English

Towards Transparent AI Systems: Interpreting Visual Question Answering Models

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2016-09-12 v2 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Machine Learning

Abstract

Deep neural networks have shown striking progress and obtained state-of-the-art results in many AI research fields in the recent years. However, it is often unsatisfying to not know why they predict what they do. In this paper, we address the problem of interpreting Visual Question Answering (VQA) models. Specifically, we are interested in finding what part of the input (pixels in images or words in questions) the VQA model focuses on while answering the question. To tackle this problem, we use two visualization techniques -- guided backpropagation and occlusion -- to find important words in the question and important regions in the image. We then present qualitative and quantitative analyses of these importance maps. We found that even without explicit attention mechanisms, VQA models may sometimes be implicitly attending to relevant regions in the image, and often to appropriate words in the question.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1608.08974,
  title  = {Towards Transparent AI Systems: Interpreting Visual Question Answering Models},
  author = {Yash Goyal and Akrit Mohapatra and Devi Parikh and Dhruv Batra},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.08974},
  year   = {2016}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T15:36:55.104Z