MIRTT: Learning Multimodal Interaction Representations from Trilinear Transformers for Visual Question Answering

Abstract

In Visual Question Answering (VQA), existing bilinear methods focus on the interaction between images and questions. As a result, the answers are either spliced into the questions or utilized as labels only for classification. On the other hand, trilinear models such as the CTI model efficiently utilize the inter-modality information between answers, questions, and images, while ignoring intra-modality information. Inspired by this observation, we propose a new trilinear interaction framework called MIRTT (Learning Multimodal Interaction Representations from Trilinear Transformers), incorporating the attention mechanisms for capturing inter-modality and intra-modality relationships. Moreover, we design a two-stage workflow where a bilinear model reduces the free-form, open-ended VQA problem into a multiple-choice VQA problem. Furthermore, to obtain accurate and generic multimodal representations, we pre-train MIRTT with masked language prediction. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Visual7W Telling task and VQA-1.0 Multiple Choice task and outperforms bilinear baselines on the VQA-2.0, TDIUC and GQA datasets.