Interpretable Visual Question Answering by Visual Grounding from Automatic Attention Annotations

Abstract

A key aspect of VQA models that are interpretable is their ability to ground their answers to relevant regions in the image. Current approaches with this capability rely on supervised learning and human annotated groundings to train attention mechanisms inside the VQA architecture. Unfortunately, obtaining human annotations specific for visual grounding is difficult and expensive. In this work, we demonstrate that we can effectively train a VQA architecture with grounding supervision that can be automatically obtained from available region descriptions and object annotations. We also show that our model trained with this mined supervision generates visual groundings that achieve higher correlation to manually-annotated groundings than alternative approaches, even in the case of state-of-the-art algorithms that are directly trained with human grounding annotations.