3,541 research outputs found
Generating Natural Questions About an Image
There has been an explosion of work in the vision & language community during
the past few years from image captioning to video transcription, and answering
questions about images. These tasks have focused on literal descriptions of the
image. To move beyond the literal, we choose to explore how questions about an
image are often directed at commonsense inference and the abstract events
evoked by objects in the image. In this paper, we introduce the novel task of
Visual Question Generation (VQG), where the system is tasked with asking a
natural and engaging question when shown an image. We provide three datasets
which cover a variety of images from object-centric to event-centric, with
considerably more abstract training data than provided to state-of-the-art
captioning systems thus far. We train and test several generative and retrieval
models to tackle the task of VQG. Evaluation results show that while such
models ask reasonable questions for a variety of images, there is still a wide
gap with human performance which motivates further work on connecting images
with commonsense knowledge and pragmatics. Our proposed task offers a new
challenge to the community which we hope furthers interest in exploring deeper
connections between vision & language.Comment: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistic
Adapting Visual Question Answering Models for Enhancing Multimodal Community Q&A Platforms
Question categorization and expert retrieval methods have been crucial for
information organization and accessibility in community question & answering
(CQA) platforms. Research in this area, however, has dealt with only the text
modality. With the increasing multimodal nature of web content, we focus on
extending these methods for CQA questions accompanied by images. Specifically,
we leverage the success of representation learning for text and images in the
visual question answering (VQA) domain, and adapt the underlying concept and
architecture for automated category classification and expert retrieval on
image-based questions posted on Yahoo! Chiebukuro, the Japanese counterpart of
Yahoo! Answers.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to tackle the
multimodality challenge in CQA, and to adapt VQA models for tasks on a more
ecologically valid source of visual questions. Our analysis of the differences
between visual QA and community QA data drives our proposal of novel
augmentations of an attention method tailored for CQA, and use of auxiliary
tasks for learning better grounding features. Our final model markedly
outperforms the text-only and VQA model baselines for both tasks of
classification and expert retrieval on real-world multimodal CQA data.Comment: Submitted for review at CIKM 201
Semantic bottleneck for computer vision tasks
This paper introduces a novel method for the representation of images that is
semantic by nature, addressing the question of computation intelligibility in
computer vision tasks. More specifically, our proposition is to introduce what
we call a semantic bottleneck in the processing pipeline, which is a crossing
point in which the representation of the image is entirely expressed with
natural language , while retaining the efficiency of numerical representations.
We show that our approach is able to generate semantic representations that
give state-of-the-art results on semantic content-based image retrieval and
also perform very well on image classification tasks. Intelligibility is
evaluated through user centered experiments for failure detection
Evaluating Text-to-Image Matching using Binary Image Selection (BISON)
Providing systems the ability to relate linguistic and visual content is one
of the hallmarks of computer vision. Tasks such as text-based image retrieval
and image captioning were designed to test this ability but come with
evaluation measures that have a high variance or are difficult to interpret. We
study an alternative task for systems that match text and images: given a text
query, the system is asked to select the image that best matches the query from
a pair of semantically similar images. The system's accuracy on this Binary
Image SelectiON (BISON) task is interpretable, eliminates the reliability
problems of retrieval evaluations, and focuses on the system's ability to
understand fine-grained visual structure. We gather a BISON dataset that
complements the COCO dataset and use it to evaluate modern text-based image
retrieval and image captioning systems. Our results provide novel insights into
the performance of these systems. The COCO-BISON dataset and corresponding
evaluation code are publicly available from \url{http://hexianghu.com/bison/}
Clue: Cross-modal Coherence Modeling for Caption Generation
We use coherence relations inspired by computational models of discourse to
study the information needs and goals of image captioning. Using an annotation
protocol specifically devised for capturing image--caption coherence relations,
we annotate 10,000 instances from publicly-available image--caption pairs. We
introduce a new task for learning inferences in imagery and text, coherence
relation prediction, and show that these coherence annotations can be exploited
to learn relation classifiers as an intermediary step, and also train
coherence-aware, controllable image captioning models. The results show a
dramatic improvement in the consistency and quality of the generated captions
with respect to information needs specified via coherence relations.Comment: Accepted as a long paper to ACL 202
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