Co-Attending Free-Form Regions and Detections With Multi-Modal Multiplicative Feature Embedding for Visual Question Answering

Authors

  • Pan Lu Tsinghua University
  • Hongsheng Li The Chinese University of Hong Kong
  • Wei Zhang East China Normal University
  • Jianyong Wang Tsinghua University
  • Xiaogang Wang The Chinese University of Hong Kong

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v32i1.12240

Keywords:

Visual Question Answering, Multi-modal Embedding, Co-attention Mechanism, Object Detection

Abstract

Recently, the Visual Question Answering (VQA) task has gained increasing attention in artificial intelligence. Existing VQA methods mainly adopt the visual attention mechanism to associate the input question with corresponding image regions for effective question answering. The free-form region based and the detection-based visual attention mechanisms are mostly investigated, with the former ones attending free-form image regions and the latter ones attending pre-specified detection-box regions. We argue that the two attention mechanisms are able to provide complementary information and should be effectively integrated to better solve the VQA problem. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network for VQA that integrates both attention mechanisms. Our proposed framework effectively fuses features from free-form image regions, detection boxes, and question representations via a multi-modal multiplicative feature embedding scheme to jointly attend question-related free-form image regions and detection boxes for more accurate question answering. The proposed method is extensively evaluated on two publicly available datasets, COCO-QA and VQA, and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Source code is available at https://github.com/lupantech/dual-mfa-vqa.

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Published

2018-04-27

How to Cite

Lu, P., Li, H., Zhang, W., Wang, J., & Wang, X. (2018). Co-Attending Free-Form Regions and Detections With Multi-Modal Multiplicative Feature Embedding for Visual Question Answering. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 32(1). https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v32i1.12240