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Poster
Out of the Box: Reasoning with Graph Convolution Nets for Factual Visual Question Answering
Medhini Narasimhan · Svetlana Lazebnik · Alex Schwing

Tue Dec 04 02:00 PM -- 04:00 PM (PST) @ Room 210 #78

Accurately answering a question about a given image requires combining observations with general knowledge. While this is effortless for humans, reasoning with general knowledge remains an algorithmic challenge. To advance research in this direction a novel fact-based' visual question answering (FVQA) task has been introduced recently along with a large set of curated facts which link two entities, i.e., two possible answers, via a relation. Given a question-image pair, deep network techniques have been employed to successively reduce the large set of facts until one of the two entities of the final remaining fact is predicted as the answer. We observe that a successive process which considers one fact at a time to form a local decision is sub-optimal. Instead, we develop an entity graph and use a graph convolutional network to`reason' about the correct answer by jointly considering all entities. We show on the challenging FVQA dataset that this leads to an improvement in accuracy of around 7% compared to the state-of-the-art.

#### Author Information

##### Medhini Narasimhan (UIUC)

CS Graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign pursuing Computer Vision and Deep Learning research.