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 image-question pair by convolving the image feature map with configurable convolutional kernels derived from the question's semantics. We evaluate the ABC-CNN architecture on three benchmark VQA datasets: Toronto COCO-QA, DAQUAR, and VQA dataset. ABC-CNN model achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods on these datasets. The question-guided attention generated by ABC-CNN is also shown to reflect the regions that are highly relevant to the questions.
Attention models have been successfully adopted in many computer vision tasks, including object detection @cite_7 @cite_23 , fine-grained image classification @cite_14 @cite_26 , and image captioning @cite_22 . Attention can be modeled as a region sequence in an image. An RNN model is utilized to predict the next attention region based on the current attention region's location and visual features. @cite_7 , @cite_23 and @cite_14 employ this framework for object recognition, object detection, and fine-grained object recognition, respectively. @cite_22 develops an attention-based model for image captioning that uses an RNN as a decoder. It extracts a set of proposal regions in each image, and learns their attention weights using the decoding LSTM decoder's hidden states and the visual features extracted in each proposal region. In @cite_26 , a bilinear CNN structure utilizes two separate branches to combine the location and content information for fine-grained image classification. ABC-CNN is inspired by the successful application of attention on these vision tasks and utilize question-guided attention to improve VQA performance.
@cite_14 @cite_26 @cite_22 @cite_7 @cite_23
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We propose "Areas of Attention", a novel attention-based model for automatic image captioning. Our approach models the dependencies between image regions, caption words, and the state of an RNN language model, using three pairwise interactions. In contrast to previous attention-based approaches that associate image regions only to the RNN state, our method allows a direct association between caption words and image regions. During training these associations are inferred from image-level captions, akin to weakly-supervised object detector training. These associations help to improve captioning by localizing the corresponding regions during testing. We also propose and compare different ways of generating attention areas: CNN activation grids, object proposals, and spatial transformers nets applied in a convolutional fashion. Spatial transformers give the best results. They allow for image specific attention areas, and can be trained jointly with the rest of the network. Our attention mechanism and spatial transformer attention areas together yield state-of-the-art results on the MSCOCO dataset.o meaningful latent semantic structure in the generated captions. 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 image-question pair by convolving the image feature map with configurable convolutional kernels derived from the question's semantics. We evaluate the ABC-CNN architecture on three benchmark VQA datasets: Toronto COCO-QA, DAQUAR, and VQA dataset. ABC-CNN model achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods on these datasets. The question-guided attention generated by ABC-CNN is also shown to reflect the regions that are highly relevant to the questions. This paper presents experiments extending the work of (2014) on recurrent neural models for attention into less constrained visual environments, specifically fine-grained categorization on the Stanford Dogs data set. In this work we use an RNN of the same structure but substitute a more powerful visual network and perform large-scale pre-training of the visual network outside of the attention RNN. Most work in attention models to date focuses on tasks with toy or more constrained visual environments, whereas we present results for fine-grained categorization better than the state-of-the-art GoogLeNet classification model. We show that our model learns to direct high resolution attention to the most discriminative regions without any spatial supervision such as bounding boxes, and it is able to discriminate fine-grained dog breeds moderately well even when given only an initial low-resolution context image and narrow, inexpensive glimpses at faces and fur patterns. This and similar attention models have the major advantage of being trained end-to-end, as opposed to other current detection and recognition pipelines with hand-engineered components where information is lost. While our model is state-of-the-art, further work is needed to fully leverage the sequential input. 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 &#x2014; 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 novel convolutional neural network dubbed SCA-CNN that incorporates Spatial and Channel-wise Attentions in a CNN. In the task of image captioning, SCA-CNN dynamically modulates the sentence generation context in multi-layer feature maps, encoding where (i.e., attentive spatial locations at multiple layers) and what (i.e., attentive channels) the visual attention is. We evaluate the proposed SCA-CNN architecture on three benchmark image captioning datasets: Flickr8K, Flickr30K, and MSCOCO. It is consistently observed that SCA-CNN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art visual attention-based image captioning methods.