Title
Multi-source Multi-level Attention Networks for Visual Question Answering.
Abstract
In recent years, Visual Question Answering (VQA) has attracted increasing attention due to its requirement on cross-modal understanding and reasoning of vision and language. VQA is proposed to automatically answer natural language questions with reference to a given image. VQA is challenging, because the reasoning process on a visual domain needs a full understanding of the spatial relationship, semantic concepts, as well as the common sense for a real image. However, most existing approaches jointly embed the abstract low-level visual features and high-level question features to infer answers. These works have limited reasoning ability due to the lack of modeling of the rich spatial context of regions, high-level semantics of images, and knowledge across multiple sources. To solve the challenges, we propose multi-source multi-level attention networks for visual question answering that can benefit both spatial inferences by visual attention on context-aware region representation and reasoning by semantic attention on concepts as well as external knowledge. Indeed, we learn to reason on image representation by question-guided attention at different levels across multiple sources, including region and concept level representation from image source as well as sentence level representation from the external knowledge base. First, we encode region-based middle-level outputs from Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) into spatially embedded representation by a multi-directional two-dimensional recurrent neural network and, further, locate the answer-related regions by Multiple Layer Perceptron as visual attention. Second, we generate semantic concepts from high-level semantics in CNNs and select those question-related concepts as concept attention. Third, we query semantic knowledge from the general knowledge base by concepts and selected question-related knowledge as knowledge attention. Finally, we jointly optimize visual attention, concept attention, knowledge attention, and question embedding by a softmax classifier to infer the final answer. Extensive experiments show the proposed approach achieved significant improvement on two very challenging VQA datasets.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3316767
ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications
Keywords
Field
DocType
Visual question answering,attention model,multi-modal representations,visual relationship
Semantic memory,Question answering,Convolutional neural network,Computer science,Natural language,General knowledge,Natural language processing,Artificial intelligence,Knowledge base,Spatial contextual awareness,Multimedia,Semantics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
15
2s
1551-6857
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.35
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dongfei Yu140.74
Jianlong Fu219522.47
Xinmie Tian348738.43
Tao Mei44702288.54