Visual question answering (VQA) and image captioning require a shared body of general knowledge connecting language and vision. We present a novel approach to improve VQA performance that exploits this connection by jointly generating captions that are targeted to help answer a specific visual question. The model is trained using an existing caption dataset by automatically determining question-relevant captions using an online gradient-based method. Experimental results on the VQA v2 challenge demonstrates that our approach obtains state-of-the-art VQA performance (e.g. 68.4% on the Test-standard set using a single model) by simultaneously generating question-relevant captions.
@article{arxiv.1906.00513,
title = {Generating Question Relevant Captions to Aid Visual Question Answering},
author = {Jialin Wu and Zeyuan Hu and Raymond J. Mooney},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.00513},
year = {2020}
}