Key Laboratory of Maritime Technology and Safety, Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Tianjin University of Technology（天津理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Macau University of Science and Technology Zhuhai MUST Science and Technology Research Institute（澳门科技大学珠海澳科大科技研究院）
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；HKUST（香港科技大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）
Vision-language (VL) understanding tasks evaluate models' comprehension of complex visual scenes through multiple-choice questions. However, we have identified two dataset biases that models can exploit as shortcuts to resolve various VL tasks correctly without proper understanding. The first type of dataset bias is \emph{Unbalanced Matching} bias, where the correct answer overlaps the question and image more than the incorrect answers. The second type of dataset bias is \emph{Distractor Similarity} bias, where incorrect answers are overly dissimilar to the correct answer but significantly sim…
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）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Visual question answering (VQA) is challenging because it requires a simultaneous understanding of both the visual content of images and the textual content of questions. The approaches used to represent the images and questions in a fine-grained manner and questions and to fuse these multi-modal features play key roles in performance. Bilinear pooling based models have been shown to outperform traditional linear models for VQA, but their high-dimensional representations and high computational complexity may seriously limit their applicability in practice. For multi-modal feature fusion, here …
Visual question answering by using information from multiple modalities has attracted more and more attention in recent years. However, it is a very challenging task, as the visual content and natural language have quite different statistical properties. In this work, we present a method called Adversarial Multimodal Network (AMN) to better understand video stories for question answering. In AMN, as inspired by generative adversarial networks, we propose to learn multimodal feature representations by finding a more coherent subspace for video clips and the corresponding texts (e.g., subtitles …
Structure Causal Models and LLMs Integration in Medical Visual Question Answering
School of Microelectronics, Tianjin University（天津大学微电子学院）；School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University（天津大学电气与信息工程学院）；Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento（特伦托大学信息工程与计算机科学系）
Visual question answering (VQA) requires joint comprehension of images and natural language questions, where many questions can't be directly or clearly answered from visual content but require reasoning from structured human knowledge with confirmation from visual content. This paper proposes visual knowledge memory network (VKMN) to address this issue, which seamlessly incorporates structured human knowledge and deep visual features into memory networks in an end-to-end learning framework. Comparing to existing methods for leveraging external knowledge for supporting VQA, this paper stresses…
This paper presents a new baseline for visual question answering task. Given an image and a question in natural language, our model produces accurate answers according to the content of the image. Our model, while being architecturally simple and relatively small in terms of trainable parameters, sets a new state of the art on both unbalanced and balanced VQA benchmark. On VQA 1.0 open ended challenge, our model achieves 64.6% accuracy on the test-standard set without using additional data, an improvement of 0.4% over state of the art, and on newly released VQA 2.0, our model scores 59.7% on v…
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；LIP6（巴黎第六大学计算机科学实验室）；Carney Institute for Brain Science, Brown University（布朗大学卡尼脑科学研究所）；Idiap Research Institute（伊迪亚普研究所）；Australian Institute for Machine Learning, University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学澳大利亚机器学习研究所）
We introduce an evaluation methodology for visual question answering (VQA) to better diagnose cases of shortcut learning. These cases happen when a model exploits spurious statistical regularities to produce correct answers but does not actually deploy the desired behavior. There is a need to identify possible shortcuts in a dataset and assess their use before deploying a model in the real world. The research community in VQA has focused exclusively on question-based shortcuts, where a model might, for example, answer "What is the color of the sky" with "blue" by relying mostly on the question…
An Empirical Study on the Language Modal in Visual Question Answering
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Ping An Property & Casualty Insurance Company of China, Ltd（中国平安财产保险股份有限公司）
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Most Visual Question Answering (VQA) models suffer from the language prior problem, which is caused by inherent data biases. Specifically, VQA models tend to answer questions (e.g., what color is the banana?) based on the high-frequency answers (e.g., yellow) ignoring image contents. Existing approaches tackle this problem by creating delicate models or introducing additional visual annotations to reduce question dependency while strengthening image dependency. However, they are still subject to the language prior problem since the data biases have not been even alleviated. In this paper, we i…
Mitigating Easy Option Bias in Multiple-Choice Question Answering
Institute of High-Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore（高性能计算研究所，科学、技术及研究局，新加坡）；Centre for Frontier AI Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore（前沿人工智能研究中心，科学、技术及研究局，新加坡）；College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore（计算与数据科学学院，南洋理工大学，新加坡）
We describe a method for visual question answering which is capable of reasoning about contents of an image on the basis of information extracted from a large-scale knowledge base. The method not only answers natural language questions using concepts not contained in the image, but can provide an explanation of the reasoning by which it developed its answer. The method is capable of answering far more complex questions than the predominant long short-term memory-based approach, and outperforms it significantly in the testing. We also provide a dataset and a protocol by which to evaluate such m…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
State-of-the-art models often make use of superficial patterns in the data that do not generalize well to out-of-domain or adversarial settings. For example, textual entailment models often learn that particular key words imply entailment, irrespective of context, and visual question answering models learn to predict prototypical answers, without considering evidence in the image. In this paper, we show that if we have prior knowledge of such biases, we can train a model to be more robust to domain shift. Our method has two stages: we (1) train a naive model that makes predictions exclusively …
Visual Question and Answering (VQA) problems are attracting increasing interest from multiple research disciplines. Solving VQA problems requires techniques from both computer vision for understanding the visual contents of a presented image or video, as well as the ones from natural language processing for understanding semantics of the question and generating the answers. Regarding visual content modeling, most of existing VQA methods adopt the strategy of extracting global features from the image or video, which inevitably fails in capturing fine-grained information such as spatial configur…
Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences（哈佛大学约翰·A·保尔森工程与应用科学学院）；MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）
Visual question answering (VQA) models have been shown to over-rely on linguistic biases in VQA datasets, answering questions "blindly" without considering visual context. Adversarial regularization (AdvReg) aims to address this issue via an adversary sub-network that encourages the main model to learn a bias-free representation of the question. In this work, we investigate the strengths and shortcomings of AdvReg with the goal of better understanding how it affects inference in VQA models. Despite achieving a new state-of-the-art on VQA-CP, we find that AdvReg yields several undesirable side-…
In visual question answering (VQA), an algorithm must answer text-based questions about images. While multiple datasets for VQA have been created since late 2014, they all have flaws in both their content and the way algorithms are evaluated on them. As a result, evaluation scores are inflated and predominantly determined by answering easier questions, making it difficult to compare different methods. In this paper, we analyze existing VQA algorithms using a new dataset. It contains over 1.6 million questions organized into 12 different categories. We also introduce questions that are meaningl…
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Question answering is an important task for autonomous agents and virtual assistants alike and was shown to support the disabled in efficiently navigating an overwhelming environment. Many existing methods focus on observation-based questions, ignoring our ability to seamlessly combine observed content with general knowledge. To understand interactions with a knowledge base, a dataset has been introduced recently and keyword matching techniques were shown to yield compelling results despite being vulnerable to misconceptions due to synonyms and homographs. To address this issue, we develop a l…
We propose a novel video understanding task by fusing knowledge-based and video question answering. First, we introduce KnowIT VQA, a video dataset with 24,282 human-generated question-answer pairs about a popular sitcom. The dataset combines visual, textual and temporal coherence reasoning together with knowledge-based questions, which need of the experience obtained from the viewing of the series to be answered. Second, we propose a video understanding model by combining the visual and textual video content with specific knowledge about the show. Our main findings are: (i) the incorporation …
We propose a novel video understanding task by fusing knowledge-based and video question answering. First, we introduce KnowIT VQA, a video dataset with 24,282 human-generated question-answer pairs about a popular sitcom. The dataset combines visual, textual and temporal coherence reasoning together with knowledge-based questions, which need of the experience obtained from the viewing of the series to be answered. Second, we propose a video understanding model by combining the visual and textual video content with specific knowledge about the show. Our main findings are: (i) the incorporation …
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Toyota Research Institute of North America（丰田北美研究院）
In this paper we consider the problem of continuously discovering image contents by actively asking image based questions and subsequently answering the questions being asked. The key components include a Visual Question Generation (VQG) module and a Visual Question Answering module, in which Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) are used. Given a dataset that contains images, questions and their answers, both modules are trained at the same time, with the difference being VQG uses the images as input and the corresponding questions as output, while VQA uses im…
Department of English, Creative Writing Program, Vanderbilt University（范德堡大学英语与创意写作系）；Vanderbilt University（范德堡大学）
Modern social intelligence includes the ability to watch videos and answer questions about social and theory-of-mind-related content, e.g., for a scene in Harry Potter, "Is the father really upset about the boys flying the car?" Social visual question answering (social VQA) is emerging as a valuable methodology for studying social reasoning in both humans (e.g., children with autism) and AI agents. However, this problem space spans enormous variations in both videos and questions. We discuss methods for creating and characterizing social VQA datasets, including 1) crowdsourcing versus in-house…
Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Many datasets have been shown to contain incidental correlations created by idiosyncrasies in the data collection process. For example, sentence entailment datasets can have spurious word-class correlations if nearly all contradiction sentences contain the word "not", and image recognition datasets can have tell-tale object-background correlations if dogs are always indoors. In this paper, we propose a method that can automatically detect and ignore these kinds of dataset-specific patterns, which we call dataset biases. Our method trains a lower capacity model in an ensemble with a higher capa…
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）
Movies provide us with a mass of visual content as well as attracting stories. Existing methods have illustrated that understanding movie stories through only visual content is still a hard problem. In this paper, for answering questions about movies, we put forward a Layered Memory Network (LMN) that represents frame-level and clip-level movie content by the Static Word Memory module and the Dynamic Subtitle Memory module, respectively. Particularly, we firstly extract words and sentences from the training movie subtitles. Then the hierarchically formed movie representations, which are learne…
Video Question Answering (VideoQA), aiming to correctly answer the given question based on understanding multi-modal video content, is challenging due to the rich video content. From the perspective of video understanding, a good VideoQA framework needs to understand the video content at different semantic levels and flexibly integrate the diverse video content to distill question-related content. To this end, we propose a Lightweight Visual-Linguistic Reasoning framework named LiVLR. Specifically, LiVLR first utilizes the graph-based Visual and Linguistic Encoders to obtain multi-grained visu…
