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
In this paper, we present a multimodal Recurrent Neural Network (m-RNN) model for generating novel image captions. It directly models the probability distribution of generating a word given previous words and an image. Image captions are generated by sampling from this distribution. The model consists of two sub-networks: a deep recurrent neural network for sentences and a deep convolutional network for images. These two sub-networks interact with each other in a multimodal layer to form the whole m-RNN model. The effectiveness of our model is validated on four benchmark datasets (IAPR TC-12, Flickr 8K, Flickr 30K and MS COCO). Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we apply the m-RNN model to retrieval tasks for retrieving images or sentences, and achieves significant performance improvement over the state-of-the-art methods which directly optimize the ranking objective function for retrieval. The project page of this work is: www.stat.ucla.edu junhua.mao m-RNN.html .