# VQA with Cascade of Self- and Co-Attention Blocks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.14777 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14777/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Deep Modular Co-Attention Networks for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10770/) (2019)
- [Bilinear Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07932/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Question-Image Co-Attention for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00061/) (2016)
- [Stacked Attention Networks for Image Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02274/) (2015)
- [Multimodal Compact Bilinear Pooling for Visual Question Answering and Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01847/) (2016)
- [MUTAN: Multimodal Tucker Fusion for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06676/) (2017)
- [Multi-modal Factorized Bilinear Pooling with Co-Attention Learning for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01471/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Fusion with Intra- and Inter- Modality Attention Flow for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05252/) (2018)
- [Compact Bilinear Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06062/) (2015)
- [An Analysis of Visual Question Answering Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09684/) (2017)
- [Beyond Bilinear: Generalized Multimodal Factorized High-order Pooling for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03619/) (2017)
- [MUREL: Multimodal Relational Reasoning for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09487/) (2019)
- [Ask, Attend and Answer: Exploring Question-Guided Spatial Attention for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05234/) (2015)
- [Where To Look: Focus Regions for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07394/) (2015)
- [BLOCK: Bilinear Superdiagonal Fusion for Visual Question Answering and Visual Relationship Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00038/) (2019)
- [Learning Conditioned Graph Structures for Interpretable Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07243/) (2018)
- [Show, Ask, Attend, and Answer: A Strong Baseline For Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03162/) (2017)
- [Compact Trilinear Interaction for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11874/) (2019)
- [Multi-modality Latent Interaction Network for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04289/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The use of complex attention modules has improved the performance of the Visual Question Answering (VQA) task. This work aims to learn an improved multi-modal representation through dense interaction of visual and textual modalities. The proposed model has an attention block containing both self-attention and co-attention on image and text. The self-attention modules provide the contextual information of objects (for an image) and words (for a question) that are crucial for inferring an answer. On the other hand, co-attention aids the interaction of image and text. Further, fine-grained information is obtained from two modalities by using a Cascade of Self- and Co-Attention blocks (CSCA). This proposal is benchmarked on the widely used VQA2.0 and TDIUC datasets. The efficacy of key components of the model and cascading of attention modules are demonstrated by experiments involving ablation analysis.