The convergence of text, visual, and audio data is crucial towards human-like artificial intelligence, however the current Vision-Language-Speech landscape is dominated by encoder-only models that lack generative abilities. We propose closing this gap with i-Code V2, one of the first models capable of generating natural language from any combination of Vision, Language, and Speech data. i-Code V2 leverages state-of-the-art single-modality encoders, combining their outputs with a new modality-fusing encoder to project combinations of modalities into a shared representational space. Language tokens are generated from these representations via an autoregressive decoder. i-Code V2 is pretrained end-to-end on a large collection of dual- and single-modality datasets with a novel text completion objective that can be generalized across arbitrary combinations of modalities. i-Code V2 matches or outperforms state-of-the-art single- and dual-modality baselines on 7 multimodal tasks, demonstrating the power of generative multimodal pretraining across a diversity of tasks and signals.

Thanks to the strong reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), recent approaches to knowledge-based visual question answering (KVQA) utilize LLMs with a global caption of an input image to answer a question. However, these approaches may miss key visual information that is not captured by the caption. Moreover, they cannot fully utilize the visual information required to answer the question. To address these issues, we introduce a new framework called Multi-Modal Knowledge-Aware Reasoner (MM-Reasoner) for KVQA. MM-Reasoner first utilizes a set of vision APIs, such as dense captioners, object detectors, and OCR, to extract detailed information from the image in textual format. Then, it prompts an LLM to extract query-specific knowledge from the extracted textual information to provide a rich representation that contains external knowledge, commonsense, explicit supporting facts, and rationales required for reasoning. Finally, the knowledge, query, and visual input are used to fine-tune a Vision-Language Model (VLM). At test time, MM-Reasoner uses the potential answers predicted by the VLM to iteratively update and optimize the prompt, refining its answer. Empirical studies show that MM-Reasoner achieves state-of-the-art performance on several KVQA datasets.

We introduce a new neural network architecture, Multimodal Neural Graph Memory Networks (MN-GMN), for visual question answering. The MN-GMN uses graph structure with different region features as node attributes and applies a recently proposed powerful graph neural network model, Graph Network (GN), to reason about objects and their interactions in an image. The input module of the MN-GMN generates a set of visual features plus a set of encoded region-grounded captions (RGCs) for the image. The RGCs capture object attributes and their relationships. Two GNs are constructed from the input module using the visual features and encoded RGCs. Each node of the GNs iteratively computes a question-guided contextualized representation of the visual/textual information assigned to it. Then, to combine the information from both GNs, the nodes write the updated representations to an external spatial memory. The final states of the memory cells are fed into an answer module to predict an answer. Experiments show MN-GMN rivals the state-of-the-art models on Visual7W, VQA-v2.0, and CLEVR datasets.