Weakly Supervised Visual Question Answer Generation

Charani Alampalle, Shamanthak Hegde, Soumya Jahagirdar, Shankar Gangisetty; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2023, pp. 5589-5597

Growing interest in conversational agents promote two-way human-computer communications involving asking and answering visual questions have become an active area of research in AI. Thus, generation of visual question-answer pair(s) becomes an important and challenging task. To address this issue, we propose a weakly-supervised visual question answer generation method that generates a relevant question-answer pairs for a given input image and associated caption. Most of the prior works are supervised and depend on the annotated question-answer datasets. In our work, we present a weakly supervised method that synthetically generates question-answer pairs procedurally from visual information and captions. The proposed method initially extracts list of answer words, then does nearest question generation that uses the caption and answer word to generate synthetic question. Next, the relevant question generator converts the nearest question to relevant language question by dependency parsing and in-order tree traversal, finally, fine-tune a ViLBERT model with the question-answer pair(s) generated at end. We perform an exhaustive experimental analysis on VQA dataset and see that our model significantly outperform SOTA methods on BLEU scores. We also show the results wrt baseline models and ablation study.