Sunny and Dark Outside?! Improving Answer Consistency in VQA through Entailed Question Generation

Arijit Ray, Karan Sikka, Ajay Divakaran, Stefan Lee, Giedrius Burachas


Abstract
While models for Visual Question Answering (VQA) have steadily improved over the years, interacting with one quickly reveals that these models lack consistency. For instance, if a model answers “red” to “What color is the balloon?”, it might answer “no” if asked, “Is the balloon red?”. These responses violate simple notions of entailment and raise questions about how effectively VQA models ground language. In this work, we introduce a dataset, ConVQA, and metrics that enable quantitative evaluation of consistency in VQA. For a given observable fact in an image (e.g. the balloon’s color), we generate a set of logically consistent question-answer (QA) pairs (e.g. Is the balloon red?) and also collect a human-annotated set of common-sense based consistent QA pairs (e.g. Is the balloon the same color as tomato sauce?). Further, we propose a consistency-improving data augmentation module, a Consistency Teacher Module (CTM). CTM automatically generates entailed (or similar-intent) questions for a source QA pair and fine-tunes the VQA model if the VQA’s answer to the entailed question is consistent with the source QA pair. We demonstrate that our CTM-based training improves the consistency of VQA models on the Con-VQA datasets and is a strong baseline for further research.
Anthology ID:
D19-1596
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5860–5865
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1596
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1596
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Arijit Ray, Karan Sikka, Ajay Divakaran, Stefan Lee, and Giedrius Burachas. 2019. Sunny and Dark Outside?! Improving Answer Consistency in VQA through Entailed Question Generation. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 5860–5865, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Sunny and Dark Outside?! Improving Answer Consistency in VQA through Entailed Question Generation (Ray et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1596.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1596.Attachment.pdf
Data
Visual GenomeVisual Question AnsweringVisual Question Answering v2.0