# Generalized Hadamard-Product Fusion Operators for Visual Question Answering

Source: [Generalized Hadamard-Product Fusion Operators for Visual Question Answering](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa642d1e209131cea032e5>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T20:58:11.540Z

Authors: Brendan Duke, Graham W. Taylor

Published: 2018-03-26T00:30:34.000Z

## Abstract

We propose a generalized class of multimodal fusion operators for the task of visual question answering (VQA). We identify generalizations of existing multimodal fusion operators based on the Hadamard product, and show that specific non-trivial instantiations of this generalized fusion operator exhibit superior performance in terms of OpenEnded accuracy on the VQA task. In particular, we introduce Nonlinearity Ensembling, Feature Gating, and post-fusion neural network layers as fusion operator components, culminating in an absolute percentage point improvement of $1.1\\%$ on the VQA 2.0 test-dev set over baseline fusion operators, which use the same features as input. We use our findings as evidence that our generalized class of fusion operators could lead to the discovery of even superior task-specific operators when used as a search space in an architecture search over fusion operators.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09374>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.09374.pdf>)
