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Visual-Textual Semantic Alignment Network for Visual Question Answering

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Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning – ICANN 2021 (ICANN 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 12895))

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Abstract

VQA task requires deep understanding of visual and textual content and access to key information to better answer the question. Most of current works only use image and question as the input of the network, where the image features are over-sampling and the text features are under-sampling, resulting in insufficient alignment between image regions and question words. In this paper, we propose a Visual-Textual Semantic Alignment Network (VTSAN). Our network acquires tags for visual semantics from a target detector and takes the Image-Tag-Question\(\mathbf {\left\langle {I, T, Q} \right\rangle }\) triad as the input. The tags can serve as an intermediate medium between the key regions of image and the key words of question, and can greatly enrich the text features. Thereby, the visual-textual semantic alignment is significantly improved. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed network on the standard VQAv2 and VQA-CPv2 benchmarks. The experimental results show that the proposed network outperforms the baseline significantly, especially on the counting questions.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61976079 & 61672203, in part by Anhui Natural Science Funds for Distinguished Young Scholar under Grant 170808J08, and in part by Anhui Key Research and Development Program under Grant 202004a05020039.

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Correspondence to Zhongqiu Zhao .

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Tian, W., Zhang, Y., He, B., Zhu, J., Zhao, Z. (2021). Visual-Textual Semantic Alignment Network for Visual Question Answering. In: Farkaš, I., Masulli, P., Otte, S., Wermter, S. (eds) Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning – ICANN 2021. ICANN 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12895. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86383-8_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86383-8_21

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