A vexing problem in artificial intelligence is reasoning about events that occur in complex, changing visual stimuli such as in video analysis or game play. Inspired by a rich tradition of visual reasoning and memory in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, we developed an artificial, configurable visual question and answer dataset (COG) to parallel experiments in humans and animals. COG is much simpler than the general problem of video analysis, yet it addresses many of the problems relating to visual and logical reasoning and memory – problems that remain challenging for modern deep learning architectures. We additionally propose a deep learning architecture that performs competitively on other diagnostic VQA datasets (i.e. CLEVR) as well as easy settings of the COG dataset. However, several settings of COG result in datasets that are progressively more challenging to learn. After training, the network can zero-shot generalize to many new tasks. Preliminary analyses of the network architectures trained on COG demonstrate that the network accomplishes the task in a manner interpretable to humans.
Let us consider Visual Question Answering (VQA) datasets based on single, static images @cite_2 @cite_18 @cite_7 @cite_19 . These datasets construct natural language questions to probe the logical understanding of a network about natural images. There has been strong suggestion in the literature that networks trained on these datasets focus on statistical regularities for the prediction tasks, whereby a system may cheat'' to superficially solve a given task @cite_38 @cite_47 . Towards that end, several researchers proposed to build an auxiliary diagnostic, synthetic datasets to uncover these potential failure modes and highlight logical comprehension (e.g. attribute identification, counting, comparison, multiple attention, and logical operations) @cite_47 @cite_44 @cite_45 @cite_13 @cite_10 . Further, many specialized neural network architectures focused on multi-task learning have been proposed to address this problem by leveraging attention @cite_16 , external memory @cite_42 @cite_4 , a family of feature-wise transformations @cite_14 @cite_27 , explicitly parsing a task into executable sub-tasks @cite_17 @cite_11 , and inferring relations between pairs of objects @cite_23 .
@cite_38 @cite_18 @cite_14 @cite_4 @cite_11 @cite_7 @cite_10 @cite_42 @cite_44 @cite_19 @cite_27 @cite_45 @cite_23 @cite_2 @cite_47 @cite_16 @cite_13 @cite_17
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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. We address a question answering task on real-world images that is set up as a Visual Turing Test. By combining latest advances in image representation and natural language processing, we propose Ask Your Neurons, a scalable, jointly trained, end-to-end formulation to this problem. In contrast to previous efforts, we are facing a multi-modal problem where the language output (answer) is conditioned on visual and natural language inputs (image and question). We provide additional insights into the problem by analyzing how much information is contained only in the language part for which we provide a new human baseline. To study human consensus, which is related to the ambiguities inherent in this challenging task, we propose two novel metrics and collect additional answers which extend the original DAQUAR dataset to DAQUAR-Consensus. Moreover, we also extend our analysis to VQA, a large-scale question answering about images dataset, where we investigate some particular design choices and show the importance of stronger visual models. At the same time, we achieve strong performance of our model that still uses a global image representation. Finally, based on such analysis, we refine our Ask Your Neurons on DAQUAR, which also leads to a better performance on this challenging task. We address the problem of Visual Question Answering (VQA), which requires joint image and language understanding to answer a question about a given photograph. Recent approaches have applied deep image captioning methods based on convolutional-recurrent networks to this problem, but have failed to model spatial inference. To remedy this, we propose a model we call the Spatial Memory Network and apply it to the VQA task. Memory networks are recurrent neural networks with an explicit attention mechanism that selects certain parts of the information stored in memory. Our Spatial Memory Network stores neuron activations from different spatial regions of the image in its memory, and uses the question to choose relevant regions for computing the answer, a process of which constitutes a single "hop" in the network. We propose a novel spatial attention architecture that aligns words with image patches in the first hop, and obtain improved results by adding a second attention hop which considers the whole question to choose visual evidence based on the results of the first hop. To better understand the inference process learned by the network, we design synthetic questions that specifically require spatial inference and visualize the attention weights. We evaluate our model on two published visual question answering datasets, DAQUAR [1] and VQA [2], and obtain improved results compared to a strong deep baseline model (iBOWIMG) which concatenates image and question features to predict the answer [3]. Visual Question Answering (VQA) has attracted much attention since it offers insight into the relationships between the multi-modal analysis of images and natural language. Most of the current algorithms are incapable of answering open-domain questions that require to perform reasoning beyond the image contents. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework which endows the model capabilities in answering more complex questions by leveraging massive external knowledge with dynamic memory networks. Specifically, the questions along with the corresponding images trigger a process to retrieve the relevant information in external knowledge bases, which are embedded into a continuous vector space by preserving the entity-relation structures. Afterwards, we employ dynamic memory networks to attend to the large body of facts in the knowledge graph and images, and then perform reasoning over these facts to generate corresponding answers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model not only achieves the state-of-the-art performance in the visual question answering task, but can also answer open-domain questions effectively by leveraging the external knowledge.