ABC-CNN: An Attention Based Convolutional Neural Network for Visual Question Answering

We propose a novel attention based deep learning architecture for visual question answering task (VQA). Given an image and an image related natural language question, VQA generates the natural language answer for the question. Generating the correct answers requires the model's attention to focus on the regions corresponding to the question, because different questions inquire about the attributes of different image regions. We introduce an attention based configurable convolutional neural network (ABC-CNN) to learn such question-guided attention. ABC-CNN determines an attention map for an image-question pair by convolving the image feature map with configurable convolutional kernels derived from the question's semantics. We evaluate the ABC-CNN architecture on three benchmark VQA datasets: Toronto COCO-QA, DAQUAR, and VQA dataset. ABC-CNN model achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods on these datasets. The question-guided attention generated by ABC-CNN is also shown to reflect the regions that are highly relevant to the questions

Parallel Attention: A Unified Framework for Visual Object Discovery through Dialogs and Queries

Recognising objects according to a pre-defined fixed set of class labels has been well studied in the Computer Vision. There are a great many practical applications where the subjects that may be of interest are not known beforehand, or so easily delineated, however. In many of these cases natural language dialog is a natural way to specify the subject of interest, and the task achieving this capability (a.k.a, Referring Expression Comprehension) has recently attracted attention. To this end we propose a unified framework, the ParalleL AttentioN (PLAN) network, to discover the object in an image that is being referred to in variable length natural expression descriptions, from short phrases query to long multi-round dialogs. The PLAN network has two attention mechanisms that relate parts of the expressions to both the global visual content and also directly to object candidates. Furthermore, the attention mechanisms are recurrent, making the referring process visualizable and explainable. The attended information from these dual sources are combined to reason about the referred object. These two attention mechanisms can be trained in parallel and we find the combined system outperforms the state-of-art on several benchmarked datasets with different length language input, such as RefCOCO, RefCOCO+ and GuessWhat?!.Comment: 11 page

Exposing and Addressing Cross-Task Inconsistency in Unified Vision-Language Models

As general purpose vision models get increasingly effective at a wide set of tasks, it is imperative that they be consistent across the tasks they support. Inconsistent AI models are considered brittle and untrustworthy by human users and are more challenging to incorporate into larger systems that take dependencies on their outputs. Measuring consistency between very heterogeneous tasks that might include outputs in different modalities is challenging since it is difficult to determine if the predictions are consistent with one another. As a solution, we introduce a benchmark dataset, COCOCON, where we use contrast sets created by modifying test instances for multiple tasks in small but semantically meaningful ways to change the gold label, and outline metrics for measuring if a model is consistent by ranking the original and perturbed instances across tasks. We find that state-of-the-art systems suffer from a surprisingly high degree of inconsistent behavior across tasks, especially for more heterogeneous tasks. Finally, we propose using a rank correlation-based auxiliary objective computed over large automatically created cross-task contrast sets to improve the multi-task consistency of large unified models, while retaining their original accuracy on downstream tasks. Project website available at https://adymaharana.github.io/cococon/Comment: Project Website: https://adymaharana.github.io/cococon

Qwen-VL: A Frontier Large Vision-Language Model with Versatile Abilities

We introduce the Qwen-VL series, a set of large-scale vision-language models designed to perceive and understand both text and images. Comprising Qwen-VL and Qwen-VL-Chat, these models exhibit remarkable performance in tasks like image captioning, question answering, visual localization, and flexible interaction. The evaluation covers a wide range of tasks including zero-shot captioning, visual or document visual question answering, and grounding. We demonstrate the Qwen-VL outperforms existing Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs). We present their architecture, training, capabilities, and performance, highlighting their contributions to advancing multimodal artificial intelligence. Code, demo and models are available at https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen-VL.Comment: Code, demo and models are available at https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen-V