Visual Grounding via Accumulated Attention
Chaorui Deng, Qi Wu, Qingyao Wu, Fuyuan Hu, Fan Lyu, Mingkui Tan
Visual Grounding (VG) aims to locate the most relevant object or region in an image, based on a natural language query. The query can be a phrase, a sentence or even a multi-round dialogue. There are three main challenges in VG: 1) what is the main focus in a query; 2) how to understand an image; 3) how to locate an object. Most existing methods combine all the information curtly, which may suffer from the problem of information redundancy (i.e. ambiguous query, complicated image and a large number of objects). In this paper, we formulate these challenges as three attention problems and propose an accumulated attention (A-ATT) mechanism to reason among them jointly. Our A-ATT mechanism can circularly accumulate the attention for useful information in image, query, and objects, while the noises are ignored gradually. We evaluate the performance of A-ATT on four popular datasets (namely ReferCOCO, ReferCOCO+, ReferCOCOg, and Guesswhat?!), and the experimental results show the superiority of the proposed method in term of accuracy.
