Visual Coreference Resolution in Visual Dialog using Neural Module Networks

Visual dialog entails answering a series of questions grounded in an image, using dialog history as context. In addition to the challenges found in visual question answering (VQA), which can be seen as one-round dialog, visual dialog encompasses several more. We focus on one such problem called visual coreference resolution that involves determining which words, typically noun phrases and pronouns, co-refer to the same entity/object instance in an image. This is crucial, especially for pronouns (e.g., `it'), as the dialog agent must first link it to a previous coreference (e.g., `boat'), and only then can rely on the visual grounding of the coreference `boat' to reason about the pronoun `it'. Prior work (in visual dialog) models visual coreference resolution either (a) implicitly via a memory network over history, or (b) at a coarse level for the entire question; and not explicitly at a phrase level of granularity. In this work, we propose a neural module network architecture for visual dialog by introducing two novel modules - Refer and Exclude - that perform explicit, grounded, coreference resolution at a finer word level. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on MNIST Dialog, a visually simple yet coreference-wise complex dataset, by achieving near perfect accuracy, and on VisDial, a large and challenging visual dialog dataset on real images, where our model outperforms other approaches, and is more interpretable, grounded, and consistent qualitatively.

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Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Visual Dialog VisDial v0.9 val CorefNMN (ResNet-152) MRR 64.1 # 3
Mean Rank 4.45 # 8
R@1 50.92 # 7
R@10 88.81 # 8
R@5 80.18 # 9
Visual Dialog VisDial v0.9 val CorefNMN MRR 63.6 # 5
Mean Rank 4.53 # 10
R@1 50.24 # 9
R@10 88.51 # 10
R@5 79.81 # 10
Common Sense Reasoning Visual Dialog v0.9 NMN [kottur2018visual] 1 in 10 R@5 80.1 # 1
Visual Dialog Visual Dialog v1.0 test-std CorefNMN (ResNet-152) NDCG (x 100) 54.70 # 67
MRR (x 100) 61.50 # 41
R@1 47.55 # 40
R@5 78.10 # 39
R@10 88.80 # 37
Mean 4.40 # 42

Methods