Deep Modular Co-attention Networks For Visual Question Answering
Zhou Yu, Jun Yu, Yuhao Cui, Dacheng Tao, Qi Tian . 2019 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2019 – 809 citations
[Code]
[Paper]
Visual Question Answering (VQA) requires a fine-grained and simultaneous understanding of both the visual content of images and the textual content of questions. Therefore, designing an effective `co-attention’ model to associate key words in questions with key objects in images is central to VQA performance. So far, most successful attempts at co-attention learning have been achieved by using shallow models, and deep co-attention models show little improvement over their shallow counterparts. In this paper, we propose a deep Modular Co-Attention Network (MCAN) that consists of Modular Co-Attention (MCA) layers cascaded in depth. Each MCA layer models the self-attention of questions and images, as well as the guided-attention of images jointly using a modular composition of two basic attention units. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate MCAN on the benchmark VQA-v2 dataset and conduct extensive ablation studies to explore the reasons behind MCAN’s effectiveness. Experimental results demonstrate that MCAN significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art. Our best single model delivers 70.63(%) overall accuracy on the test-dev set. Code is available at https://github.com/MILVLG/mcan-vqa.