LOIS: Looking Out of Instance Semantics for Visual Question Answering

Abstract: Visual question answering (VQA) has been intensively studied as a multimodal task that requires effort in bridging vision and language to infer answers correctly. Recent attempts have developed various attention-based modules for solving VQA tasks. However, the performance of model inference is largely bottlenecked by visual processing for semantics understanding. Most existing detection methods rely on bounding boxes, remaining a serious challenge for VQA models to understand the causal nexus of object semantics in images and correctly infer contextual information. To this end, we propose a finer model framework without bounding boxes in this work, termed Looking Out of Instance Semantics (LOIS) to tackle this important issue. LOIS enables more fine-grained feature descriptions to produce visual facts. Furthermore, to overcome the label ambiguity caused by instance masks, two types of relation attention modules: 1) intra-modality and 2) inter-modality, are devised to infer the correct answers from the different multi-view features. Specifically, we implement a mutual relation attention module to model sophisticated and deeper visual semantic relations between instance objects and background information. In addition, our proposed attention model can further analyze salient image regions by focusing on important word-related questions. Experimental results on four benchmark VQA datasets prove that our proposed method has favorable performance in improving visual reasoning capability.