Knowledge-Routed Visual Question Reasoning: Challenges for Deep Representation Embedding

Though beneficial for encouraging the Visual Question Answering (VQA) models to discover the underlying knowledge by exploiting the input-output correlation beyond image and text contexts, the existing knowledge VQA datasets are mostly annotated in a crowdsource way, e.g., collecting questions and external reasons from different users via the internet. In addition to the challenge of knowledge reasoning, how to deal with the annotator bias also remains unsolved, which often leads to superficial over-fitted correlations between questions and answers. To address this issue, we propose a novel dataset named Knowledge-Routed Visual Question Reasoning for VQA model evaluation. Considering that a desirable VQA model should correctly perceive the image context, understand the question, and incorporate its learned knowledge, our proposed dataset aims to cutoff the shortcut learning exploited by the current deep embedding models and push the research boundary of the knowledge-based visual question reasoning. Specifically, we generate the question-answer pair based on both the Visual Genome scene graph and an external knowledge base with controlled programs to disentangle the knowledge from other biases. The programs can select one or two triplets from the scene graph or knowledge base to push multi-step reasoning, avoid answer ambiguity, and balanced the answer distribution. In contrast to the existing VQA datasets, we further imply the following two major constraints on the programs to incorporate knowledge reasoning: i) multiple knowledge triplets can be related to the question, but only one knowledge relates to the image object. This can enforce the VQA model to correctly perceive the image instead of guessing the knowledge based on the given question solely; ii) all questions are based on different knowledge, but the candidate answers are the same for both the training and test sets.