Recent advances in visual representation learning allowed to build an abundance of powerful off-the-shelf features that are ready-to-use for numerous downstream tasks. This work aims to assess how well these features preserve information about the objects, such as their spatial location, their visual properties and their relative relationships. We propose to do so by evaluating them in the context of visual reasoning, where multiple objects with complex relationships and different attributes are at play. More specifically, we introduce a protocol to evaluate visual representations for the task of Visual Question Answering. In order to decouple visual feature extraction from reasoning, we design a specific attention-based reasoning module which is trained on the frozen visual representations to be evaluated, in a spirit similar to standard feature evaluations relying on shallow networks. We compare two types of visual representations, densely extracted local features and object-centric ones, against the performances of a perfect image representation using ground truth. Our main findings are two-fold. First, despite excellent performances on classical proxy tasks, such representations fall short for solving complex reasoning problem. Second, object-centric features better preserve the critical information necessary to perform visual reasoning. In our proposed framework we show how to methodologically approach this evaluation.

本研究探索了通过视觉表征学习来评估对象信息如何被保留，例如它们的空间位置、视觉属性和相对关系，并介绍了一种用于评估视觉表征的协议，重点关注视觉推理的任务，比较了局部特征和面向对象的特征对于视觉推理的影响。

迈向无监督视觉推理：现成特征是否具备推理能力?