No Arabic abstract
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 selections. A distinction of our approach is its intuitive and interpretable output, as discrete counts are automatically grounded in the image. Furthermore, our method outperforms the state of the art architecture for VQA on multiple metrics that evaluate counting.
We present a modular approach for learning policies for navigation over long planning horizons from language input. Our hierarchical policy operates at multiple timescales, where the higher-level master policy proposes subgoals to be executed by specialized sub-policies. Our choice of subgoals is compositional and semantic, i.e. they can be sequentially combined in arbitrary orderings, and assume human-interpretable descriptions (e.g. exit room, find kitchen, find refrigerator, etc.). We use imitation learning to warm-start policies at each level of the hierarchy, dramatically increasing sample efficiency, followed by reinforcement learning. Independent reinforcement learning at each level of hierarchy enables sub-policies to adapt to consequences of their actions and recover from errors. Subsequent joint hierarchical training enables the master policy to adapt to the sub-policies. On the challenging EQA (Das et al., 2018) benchmark in House3D (Wu et al., 2018), requiring navigating diverse realistic indoor environments, our approach outperforms prior work by a significant margin, both in terms of navigation and question answering.
We study how to leverage off-the-shelf visual and linguistic data to cope with out-of-vocabulary answers in visual question answering task. Existing large-scale visual datasets with annotations such as image class labels, bounding boxes and region descriptions are good sources for learning rich and diverse visual concepts. However, it is not straightforward how the visual concepts can be captured and transferred to visual question answering models due to missing link between question dependent answering models and visual data without question. We tackle this problem in two steps: 1) learning a task conditional visual classifier, which is capable of solving diverse question-specific visual recognition tasks, based on unsupervised task discovery and 2) transferring the task conditional visual classifier to visual question answering models. Specifically, we employ linguistic knowledge sources such as structured lexical database (e.g. WordNet) and visual descriptions for unsupervised task discovery, and transfer a learned task conditional visual classifier as an answering unit in a visual question answering model. We empirically show that the proposed algorithm generalizes to out-of-vocabulary answers successfully using the knowledge transferred from the visual dataset.
We describe a very simple bag-of-words baseline for visual question answering. This baseline concatenates the word features from the question and CNN features from the image to predict the answer. When evaluated on the challenging VQA dataset [2], it shows comparable performance to many recent approaches using recurrent neural networks. To explore the strength and weakness of the trained model, we also provide an interactive web demo and open-source code. .
Performance on the most commonly used Visual Question Answering dataset (VQA v2) is starting to approach human accuracy. However, in interacting with state-of-the-art VQA models, it is clear that the problem is far from being solved. In order to stress test VQA models, we benchmark them against human-adversarial examples. Human subjects interact with a state-of-the-art VQA model, and for each image in the dataset, attempt to find a question where the models predicted answer is incorrect. We find that a wide range of state-of-the-art models perform poorly when evaluated on these examples. We conduct an extensive analysis of the collected adversarial examples and provide guidance on future research directions. We hope that this Adversarial VQA (AdVQA) benchmark can help drive progress in the field and advance the state of the art.
Data augmentation is an approach that can effectively improve the performance of multimodal machine learning. This paper introduces a generative model for data augmentation by leveraging the correlations among multiple modalities. Different from conventional data augmentation approaches that apply low level operations with deterministic heuristics, our method proposes to learn an augmentation sampler that generates samples of the target modality conditioned on observed modalities in the variational auto-encoder framework. Additionally, the proposed model is able to quantify the confidence of augmented data by its generative probability, and can be jointly updated with a downstream pipeline. Experiments on Visual Question Answering tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed generative model, which is able to boost the strong UpDn-based models to the state-of-the-art performance.