A key solution to visual question answering (VQA) exists in how to fuse visual and language features extracted from an input image and question. We show that an attention mechanism that enables dense, bi-directional interactions between the two modalities contributes to boost accuracy of prediction of answers. Specifically, we present a simple architecture that is fully symmetric between visual and language representations, in which each question word attends on image regions and each image region attends on question words. It can be stacked to form a hierarchy for multi-step interactions between an image-question pair. We show through experiments that the proposed architecture achieves a new state-of-the-art on VQA and VQA 2.0 despite its small size. We also present qualitative evaluation, demonstrating how the proposed attention mechanism can generate reasonable attention maps on images and questions, which leads to the correct answer prediction.

本文提出了一种基于多步交互和注意力机制的简单且完全对称的网络结构方案，用于解决视觉问答中视觉和语言特征的融合问题，并取得了新的最优结果，而提出的注意力机制也能够生成合理的注意力图从而正确预测答案。

通过密集对称共同注意力改进视觉与语言表示的融合用于视觉问答