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Debiasing the BottomUpTopDown Model for Visual Question Answering

This repo contains code to run the VQA-CP experiments from our paper "Don’t Take the Easy Way Out: Ensemble Based Methods for Avoiding Known Dataset Biases". In particular, it contains code to a train VQA model so that it does not make use of question-type priors when answering questions, and evaluate it on VQA-CP v2.0.

This repo is a fork of this implementation of the BottomUpTopDown VQA model. This fork extends the implementation so it can be used on VQA-CP v2.0, and supports the debiasing methods from our paper.

Prerequisites

Make sure you are on a machine with a NVIDIA GPU and Python 2 with about 100 GB disk space.

1. Install PyTorch v0.3 with CUDA and Python 2.7.
2. Install h5py, pillow, and tqdm

Data Setup

All data should be downloaded to a 'data/' directory in the root directory of this repository.

The easiest way to download the data is to run the provided script tools/download.sh from the repository root. The features are provided by and downloaded from the original authors' repo. If the script does not work, it should be easy to examine the script and modify the steps outlined in it according to your needs. Then run tools/process.sh from the repository root to process the data to the correct format.

Setup Example

On a fresh machine with Ubuntu 18.04, I was able to setup everything by installing Cuda 10.0, then running:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install unzip
sudo apt install python-pip
pip2 install torch==0.3.1
pip2 install h5py tqdm pillow 
bash tools/download.sh
bash tools/process.sh

Training

Run python main.py --output_dir /path/to/output --seed 0 to start training our Learned-Mixin +H VQA-CP model, see the command line options for how to use other ensemble method, or how to train on non-changing priors VQA 2.0.

Testing

The scores reported by the script are very close (within a hundredth of a percent in my experience) to the results reported by the official evaluation metric, but can be slightly different because the answer normalization process of the official script is not fully accounted for. To get the official numbers, you can run python save_predictions.py /path/to/model /path/to/output_file and the run the official VQA 2.0 evaluation script on the resulting file.

Results by Answer Type

We present a breakdown of accuracy by answer type below. The overall accuracies do not precisely match the results in the paper because, due to a checkpointing issue, we had to re-run our experiments to get these numbers. The results are still averaged over eight runs, and are very close to the numbers in the paper.

VQA 2.0 Results

We present scores for our methods on VQA 2.0, these were collected by re-training the models on the VQA 2.0 train set and testing on the validation set. Results are again averaged over eight runs.

Code Changes

In general we have tried to minimizes changes to the original codebase to reduce the risk of adding bugs, the main changes are:

1. The download and preprocessing script also setup VQA-CP 2.0
2. We use the filesystem, instead of HDF5, to store image feature. On my machine this is about a 1.5-3.0x speed up
3. Support dynamically loading the image features from disk during training so models can be trained on machines with less RAM
4. Debiasing objectives are added in vqa_debiasing_objectives.py
5. Some additional arguments are added to main.py that control the debiasing objective
6. Minor quality of life improvements and tqdm progress monitoring