This paper presents stacked attention networks (SANs) that learn to answer natural language questions from images. SANs use semantic representation of a question as query to search for the regions in an image that are related to the answer. We argue that image question answering (QA) often requires multiple steps of reasoning. Thus, we develop a multiple-layer SAN in which we query an image multiple times to infer the answer progressively. Experiments conducted on four image QA data sets demonstrate that the proposed SANs significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art approaches. The visualization of the attention layers illustrates the progress that the SAN locates the relevant visual clues that lead to the answer of the question layer-by-layer.

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 .

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.

We have seen great progress in basic perceptual tasks such as object recognition and detection. However, AI models still fail to match humans in high-level vision tasks due to the lack of capacities for deeper reasoning. Recently the new task of visual question answering (QA) has been proposed to evaluate a model's capacity for deep image understanding. Previous works have established a loose, global association between QA sentences and images. However, many questions and answers, in practice, relate to local regions in the images. We establish a semantic link between textual descriptions and image regions by object-level grounding. It enables a new type of QA with visual answers, in addition to textual answers used in previous work. We study the visual QA tasks in a grounded setting with a large collection of 7W multiple-choice QA pairs. Furthermore, we evaluate human performance and several baseline models on the QA tasks. Finally, we propose a novel LSTM model with spatial attention to tackle the 7W QA tasks.

Visual attention has been successfully applied in structural prediction tasks such as visual captioning and question answering. Existing visual attention models are generally spatial, i.e., the attention is modeled as spatial probabilities that re-weight the last conv-layer feature map of a CNN encoding an input image. However, we argue that such spatial attention does not necessarily conform to the attention mechanism -a dynamic feature extractor that combines contextual fixations over time, as CNN features are naturally spatial, channel-wise and multi-layer. In this paper, we introduce a novel convolutional neural network dubbed SCA-CNN that incorporates Spatial and Channelwise Attentions in a CNN. In the task of image captioning, SCA-CNN dynamically modulates the sentence generation context in multi-layer feature maps, encoding where (i.e., attentive spatial locations at multiple layers) and what (i.e., attentive channels) the visual attention is. We evaluate the proposed SCA-CNN architecture on three benchmark image captioning datasets: Flickr8K, Flickr30K, and MSCOCO. It is consistently observed that SCA-CNN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art visual attention-based image captioning methods.1 Each convolutional layer is optionally followed by a pooling, downsampling, normalization, or a fully connected layer.

We propose the task of free-form and open-ended Visual Question Answering (VQA). Given an image and a natural language question about the image, the task is to provide an accurate natural language answer. Mirroring real-world scenarios, such as helping the visually impaired, both the questions and answers are open-ended. Visual questions selectively target different areas of an image, including background details and underlying context. As a result, a system that succeeds at VQA typically needs a more detailed understanding of the image and complex reasoning than a system producing generic image captions. Moreover, VQA is amenable to automatic evaluation, since many open-ended answers contain only a few words or a closed set of answers that can be provided in a multiple-choice format. We provide a dataset containing ∼0.25M images, ∼0.76M questions, and ∼10M answers (www.visualqa.org), and discuss the information it provides. Numerous baselines and methods for VQA are provided and compared with human performance. Our VQA demo is available on CloudCV (http://cloudcv.org/vqa).

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.

自动在自然语言中自动生成图像的描述称为图像字幕。这是一个积极的研究主题，位于人工智能，计算机视觉和自然语言处理中两个主要领域的交集。图像字幕是图像理解中的重要挑战之一，因为它不仅需要识别图像中的显着对象，还需要其属性及其相互作用的方式。然后，系统必须生成句法和语义上正确的标题，该标题描述了自然语言的图像内容。鉴于深度学习模型的重大进展及其有效编码大量图像并生成正确句子的能力，最近已经提出了几种基于神经的字幕方法，每种方法都试图达到更好的准确性和标题质量。本文介绍了一个基于编码器的图像字幕系统，其中编码器使用以RESNET-101作为骨干为骨干来提取图像中每个区域的空间和全局特征。此阶段之后是一个精致的模型，该模型使用注意力进行注意的机制来提取目标图像对象的视觉特征，然后确定其相互作用。解码器由一个基于注意力的复发模块和一个反思性注意模块组成，该模块会协作地将注意力应用于视觉和文本特征，以增强解码器对长期顺序依赖性建模的能力。在两个基准数据集（MSCOCO和FLICKR30K）上进行的广泛实验显示了提出的方法和生成的字幕的高质量。

视觉问题应答（VQA）是一个具有挑战性的任务，在计算机视觉和自然语言处理领域中引起了越来越多的关注。然而，目前的视觉问题回答具有语言偏差问题，这减少了模型的稳健性，对视觉问题的实际应用产生了不利影响。在本文中，我们首次对该领域进行了全面的审查和分析，并根据三个类别对现有方法进行分类，包括增强视觉信息，弱化语言前瞻，数据增强和培训策略。与此同时，依次介绍相关的代表方法，依次汇总和分析。揭示和分类语言偏见的原因。其次，本文介绍了主要用于测试的数据集，并报告各种现有方法的实验结果。最后，我们讨论了该领域的可能的未来研究方向。

Visual question answering is fundamentally compositional in nature-a question like where is the dog? shares substructure with questions like what color is the dog? and where is the cat? This paper seeks to simultaneously exploit the representational capacity of deep networks and the compositional linguistic structure of questions. We describe a procedure for constructing and learning neural module networks, which compose collections of jointly-trained neural "modules" into deep networks for question answering. Our approach decomposes questions into their linguistic substructures, and uses these structures to dynamically instantiate modular networks (with reusable components for recognizing dogs, classifying colors, etc.). The resulting compound networks are jointly trained. We evaluate our approach on two challenging datasets for visual question answering, achieving state-of-the-art results on both the VQA natural image dataset and a new dataset of complex questions about abstract shapes.

We propose a hierarchical attention network for document classification. Our model has two distinctive characteristics: (i) it has a hierarchical structure that mirrors the hierarchical structure of documents; (ii) it has two levels of attention mechanisms applied at the wordand sentence-level, enabling it to attend differentially to more and less important content when constructing the document representation. Experiments conducted on six large scale text classification tasks demonstrate that the proposed architecture outperform previous methods by a substantial margin. Visualization of the attention layers illustrates that the model selects qualitatively informative words and sentences.

A number of studies have found that today's Visual Question Answering (VQA) models are heavily driven by superficial correlations in the training data and lack sufficient image grounding. To encourage development of models geared towards the latter, we propose a new setting for VQA where for every question type, train and test sets have different prior distributions of answers. Specifically, we present new splits of the VQA v1 and VQA v2 datasets, which we call Visual Question Answering under Changing Priors (VQA-CP v1 and VQA-CP v2 respectively). First, we evaluate several existing VQA models under this new setting and show that their performance degrades significantly compared to the original VQA setting. Second, we propose a novel Grounded Visual Question Answering model (GVQA) that contains inductive biases and restrictions in the architecture specifically designed to prevent the model from 'cheating' by primarily relying on priors in the training data. Specifically, GVQA explicitly disentangles the recognition of visual concepts present in the image from the identification of plausible answer space for a given question, enabling the model to more robustly generalize across different distributions of answers. GVQA is built off an existing VQA model -Stacked Attention Networks (SAN). Our experiments demonstrate that GVQA significantly outperforms SAN on both VQA-CP v1 and VQA-CP v2 datasets. Interestingly, it also outperforms more powerful VQA models such as Multimodal Compact Bilinear Pooling (MCB) in several cases. GVQA offers strengths complementary to SAN when trained and evaluated on the original VQA v1 and VQA v2 datasets. Finally, GVQA is more transparent and interpretable than existing VQA models.

We present an approach named JSFusion (Joint Sequence Fusion) that can measure semantic similarity between any pairs of multimodal sequence data (e.g. a video clip and a language sentence). Our multimodal matching network consists of two key components. First, the Joint Semantic Tensor composes a dense pairwise representation of two sequence data into a 3D tensor. Then, the Convolutional Hierarchical Decoder computes their similarity score by discovering hidden hierarchical matches between the two sequence modalities. Both modules leverage hierarchical attention mechanisms that learn to promote well-matched representation patterns while prune out misaligned ones in a bottom-up manner. Although the JSFusion is a universal model to be applicable to any multimodal sequence data, this work focuses on video-language tasks including multimodal retrieval and video QA. We evaluate the JS-Fusion model in three retrieval and VQA tasks in LSMDC, for which our model achieves the best performance reported so far. We also perform multiple-choice and movie retrieval tasks for the MSR-VTT dataset, on which our approach outperforms many state-of-the-art methods.

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。

视觉问题回答是自然语言和愿景理解的重要任务。但是，在大多数公众视觉问题上回答了诸如VQA，CLEVR之类的数据集，这些问题是针对给定图像的特定于“她的眼睛是什么颜色？”的人类产生的。人类产生的众包问题相对简单，有时对某些实体或属性有偏见。在本文中，我们介绍了一个基于Image-Chiqa的新问题回答数据集。它包含Internet用户发布的现实查询，并结合了几个相关的开放域图像。系统应确定图像是否可以回答问题。与以前的VQA数据集不同，这些问题是现实世界中独立的查询，这些查询更加各种和无偏见。与先前的图像回程或图像捕获数据集相比，Chiqa不仅衡量了相关性，而且还可以衡量答案性，这需要更细粒度的视力和语言推理。 Chiqa包含超过40k的问题和超过200k的问题图像对。将三级2/1/0标签分配给每个对，指示完美的答案，部分答案和无关紧要。数据分析表明，Chiqa需要对语言和视觉有深入的了解，包括接地，比较和阅读。我们评估了几种最先进的视觉语言模型，例如ALBEF，表明仍然有一个很大的改进奇卡的空间。

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

Figure 1: Our MovieQA dataset contains 14,944 questions about 408 movies. It contains multiple sources of information: plots, subtitles, video clips, scripts, and DVS transcriptions. In this figure we show example QAs from The Matrix and localize them in the timeline.

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。

We propose a technique for producing 'visual explanations' for decisions from a large class of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based models, making them more transparent and explainable.Our approach -Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), uses the gradients of any target concept (say 'dog' in a classification network or a sequence of words in captioning network) flowing into the final convolutional layer to produce a coarse localization map highlighting the important regions in the image for predicting the concept.Unlike previous approaches, Grad-CAM is applicable to a wide variety of CNN model-families: (1) CNNs with fullyconnected layers (e.g. VGG), (2) CNNs used for structured outputs (e.g. captioning), (3) CNNs used in tasks with multimodal inputs (e.g. visual question answering) or reinforcement learning, all without architectural changes or re-training. We combine Grad-CAM with existing fine-grained visualizations to create a high-resolution class-discriminative vi-

Visual understanding goes well beyond object recognition. With one glance at an image, we can effortlessly imagine the world beyond the pixels: for instance, we can infer people's actions, goals, and mental states. While this task is easy for humans, it is tremendously difficult for today's vision systems, requiring higher-order cognition and commonsense reasoning about the world. We formalize this task as Visual Commonsense Reasoning. Given a challenging question about an image, a machine must answer correctly and then provide a rationale justifying its answer.Next, we introduce a new dataset, VCR, consisting of 290k multiple choice QA problems derived from 110k movie scenes. The key recipe for generating non-trivial and highquality problems at scale is Adversarial Matching, a new approach to transform rich annotations into multiple choice questions with minimal bias. Experimental results show that while humans find VCR easy (over 90% accuracy), state-of-the-art vision models struggle (∼45%).To move towards cognition-level understanding, we present a new reasoning engine, Recognition to Cognition Networks (R2C), that models the necessary layered inferences for grounding, contextualization, and reasoning. R2C helps narrow the gap between humans and machines (∼65%); still, the challenge is far from solved, and we provide analysis that suggests avenues for future work.