The ability of intelligent agents to play games in human-like fashion is popularly considered a benchmark of progress in Artificial Intelligence. Similarly, performance on multi-disciplinary tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA) is considered a marker for gauging progress in Computer Vision. In our work, we bring games and VQA together. Specifically, we introduce the first computational model aimed at Pictionary, the popular word-guessing social game. We first introduce Sketch-QA, an elementary version of Visual Question Answering task. Styled after Pictionary, Sketch-QA uses incrementally accumulated sketch stroke sequences as visual data. Notably, Sketch-QA involves asking a fixed question ("What object is being drawn?") and gathering open-ended guess-words from human guessers. We analyze the resulting dataset and present many interesting findings therein. To mimic Pictionary-style guessing, we subsequently propose a deep neural model which generates guess-words in response to temporally evolving human-drawn sketches. Our model even makes human-like mistakes while guessing, thus amplifying the human mimicry factor. We evaluate our model on the large-scale guess-word dataset generated via Sketch-QA task and compare with various baselines. We also conduct a Visual Turing Test to obtain human impressions of the guess-words generated by humans and our model. Experimental results demonstrate the promise of our approach for Pictionary and similarly themed games.
Since our model aims to mimic human-like guessing behavior, a subjective evaluation of generated guesses falls within the ambit of a Visual Turing Test @cite_32 @cite_18 @cite_12 . However, the free-form nature of guess-words and the ambiguity arising from partial stroke information make our task uniquely more challenging.
@cite_18 @cite_32 @cite_12
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As language and visual understanding by machines progresses rapidly, we are observing an increasing interest in holistic architectures that tightly interlink both modalities in a joint learning and inference process. This trend has allowed the community to progress towards more challenging and open tasks and refueled the hope at achieving the old AI dream of building machines that could pass a turing test in open domains. In order to steadily make progress towards this goal, we realize that quantifying performance becomes increasingly difficult. Therefore we ask how we can precisely define such challenges and how we can evaluate different algorithms on this open tasks? In this paper, we summarize and discuss such challenges as well as try to give answers where appropriate options are available in the literature. We exemplify some of the solutions on a recently presented dataset of question-answering task based on real-world indoor images that establishes a visual turing challenge. Finally, we argue despite the success of unique ground-truth annotation, we likely have to step away from carefully curated dataset and rather rely on 'social consensus' as the main driving force to create suitable benchmarks. Providing coverage in this inherently ambiguous output space is an emerging challenge that we face in order to make quantifiable progress in this area. Today, computer vision systems are tested by their accuracy in detecting and localizing instances of objects. As an alternative, and motivated by the ability of humans to provide far richer descriptions and even tell a story about an image, we construct a “visual Turing test”: an operator-assisted device that produces a stochastic sequence of binary questions from a given test image. The query engine proposes a question; the operator either provides the correct answer or rejects the question as ambiguous; the engine proposes the next question (“just-in-time truthing”). The test is then administered to the computer-vision system, one question at a time. After the system’s answer is recorded, the system is provided the correct answer and the next question. Parsing is trivial and deterministic; the system being tested requires no natural language processing. The query engine employs statistical constraints, learned from a training set, to produce questions with essentially unpredictable answers—the answer to a question, given the history of questions and their correct answers, is nearly equally likely to be positive or negative. In this sense, the test is only about vision. The system is designed to produce streams of questions that follow natural story lines, from the instantiation of a unique object, through an exploration of its properties, and on to its relationships with other uniquely instantiated objects. In this paper, we present the mQA model, which is able to answer questions about the content of an image. The answer can be a sentence, a phrase or a single word. Our model contains four components: a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to extract the question representation, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to extract the visual representation, an LSTM for storing the linguistic context in an answer, and a fusing component to combine the information from the first three components and generate the answer. We construct a Freestyle Multilingual Image Question Answering (FM-IQA) dataset to train and evaluate our mQA model. It contains over 150,000 images and 310,000 freestyle Chinese question-answer pairs and their English translations. The quality of the generated answers of our mQA model on this dataset is evaluated by human judges through a Turing Test. Specifically, we mix the answers provided by humans and our model. The human judges need to distinguish our model from the human. They will also provide a score (i.e. 0, 1, 2, the larger the better) indicating the quality of the answer. We propose strategies to monitor the quality of this evaluation process. The experiments show that in 64.7 of cases, the human judges cannot distinguish our model from humans. The average score is 1.454 (1.918 for human). The details of this work, including the FM-IQA dataset, can be found on the project page: this http URL