Transformer Module Networks for Systematic Generalization in Visual Question Answering
Fujitsu Limited（富士通有限公司）；Fujitsu Research of America, Inc.（美国富士通研究公司）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Center for Brains, Minds and Machines（大脑、心智与机器中心）
Transformers achieve great performance on Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, their systematic generalization capabilities, i.e., handling novel combinations of known concepts, is unclear. We reveal that Neural Module Networks (NMNs), i.e., question-specific compositions of modules that tackle a sub-task, achieve better or similar systematic generalization performance than the conventional Transformers, even though NMNs' modules are CNN-based. In order to address this shortcoming of Transformers with respect to NMNs, in this paper we investigate whether and how modularity can bring benefits to Transformers. Namely, we introduce Transformer Module Network (TMN), a novel NMN based on compositions of Transformer modules. TMNs achieve state-of-the-art systematic generalization performance in three VQA datasets, improving more than 30% over standard Transformers for novel compositions of sub-tasks. We show that not only the module composition but also the module specialization for each sub-task are the key of such performance gain.
Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra（比尔拉理工学院，梅斯拉）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
In recent years, multi-modal transformers have shown significant progress in Vision-Language tasks, such as Visual Question Answering (VQA), outperforming previous architectures by a considerable margin. This improvement in VQA is often attributed to the rich interactions between vision and language streams. In this work, we investigate the efficacy of co-attention transformer layers in helping the network focus on relevant regions while answering the question. We generate visual attention maps using the question-conditioned image attention scores in these co-attention layers. We evaluate the …
Vision And Text Transformer For Predicting Answerability On Visual Question Answering
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（日本先端科学技术大学院大学）；University of Science, Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市理科大学）；Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City（越南国家大学胡志明市分校）；Zalo Research Center（Zalo研究中心）
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…
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 …
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Hanyang University（汉阳大学）；AI Institute (AIIS), Seoul National University（首尔国立大学人工智能研究院（AIIS））
Knowledge-based visual question answering (QA) aims to answer a question which requires visually-grounded external knowledge beyond image content itself. Answering complex questions that require multi-hop reasoning under weak supervision is considered as a challenging problem since i) no supervision is given to the reasoning process and ii) high-order semantics of multi-hop knowledge facts need to be captured. In this paper, we introduce a concept of hypergraph to encode high-level semantics of a question and a knowledge base, and to learn high-order associations between them. The proposed mod…
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）
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…
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）
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…
Previous studies such as VizWiz find that Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems that can read and reason about text in images are useful in application areas such as assisting visually-impaired people. TextVQA is a VQA dataset geared towards this problem, where the questions require answering systems to read and reason about visual objects and text objects in images. One key challenge in TextVQA is the design of a system that effectively reasons not only about visual and text objects individually, but also about the spatial relationships between these objects. This motivates the use of 'edge…
Reasoning over multiple modalities, e.g. in Visual Question Answering (VQA), requires an alignment of semantic concepts across domains. Despite the widespread success of end-to-end learning, today's multimodal pipelines by and large leverage pre-extracted, fixed features from object detectors, typically Faster R-CNN, as representations of the visual world. The obvious downside is that the visual representation is not specifically tuned to the multimodal task at hand. At the same time, while transformer-based object detectors have gained popularity, they have not been employed in today's multim…
We propose an Auto-Parsing Network (APN) to discover and exploit the input data's hidden tree structures for improving the effectiveness of the Transformer-based vision-language systems. Specifically, we impose a Probabilistic Graphical Model (PGM) parameterized by the attention operations on each self-attention layer to incorporate sparse assumption. We use this PGM to softly segment an input sequence into a few clusters where each cluster can be treated as the parent of the inside entities. By stacking these PGM constrained self-attention layers, the clusters in a lower layer compose into a …
University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；Goethe University Frankfurt（法兰克福歌德大学）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）
Transformers for visual-language representation learning have been getting a lot of interest and shown tremendous performance on visual question answering (VQA) and grounding. But most systems that show good performance of those tasks still rely on pre-trained object detectors during training, which limits their applicability to the object classes available for those detectors. To mitigate this limitation, the following paper focuses on the problem of weakly supervised grounding in context of visual question answering in transformers. The approach leverages capsules by grouping each visual tok…
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 …
We present a pre-training approach for vision and language transformer models, which is based on a mixture of diverse tasks. We explore both the use of image-text captioning data in pre-training, which does not need additional supervision, as well as object-aware strategies to pre-train the model. We evaluate the method on a number of textgenerative vision+language tasks, such as Visual Question Answering, visual entailment and captioning, and demonstrate large gains over standard pre-training methods.
Textbook Question Answering is a complex task in the intersection of Machine Comprehension and Visual Question Answering that requires reasoning with multimodal information from text and diagrams. For the first time, this paper taps on the potential of transformer language models and bottom-up and top-down attention to tackle the language and visual understanding challenges this task entails. Rather than training a language-visual transformer from scratch we rely on pre-trained transformers, fine-tuning and ensembling. We add bottom-up and top-down attention to identify regions of interest cor…
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…
Vision-and-language reasoning requires an understanding of visual concepts, language semantics, and, most importantly, the alignment and relationships between these two modalities. We thus propose the LXMERT (Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers) framework to learn these vision-and-language connections. In LXMERT, we build a large-scale Transformer model that consists of three encoders: an object relationship encoder, a language encoder, and a cross-modality encoder. Next, to endow our model with the capability of connecting vision and language semantics, we pre-tr…
Accurate and efficient product classification is significant for E-commerce applications, as it enables various downstream tasks such as recommendation, retrieval, and pricing. Items often contain textual and visual information, and utilizing both modalities usually outperforms classification utilizing either mode alone. In this paper we describe our methodology and results for the SIGIR eCom Rakuten Data Challenge. We employ a dual attention technique to model image-text relationships using pretrained language and image embeddings. While dual attention has been widely used for Visual Question…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；National Engineering Laboratory for Integrated Aero-Space-Ground-Ocean Big Data Application Technology（国家空天地海一体化大数据应用技术国家工程实验室）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Vision-and-Language (VL) pre-training has shown great potential on many related downstream tasks, such as Visual Question Answering (VQA), one of the most popular problems in the VL field. All of these pre-trained models (such as VisualBERT, ViLBERT, LXMERT and UNITER) are built with Transformer, which extends the classical attention mechanism to multiple layers and heads. To investigate why and how these models work on VQA so well, in this paper we explore the roles of individual heads and layers in Transformer models when handling $12$ different types of questions. Specifically, we manually …
Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）；UNC Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Mirroring the success of masked language models, vision-and-language counterparts like ViLBERT, LXMERT and UNITER have achieved state of the art performance on a variety of multimodal discriminative tasks like visual question answering and visual grounding. Recent work has also successfully adapted such models towards the generative task of image captioning. This begs the question: Can these models go the other way and generate images from pieces of text? Our analysis of a popular representative from this model family - LXMERT - finds that it is unable to generate rich and semantically meaning…
Prompt-based Personalized Federated Learning for Medical Visual Question Answering
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University（北海道大学信息科学与技术研究生院）；Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University（北海道大学信息科学与技术学院）
Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）
Generalizing beyond the experiences has a significant role in developing practical AI systems. It has been shown that current Visual Question Answering (VQA) models are over-dependent on the language-priors (spurious correlations between question-types and their most frequent answers) from the train set and pose poor performance on Out-of-Distribution (OOD) test sets. This conduct limits their generalizability and restricts them from being utilized in real-world situations. This paper shows that the sequence model architecture used in the question-encoder has a significant role in the generali…
Multimodal image-language transformers have achieved impressive results on a variety of tasks that rely on fine-tuning (e.g., visual question answering and image retrieval). We are interested in shedding light on the quality of their pretrained representations -- in particular, if these models can distinguish different types of verbs or if they rely solely on nouns in a given sentence. To do so, we collect a dataset of image-sentence pairs (in English) consisting of 421 verbs that are either visual or commonly found in the pretraining data (i.e., the Conceptual Captions dataset). We use this d…
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）
Video question answering has recently received a lot of attention from multimodal video researchers. Most video question answering datasets are usually in the form of multiple-choice. But, the model for the multiple-choice task does not infer the answer. Rather it compares the answer candidates for picking the correct answer. Furthermore, it makes it difficult to extend to other tasks. In this paper, we challenge the existing multiple-choice video question answering by changing it to open-ended video question answering. To tackle open-ended question answering, we use the pretrained GPT2 model.…
Sea AI Lab（Sea人工智能实验室）；Sea-NExT Joint Lab（Sea-NExT联合实验室）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
This paper proposes a Video Graph Transformer (VGT) model for Video Quetion Answering (VideoQA). VGT's uniqueness are two-fold: 1) it designs a dynamic graph transformer module which encodes video by explicitly capturing the visual objects, their relations, and dynamics for complex spatio-temporal reasoning; and 2) it exploits disentangled video and text Transformers for relevance comparison between the video and text to perform QA, instead of entangled cross-modal Transformer for answer classification. Vision-text communication is done by additional cross-modal interaction modules. With more …
Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院重庆绿色智能技术研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
This paper presents a new method for end-to-end Video Question Answering (VideoQA), aside from the current popularity of using large-scale pre-training with huge feature extractors. We achieve this with a pyramidal multimodal transformer (PMT) model, which simply incorporates a learnable word embedding layer, a few convolutional and transformer layers. We use the anisotropic pyramid to fulfill video-language interactions across different spatio-temporal scales. In addition to the canonical pyramid, which includes both bottom-up and top-down pathways with lateral connections, novel strategies a…
Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院重庆绿色智能技术研究院）；Chongqing School, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学重庆学院）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳人工智能与机器人学会）
Video question answering (VideoQA) is challenging given its multimodal combination of visual understanding and natural language understanding. While existing approaches seldom leverage the appearance-motion information in the video at multiple temporal scales, the interaction between the question and the visual information for textual semantics extraction is frequently ignored. Targeting these issues, this paper proposes a novel Temporal Pyramid Transformer (TPT) model with multimodal interaction for VideoQA. The TPT model comprises two modules, namely Question-specific Transformer (QT) and Vi…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Google Brain（谷歌大脑）；Microsoft（微软）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
To build Video Question Answering (VideoQA) systems capable of assisting humans in daily activities, seeking answers from long-form videos with diverse and complex events is a must. Existing multi-modal VQA models achieve promising performance on images or short video clips, especially with the recent success of large-scale multi-modal pre-training. However, when extending these methods to long-form videos, new challenges arise. On the one hand, using a dense video sampling strategy is computationally prohibitive. On the other hand, methods relying on sparse sampling struggle in scenarios wher…
Surgical-VQLA: Transformer with Gated Vision-Language Embedding for Visual Question Localized-Answering in Robotic Surgery
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)（香港中文大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Shun Hing Institute of Advanced Engineering（信兴高等工程研究所）
Redundancy-aware Transformer for Video Question Answering
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Institute of Dataspace, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心数据空间研究院）
Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Video Question Answering with Multi-Modal Prompts
Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Univ Rennes（雷恩大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；IRISA（法国雷恩信息与自动化系统研究所）；Institute of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence (IARAI)（高级人工智能研究所（IARAI））
To understand movies, humans constantly reason over the dialogues and actions shown in specific scenes and relate them to the overall storyline already seen. Inspired by this behaviour, we design ROLL, a model for knowledge-based video story question answering that leverages three crucial aspects of movie understanding: dialog comprehension, scene reasoning, and storyline recalling. In ROLL, each of these tasks is in charge of extracting rich and diverse information by 1) processing scene dialogues, 2) generating unsupervised video scene descriptions, and 3) obtaining external knowledge in a w…
