Reinforcement Stacked Learning with Semantic-Associated Attention for Visual Question Answering

The task of visual question answering (VQA) is to generate an answer for a question according to the content of an image being asked. In this process, the critical problems of effectively embedding the question feature and image feature as well as transforming the features to the prediction of answer are still faithfully unresolved. In this paper, depending on these problems, a semantic-associated attention method and a reinforcement stacked learning mechanism are proposed. Firstly, within the associations of high-level semantics, a visual spatial attention model (VSA) and a multi-semantic attention model (MSA) are proposed to extract the low-level image feature and high-level semantic feature, respectively. Furthermore, we develop a reinforcement stacked learning architecture, which splits the transformation process into multiple stages, to gradually approach the answers. At each stage, a new reinforcement learning (RL) method is introduced to directly criticize inappropriate answers to optimize the model. The extensive experiments on the VQA task show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance.