TA-Student VQA: Multi-Agents Training by Self-Questioning

Peixi Xiong, Ying Wu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020, pp. 10065-10075

There are two main challenges in Visual Question Answering (VQA). The first one is that each model obtains its strengths and shortcomings when applied to several questions; what is more, the "ceiling effect" for specific questions is difficult to overcome with simple consecutive training. The second challenge is that even the state-of-the-art dataset is of large scale, questions targeted at a single image are off in format and lack diversity in content. We introduce our self-questioning model with multi-agent training: TA-student VQA. This framework differs from standard VQA algorithms by involving question-generating mechanisms and collaborative learning questions between question-answering agents. Thus, TA-student VQA overcomes the limitation of the content diversity and format variation of questions and improves the overall performance of multiple question-answering agents. We evaluate our model on VQA-v2, which outperforms algorithms without such mechanisms. In addition, TA-student VQA achieves a greater model capacity, allowing it to answer more generated questions in addition to those in the annotated datasets.