Visual Coreference Resolution in Visual Dialog using Neural Module Networks

Satwik Kottur, Jose M. F. Moura, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra, Marcus Rohrbach ; The European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 153-169

Abstract


Visual dialog entails answering a series of questions grounded in an image, using dialog history as context. In addition to the challenges found in visual question answering (VQA), which can be seen as one-round dialog, visual dialog encompasses several more. We focus on one such problem called ‘visual coreference resolution’ that involves determining which words, typically noun phrases and pronouns, ‘co-refer’ to the same entity/object instance in an image. This is crucial, especially for pronouns (e.g., ‘it'), as the dialog agent must first link it to a previous coreference (e.g., ‘boat'), and only then can rely on the visual grounding of the coreference ‘boat' to reason about the pronoun `it'. Prior work (in visual dialog) models visual coreference resolution either (a) implicitly via a memory network over history, or (b) at a coarse level for the entire question; and not explicitly at a phrase level of granularity. In this work, we propose a neural module network architecture for visual dialog by introducing two novel modules---Refer and Exclude---that perform explicit, grounded, coreference resolution at a finer word level. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on MNIST Dialog, a visually simple yet coreference-wise complex dataset, by achieving near perfect accuracy, and on VisDial, a large and challenging visual dialog dataset on real images, where our model outperforms other approaches, and is more interpretable, grounded, and consistent qualitatively.

Related Material


[pdf]
[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Kottur_2018_ECCV,
author = {Kottur, Satwik and Moura, Jose M. F. and Parikh, Devi and Batra, Dhruv and Rohrbach, Marcus},
title = {Visual Coreference Resolution in Visual Dialog using Neural Module Networks},
booktitle = {The European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)},
month = {September},
year = {2018}
}