Integrating Image Features with Convolutional Sequence-to-sequence Network for Multilingual Visual Question Answering

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a task that requires computers to give correct answers for the input questions based on the images. This task can be solved by humans with ease but is a challenge for computers. The VLSP2022-EVJVQA shared task carries the Visual Question Answering task in the multilingual domain on a newly released dataset: UIT-EVJVQA, in which the questions and answers are written in three different languages: English, Vietnamese and Japanese. We approached the challenge as a sequence-to-sequence learning task, in which we integrated hints from pre-trained state-of-the-art VQA models and image features with Convolutional Sequence-to-Sequence network to generate the desired answers. Our results obtained up to 0.3442 by F1 score on the public test set, 0.4210 on the private test set, and placed 3rd in the competition.Comment: VLSP2022-EVJVQ

Semantics for vision-and-language understanding

Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence have led to several breakthroughs in many heterogeneous scientific fields, such as the prediction of protein structures or self-driving cars. These results are obtained by means of Machine Learning techniques, which make it possible to automatically learn from the available annotated examples a mathematical model capable of solving the task. One of its sub-fields, Deep Learning, brought further improvements by providing the possibility to also compute an informative and non-redundant representation for each example by means of the same learning process. To successfully solve the task under analysis, the model needs to overcome the generalization gap, meaning that it needs to work well both on the training data, and on examples which are drawn from the same distribution but are never observed at training time. Several heuristics are often used to overcome this gap, such as the introduction of inductive biases when modeling the data or the usage of regularization techniques; however, a popular way consists in collecting and annotating more examples hoping they can cover the cases which were not previously observed. In particular, recent state-of-the-art solutions use hundreds of millions or even billions of annotated examples, and the underlying trend seems to imply that the collection and annotation of more and more examples should be the prominent way to overcome the generalization gap. However, there are many fields, e.g. medical fields, in which it is difficult to collect such a large amount of examples, and producing high quality annotations is even more arduous and costly. During my Ph.D. and in this thesis, I designed and proposed several solutions which address the generalization gap in three different domains by leveraging semantic aspects of the available data. In particular, the first part of the thesis includes techniques which create new annotations for the data under analysis: these include data augmentation techniques, which are used to compute variations of the annotations by means of semantics-preserving transformations, and transfer learning, which is used in the scope of this thesis to automatically generate textual descriptions for a set of images. In the second part of the thesis, this gap is reduced by customizing the training objective based on the semantics of the annotations. By means of these customizations, a problem is shifted from the commonly used single-task setting to a multi-task learning setting by designing an additional task, and then two variations of a standard loss function are proposed by introducing semantic knowledge into the training process

Advancing Multi-Modal Deep Learning: Towards Language-Grounded Visual Understanding

Using deep learning, computer vision now rivals people at object recognition and detection, opening doors to tackle new challenges in image understanding. Among these challenges, understanding and reasoning about language grounded visual content is of fundamental importance to advancing artificial intelligence. Recently, multiple datasets and algorithms have been created as proxy tasks towards this goal, with visual question answering (VQA) being the most widely studied. In VQA, an algorithm needs to produce an answer to a natural language question about an image. However, our survey of datasets and algorithms for VQA uncovered several sources of dataset bias and sub-optimal evaluation metrics that allowed algorithms to perform well by merely exploiting superficial statistical patterns. In this dissertation, we describe new algorithms and datasets that address these issues. We developed two new datasets and evaluation metrics that enable a more accurate measurement of abilities of a VQA model, and also expand VQA to include new abilities, such as reading text, handling out-of-vocabulary words, and understanding data-visualization. We also created new algorithms for VQA that have helped advance the state-of-the-art for VQA, including an algorithm that surpasses humans on two different chart question answering datasets about bar-charts, line-graphs and pie charts. Finally, we provide a holistic overview of several yet-unsolved challenges in not only VQA but vision and language research at large. Despite enormous progress, we find that a robust understanding and integration of vision and language is still an elusive goal, and much of the progress may be misleading due to dataset bias, superficial correlations and flaws in standard evaluation metrics. We carefully study and categorize these issues for several vision and language tasks and outline several possible paths towards development of safe, robust and trustworthy AI for language-grounded visual understanding

Application of multimodal machine learning to visual question answering

Master’s Degree in ICT Research and Innovation (i2-ICT)Due to the great advances in Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision in recent yearswith neural networks and attention mechanisms, a great interest in VQA has been awakened,starting to be considered as the ”Visual Turing Test” for modern AI systems, since it is aboutanswering a question from an image, where the system has to learn to understand and reasonabout the image and question shown. One of the main reasons for this great interest is thelarge number of potential applications that these systems allow, such as medical applicationsfor diagnosis through an image, assistants for blind people, e-learning applications, etc.In this Master’s thesis, a study of the state of the art of VQA is proposed, investigatingboth techniques and existing datasets. Finally, a development is carried out in order to try toreproduce the results of the art with the latest VQA models with the aim of being able to applythem and experiment on new datasets.Therefore, in this work, experiments are carried out with a first VQA model, MoViE+MCAN[1] [2] (winner of the 2020 VQA Challenge), which after observing its non-viability due toresource issues, we switched to the LXMERT Model [3], which consists of a pre-trained modelin 5 subtasks, which allows us to perform fine-tunnig on several tasks, which in this specificcase is the VQA task on the VQA v2.0 [4] dataset.As the main result of this Thesis we experimentally show that LXMERT provides similarresults to MoViE-MCAN (the best known method for VQA) in the most recent and demandingbenchmarks with less resources starting from the pre-trained model provided by the GitHubrepository [5]

Adversarial content manipulation for analyzing and improving model robustness

The recent rapid progress in machine learning systems has opened up many real-world applications --- from recommendation engines on web platforms to safety critical systems like autonomous vehicles. A model deployed in the real-world will often encounter inputs far from its training distribution. For example, a self-driving car might come across a black stop sign in the wild. To ensure safe operation, it is vital to quantify the robustness of machine learning models to such out-of-distribution data before releasing them into the real-world. However, the standard paradigm of benchmarking machine learning models with fixed size test sets drawn from the same distribution as the training data is insufficient to identify these corner cases efficiently. In principle, if we could generate all valid variations of an input and measure the model response, we could quantify and guarantee model robustness locally. Yet, doing this with real world data is not scalable. In this thesis, we propose an alternative, using generative models to create synthetic data variations at scale and test robustness of target models to these variations. We explore methods to generate semantic data variations in a controlled fashion across visual and text modalities. We build generative models capable of performing controlled manipulation of data like changing visual context, editing appearance of an object in images or changing writing style of text. Leveraging these generative models we propose tools to study robustness of computer vision systems to input variations and systematically identify failure modes. In the text domain, we deploy these generative models to improve diversity of image captioning systems and perform writing style manipulation to obfuscate private attributes of the user. Our studies quantifying model robustness explore two kinds of input manipulations, model-agnostic and model-targeted. The model-agnostic manipulations leverage human knowledge to choose the kinds of changes without considering the target model being tested. This includes automatically editing images to remove objects not directly relevant to the task and create variations in visual context. Alternatively, in the model-targeted approach the input variations performed are directly adversarially guided by the target model. For example, we adversarially manipulate the appearance of an object in the image to fool an object detector, guided by the gradients of the detector. Using these methods, we measure and improve the robustness of various computer vision systems -- specifically image classification, segmentation, object detection and visual question answering systems -- to semantic input variations.Der schnelle Fortschritt von Methoden des maschinellen Lernens hat viele neue Anwendungen ermöglicht – von Recommender-Systemen bis hin zu sicherheitskritischen Systemen wie autonomen Fahrzeugen. In der realen Welt werden diese Systeme oft mit Eingaben außerhalb der Verteilung der Trainingsdaten konfrontiert. Zum Beispiel könnte ein autonomes Fahrzeug einem schwarzen Stoppschild begegnen. Um sicheren Betrieb zu gewährleisten, ist es entscheidend, die Robustheit dieser Systeme zu quantifizieren, bevor sie in der Praxis eingesetzt werden. Aktuell werden diese Modelle auf festen Eingaben von derselben Verteilung wie die Trainingsdaten evaluiert. Allerdings ist diese Strategie unzureichend, um solche Ausnahmefälle zu identifizieren. Prinzipiell könnte die Robustheit “lokal” bestimmt werden, indem wir alle zulässigen Variationen einer Eingabe generieren und die Ausgabe des Systems überprüfen. Jedoch skaliert dieser Ansatz schlecht zu echten Daten. In dieser Arbeit benutzen wir generative Modelle, um synthetische Variationen von Eingaben zu erstellen und so die Robustheit eines Modells zu überprüfen. Wir erforschen Methoden, die es uns erlauben, kontrolliert semantische Änderungen an Bild- und Textdaten vorzunehmen. Wir lernen generative Modelle, die kontrollierte Manipulation von Daten ermöglichen, zum Beispiel den visuellen Kontext zu ändern, die Erscheinung eines Objekts zu bearbeiten oder den Schreibstil von Text zu ändern. Basierend auf diesen Modellen entwickeln wir neue Methoden, um die Robustheit von Bilderkennungssystemen bezüglich Variationen in den Eingaben zu untersuchen und Fehlverhalten zu identifizieren. Im Gebiet von Textdaten verwenden wir diese Modelle, um die Diversität von sogenannten Automatische Bildbeschriftung-Modellen zu verbessern und Schreibtstil-Manipulation zu erlauben, um private Attribute des Benutzers zu verschleiern. Um die Robustheit von Modellen zu quantifizieren, werden zwei Arten von Eingabemanipulationen untersucht: Modell-agnostische und Modell-spezifische Manipulationen. Modell-agnostische Manipulationen basieren auf menschlichem Wissen, um bestimmte Änderungen auszuwählen, ohne das entsprechende Modell miteinzubeziehen. Dies beinhaltet das Entfernen von für die Aufgabe irrelevanten Objekten aus Bildern oder Variationen des visuellen Kontextes. In dem alternativen Modell-spezifischen Ansatz werden Änderungen vorgenommen, die für das Modell möglichst ungünstig sind. Zum Beispiel ändern wir die Erscheinung eines Objekts um ein Modell der Objekterkennung täuschen. Dies ist durch den Gradienten des Modells möglich. Mithilfe dieser Werkzeuge können wir die Robustheit von Systemen zur Bildklassifizierung oder -segmentierung, Objekterkennung und Visuelle Fragenbeantwortung quantifizieren und verbessern

이야기형 설명문을 활용한 대규모 비디오 학습 연구

학위논문 (박사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 컴퓨터공학부, 2021. 2. 김건희.Extensive contributions are being made to develop intelligent agents that can recognize and communicate with the world. In this sense, various video-language tasks have drawn a lot of interests in computer vision research, including image/video captioning, video retrieval and video question answering. It can be applied to high-level computer vision tasks and various future industries such as search engines, social marketing, automated driving, and robotics support through QA / dialog generation for the surrounding environment. However, despite these developments, video-language learning suffers from a higher degree of complexity. This thesis investigates methodologies for learning the relationship between videos and free-formed languages, including explanations, conversations, and question-and-answers, so that the machine can easily adapt to target downstream tasks. First, we introduce several methods to learn the relationship between long sentences and videos efficiently. We introduce the approaches for supervising human attention transfer for the video attention model, which shows the video attention mechanism can benefit from explicit human gaze labels. Next, we introduce the end-to-end semantic attention method, which further reduces the visual attention algorithm's complexity by using the representative visual concept word detected by the attention-based detector. As a follow-up study on previous methods, we introduce a JSFusion (Joint Sequence Fusion) method that enables efficient video search and QA by enabling many-to-many matching of attention model. Next, we introduce the CiSIN(Character in Story Identification Network), which uses Attention to increase the performance of character grounding and character re-identification in the movie. Finally, we introduce Transitional Adaptation, which promotes the caption generation models to generates coherent narratives for long videos. In summary, this thesis presents a novel approaches for automatic video description generation/retrieval and shows the benefits of extracting linguistic knowledge for object and motion in the video as well as the advantage of multimodal audio-visual learning for understanding videos. Since the proposed methods are easily adapted to any video-language tasks, it is expected to be applied to the latest models, bringing additional performance improvements. Moving forward, we plan to design an unsupervised video learning framework that can solve many challenges in the industry by integrating an unlimited amount of video, audio, and free-formed language data from the web.시각-언어 학습은 이미지/비디오 캡션(Image/Video captioning), 시각 질의응답(Visual Question and Answering), 비디오 검색(Video Retrieval), 장면 이해(scene understanding), 이벤트 인식(event detection) 등 고차원의 컴퓨터 비전 태스크(task)뿐만 아니라 주변 환경에 대한 질의 응답 및 대화 생성(Dialogue Generation)으로 인터넷 검색 뿐만 아니라 최근 활발한 소셜 마케팅(Social Marketing) 자율 주행(Automated Driving), 로보틱스(Robotics)을 보조하는 등 여러 미래 산업에 적용될 수 있어 활발히 연구되고 있는 중요한 분야이다. 컴퓨터 비젼과 자연어 처리는 이러한 중요성을 바탕으로 각자 고유한 영역에서 발전을 거듭해 왔으나, 최근 딥러닝의 등장과 함께 눈부시게 발전하면서 서로를 보완하며 학습 결과를 향상시키는 등 큰 시너지 효과를 발휘하게 되었다. 하지만 이런 발전에도 불구하고, 비디오-언어간 학습은 문제의 복잡도가 한층 높아 어려움을 겪게 되는 경우가 많다. 본 논문에서는 비디오와 이에 대응하는 설명, 대화, 질의 응답 등 더 나아가 자유 형태의 언어 (Free-formed language)간의 관계를 더욱 효율적으로 학습하고, 목표 임무에 잘 대응할 수 있도록 개선하는 것을 목표로 한다. 먼저, 시각적 복잡도가 이미지보다 높은 비디오와 긴 문장 사이의 관계를 효율적으로 학습하기 위한 여러 방법들을 소개한다. 인간의 주의 인식(Attention) 모델을 비디오-언어 모델에 지도 학습 하는 방법을 소개하고, 이어서 비디오에서 우선 검출된 대표 시각 단어를 매개로 하여 주의 인식(Attention) 알고리즘의 복잡도를 더욱 줄이는 의미 중심 주의 인식 (Semantic Attention) 방법, 어텐션 모델의 다대다 매칭을 기반으로 효율적인 비디오 검색 및 질의응답을 가능케 하는 비디오-언어간 융합 (Joint Sequence Fusion) 방법 등 비디오 주의 인식을 효율적으로 학습시킬 수 있는 방법들을 제시한다. 다음으로는, 주의 인식(Attention) 모델이 물체-단어 간 관계를 넘어 비디오 상에서 인물 검색 (Person Searching) 그리고 인물 재 식별 (Person Re-Identification)을 동시에 수행하며 상승작용을 일으키는 스토리 속 캐릭터 인식 신경망 (Character in Story Identification Network) 을 소개하며, 마지막으로 자기 지도 학습(Self-supervised Learning)을 통해 주의 인식(Attention) 기반 언어 모델이 긴 비디오에 대한 설명을 연관성 있게 잘 생성할 수 있도록 유도하는 방법을 소개한다. 요약하자면, 이 학위 논문에서 제안한 새로운 방법론들은 비디오-언어 학습에 해당하는 비디오 캡션(Video captioning), 비디오 검색(Video Retrieval), 시각 질의응답(Video Question and Answering)등을 해결할 수 있는 기술적 디딤돌이 되며, 비디오 캡션 학습을 통해 학습된 주의 인식 모듈은 검색 및 질의응답, 인물 검색 등 각 네트워크에 이식되면서 새로운 문제들에 대해 동시에 최고 수준(State-of-the-art)의 성능을 달성하였다. 이를 통해 비디오-언어 학습으로 얻은 언어 지식의 이전은 시각-청각을 아우르는 비디오 멀티모달 학습에 큰 도움이 되는 것을 실험적으로 보여준다. 향후 작업 방향 (Future Work)으로는 앞서 연구한 내용들을 기반으로 웹 속에 존재하는 대규모의 언어, 비디오, 오디오 데이터를 통합해 학습에 활용하여 산업계의 많은 난제를 해결할 수 있는 비지도 학습 모델을 만들고자 한다.Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 1.2 Outline of the thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 Chapter 2 Related Work 2.1 Video Captioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 2.2 Video Retrieval with Natural Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 2.3 Video Question and Answering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2.4 Cross-modal Representation Learning for Vision and LanguageTasks . . . . 15 Chapter 3 Human Attention Transfer for Video Captioning18 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Video Datasets for Caption and Gaze . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 3.3 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 3.3.1 Video Pre-processing and Description . . . . . . . . . . . 22 3.3.2The Recurrent Gaze Prediction (RGP) Model . . . . . . . 23 3.3.3Construction of Visual Feature Pools . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 3.3.4The Decoder for Caption Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 3.3.5Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 3.4 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 3.4.1Evaluation of Gaze Prediction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 3.4.2Evaluation of Video Captioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 3.4.3Human Evaluation via AMT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 3.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Chapter 4 Semantic Word Attention for Video QA and VideoCaptioning 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 4.1.1Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 4.1.2Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 4.2 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 4.2.1Preprocessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 4.2.2An Attention Model for Concept Detection . . . . . . . . 42 4.2.3Video-to-Language Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 4.2.4A Model for Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 4.2.5A Model for Fill-in-the-Blank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 4.2.6A Model for Multiple-Choice Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 4.2.7A Model for Retrieval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 4.3 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 4.3.1The LSMDC Dataset and Tasks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 4.3.2Quantitative Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 4.3.3Qualitative Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 4.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Chapter 5 Joint Sequnece Fusion Attention for Multimodal Sequence Data 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 5.2 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 5.3 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 5.3.1Preprocessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 5.3.2The Joint Semantic Tensor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 5.3.3The Convolutional Hierarchical Decoder . . . . . . . . . . 66 5.3.4An Illustrative Example of How the JSFusion Model Works 68 5.3.5Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 5.3.6Implementation of Video-Language Models . . . . . . . . 69 5.4 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 5.4.1LSMDC Dataset and Tasks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 5.4.2MSR-VTT-(RET/MC) Dataset and Tasks . . . . . . . . . 73 5.4.3Quantitative Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 5.4.4Qualitative Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 5.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Chapter 6 Character Re-Identification and Character Ground-ing for Movie Understanding 6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 6.2 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 6.3 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 6.3.1Video Preprocessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 6.3.2Visual Track Embedding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 6.3.3Textual Character Embedding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 6.3.4Character Grounding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 6.3.5Re-Identification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 6.3.6Joint Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 6.4 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 6.4.1Experimental Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 6.4.2Quantitative Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 6.4.3Qualitative Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 6.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Chapter 7 Transitional Adaptation of Pretrained Models forVisual Storytelling 7.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 7.2 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 7.3 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 7.3.1The Visual Encoder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 7.3.2The Language Generator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 7.3.3Adaptation training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 7.3.4The Sequential Coherence Loss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 7.3.5Training with the adaptation Loss . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 7.3.6Fine-tuning and Inference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 7.4 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 7.4.1Experimental Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 7.4.2Quantitative Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 7.4.3Further Analyses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 7.4.4Human Evaluation Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 7.4.5Qualitative Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 7.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Chapter 8 Conclusion 8.1 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 8.2 Future Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 Bibliography ... 123 요약 ... 148 Acknowledgements ... 150Docto