BERT representations for video question answering

Abstract

Visual question answering (VQA) aims at answering questions about the visual content of an image or a video. Currently, most work on VQA is focused on image-based question answering, and less attention has been paid into answering questions about videos. However, VQA in video presents some unique challenges that are worth studying: it not only requires to model a sequence of visual features over time, but often it also needs to reason about associated subtitles. In this work, we propose to use BERT, a sequential modelling technique based on Transformers, to encode the complex semantics from video clips. Our proposed model jointly captures the visual and language information of a video scene by encoding not only the subtitles but also a sequence of visual concepts with a pretrained language-based Transformer. In our experiments, we exhaustively study the performance of our model by taking different input arrangements, showing outstanding improvements when compared against previous work on two well-known video VQA datasets: TVQA and Pororo.

Publication
Proceedings - 2020 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, WACV 2020
Zekun Yang
Zekun Yang
PhD Student
Noa Garcia
Noa Garcia
Specially-Appointed Assistant Professor

Her research interests lie in computer vision and machine learning applied to visual retrieval and joint models of vision and language for high-level understanding tasks.

Chenhui Chu
Chenhui Chu
Guest Associate Professor
Yuta Nakashima
Yuta Nakashima
Professor

Yuta Nakashima is a professor with Institute for Datability Science, Osaka University. His research interests include computer vision, pattern recognition, natural langauge processing, and their applications.