Question-Conditioned Counterfactual Image Generation for VQA

While Visual Question Answering (VQA) models continue to push the state-of-the-art forward, they largely remain black-boxes - failing to provide insight into how or why an answer is generated. In this ongoing work, we propose addressing this shortcoming by learning to generate counterfactual images for a VQA model - i.e. given a question-image pair, we wish to generate a new image such that i) the VQA model outputs a different answer, ii) the new image is minimally different from the original, and iii) the new image is realistic. Our hope is that providing such counterfactual examples allows users to investigate and understand the VQA model's internal mechanisms.Comment: Accepted by the VQA Workshop at CVPR 201

Counterfactual Samples Synthesizing for Robust Visual Question Answering

Despite Visual Question Answering (VQA) has realized impressive progress over the last few years, today's VQA models tend to capture superficial linguistic correlations in the train set and fail to generalize to the test set with different QA distributions. To reduce the language biases, several recent works introduce an auxiliary question-only model to regularize the training of targeted VQA model, and achieve dominating performance on VQA-CP. However, since the complexity of design, current methods are unable to equip the ensemble-based models with two indispensable characteristics of an ideal VQA model: 1) visual-explainable: the model should rely on the right visual regions when making decisions. 2) question-sensitive: the model should be sensitive to the linguistic variations in question. To this end, we propose a model-agnostic Counterfactual Samples Synthesizing (CSS) training scheme. The CSS generates numerous counterfactual training samples by masking critical objects in images or words in questions, and assigning different ground-truth answers. After training with the complementary samples (ie, the original and generated samples), the VQA models are forced to focus on all critical objects and words, which significantly improves both visual-explainable and question-sensitive abilities. In return, the performance of these models is further boosted. Extensive ablations have shown the effectiveness of CSS. Particularly, by building on top of the model LMH, we achieve a record-breaking performance of 58.95% on VQA-CP v2, with 6.5% gains.Comment: Appear in CVPR 2020; Codes in https://github.com/yanxinzju/CSS-VQ

Multimodal Research in Vision and Language: A Review of Current and Emerging Trends

Deep Learning and its applications have cascaded impactful research and development with a diverse range of modalities present in the real-world data. More recently, this has enhanced research interests in the intersection of the Vision and Language arena with its numerous applications and fast-paced growth. In this paper, we present a detailed overview of the latest trends in research pertaining to visual and language modalities. We look at its applications in their task formulations and how to solve various problems related to semantic perception and content generation. We also address task-specific trends, along with their evaluation strategies and upcoming challenges. Moreover, we shed some light on multi-disciplinary patterns and insights that have emerged in the recent past, directing this field towards more modular and transparent intelligent systems. This survey identifies key trends gravitating recent literature in VisLang research and attempts to unearth directions that the field is heading towards