The predominant approach to Visual Question Answering (VQA) demands that the model represents within its weights all of the information required to answer any question about any image. Learning this information from any real training set seems unlikely, and representing it in a reasonable number of weights doubly so. We propose instead to approach VQA as a meta learning task, thus separating the question answering method from the information required. At test time, the method is provided with a support set of example questions/answers, over which it reasons to resolve the given question. The support set is not fixed and can be extended without retraining, thereby expanding the capabilities of the model. To exploit this dynamically provided information, we adapt a state-of-the-art VQA model with two techniques from the recent meta learning literature, namely prototypical networks and meta networks. Experiments demonstrate the capability of the system to learn to produce completely novel answers (i.e. never seen during training) from examples provided at test time. In comparison to the existing state of the art, the proposed method produces qualitatively distinct results with higher recall of rare answers, and a better sample efficiency that allows training with little initial data. More importantly, it represents an important step towards vision-and-language methods that can learn and reason on-the-fly.

本文提出了一种元学习的方法来解决图像问题回答（VQA）问题，并采用了原型网络和元网络两种技术，通过给定的例子来推理解决给定的问题，与现有技术相比，该方法能够产生具有更高罕见回答的召回率和更好的样本效率，是学习和推理基于视觉和语言的方法的重要一步。

将视觉问答作为元学习任务