Visual Question Answering (VQA) requires a finegrained and simultaneous understanding of both the visual content of images and the textual content of questions. Therefore, designing an effective 'co-attention' model to associate key words in questions with key objects in images is central to VQA performance. So far, most successful attempts at co-attention learning have been achieved by using shallow models, and deep co-attention models show little improvement over their shallow counterparts. In this paper, we propose a deep Modular Co-Attention Network (MCAN) that consists of Modular Co-Attention (MCA) layers cascaded in depth. Each MCA layer models the self-attention of questions and images, as well as the guided-attention of images jointly using a modular composition of two basic attention units. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate MCAN on the benchmark VQA-v2 dataset and conduct extensive ablation studies to explore the reasons behind MCAN's effectiveness.Experimental results demonstrate that MCAN significantly outperforms the previous state-ofthe-art. Our best single model delivers 70.63% overall accuracy on the test-dev set.Code is available at https://github.com/MILVLG/mcan-vqa.

Attention networks in multimodal learning provide an efficient way to utilize given visual information selectively. However, the computational cost to learn attention distributions for every pair of multimodal input channels is prohibitively expensive. To solve this problem, co-attention builds two separate attention distributions for each modality neglecting the interaction between multimodal inputs. In this paper, we propose bilinear attention networks (BAN) that find bilinear attention distributions to utilize given vision-language information seamlessly. BAN considers bilinear interactions among two groups of input channels, while low-rank bilinear pooling extracts the joint representations for each pair of channels. Furthermore, we propose a variant of multimodal residual networks to exploit eight-attention maps of the BAN efficiently. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate our model on visual question answering (VQA 2.0) and Flickr30k Entities datasets, showing that BAN significantly outperforms previous methods and achieves new state-of-the-arts on both datasets.

视觉问题应答（VQA）任务利用视觉图像和语言分析来回回答图像的文本问题。它是一个流行的研究课题，在过去十年中越来越多的现实应用。本文介绍了我们最近对AliceMind-MMU的研究（阿里巴巴的编码器 - 解码器来自Damo Academy - 多媒体理解的机器智能实验室），其比人类在VQA上获得相似甚至略微更好的结果。这是通过系统地改善VQA流水线来实现的，包括：（1）具有全面的视觉和文本特征表示的预培训; （2）与学习参加的有效跨模型互动; （3）一个新颖的知识挖掘框架，具有专门的专业专家模块，适用于复杂的VQA任务。处理不同类型的视觉问题，需要具有相应的专业知识在提高我们的VQA架构的表现方面发挥着重要作用，这取决于人力水平。进行了广泛的实验和分析，以证明新的研究工作的有效性。

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its applications have sparked extraordinary interest in recent years. This achievement can be ascribed in part to advances in AI subfields including Machine Learning (ML), Computer Vision (CV), and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Deep learning, a sub-field of machine learning that employs artificial neural network concepts, has enabled the most rapid growth in these domains. The integration of vision and language has sparked a lot of attention as a result of this. The tasks have been created in such a way that they properly exemplify the concepts of deep learning. In this review paper, we provide a thorough and an extensive review of the state of the arts approaches, key models design principles and discuss existing datasets, methods, their problem formulation and evaluation measures for VQA and Visual reasoning tasks to understand vision and language representation learning. We also present some potential future paths in this field of research, with the hope that our study may generate new ideas and novel approaches to handle existing difficulties and develop new applications.

Vision-and-language reasoning requires an understanding of visual concepts, language semantics, and, most importantly, the alignment and relationships between these two modalities. We thus propose the LXMERT (Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers) framework to learn these vision-and-language connections. In LXMERT, we build a large-scale Transformer model that consists of three encoders: an object relationship encoder, a language encoder, and a cross-modality encoder. Next, to endow our model with the capability of connecting vision and language semantics, we pre-train the model with large amounts of image-and-sentence pairs, via five diverse representative pre-training tasks: masked language modeling, masked object prediction (feature regression and label classification), cross-modality matching, and image question answering. These tasks help in learning both intra-modality and cross-modality relationships. After fine-tuning from our pretrained parameters, our model achieves the state-of-the-art results on two visual question answering datasets (i.e., VQA and GQA). We also show the generalizability of our pretrained cross-modality model by adapting it to a challenging visual-reasoning task, NLVR 2 , and improve the previous best result by 22% absolute (54% to 76%). Lastly, we demonstrate detailed ablation studies to prove that both our novel model components and pretraining strategies significantly contribute to our strong results; and also present several attention visualizations for the different encoders. 1

根据图像回答语义复杂的问题是在视觉问题应答（VQA）任务中的具有挑战性。虽然图像可以通过深度学习来良好代表，但是始终简单地嵌入问题，并且不能很好地表明它的含义。此外，视觉和文本特征具有不同模式的间隙，很难对齐和利用跨模块信息。在本文中，我们专注于这两个问题，并提出了一种匹配关注（GMA）网络的图表。首先，它不仅为图像构建图形，而且在句法和嵌入信息方面构建了该问题的图表。接下来，我们通过双级图形编码器探讨了模特内的关系，然后呈现双边跨模型图匹配注意力以推断图像与问题之间的关系。然后将更新的跨模式特征发送到答案预测模块中以进行最终答案预测。实验表明，我们的网络在GQA数据集和VQA 2.0数据集上达到了最先进的性能。消融研究验证了GMA网络中每个模块的有效性。

以前的研究如vizwiz发现，可以阅读的视觉问题（VQA）系统可以阅读和图像中的文本的理由在辅助视觉上受损人群的应用领域很有用。 TextVQA是一个用于这个问题的VQA数据集，其中问题需要回答系统来读取和理由图像中的视觉对象和文本对象。 TextVQA中的一个关键挑战是系统的设计，有效地是单独的视觉和文本对象的理由，而且还有关于这些对象之间的空间关系。这激励了使用“边缘特征”，即关于每对对象之间的关系的信息。一些当前TextVQA模型解决了这个问题，但只使用关系类别（而不是边缘特征向量），或者不要在变压器架构中使用边缘功能。为了克服这些缺点，我们提出了一种曲线图形关系变压器（GRT），除了节点信息之外，还使用边缘信息进行变压器中的图注意计算。我们发现，在不使用任何其他优化的情况下，所提出的GRT方法优于M4C基线模型的精度0.65％在Val Set上的精度和测试集0.57％。定性，我们观察到GRT对M4C具有卓越的空间推理能力。

A number of recent works have proposed attention models for Visual Question Answering (VQA) that generate spatial maps highlighting image regions relevant to answering the question. In this paper, we argue that in addition to modeling "where to look" or visual attention, it is equally important to model "what words to listen to" or question attention. We present a novel co-attention model for VQA that jointly reasons about image and question attention. In addition, our model reasons about the question (and consequently the image via the co-attention mechanism) in a hierarchical fashion via a novel 1-dimensional convolution neural networks (CNN). Our model improves the state-of-the-art on the VQA dataset from 60.3% to 60.5%, and from 61.6% to 63.3% on the COCO-QA dataset. By using ResNet, the performance is further improved to 62.1% for VQA and 65.4% for COCO-QA. 1 .

多模式变压器表现出高容量和灵活性，可将图像和文本对齐以进行视觉接地。然而，由于自我发挥操作的二次时间复杂性，仅编码的接地框架（例如，transvg）遭受了沉重的计算。为了解决这个问题，我们通过将整个接地过程解散为编码和解码阶段，提出了一种新的多模式变压器体系结构，以动态MDETR形成。关键观察是，图像中存在很高的空间冗余。因此，我们通过在加快视觉接地过程之前利用这种稀疏性来设计一种新的动态多模式变压器解码器。具体而言，我们的动态解码器由2D自适应采样模块和文本引导的解码模块组成。采样模块旨在通过预测参考点的偏移来选择这些信息补丁，而解码模块则可以通过在图像功能和文本功能之间执行交叉注意来提取接地对象信息。这两个模块也被堆叠起来，以逐渐弥合模态间隙，并迭代地完善接地对象的参考点，最终实现了视觉接地的目的。对五个基准测试的广泛实验表明，我们提出的动态MDETR实现了计算和准确性之间的竞争权衡。值得注意的是，在解码器中仅使用9％的特征点，我们可以降低〜44％的多模式变压器的GLOP，但仍然比仅编码器的对应物更高的精度。此外，为了验证其概括能力并扩展我们的动态MDETR，我们构建了第一个单级剪辑授权的视觉接地框架，并在这些基准测试中实现最先进的性能。

用于视觉语言表示学习的变压器已经引起了很多兴趣，并在视觉问题答案（VQA）和接地方面表现出了巨大的表现。但是，大多数显示出良好性能的系统在培训过程中仍然依赖于预训练的对象探测器，这将其适用性限制在可用于这些检测器的对象类中。为了减轻这种限制，以下论文着重于在变形金刚中的视觉问题答案的背景下进行弱监督的基础问题。该方法通过将每个视觉令牌分组在视觉编码器中，并使用语言自我发项层作为文本引导选择模块来利用胶囊，以在将它们转发到下一层之前掩盖它们。我们评估了针对挑战的GQA以及VQA帽数据集的VQA接地的方法。我们的实验表明：在从标准变压器体系结构中删除蒙版对象的信息的同时，胶囊的集成显着提高了此类系统的接地能力，并提供了与其他新的最先进的结果。在现场接近。

Most TextVQA approaches focus on the integration of objects, scene texts and question words by a simple transformer encoder. But this fails to capture the semantic relations between different modalities. The paper proposes a Scene Graph based co-Attention Network (SceneGATE) for TextVQA, which reveals the semantic relations among the objects, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tokens and the question words. It is achieved by a TextVQA-based scene graph that discovers the underlying semantics of an image. We created a guided-attention module to capture the intra-modal interplay between the language and the vision as a guidance for inter-modal interactions. To make explicit teaching of the relations between the two modalities, we proposed and integrated two attention modules, namely a scene graph-based semantic relation-aware attention and a positional relation-aware attention. We conducted extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, Text-VQA and ST-VQA. It is shown that our SceneGATE method outperformed existing ones because of the scene graph and its attention modules.

Large-scale pre-training methods of learning cross-modal representations on image-text pairs are becoming popular for vision-language tasks. While existing methods simply concatenate image region features and text features as input to the model to be pre-trained and use selfattention to learn image-text semantic alignments in a brute force manner, in this paper, we propose a new learning method Oscar 1 , which uses object tags detected in images as anchor points to significantly ease the learning of alignments. Our method is motivated by the observation that the salient objects in an image can be accurately detected, and are often mentioned in the paired text. We pre-train an Oscar model on the public corpus of 6.5 million text-image pairs, and fine-tune it on downstream tasks, creating new state-of-the-arts on six well-established vision-language understanding and generation tasks. 2

视觉问题回答（VQA）本质上是从根本上组成的，许多问题仅通过将它们分解为模块化子问题就可以回答。最新提出的神经模块网络（NMN）采用此策略来问答案，而在现成的布局解析器或有关网络体系结构设计的其他专家政策中，而不是从数据中学习。这些策略导致对输入的语义复杂差异的适应性不令人满意，从而阻碍了模型的表示能力和概括性。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一个语义吸引的模块化胶囊路由框架，称为Super，以更好地捕获特定实例的视觉 - 语义特征并完善预测的判别性表示。特别是，在超级网络的每一层中都定制了五个功能强大的专用模块以及动态路由器，并构造了紧凑的路由空间，使得可以充分利用各种可自定义的路由，并且可以明确校准视觉声称表示。我们相对证明，我们提出的超级方案在五个基准数据集以及参数效率优势上的有效性和概括能力合理。值得强调的是，这项工作不是在VQA中追求最先进的结果。取而代之的是，我们希望我们的模型有责任为VQA提供建筑学习和表示校准的新颖观点。

近年来，多模态变压器在视觉语言任务中显示出显着进展，例如视觉问题应答（VQA），以相当多的余量优于以前的架构。 VQA的这种改进通常归因于视觉和语言流之间的丰富相互作用。在这项工作中，我们研究了共同关注变压器层在回答问题时帮助网络专注于相关区域的功效。我们使用这些共同关注层中的质询图像注意力分数来生成视觉注意图。我们评估以下关键组分对最先进的VQA模型的视觉注意的影响：（i）对象区域提案数，（ii）言语（POS）标签的问题部分，（iii）问题语义，（iv）共同关注层数，和（v）答案准确性。我们比较神经网络注意力地图对人类注意力地图的定性和定量。我们的研究结果表明，在给出一个问题的情况下，共同关注变压器模块对图像的相关区域至关重要。重要的是，我们观察到问题的语义含义不是驱动视觉关注的，但问题中的特定关键词是。我们的工作揭示了关注变压器层的功能和解释，突出了当前网络中的差距，并指导了同时处理视觉和语言流的未来VQA模型和网络的开发。

Transformer-based architectures represent the state of the art in sequence modeling tasks like machine translation and language understanding. Their applicability to multi-modal contexts like image captioning, however, is still largely under-explored. With the aim of filling this gap, we present M 2 -a Meshed Transformer with Memory for Image Captioning. The architecture improves both the image encoding and the language generation steps: it learns a multi-level representation of the relationships between image regions integrating learned a priori knowledge, and uses a mesh-like connectivity at decoding stage to exploit low-and high-level features. Experimentally, we investigate the performance of the M 2 Transformer and different fully-attentive models in comparison with recurrent ones. When tested on COCO, our proposal achieves a new state of the art in single-model and ensemble configurations on the "Karpathy" test split and on the online test server. We also assess its performances when describing objects unseen in the training set. Trained models and code for reproducing the experiments are publicly

Top-down visual attention mechanisms have been used extensively in image captioning and visual question answering (VQA) to enable deeper image understanding through fine-grained analysis and even multiple steps of reasoning. In this work, we propose a combined bottom-up and topdown attention mechanism that enables attention to be calculated at the level of objects and other salient image regions. This is the natural basis for attention to be considered. Within our approach, the bottom-up mechanism (based on Faster R-CNN) proposes image regions, each with an associated feature vector, while the top-down mechanism determines feature weightings. Applying this approach to image captioning, our results on the MSCOCO test server establish a new state-of-the-art for the task, achieving CIDEr / SPICE / BLEU-4 scores of 117.9, 21.5 and 36.9, respectively. Demonstrating the broad applicability of the method, applying the same approach to VQA we obtain first place in the 2017 VQA Challenge.

Joint image-text embedding is the bedrock for most Visionand-Language (V+L) tasks, where multimodality inputs are simultaneously processed for joint visual and textual understanding. In this paper, we introduce UNITER, a UNiversal Image-TExt Representation, learned through large-scale pre-training over four image-text datasets (COCO, Visual Genome, Conceptual Captions, and SBU Captions), which can power heterogeneous downstream V+L tasks with joint multimodal embeddings. We design four pre-training tasks: Masked Language Modeling (MLM), Masked Region Modeling (MRM, with three variants), Image-Text Matching (ITM), and Word-Region Alignment (WRA). Different from previous work that applies joint random masking to both modalities, we use conditional masking on pre-training tasks (i.e., masked language/region modeling is conditioned on full observation of image/text). In addition to ITM for global image-text alignment, we also propose WRA via the use of Optimal Transport (OT) to explicitly encourage finegrained alignment between words and image regions during pre-training. Comprehensive analysis shows that both conditional masking and OTbased WRA contribute to better pre-training. We also conduct a thorough ablation study to find an optimal combination of pre-training tasks. Extensive experiments show that UNITER achieves new state of the art across six V+L tasks (over nine datasets), including Visual Question

在本文中，我们提出了端到端的结构化多峰关注（SMA）神经网络，主要解决了上述前两个问题。 SMA首先使用结构图表示来编码图像中出现的对象对象，对象文本和文本文本关系，然后设计多模式图注意网络以推理它。最后，由上述模块的输出由全局本地注意力应答模块处理，以通过跟随M4C迭代地生成从两个OCR和常规词汇拼接的答案。我们所提出的模型优于TextVQA数据集上的SOTA模型以及除基于预先训练的水龙头之外的所有模型中的所有模型中的ST-VQA数据集的两个任务。展示了强大的推理能力，它还在TextVQA挑战中获得了第一名的第一名。我们在几种推理模型中广泛测试了不同的OCR方法，并调查了逐步提高了OCR性能对TextVQA基准的影响。通过更好的OCR结果，不同的型号对VQA准确性的戏剧性提高，但我们的模型受益最强烈的文本视觉推理能力。要授予我们的方法，并为进一步作品提供公平的测试基础，我们还为TextVQA数据集提供人为的地面实际OCR注释，这些ocr注释未在原始版本中提供。 TextVQA数据集的代码和地面ocr注释在https://github.com/chenyugao-cs/sma提供

We present an effective method for fusing visual-and-language representations for several question answering tasks including visual question answering and visual entailment. In contrast to prior works that concatenate unimodal representations or use only cross-attention, we compose multimodal representations via channel fusion. By fusing on the channels, the model is able to more effectively align the tokens compared to standard methods. These multimodal representations, which we call compound tokens are generated with cross-attention transformer layers. First, vision tokens are used as queries to retrieve compatible text tokens through cross-attention. We then chain the vision tokens and the queried text tokens along the channel dimension. We call the resulting representations compound tokens. A second group of compound tokens are generated using an analogous process where the text tokens serve as queries to the cross-attention layer. We concatenate all the compound tokens for further processing with multimodal encoder. We demonstrate the effectiveness of compound tokens using an encoder-decoder vision-language model trained end-to-end in the open-vocabulary setting. Compound Tokens achieve highly competitive performance across a range of question answering tasks including GQA, VQA2.0, and SNLI-VE.

我们启动了对MLP架构进行了视觉和语言（VL）融合的第一个实证研究。通过对5 VL任务和5个强大的VQA基准测试的广泛实验，我们发现：（i）没有预先训练，使用MLP进行多模式融合，与变压器相比具有明显的性能差距; （ii）但是，VL预培训可以帮助关闭性能差距; （iii）代替重大的多主头注意力，将微小的单臂注意MLPS增加足以实现对变压器的可比性。此外，我们还发现，当在更难的鲁棒VQA基准测试时，MLP和变压器之间的性能差距不会扩大，建议使用MLP融合可以大致呈现与使用变压器相似的程度。这些结果提示MLP可以有效地学会对准从较低级别的编码器中提取的视觉和文本功能，而不依赖于自我关注。基于此，我们提出了一个更大胆的问题：我们可以为VL建模提供全部MLP架构，其中VL融合和视觉编码器都用MLPS替换吗？我们的结果表明，与最先进的全功能VL模型相比，全部MLP VL模型是当它们都获得预先培训的时型vl模型。然而，预先培训ALL-MLP可能令人惊讶地实现比没有预先训练的完整变压器模型更好的平均分数。这表明VL建模的MLP样架构的大规模预培训的潜力，并激发了未来的研究方向，简化了较少的归纳设计偏差的良好的VL建模。我们的代码可公开提供：https://github.com/easonnie/mlp-vil