Attention networks in multimodal learning provide an efficient way to utilize given visual information selectively. However, the computational cost to learn attention distributions for every pair of multimodal input channels is prohibitively expensive. To solve this problem, co-attention builds two separate attention distributions for each modality neglecting the interaction between multimodal inputs. In this paper, we propose bilinear attention networks (BAN) that find bilinear attention distributions to utilize given vision-language information seamlessly. BAN considers bilinear interactions among two groups of input channels, while low-rank bilinear pooling extracts the joint representations for each pair of channels. Furthermore, we propose a variant of multimodal residual networks to exploit eight-attention maps of the BAN efficiently. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate our model on visual question answering (VQA 2.0) and Flickr30k Entities datasets, showing that BAN significantly outperforms previous methods and achieves new state-of-the-arts on both datasets.
In order to answer semantically-complicated questions about an image, a Visual Question Answering (VQA) model needs to fully understand the visual scene in the image, especially the interactive dynamics between different objects. We propose a Relation-aware Graph Attention Network (ReGAT), which encodes each image into a graph and models multi-type inter-object relations via a graph attention mechanism, to learn question-adaptive relation representations. Two types of visual object relations are explored: (i) Explicit Relations that represent geometric positions and semantic interactions between objects; and (ii) Implicit Relations that capture the hidden dynamics between image regions. Experiments demonstrate that ReGAT outperforms prior state-of-the-art approaches on both VQA 2.0 and VQA-CP v2 datasets. We further show that ReGAT is compatible to existing VQA architectures, and can be used as a generic relation encoder to boost the model performance for VQA.
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have recently become one of the most powerful tools for graph analytics tasks in numerous applications, ranging from social networks and natural language processing to bioinformatics and chemoinformatics, thanks to their ability to capture the complex relationships between concepts. At present, the vast majority of GCNs use a neighborhood aggregation framework to learn a continuous and compact vector, then performing a pooling operation to generalize graph embedding for the classification task. These approaches have two disadvantages in the graph classification task: (1)when only the largest sub-graph structure ($k$-hop neighbor) is used for neighborhood aggregation, a large amount of early-stage information is lost during the graph convolution step; (2) simple average/sum pooling or max pooling utilized, which loses the characteristics of each node and the topology between nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called, dual attention graph convolutional networks (DAGCN) to address these problems. DAGCN automatically learns the importance of neighbors at different hops using a novel attention graph convolution layer, and then employs a second attention component, a self-attention pooling layer, to generalize the graph representation from the various aspects of a matrix graph embedding. The dual attention network is trained in an end-to-end manner for the graph classification task. We compare our model with state-of-the-art graph kernels and other deep learning methods. The experimental results show that our framework not only outperforms other baselines but also achieves a better rate of convergence.
Many real-world problems can be represented as graph-based learning problems. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for learning spatial and attentional convolution neural networks on arbitrary graphs. Different from previous convolutional neural networks on graphs, we first design a motif-matching guided subgraph normalization method to capture neighborhood information. Then we implement subgraph-level self-attentional layers to learn different importances from different subgraphs to solve graph classification problems. Analogous to image-based attentional convolution networks that operate on locally connected and weighted regions of the input, we also extend graph normalization from one-dimensional node sequence to two-dimensional node grid by leveraging motif-matching, and design self-attentional layers without requiring any kinds of cost depending on prior knowledge of the graph structure. Our results on both bioinformatics and social network datasets show that we can significantly improve graph classification benchmarks over traditional graph kernel and existing deep models.
Existing attention mechanisms are trained to attend to individual items in a collection (the memory) with a predefined, fixed granularity, e.g., a word token or an image grid. We propose area attention: a way to attend to areas in the memory, where each area contains a group of items that are structurally adjacent, e.g., spatially for a 2D memory such as images, or temporally for a 1D memory such as natural language sentences. Importantly, the shape and the size of an area are dynamically determined via learning, which enables a model to attend to information with varying granularity. Area attention can easily work with existing model architectures such as multi-head attention for simultaneously attending to multiple areas in the memory. We evaluate area attention on two tasks: neural machine translation (both character and token-level) and image captioning, and improve upon strong (state-of-the-art) baselines in all the cases. These improvements are obtainable with a basic form of area attention that is parameter free.
State-of-the-art deep convolutional networks (DCNs) such as squeeze-and- excitation (SE) residual networks implement a form of attention, also known as contextual guidance, which is derived from global image features. Here, we explore a complementary form of attention, known as visual saliency, which is derived from local image features. We extend the SE module with a novel global-and-local attention (GALA) module which combines both forms of attention -- resulting in state-of-the-art accuracy on ILSVRC. We further describe ClickMe.ai, a large-scale online experiment designed for human participants to identify diagnostic image regions to co-train a GALA network. Adding humans-in-the-loop is shown to significantly improve network accuracy, while also yielding visual features that are more interpretable and more similar to those used by human observers.
We introduce hyperbolic attention networks to endow neural networks with enough capacity to match the complexity of data with hierarchical and power-law structure. A few recent approaches have successfully demonstrated the benefits of imposing hyperbolic geometry on the parameters of shallow networks. We extend this line of work by imposing hyperbolic geometry on the activations of neural networks. This allows us to exploit hyperbolic geometry to reason about embeddings produced by deep networks. We achieve this by re-expressing the ubiquitous mechanism of soft attention in terms of operations defined for hyperboloid and Klein models. Our method shows improvements in terms of generalization on neural machine translation, learning on graphs and visual question answering tasks while keeping the neural representations compact.
Existing attention mechanisms either attend to local image grid or object level features for Visual Question Answering (VQA). Motivated by the observation that questions can relate to both object instances and their parts, we propose a novel attention mechanism that jointly considers reciprocal relationships between the two levels of visual details. The bottom-up attention thus generated is further coalesced with the top-down information to only focus on the scene elements that are most relevant to a given question. Our design hierarchically fuses multi-modal information i.e., language, object- and gird-level features, through an efficient tensor decomposition scheme. The proposed model improves the state-of-the-art single model performances from 67.9% to 68.2% on VQAv1 and from 65.3% to 67.4% on VQAv2, demonstrating a significant boost.
In this paper, we exploit a memory-augmented neural network to predict accurate answers to visual questions, even when those answers occur rarely in the training set. The memory network incorporates both internal and external memory blocks and selectively pays attention to each training exemplar. We show that memory-augmented neural networks are able to maintain a relatively long-term memory of scarce training exemplars, which is important for visual question answering due to the heavy-tailed distribution of answers in a general VQA setting. Experimental results on two large-scale benchmark datasets show the favorable performance of the proposed algorithm with a comparison to state of the art.
We present graph attention networks (GATs), novel neural network architectures that operate on graph-structured data, leveraging masked self-attentional layers to address the shortcomings of prior methods based on graph convolutions or their approximations. By stacking layers in which nodes are able to attend over their neighborhoods' features, we enable (implicitly) specifying different weights to different nodes in a neighborhood, without requiring any kind of costly matrix operation (such as inversion) or depending on knowing the graph structure upfront. In this way, we address several key challenges of spectral-based graph neural networks simultaneously, and make our model readily applicable to inductive as well as transductive problems. Our GAT models have achieved or matched state-of-the-art results across four established transductive and inductive graph benchmarks: the Cora, Citeseer and Pubmed citation network datasets, as well as a protein-protein interaction dataset (wherein test graphs remain unseen during training).
We propose an architecture for VQA which utilizes recurrent layers to generate visual and textual attention. The memory characteristic of the proposed recurrent attention units offers a rich joint embedding of visual and textual features and enables the model to reason relations between several parts of the image and question. Our single model outperforms the first place winner on the VQA 1.0 dataset, performs within margin to the current state-of-the-art ensemble model. We also experiment with replacing attention mechanisms in other state-of-the-art models with our implementation and show increased accuracy. In both cases, our recurrent attention mechanism improves performance in tasks requiring sequential or relational reasoning on the VQA dataset.