# Text-Aware Dual Routing Network for Visual Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.14450 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14450/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [Pointer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03134/) (2015)
- [Abstractive Text Summarization Using Sequence-to-Sequence RNNs and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.06023/) (2016)
- [VLMo: Unified Vision-Language Pre-Training with Mixture-of-Modality-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02358/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04906/) (2021)
- [Large-Scale Adversarial Training for Vision-and-Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06195/) (2020)
- [UNITER: UNiversal Image-TExt Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11740/) (2019)
- [Incorporating Copying Mechanism in Sequence-to-Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06393/) (2016)
- [ERNIE-ViL: Knowledge Enhanced Vision-Language Representations Through Scene Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16934/) (2020)
- [UniT: Multimodal Multitask Learning with a Unified Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10772/) (2021)
- [Deeper Text Understanding for IR with Contextual Neural Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09217/) (2019)
- [Neural Baby Talk](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09845/) (2018)
- [Iterative Answer Prediction with Pointer-Augmented Multimodal Transformers for TextVQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06258/) (2019)
- [Closed-loop Matters: Dual Regression Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07018/) (2020)
- [Rosetta: Large scale system for text detection and recognition in images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05085/) (2019)
- [NAT: Neural Architecture Transformer for Accurate and Compact Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14488/) (2019)
- [Breaking the Curse of Space Explosion: Towards Efficient NAS with Curriculum Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07197/) (2020)
- [Visual Question Answering with Memory-Augmented Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.04968/) (2017)
- [Finding the Evidence: Localization-aware Answer Prediction for Text Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02582/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual question answering (VQA) is a challenging task to provide an accurate natural language answer given an image and a natural language question about the image. It involves multi-modal learning, i.e., computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP), as well as flexible answer prediction for free-form and open-ended answers. Existing approaches often fail in cases that require reading and understanding text in images to answer questions. In practice, they cannot effectively handle the answer sequence derived from text tokens because the visual features are not text-oriented. To address the above issues, we propose a Text-Aware Dual Routing Network (TDR) which simultaneously handles the VQA cases with and without understanding text information in the input images. Specifically, we build a two-branch answer prediction network that contains a specific branch for each case and further develop a dual routing scheme to dynamically determine which branch should be chosen. In the branch that involves text understanding, we incorporate the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) features into the model to help understand the text in the images. Extensive experiments on the VQA v2.0 dataset demonstrate that our proposed TDR outperforms existing methods, especially on the ''number'' related VQA questions.