Skip to main content

Multi-Attention Relation Network for Figure Question Answering

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
  • 1724 Accesses

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13369))

Abstract

Figure question answering (FQA) is proposed as a new multimodal task for visual question answering (VQA). Given a scientific-style figure and a related question, the machine needs to answer the question based on reasoning. The Relation Network (RN) is the proposed approach for the baseline of FQA, which computes a representation of relations between objects within images to get the answer result. We improve the RN model by using a variety of attention mechanism methods. Here, we propose a novel algorithm called Multi-attention Relation Network (MARN), which consists of a CBAM module, an LSTM module, and an attention relation module. The CBAM module first performs an attention mechanism during the feature extraction of the image to make the feature map more effective. Then in the attention relation module, each object pair contributes differently to reasoning. The experiments show that MARN greatly outperforms the RN model and other state-of-the-art methods on the FigureQA and DVQA datasets.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   89.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Zhou, B., Tian, Y., Sukhbaatar, S., Szlam, A., Fergus, R.: VQA: Visual question answering. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 2425–2433 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Kafle, K., Price, B., Cohen, S., Kanan, C.: Dvqa: Understanding data visualizations via question answering. In: Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE/ CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 5648–5656. IEEE (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Kahou, S.E., Michalski, V., Atkinson, A., Kadar, A., Trischler, A., Bengio, Y.: Figureqa: An annotated figure dataset for visual reasoning (2017). arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.07300

  4. Santoro, A., Raposo, D., Barrett, D.G., Malinowski, M., Pascanu, R.: A simple neural network module for relational reasoning (2017). arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.01427

  5. Woo, S., Park, J., Lee, J.-Y., Kweon, I.S.: CBAM: Convolutional block attention module. In: Ferrari, V., Hebert, M., Sminchisescu, C., Weiss, Y. (eds.) ECCV 2018. LNCS, vol. 11211, pp. 3–19. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01234-2_1

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Goyal, Y., Khot, T., Summers-Stay, D., Batra, D., Parikh, D.: Making the V in VQA matter: Elevating the role of image understanding in visual question answering. In: Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 6325–6334 (2017). doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2017.670

  7. Krishna, R., Zhu, Y., Groth, O., Johnson, J., Hata, K.: Visual genome: connecting language and vision using crowdsourced dense image annotations. Int. J. Comput. Vis. 123(1), 32–73 (2017)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  8. Kafle, K., Kanan, C.: Answer-type prediction for visual question answering. In: Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 4976–4984 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Andreas, J., Rohrbach, M., Darrell, T., Klein, D.: Deep compositional question answering with neural module networks. Comput. Sci. 27 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Methani, N., Ganguly, P., Khapra M., Kumar, P.: PlotQA: Reasoning over scientific plots. In: Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), pp. 1516–1525 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Ritwick, C., Sumit, S., Utkarsh, G., Pranav, M., Prann, B., Ajay, J.: Leaf-qa: Locate, encode and attend for figure question answering. In: Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), pp. 3501–3510 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Simonyan, K., Zisserman, A.: Very deep convolutional networks for large-scale image recognition. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Johnson, J., Hariharan, B., Maten, L. Fei-Fei, L.: CLEVR: A diagnostic dataset for compositional language and elementary visual reasoning. In: Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 1988–1997 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Reddy, R., Ramesh, R.: Figurenet: A deep learning model for question-answering on scientific plots. In: Proceedings of the 2019 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), pp. 1–8 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Jialong, Z., Guoli, W., Taofeng, X., Qingfeng, W.: An affinity-driven relation network for figure question answering. In: Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), pp. 1–6 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Itti, L., Koch, C., Niebur, E.: A model of saliency-based visual attention for rapid scene analysis. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. (TPAMI) 20, 1254–1259 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Rensink, R.A.: The dynamic representation of scenes. Vis. Cogn. 7, 17–42 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Larochelle, H., Hinton, G.E.: Learning to combine foveal glimpses with a thirdorder Boltzmann machine. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. (NIPS) (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Wang, F., et al.: Residual attention network for image classification. In: Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.06904 (2017)

  20. Hu, J., Shen, L., Sun, G.: Squeeze-and-excitation networks. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.01507 (2017)

  21. Ioffe, S., Szegedy, C.: Batch normalization: Accelerating deep network training by reducing internal covariate shift. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning (2015)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Qingfeng Wu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Li, Y., Wu, Q., Chen, B. (2022). Multi-Attention Relation Network for Figure Question Answering. In: Memmi, G., Yang, B., Kong, L., Zhang, T., Qiu, M. (eds) Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management. KSEM 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13369. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10986-7_54

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10986-7_54

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-10985-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-10986-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics