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 we develop a Multi-modal Factorized Bilinear (MFB) pooling approach to efficiently and effectively combine multi-modal features, which results in superior performance for VQA compared with other bilinear pooling approaches. For fine-grained image and question representation, we develop a co-attention mechanism using an end-to-end deep network architecture to jointly learn both the image and question attentions. Combining the proposed MFB approach with co-attention learning in a new network architecture provides a unified model for VQA. Our experimental results demonstrate that the single MFB with co-attention model achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the real-world VQA dataset. Code available at this https URL.
To overcome this problem, Kim proposed the Multi-modal Low-rank Bilinear Pooling (MLB) approach based on the Hadamard product of two feature vectors (i.e., the image feature @math and the question feature @math ) in the common space with two low-rank projection matrices: @cite_22 : where @math and @math are the projection matrices, @math is the dimensionality of the output feature, and @math denotes the Hadamard product or the element-wise multiplication of two vectors. To further increase model capacity, nonlinear activation like @math is added after @math . Since the MLB approach can generate feature vectors with low dimensions and deep models with fewer parameters, it has achieved comparable performance to MCB. In @cite_22 , the experimental results indicated that MLB may lead to a slow convergence rate (the MLB with attention model takes 250k iterations, which is about 140 epochs, to converge @cite_22 ).
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Pooling second-order local feature statistics to form a high-dimensional bilinear feature has been shown to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a variety of fine-grained classification tasks. To address the computational demands of high feature dimensionality, we propose to represent the covariance features as a matrix and apply a low-rank bilinear classifier. The resulting classifier can be evaluated without explicitly computing the bilinear feature map which allows for a large reduction in the compute time as well as decreasing the effective number of parameters to be learned. To further compress the model, we propose a classifier co-decomposition that factorizes the collection of bilinear classifiers into a common factor and compact per-class terms. The co-decomposition idea can be deployed through two convolutional layers and trained in an end-to-end architecture. We suggest a simple yet effective initialization that avoids explicitly first training and factorizing the larger bilinear classifiers. Through extensive experiments, we show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on several public datasets for fine-grained classification trained with only category labels. Importantly, our final model is an order of magnitude smaller than the recently proposed compact bilinear model [8], and three orders smaller than the standard bilinear CNN model [19].