Rich and dense human labeled datasets are among the main enabling factors for
the recent advance on vision-language understanding. Many seemingly distant
annotations (e.g., semantic segmentation and visual question answering (VQA))
are inherently connected in that they reveal different levels and perspectives
of human understandings about the same visual scenes --- and even the same set
of images (e.g., of COCO). The popularity of COCO correlates those annotations
and tasks. Explicitly linking them up may significantly benefit both individual
tasks and the unified vision and language modeling. We present the preliminary
work of linking the instance segmentations provided by COCO to the questions
and answers (QAs) in the VQA dataset, and name the collected links visual
questions and segmentation answers (VQS). They transfer human supervision
between the previously separate tasks, offer more effective leverage to
existing problems, and also open the door for new research problems and models.
We study two applications of the VQS data in this paper: supervised attention
for VQA and a novel question-focused semantic segmentation task. For the
former, we obtain state-of-the-art results on the VQA real multiple-choice task
by simply augmenting the multilayer perceptrons with some attention features
that are learned using the segmentation-QA links as explicit supervision. To
put the latter in perspective, we study two plausible methods and compare them
to an oracle method assuming that the instance segmentations are given at the
test stage.Comment: To appear on ICCV 201
