Visual Question Answering System Research Articles

Dual modality prompt learning for visual question-grounded answering in robotic surgery

With recent advancements in robotic surgery, notable strides have been made in visual question answering (VQA). Existing VQA systems typically generate textual answers to questions but fail to indicate the location of the relevant content within the image. This limitation restricts the interpretative capacity of the VQA models and their ability to explore specific image regions. To address this issue, this study proposes a grounded VQA model for robotic surgery, capable of localizing a specific region during answer prediction. Drawing inspiration from prompt learning in language models, a dual-modality prompt model was developed to enhance precise multimodal information interactions. Specifically, two complementary prompters were introduced to effectively integrate visual and textual prompts into the encoding process of the model. A visual complementary prompter merges visual prompt knowledge with visual information features to guide accurate localization. The textual complementary prompter aligns visual information with textual prompt knowledge and textual information, guiding textual information towards a more accurate inference of the answer. Additionally, a multiple iterative fusion strategy was adopted for comprehensive answer reasoning, to ensure high-quality generation of textual and grounded answers. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the model, demonstrating its superiority over existing methods on the EndoVis-18 and EndoVis-17 datasets.

BOK-VQA: Bilingual outside Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering via Graph Representation Pretraining

The current research direction in generative models, such as the recently developed GPT4, aims to find relevant knowledge information for multimodal and multilingual inputs to provide answers. Under these research circumstances, the demand for multilingual evaluation of visual question answering (VQA) tasks, a representative task of multimodal systems, has increased. Accordingly, we propose a bilingual outside-knowledge VQA (BOK-VQA) dataset in this study that can be extended to multilingualism. The proposed data include 17K images, 17K question-answer pairs for both Korean and English and 280K instances of knowledge information related to question-answer content. We also present a framework that can effectively inject knowledge information into a VQA system by pretraining the knowledge information of BOK-VQA data in the form of graph embeddings. Finally, through in-depth analysis, we demonstrated the actual effect of the knowledge information contained in the constructed training data on VQA.

Improving Automatic VQA Evaluation Using Large Language Models

8 years after the visual question answering (VQA) task was proposed, accuracy remains the primary metric for automatic evaluation. VQA Accuracy has been effective so far in the IID evaluation setting. However, our community is undergoing a shift towards open-ended generative models and OOD evaluation. In this new paradigm, the existing VQA Accuracy metric is overly stringent and underestimates the performance of VQA systems. Thus, there is a need to develop more robust automatic VQA metrics that serve as a proxy for human judgment. In this work, we propose to leverage the in-context learning capabilities of instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) to build a better VQA metric. We formulate VQA evaluation as an answer-rating task where the LLM is instructed to score the accuracy of a candidate answer given a set of reference answers. We demonstrate the proposed metric better correlates with human judgment compared to existing metrics across several VQA models and benchmarks. We hope wide adoption of our metric will contribute to better estimating the research progress on the VQA task. We plan to release the evaluation code and collected human judgments.

Research on the Teaching Method of College Students’ Education Based on Visual Question Answering Technology

With the changes of the times, visual question answering (VQA) technology has gradually been widely used in many fields, such as intelligent bionic robots, student learning and education, and visual assistance for the disabled. In view of this, the study proposes a method of college student education and teaching system based on VQA technology. First, a multiscale fusion feature method is proposed for the representation of image features, and then an improved mixed attention mechanism is proposed based on this. Solve the network noise problem; finally, introduce the VQA system. The results show that the research method tends to a stable state when the iteration reaches the 28th time, and the corresponding loss function converges to 2.38, which is 0.5% lower than the traditional model; in the application effect analysis, on the data set test-dev, the research model The accuracies of the four types of questions about “total, whether, count, and others” are 69.94%, 86.21%, 50.16%, and 59.61%, respectively; among the example outputs of the VQA dataset, the research model can accurately infer the categories of each target object. Analyzing the change of students’ comprehensive literacy, when the teaching times of the constructed model reach six times, taking students’ enthusiasm as an example, the score ratios of innovation literacy in subjects such as English, mathematics, and Chinese are 96.32, 93.14, and 88.56. The above results all show that the accuracy of the research method is better, and it has better feasibility and effectiveness in the field of education and the teaching of students.

Novel approach to integrate various feature extraction techniques for the Visual Question Answering System with skeletal images in the healthcare sector

In the realm of medical science, one of the most challenging concepts to grasp is the Medical Imaging Query Response System. The comprehension and classification of the diverse representations of the human body require a significant degree of effort and expertise. Furthermore, it is imperative for users within the healthcare sector to rigorously validate the system. In the domain of human health, a plethora of imaging techniques, including MRI, CT, ultrasound, X-ray, PET-CT, and others, play a pivotal role in the identification of medical issues. These technologies are instrumental in supporting both patient engagement and clinical decision-making. However, the utilization of models, techniques, and datasets for processing textual and visual information introduces complexities that can at times impede the provision of pertinent clinical solutions. The overarching objective of the proposed approach is to conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis of various feature extraction methodologies for both visual and textual information within the Visual Question Answering (VQA) system, focusing on human skeletal images. This endeavor is aimed at enhancing the VQA system's performance with newer datasets and addressing any limitations inherent in existing models. In addition, this research initiative seeks to enable researchers to identify and optimize novel methods that enhance the accuracy of the VQA system. The models under scrutiny in this analysis encompass various methods of feature extraction that help to improve the model and quality of the healthcare industry. The researcher will find the proper methodology for different datasets. To gauge the efficacy of each model in delivering the desired outcomes, an array of metrics will be employed, including classification measurement accuracy, F-classification, C-true positive rate (CTPR), C-precision, C-recall, C-sensitivity, and C-false negative rate (FNR). These metrics are designed to enhance the accuracy of any dataset and optimize the performance of both visual and textual components to ensure accurate responses to the posed queries.

Counting in Visual Question Answering: Methods, Datasets, and Future Work

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a language-based method for analyzing images, which is highly helpful in assisting people with visual impairment. The VQA system requires a demonstrated holistic image understanding and conducts basic reasoning tasks concerning the image in contrast to the specific task-oriented models that simply classifies object into categories. Thus, VQA systems contribute to the growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology by answering open-ended, arbitrary questions about a given image. In addition, VQA is also used to assess the system’s ability by conducting Visual Turing Test (VTT). However, because of the inability to generate the essential datasets and being incapable of evaluating the systems due to flawlessness and bias, the VQA system is incapable of assessing the system’s overall efficiency. This is seen as a possible and significant limitation of the VQA system. This, in turn, has a negative impact on the progress of performance observed in VQA algorithms. Currently, the research on the VQA system is dealing with more specific sub-problems, which include counting in VQA systems. The counting sub-problem of VQA is a more sophisticated one, riddling with several challenging questions, especially when it comes to complex counting questions such as those that demand object identifications along with detection of objects attributes and positional reasoning. The pooling operation that is considered to perform an attention mechanism in VQA is found to degrade the counting performance. A number of algorithms have been developed to address this issue. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of counting techniques in the VQA system that is developed especially for answering questions such as “How many?”. However, the performance progress achieved by this system is still not satisfactory due to bias that occurs in the datasets from the way we phrase the questions and because of weak evaluation metrics. In the future, fully-fledged architecture, wide-size datasets with complex counting questions and a detailed breakdown in categories, and strong evaluation metrics for evaluating the ability of the system to answer complex counting questions, such as positional and comparative reasoning will be executed.

EVJVQA CHALLENGE: MULTILINGUAL VISUAL QUESTION ANSWERING

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a challenging task of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), attracting significant attention from researchers. English is a resource-rich language that has witnessed various developments in datasets and models for visual question answering. Visual question answering in other languages also would be developed for resources and models. In addition, there is no multilingual dataset targeting the visual content of a particular country with its own objects and cultural characteristics. To address the weakness, we provide the research community with a benchmark dataset named EVJVQA, including 33,000+ pairs of question-answer over three languages: Vietnamese, English, and Japanese, on approximately 5,000 images taken from Vietnam for evaluating multilingual VQA systems or models. EVJVQA is used as a benchmark dataset for the challenge of multilingual visual question answering at the 9th Workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP 2022). This task attracted 62 participant teams from various universities and organizations. In this article, we present details of the organization of the challenge, an overview of the methods employed by shared-task participants, and the results. The highest performances are 0.4392 in F1-score and 0.4009 in BLUE on the private test set. The multilingual QA systems proposed by the top 2 teams use ViT for the pre-trained vision model and mT5 for the pre-trained language model, a powerful pre-trained language model based on the transformer architecture. EVJVQA is a challenging dataset that motivates NLP and CV researchers to further explore the multilingual models or systems for visual question answering systems.

Counting-based visual question answering with serial cascaded attention deep learning

The counting-based questions play a major part in Visual Question Answering (VQA), the most challenging factor is counting the different objects present in the images. Recently more attention is paid to design a model of count-aided VQA. Based on the questions, the VQA system responds with appropriate answers. Yet, the complex questions are necessitating in the system with answers. The earlier models are still facing the challenging problems of counting the various objects within the images as the models become futile to select the features and lack fine-grained representation. In order to sustain the image representation, this paper proposes a new model for VQA using the heuristic approach of serial cascaded deep learning methods. Initially, the standard data regarding images and text data are gathered and fed to the pre-processing process. Consequently, the feature extraction is done on both the image and the text data. Here, the deep features from images are taken using Visual Geometry Group 16 (VGG16) and the text features are extracted using Text Convolutional Neural Network (TCNN). Then, the optimal weighted fused features are obtained, where the weights used for getting the necessary features are tuned via the Improved Tuna Swarm Optimization (ITSO) algorithm. Finally, the counting answers are retrieved based on the given queries, which is carried out via Serial Cascaded Recurrent Neural Network with Attention Mechanism-based Long Short-Term Memory (SCRAM-LSTM). The performance is examined with divergent metrics compared with conventional models. Hence, the findings reveal that it offers superior performance in estimating the appropriate answers. Therefore, the proposed work is widely used for such potential applications as helping blind or visually impaired people to get information, integrating with image retrieval systems, and also for search engines. Especially, it is utilized for the vision and language systems.

Multiscale Feature Extraction and Fusion of Image and Text in VQA

The Visual Question Answering (VQA) system is the process of finding useful information from images related to the question to answer the question correctly. It can be widely used in the fields of visual assistance, automated security surveillance, and intelligent interaction between robots and humans. However, the accuracy of VQA has not been ideal, and the main difficulty in its research is that the image features cannot well represent the scene and object information, and the text information cannot be fully represented. This paper used multi-scale feature extraction and fusion methods in the image feature characterization and text information representation sections of the VQA system, respectively to improve its accuracy. Firstly, aiming at the image feature representation problem, multi-scale feature extraction and fusion method were adopted, and the image features output of different network layers were extracted by a pre-trained deep neural network, and the optimal scheme of feature fusion method was found through experiments. Secondly, for the representation of sentences, a multi-scale feature method was introduced to characterize and fuse the word-level, phrase-level, and sentence-level features of sentences. Finally, the VQA model was improved using the multi-scale feature extraction and fusion method. The results show that the addition of multi-scale feature extraction and fusion improves the accuracy of the VQA model.

Vision–Language Model for Visual Question Answering in Medical Imagery

In the clinical and healthcare domains, medical images play a critical role. A mature medical visual question answering system (VQA) can improve diagnosis by answering clinical questions presented with a medical image. Despite its enormous potential in the healthcare industry and services, this technology is still in its infancy and is far from practical use. This paper introduces an approach based on a transformer encoder-decoder architecture. Specifically, we extract image features using the vision transformer (ViT) model, and we embed the question using a textual encoder transformer. Then, we concatenate the resulting visual and textual representations and feed them into a multi-modal decoder for generating the answer in an autoregressive way. In the experiments, we validate the proposed model on two VQA datasets for radiology images termed VQA-RAD and PathVQA. The model shows promising results compared to existing solutions. It yields closed and open accuracies of 84.99% and 72.97%, respectively, for VQA-RAD, and 83.86% and 62.37%, respectively, for PathVQA. Other metrics such as the BLUE score showing the alignment between the predicted and true answer sentences are also reported.

Medical knowledge-based network for Patient-oriented Visual Question Answering

Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems have achieved great success in general scenarios. In medical domain, VQA systems are still in their infancy as the datasets are limited by scale and application scenarios. Current medical VQA datasets are designed to conduct basic analyses of medical imaging such as modalities, planes, organ systems, abnormalities, etc., aiming to provide constructive medical suggestions for doctors, containing a large number of professional terms with limited help for patients. In this paper, we introduce a new Patient-oriented Visual Question Answering (P-VQA) dataset, which builds a VQA system for patients by covering an entire treatment process including medical consultation, imaging diagnosis, clinical diagnosis, treatment advice, review, etc. P-VQA covers 20 common diseases with 2,169 medical images, 24,800 question-answering pairs, and a medical knowledge graph containing 419 entities. In terms of methodology, we propose a Medical Knowledge-based VQA Network (MKBN) to answer questions according to the images and a medical knowledge graph in our P-VQA. MKBN learns two cluster embeddings (disease-related and relation-related embeddings) according to structural characteristics of the medical knowledge graph and learns three different interactive features (image-question, image-disease, and question-relation) according to characteristics of diagnosis. For comparisons, we evaluate several state-of-the-art baselines on the P-VQA dataset as benchmarks. Experimental results on P-VQA demonstrate that MKBN achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared with baseline methods. The dataset is available at https://github.com/cs-jerhuang/P-VQA.

A Neuro-Symbolic ASP Pipeline for Visual Question Answering

AbstractWe present a neuro-symbolic visual question answering (VQA) pipeline for CLEVR, which is a well-known dataset that consists of pictures showing scenes with objects and questions related to them. Our pipeline covers (i) training neural networks for object classification and bounding-box prediction of the CLEVR scenes, (ii) statistical analysis on the distribution of prediction values of the neural networks to determine a threshold for high-confidence predictions, and (iii) a translation of CLEVR questions and network predictions that pass confidence thresholds into logic programmes so that we can compute the answers using an answer-set programming solver. By exploiting choice rules, we consider deterministic and non-deterministic scene encodings. Our experiments show that the non-deterministic scene encoding achieves good results even if the neural networks are trained rather poorly in comparison with the deterministic approach. This is important for building robust VQA systems if network predictions are less-than perfect. Furthermore, we show that restricting non-determinism to reasonable choices allows for more efficient implementations in comparison with related neuro-symbolic approaches without losing much accuracy.

Dynamic Key-Value Memory Enhanced Multi-Step Graph Reasoning for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering

Knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA) is a vision-language task that requires an agent to correctly answer image-related questions using knowledge that is not presented in the given image. It is not only a more challenging task than regular VQA but also a vital step towards building a general VQA system. Most existing knowledge-based VQA systems process knowledge and image information similarly and ignore the fact that the knowledge base (KB) contains complete information about a triplet, while the extracted image information might be incomplete as the relations between two objects are missing or wrongly detected. In this paper, we propose a novel model named dynamic knowledge memory enhanced multi-step graph reasoning (DMMGR), which performs explicit and implicit reasoning over a key-value knowledge memory module and a spatial-aware image graph, respectively. Specifically, the memory module learns a dynamic knowledge representation and generates a knowledge-aware question representation at each reasoning step. Then, this representation is used to guide a graph attention operator over the spatial-aware image graph. Our model achieves new state-of-the-art accuracy on the KRVQR and FVQA datasets. We also conduct ablation experiments to prove the effectiveness of each component of the proposed model.

VisQA: X-raying Vision and Language Reasoning in Transformers

Visual Question Answering systems target answering open-ended textual questions given input images. They are a testbed for learning high-level reasoning with a primary use in HCI, for instance assistance for the visually impaired. Recent research has shown that state-of-the-art models tend to produce answers exploiting biases and shortcuts in the training data, and sometimes do not even look at the input image, instead of performing the required reasoning steps. We present VisQA, a visual analytics tool that explores this question of reasoning vs. bias exploitation. It exposes the key element of state-of-the-art neural models - attention maps in transformers. Our working hypothesis is that reasoning steps leading to model predictions are observable from attention distributions, which are particularly useful for visualization. The design process of VisQA was motivated by well-known bias examples from the fields of deep learning and vision-language reasoning and evaluated in two ways. First, as a result of a collaboration of three fields, machine learning, vision and language reasoning, and data analytics, the work lead to a better understanding of bias exploitation of neural models for VQA, which eventually resulted in an impact on its design and training through the proposition of a method for the transfer of reasoning patterns from an oracle model. Second, we also report on the design of VisQA, and a goal-oriented evaluation of VisQA targeting the analysis of a model decision process from multiple experts, providing evidence that it makes the inner workings of models accessible to users.

Improving users' mental model with attention‐directed counterfactual edits

AbstractIn the domain of visual question answering (VQA), studies have shown improvement in users' mental model of the VQA system when they are exposed to examples of how these systems answer certain image‐question (IQ) pairs. In this work, we show that showing controlled counterfactual IQ examples are more effective at improving the mental model of users as compared to simply showing random examples. We compare a generative approach and a retrieval‐based approach to show counterfactual examples. We use recent advances in generative adversarial networks to generate counterfactual images by deleting and inpainting certain regions of interest in the image. We then expose users to changes in the VQA system's answer on those altered images. To select the region of interest for inpainting, we experiment with using both human‐annotated attention maps and a fully automatic method that uses the VQA system's attention values. Finally, we test the user's mental model by asking them to predict the model's performance on a test counterfactual image. We note an overall improvement in users' accuracy to predict answer change when shown counterfactual explanations. While realistic retrieved counterfactuals obviously are the most effective at improving the mental model, we show that a generative approach can also be equally effective.

Visual question answering: Which investigated applications?

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is an extremely stimulating and challenging research area where Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processig (NLP) have recently met. In image captioning and video summarization, the semantic information is completely contained in still images or video dynamics, and it has only to be mined and expressed in a human-consistent way. Differently from this, in VQA semantic information in the same media must be compared with the semantics implied by a question expressed in natural language, doubling the artificial intelligence-related effort. Some recent surveys about VQA approaches have focused on methods underlying either the image-related processing or the verbal-related one, or on the way to consistently fuse the conveyed information. Possible applications are only suggested, and, in fact, most cited works rely on general-purpose datasets that are used to assess the building blocks of a VQA system. This paper rather considers the proposals that focus on real-world applications, possibly using as benchmarks suitable data bound to the application domain. The paper also reports about some recent challenges in VQA research.

A survey of methods, datasets and evaluation metrics for visual question answering

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a multi-disciplinary research problem that has captured the attention of both computer vision as well as natural language processing researchers. In Visual Question Answering, a system is given an image; a question in a natural language related to that image as an input, and the VQA system is required to give an answer in natural language as an output. A VQA algorithm may require common sense reasoning over the information contained in the image and world knowledge to produce the right answer. In this paper, we have discussed some of the core concepts used in VQA systems and present a comprehensive survey of efforts in the past to address this problem. Apart from traditional VQA models, we have also discussed visual question answering models that require reading texts present in images and evaluated on recently developed datasets like TextVQA, ST-VQA, and OCR-VQA. Apart from standard datasets discussed in previous surveys, we have also discussed some new datasets developed in 2019 and 2020 such as GQA, OK-VQA, TextVQA, ST-VQA, and OCR-VQA. The new evaluation metrics such as BLEU, MPT, METEOR, Average Normalized Levenshtein Similarity (ANLS), Validity, Plausibility, Distribution, Consistency, Grounding, F1-Score are explained together with the evaluation metrics discussed by previous surveys. We conclude our survey with a discussion on open issues in each phase of the VQA task and present some promising future directions.

MedFuseNet:\xa0An\xa0attention-based multimodal deep learning model for visual question answering in the medical domain

Medical images are difficult to comprehend for a person without expertise. The scarcity of medical practitioners across the globe often face the issue of physical and mental fatigue due to the high number of cases, inducing human errors during the diagnosis. In such scenarios, having an additional opinion can be helpful in boosting the confidence of the decision maker. Thus, it becomes crucial to have a reliable visual question answering (VQA) system to provide a ‘second opinion’ on medical cases. However, most of the VQA systems that work today cater to real-world problems and are not specifically tailored for handling medical images. Moreover, the VQA system for medical images needs to consider a limited amount of training data available in this domain. In this paper, we develop MedFuseNet, an attention-based multimodal deep learning model, for VQA on medical images taking the associated challenges into account. Our MedFuseNet aims at maximizing the learning with minimal complexity by breaking the problem statement into simpler tasks and predicting the answer. We tackle two types of answer prediction—categorization and generation. We conducted an extensive set of quantitative and qualitative analyses to evaluate the performance of MedFuseNet. Our experiments demonstrate that MedFuseNet outperforms the state-of-the-art VQA methods, and that visualization of the captured attentions showcases the intepretability of our model’s predicted results.

Visual question answering in the medical domain based on deep learning approaches: A comprehensive study

Visual Question Answering (VQA) in the medical domain has attracted more attention from research communities in the last few years due to its various applications. This paper investigates several deep learning approaches in building a medical VQA system based on ImageCLEF’s VQA-Med dataset, which consists of about 4K images with about 15K question-answer pairs. Due to the wide variety of the images and questions included in this dataset, the proposed model is a hierarchical one consisting of many sub-models, each tailored to handle certain questions. For that, a special model is built to classify the questions into four categories, where each category is handled by a separate sub-model. At their core, all of these models consist of pre-trained Convolution Neural Networks (CNN). In order to get the best results, extensive experiments are performed and various techniques are employed including Data Augmentation (DA), Multi-Task Learning (MTL), Global Average Pooling (GAP), Ensembling, and Sequence to Sequence (Seq2Seq) models. Overall, the final model achieves 60.8 accuracy and 63.4 BLEU score, which are competitive with the state-of-the-art results despite using less demanding and simpler sub-models.

A comparative study of language transformers for video question answering

With the goal of correctly answering questions about images or videos, visual question answering (VQA) has quickly developed in recent years. However, current VQA systems mainly focus on answering questions about a single image and face many challenges in answering video-based questions. VQA in video not only has to understand the evolution between video frames but also requires a certain understanding of corresponding subtitles. In this paper, we propose a language Transformer-based video question answering model to encode the complex semantics from video clips. Different from previous models which represent visual features by recurrent neural networks, our model encodes visual concept sequences with a pre-trained language Transformer. We investigate the performance of our model using four language Transformers over two different datasets. The results demonstrate outstanding improvements compared to previous work.