Tell-and-Answer: Towards Explainable Visual Question Answering using Attributes and Captions

Qing Li, Jianlong Fu, Dongfei Yu, Tao Mei, Jiebo Luo


Abstract
In Visual Question Answering, most existing approaches adopt the pipeline of representing an image via pre-trained CNNs, and then using the uninterpretable CNN features in conjunction with the question to predict the answer. Although such end-to-end models might report promising performance, they rarely provide any insight, apart from the answer, into the VQA process. In this work, we propose to break up the end-to-end VQA into two steps: explaining and reasoning, in an attempt towards a more explainable VQA by shedding light on the intermediate results between these two steps. To that end, we first extract attributes and generate descriptions as explanations for an image. Next, a reasoning module utilizes these explanations in place of the image to infer an answer. The advantages of such a breakdown include: (1) the attributes and captions can reflect what the system extracts from the image, thus can provide some insights for the predicted answer; (2) these intermediate results can help identify the inabilities of the image understanding or the answer inference part when the predicted answer is wrong. We conduct extensive experiments on a popular VQA dataset and our system achieves comparable performance with the baselines, yet with added benefits of explanability and the inherent ability to further improve with higher quality explanations.
Anthology ID:
D18-1164
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1338–1346
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1164
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1164
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qing Li, Jianlong Fu, Dongfei Yu, Tao Mei, and Jiebo Luo. 2018. Tell-and-Answer: Towards Explainable Visual Question Answering using Attributes and Captions. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1338–1346, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Tell-and-Answer: Towards Explainable Visual Question Answering using Attributes and Captions (Li et al., EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1164.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/D18-1164.mp4
Data
COCO CaptionsImageNetVisual Question Answering