Zero-Shot Visual Question Answering

Part of the appeal of Visual Question Answering (VQA) is its promise to answer new questions about previously unseen images. Most current methods demand training questions that illustrate every possible concept, and will therefore never achieve this capability, since the volume of required training data would be prohibitive. Answering general questions about images requires methods capable of Zero-Shot VQA, that is, methods able to answer questions beyond the scope of the training questions. We propose a new evaluation protocol for VQA methods which measures their ability to perform Zero-Shot VQA, and in doing so highlights significant practical deficiencies of current approaches, some of which are masked by the biases in current datasets. We propose and evaluate several strategies for achieving Zero-Shot VQA, including methods based on pretrained word embeddings, object classifiers with semantic embeddings, and test-time retrieval of example images. Our extensive experiments are intended to serve as baselines for Zero-Shot VQA, and they also achieve state-of-the-art performance in the standard VQA evaluation setting.

Damien Teney, Anton van den Hengel · 2016