Rethinking Diversified and Discriminative Proposal Generation for Visual Grounding

Visual grounding aims to localize an object in an image referred to by a textual query phrase. Various visual grounding approaches have been proposed, and the problem can be modularized into a general framework: proposal generation, multi-modal feature representation, and proposal ranking. Of these three modules, most existing approaches focus on the latter two, with the importance of proposal generation generally neglected. In this paper, we rethink the problem of what properties make a good proposal generator. We introduce the diversity and discrimination simultaneously when generating proposals, and in doing so propose Diversified and Discriminative Proposal Networks model (DDPN). Based on the proposals generated by DDPN, we propose a high performance baseline model for visual grounding and evaluate it on four benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our model delivers significant improvements on all the tested data-sets (e.g., 18.8\% improvement on ReferItGame and 8.2\% improvement on Flickr30k Entities over the existing state-of-the-arts respectively)

Beyond Bilinear: Generalized Multi-modal Factorized High-order Pooling for Visual Question Answering

Visual question answering (VQA) is challenging because it requires a simultaneous understanding of both visual content of images and textual content of questions. To support the VQA task, we need to find good solutions for the following three issues: 1) fine-grained feature representations for both the image and the question; 2) multi-modal feature fusion that is able to capture the complex interactions between multi-modal features; 3) automatic answer prediction that is able to consider the complex correlations between multiple diverse answers for the same question. For fine-grained image and question representations, a `co-attention' mechanism is developed by using a deep neural network architecture to jointly learn the attentions for both the image and the question, which can allow us to reduce the irrelevant features effectively and obtain more discriminative features for image and question representations. For multi-modal feature fusion, a generalized Multi-modal Factorized High-order pooling approach (MFH) is developed to achieve more effective fusion of multi-modal features by exploiting their correlations sufficiently, which can further result in superior VQA performance as compared with the state-of-the-art approaches. For answer prediction, the KL (Kullback-Leibler) divergence is used as the loss function to achieve more accurate characterization of the complex correlations between multiple diverse answers with same or similar meaning, which can allow us to achieve faster convergence rate and obtain slightly better accuracy on answer prediction. A deep neural network architecture is designed to integrate all these aforementioned modules into one unified model for achieving superior VQA performance. With an ensemble of 9 models, we achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale VQA datasets and win the runner-up in the VQA Challenge 2017.