High-Order Attention Models for Visual Question Answering

The quest for algorithms that enable cognitive abilities is an important part of machine learning. A common trait in many recently investigated cognitive-like tasks is that they take into account different data modalities, such as visual and textual input. In this paper we propose a novel and generally applicable form of attention mechanism that learns high-order correlations between various data modalities. We show that high-order correlations effectively direct the appropriate attention to the relevant elements in the different data modalities that are required to solve the joint task. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our high-order attention mechanism on the task of visual question answering (VQA), where we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the standard VQA dataset.

PDF Abstract NeurIPS 2017 PDF NeurIPS 2017 Abstract
Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Visual Question Answering (VQA) COCO Visual Question Answering (VQA) real images 1.0 multiple choice 3-Modalities: Unary + Pairwise + Ternary (ResNet) Percentage correct 69.3 # 4

Methods