text: Recent breakthroughs in computer vision and natural language processing have spurred interest in challenging multi-modal tasks such as visual question-answering and visual dialogue. For such tasks, one successful approach is to condition image-based convolutional network computation on language via Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) layers, i.e., per-channel scaling and shifting. We propose to generate the parameters of FiLM layers going up the hierarchy of a convolutional network in a multi-hop fashion rather than all at once, as in prior work. By alternating between attending to the language input and generating FiLM layer parameters, this approach is better able to scale to settings with longer input sequences such as dialogue. We demonstrate that multi-hop FiLM generation achieves state-of-the-art for the short input sequence task ReferIt --- on-par with single-hop FiLM generation --- while also significantly outperforming prior state-of-the-art and single-hop FiLM generation on the GuessWhat?! visual dialogue task.
  @cite_22: We introduce GuessWhat?!, a two-player guessing game as a testbed for research on the interplay of computer vision and dialogue systems. The goal of the game is to locate an unknown object in a rich image scene by asking a sequence of questions. Higher-level image understanding, like spatial reasoning and language grounding, is required to solve the proposed task. Our key contribution is the collection of a large-scale dataset consisting of 150K human-played games with a total of 800K visual question-answer pairs on 66K images. We explain our design decisions in collecting the dataset and introduce the oracle and questioner tasks that are associated with the two players of the game. We prototyped deep learning models to establish initial baselines of the introduced tasks.
  @cite_52: 
  @cite_45: Goal-oriented dialogue has been paid attention for its numerous applications in artificial intelligence. To solve this task, deep learning and reinforcement learning have recently been applied. However, these approaches struggle to find a competent recurrent neural questioner, owing to the complexity of learning a series of sentences. Motivated by theory of mind, we propose "Answerer in Questioner's Mind" (AQM), a novel algorithm for goal-oriented dialogue. With AQM, a questioner asks and infers based on an approximated probabilistic model of the answerer. The questioner figures out the answerer's intent via selecting a plausible question by explicitly calculating the information gain of the candidate intentions and possible answers to each question. We test our framework on two goal-oriented visual dialogue tasks: "MNIST Counting Dialog" and "GuessWhat?!." In our experiments, AQM outperforms comparative algorithms and makes human-like dialogue. We further use AQM as a tool for analyzing the mechanism of deep reinforcement learning approach and discuss the future direction of practical goal-oriented neural dialogue systems.
  @cite_49: 
  @cite_2: It is commonly assumed that language refers to high-level visual concepts while leaving low-level visual processing unaffected. This view dominates the current literature in computational models for language-vision tasks, where visual and linguistic inputs are mostly processed independently before being fused into a single representation. In this paper, we deviate from this classic pipeline and propose to modulate the by a linguistic input. Specifically, we introduce Conditional Batch Normalization (CBN) as an efficient mechanism to modulate convolutional feature maps by a linguistic embedding. We apply CBN to a pre-trained Residual Network (ResNet), leading to the MODulatEd ResNet ( ) architecture, and show that this significantly improves strong baselines on two visual question answering tasks. Our ablation study confirms that modulating from the early stages of the visual processing is beneficial.
  @cite_34: Recognising objects according to a pre-defined fixed set of class labels has been well studied in the Computer Vision. There are a great many practical applications where the subjects that may be of interest are not known beforehand, or so easily delineated, however. In many of these cases natural language dialog is a natural way to specify the subject of interest, and the task achieving this capability (a.k.a, Referring Expression Comprehension) has recently attracted attention. To this end we propose a unified framework, the ParalleL AttentioN (PLAN) network, to discover the object in an image that is being referred to in variable length natural expression descriptions, from short phrases query to long multi-round dialogs. The PLAN network has two attention mechanisms that relate parts of the expressions to both the global visual content and also directly to object candidates. Furthermore, the attention mechanisms are recurrent, making the referring process visualizable and explainable. The attended information from these dual sources are combined to reason about the referred object. These two attention mechanisms can be trained in parallel and we find the combined system outperforms the state-of-art on several benchmarked datasets with different length language input, such as RefCOCO, RefCOCO+ and GuessWhat?!.
summary: The game @cite_22 can be seen as a dialogue version of the game, one which additionally draws on visual question answering ability. @cite_52 @cite_45 @cite_49 make headway on the dialogue generation task via reinforcement learning. However, these approaches are bottlenecked by the accuracy of Oracle and Guesser models, despite existing modeling advances @cite_34 @cite_2 ; accurate Oracle and Guesser models are crucial for providing a meaningful learning signal for dialogue generation models, so we believe the architecture will facilitate high quality dialogue generation as well.