The World in My Mind: Visual Dialog with Adversarial Multi-modal Feature Encoding

Visual Dialog is a multi-modal task that requires a model to participate in a multi-turn human dialog grounded on an image, and generate correct, human-like responses. In this paper, we propose a novel Adversarial Multi-modal Feature Encoding (AMFE) framework for effective and robust auxiliary training of visual dialog systems. AMFE can force the language-encoding part of a model to generate hidden states in a distribution closely related to the distribution of real-world images, resulting in language features containing general knowledge from both modalities by nature, which can help generate both more correct and more general responses with reasonably low time cost. Experimental results show that AMFE can steadily bring performance gains to different models on different scales of data. Our method outperforms both the supervised learning baselines and other fine-tuning methods, achieving state-of-the-art results on most metrics of VisDial v0.5/v0.9 generative tasks.