We introduce the task of Visual Dialog, which requires an AI agent to hold a meaningful dialog with humans in natural, conversational language about visual content. Specifically, given an image, a dialog history, and a question about the image, the agent has to ground the question in image, infer context from history, and answer the question accurately. Visual Dialog is disentangled enough from a specific downstream task so as to serve as a general test of machine intelligence, while being grounded in vision enough to allow objective evaluation of individual responses and benchmark progress. We develop a novel two-person chat data-collection protocol to curate a large-scale Visual Dialog dataset (VisDial). Data collection is underway and on completion, VisDial will contain 1 dialog with 10 question-answer pairs on all ~200k images from COCO, with a total of 2M dialog question-answer pairs. We introduce a family of neural encoder-decoder models for Visual Dialog with 3 encoders -- Late Fusion, Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder and Memory Network -- and 2 decoders (generative and discriminative), which outperform a number of sophisticated baselines. We propose a retrieval-based evaluation protocol for Visual Dialog where the AI agent is asked to sort a set of candidate answers and evaluated on metrics such as mean-reciprocal-rank of human response. We quantify gap between machine and human performance on the Visual Dialog task via human studies. Our dataset, code, and trained models will be released publicly. Putting it all together, we demonstrate the first 'visual chatbot'!

本文介绍了视觉对话任务，即通过图像、对话历史和问题，要求AI智能体以自然、对话式的语言与人类进行有意义的对话，并率先提出了一种基于视觉的通用测试方法以及一种新颖的二人聊天数据收集协议。在此基础上，利用Latre Fusion、Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder和Memory Network等三个编码器和两个解码器（生成式和判别式），超越了许多复杂的基准线，并采用了基于检索的评估协议，Quantify了机器和人类在视觉对话任务上的性能差距，进而演示了第一款“视觉聊天机器人”。