Multimodal Residual Learning for Visual QA (NIPS 2016)

Multimodal residual networks three-block layered model. GRUs initialized with Skip-Thought Vectors for question embedding and ResNet-152 for extracting visual feature vectors are used. Joint representations are learned by element-wise multiplication, which leads to implicit attentional model without attentional parameters.

This current code can get 61.84 on Open-Ended and 66.33 on Multiple-Choice on test-standard split.

Notice that this code is based on Lu et al (2015)'s VQA_LSTM_CNN. Also, you need to use this base code for preprocessing.

Our latest work can be found in Hadamard Product for Low-rank Bilinear Pooling, which is the state-of-the-art (Single: 65.07/68.89, Ensemble: 66.89/70.29 for test-standard) as of Dec 1st 2016. The code for this will be released in Github.

Dependencies

• rnn

You can install the dependencies:

luarocks install rnn

Training

Please follow the instruction from VQA_LSTM_CNN for preprocessing. --split 2 option allows to use train+val set to train, and test-dev or test-standard set to evaluate. Set --num_ans to 2000 to reproduce the result.

For question features, you need to use this:

• skip-thoughts
• DPPnet (see 003_skipthoughts_porting)
• make_lookuptable.lua

for image features,

$ th prepro_res.lua -input_json data_train-val_test-dev_2k/data_prepro.json -image_root path_to_image_root -cnn_model path to cnn_model

The pretrained ResNet-152 model and related scripts can be found in fb.resnet.torch.

$ th train_residual.lua

With the default parameter, this will take around twenty hours on a sinlge NVIDIA Titan X GPU, and will generate the model under model/.

Notice that for the exact reproduction, ResNet-152 features by Caffe are needed.

Evaluation

$ th eval_residual.lua

In evaluation, you can use generated image captions to improve accuracies (for test-dev; overall +0.08%, others +0.17%) with option -priming (default=false). We used NeuralTalk2 to generate captions_test2015.json. This is only used for evaluation.

References

If you use this code as part of any published research, we'd really appreciate it if you could cite the following paper:

@inproceedings{kim2016b,
author = {Kim, Jin-Hwa and Lee, Sang-Woo and Kwak, Donghyun and Heo, Min-Oh and Kim, Jeonghee and Ha, Jung-Woo and Zhang, Byoung-Tak},
booktitle = {Advances In Neural Information Processing Systems 29},
pages = {361--369},
title = {{Multimodal Residual Learning for Visual QA}},
year = {2016}
}

This code uses Torch7 rnn package and its TrimZero module for question embeddings. Notice that following papers:

@article{Leonard2015a,
author = {L{\'{e}}onard, Nicholas and Waghmare, Sagar and Wang, Yang and Kim, Jin-Hwa},
journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.07889},
title = {{rnn : Recurrent Library for Torch}},
year = {2015}
}
@inproceedings{Kim2016a,
author = {Kim, Jin-Hwa and Kim, Jeonghee and Ha, Jung-Woo and Zhang, Byoung-Tak},
booktitle = {Proceedings of KIIS Spring Conference},
isbn = {2093-4025},
number = {1},
pages = {165--166},
title = {{TrimZero: A Torch Recurrent Module for Efficient Natural Language Processing}},
volume = {26},
year = {2016}
}

License

BSD 3-Clause License.

Patent (Pending)

METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR PROCESSING DATA USING ELEMENT-WISE MULTIPLICATION AND MULTIMODAL RESIDUAL LEARNING FOR VISUAL QUESTION-ANSWERING