Goal-Oriented Visual Question Generation via Intermediate Rewards

Junjie Zhang, Qi Wu, Chunhua Shen, Jian Zhang, Jianfeng Lu, Anton van den Hengel; Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 186-201

Despite significant progress in a variety of vision-and-language problems, developing a method capable of asking intelligent, goal-oriented questions about images is proven to be an inscrutable challenge. Towards this end, we propose a Deep Reinforcement Learning framework based on three new intermediate rewards, namely goal-achieved, progressive and informativeness that encourage the generation of succinct questions, which in turn uncover valuable information towards the overall goal. By directly optimizing for questions that work quickly towards fulfilling the overall goal, we avoid the tendency of existing methods to generate long series of inane queries that add little value. We evaluate our model on the GuessWhat?! dataset and show that the resulting questions can help a standard `Guesser' identify a specific object in an image at a much higher success rate.