Recently, Biomedical Question Answering (BQA) has attracted growing attention due to its application value and technical challenges. Most existing works treat it as a semantic matching task that predicts answers by computing confidence among questions, options and evidence sentences, which is insufficient for scenarios that require complex reasoning based on a deep understanding of biomedical evidences. We propose a novel model termed Hierarchical Representation-based Dynamic Reasoning Network (HDRN) to tackle this problem. It first constructs the hierarchical representations for biomedical evidences to learn semantics within and among evidences. It then performs dynamic reasoning based on the hierarchical representations of evidences to solve complex biomedical problems. Against the existing state-of-the-art model, the proposed model significantly improves more than 4.5%, 3% and 1.3% on three mainstream BQA datasets, PubMedQA, MedQA-USMLE and NLPEC. The ablation study demonstrates the superiority of each improvement of our model. The code will be released after the paper is published.

Existing video question answering (video QA) models lack the capacity for deep video understanding and flexible multistep reasoning. We propose for video QA a novel model which performs dynamic multistep reasoning between questions and videos. It creates video semantic representation based on the video scene graph composed of semantic elements of the video and semantic relations among these elements. Then, it performs multistep reasoning for better answer decision between the representations of the question and the video, and dynamically integrate the reasoning results. Experiments show the significant advantage of the proposed model against previous methods in accuracy and interpretability. Against the existing state-of-the-art model, the proposed model dramatically improves more than 4%/3.1%/2% on the three widely used video QA datasets, MSRVTT-QA, MSRVTT multi-choice, and TGIF-QA, and displays better interpretability by backtracing along with the attention mechanisms to the video scene graphs.

Multi-hop Question Answering is an agent task for testing the reasoning ability. With the development of pre-trained models, the implicit reasoning ability has been surprisingly improved and can even surpass human performance. However, the nature of the black box hinders the construction of explainable intelligent systems. Several researchers have explored explainable neural-symbolic reasoning methods based on question decomposition techniques. The undifferentiable symbolic operations and the error propagation in the reasoning process lead to poor performance. To alleviate it, we propose a simple yet effective Global Differentiable Learning strategy to explore optimal reasoning paths from the latent probability space so that the model learns to solve intermediate reasoning processes without expert annotations. We further design a Dynamic Adaptive Reasoner to enhance the generalization of unseen questions. Our method achieves 17% improvements in F1-score against BreakRC and shows better interpretability. We take a step forward in building interpretable reasoning methods.