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A negative case analysis of visual grounding methods for VQA (ACL 2020 short paper)

Recent works in VQA attempt to improve visual grounding by training the model to attend to query-relevant visual regions. Such methods have claimed impressive gains in challenging datasets such as VQA-CP. However, in this work we show that boosts in performance come from a regularization effect as opposed to proper visual grounding.

This repo is based on Self-Critical Reasoning codebase.

Install dependencies

We use Anaconda to manage our dependencies. You will need to execute the following steps to install all dependencies:

• Edit the value for prefix variable in requirements.yml file, by assigning it the path to conda environment

• Then, install all dependencies using: conda env create -f requirements.yml

• Change to the new environment: source activate negative_analysis_of_grounding

• Install: python -m spacy download en_core_web_lg

Executing scripts

While executing scripts, first ensure that your main project directory is in PYTHONPATH:

cd ${PROJ_DIR} && export PYTHONPATH=.

Setting up data

• Inside scripts/common.sh, edit DATA_DIR variable by assigning it the path where you wish to download all data
• Download UpDn features from google drive into ${DATA_DIR} folder
• Download questions/answers for VQAv2 and VQA-CPv2 by executing ./scripts/download.sh
• Preprocess VQA datasets by executing: ./scripts/preprocess.sh
• Download ans_cossim.pkl and place it into ${DATA_DIR}

Training baseline model

We are providing pre-trained models for both VQAv2 and VQA-CPv2 here

To train the baselines yourself execute ./scripts/baseline/vqacp2_baseline.sh.

• Note#1: We need pre-trained baseline model to train HINT/SCR and our regularizer.
• Note#2: We need to train baselines on 100% of the training set. However, by default, the training script expects to train only on subset with visual hints (e.g., HAT or textual explanations). So, to train baseline, we need to use the flag --do_not_discard_items_without_hints, otherwise it will throw an error message saying that hint_type flag is missing.

Training state-of-the-art models

Setting up data

• Download visual cues/hints from https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1fkydOF-_LRpXK1ecgst5XujhyQdE6It7?usp=sharing into the following directory: ${DATA_DIR}/hints
  • The shared folder contains Human Attention Map-based cues and Textual Explanations-based cues
  • The folder contains 3 versions for each type of cue: a) relevant cues (original) b) irrelevant cues (1 - relevant) c) random cues

The following scripts train HINT/SCR with a) relevant cues b) irrelevant cues c) fixed random cues and d) varying random cues:

Training HINT [1]

Execute ./scripts/hint/vqacp2_hint.sh for VQACPv2

Execute ./scripts/hint/vqa2_hint.sh for VQAv2

Training SCR [2]

Execute ./scripts/scr/vqacp2_scr.sh for VQACPv2

Execute ./scripts/scr/vqa2_scr.sh for VQAv2

Note: By default, HINT and SCR are only trained on subset with visual cues. To train on full dataset, please specify --do_not_discard_items_without_hints flag.

Training our 'zero-out' regularizer

• Execute ./scripts/our_zero_out_regularizer/vqacp2_zero_out_full.sh to train with our regularizer on 100% of VQACPv2
• Execute ./scripts/our_zero_out_regularizer/vqacp2_zero_out_subset.sh to train with our regularizer on a subset of VQACPv2
• Execute ./scripts/our_zero_out_regularizer/vqa2_zero_out_full.sh to train with our regularizer on 100% of VQAv2
• Execute ./scripts/our_zero_out_regularizer/vqa2_zero_out_subset.sh to train with our regularizer on a subset of VQAv2

Analysis

Computing rank correlation

Please refer to scripts/analysis/compute_rank_correlation.sh for sample scripts that can be used to compute rank correlations. The script uses the object sensitivity files generated during the training/evaluation.

References

[1] Selvaraju, Ramprasaath R., et al. "Taking a hint: Leveraging explanations to make vision and language models more grounded." Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision. 2019.

[2] Wu, Jialin, and Raymond Mooney. "Self-Critical Reasoning for Robust Visual Question Answering." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. 2019.

Citation

@inproceedings{shrestha-etal-2020-negative,
    title = "A negative case analysis of visual grounding methods for {VQA}",
    author = "Shrestha, Robik  and
      Kafle, Kushal  and
      Kanan, Christopher",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = jul,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.acl-main.727",
    pages = "8172--8181"
}