Seeing and Reasoning: A Simple Deep Learning Approach to Visual Question Answering

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a complex task that requires a deep understanding of both visual content and natural language questions. The challenge lies in enabling models to recognize and interpret visual elements and to reason through questions in a multi-step, compositional manner. We propo...

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Main Authors: Rufai Yusuf Zakari, Jim Wilson Owusu, Ke Qin, Tao He, Guangchun Luo
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Tsinghua University Press 2025-04-01
Series:Big Data Mining and Analytics
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Online Access:https://www.sciopen.com/article/10.26599/BDMA.2024.9020079
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author Rufai Yusuf Zakari
Jim Wilson Owusu
Ke Qin
Tao He
Guangchun Luo
author_facet Rufai Yusuf Zakari
Jim Wilson Owusu
Ke Qin
Tao He
Guangchun Luo
author_sort Rufai Yusuf Zakari
collection DOAJ
description Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a complex task that requires a deep understanding of both visual content and natural language questions. The challenge lies in enabling models to recognize and interpret visual elements and to reason through questions in a multi-step, compositional manner. We propose a novel Transformer-based model that introduces specialized tokenization techniques to effectively capture intricate relationships between visual and textual features. The model employs an enhanced self-attention mechanism, enabling it to attend to multiple modalities simultaneously, while a co-attention unit dynamically guides focus to the most relevant image regions and question components. Additionally, a multi-step reasoning module supports iterative inference, allowing the model to excel at complex reasoning tasks. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the model’s superior performance, with accuracies of 98.6% on CLEVR, 63.78% on GQA, and 68.67% on VQA v2.0. Ablation studies confirm the critical contribution of key components, such as the reasoning module and co-attention mechanism, to the model’s effectiveness. Qualitative analysis of the learned attention distributions further illustrates the model’s dynamic reasoning process, adapting to task complexity. Overall, our study advances the adaptation of Transformer architectures for VQA, enhancing both reasoning capabilities and model interpretability in visual reasoning tasks.
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spelling doaj-art-5bbbc5e940b64e5f8a3949fbf6ce24ab2025-08-20T02:04:30ZengTsinghua University PressBig Data Mining and Analytics2096-06542097-406X2025-04-018245847810.26599/BDMA.2024.9020079Seeing and Reasoning: A Simple Deep Learning Approach to Visual Question AnsweringRufai Yusuf Zakari0Jim Wilson Owusu1Ke Qin2Tao He3Guangchun Luo4School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, ChinaSchool of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, ChinaSchool of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, ChinaSchool of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, ChinaSchool of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, ChinaVisual Question Answering (VQA) is a complex task that requires a deep understanding of both visual content and natural language questions. The challenge lies in enabling models to recognize and interpret visual elements and to reason through questions in a multi-step, compositional manner. We propose a novel Transformer-based model that introduces specialized tokenization techniques to effectively capture intricate relationships between visual and textual features. The model employs an enhanced self-attention mechanism, enabling it to attend to multiple modalities simultaneously, while a co-attention unit dynamically guides focus to the most relevant image regions and question components. Additionally, a multi-step reasoning module supports iterative inference, allowing the model to excel at complex reasoning tasks. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the model’s superior performance, with accuracies of 98.6% on CLEVR, 63.78% on GQA, and 68.67% on VQA v2.0. Ablation studies confirm the critical contribution of key components, such as the reasoning module and co-attention mechanism, to the model’s effectiveness. Qualitative analysis of the learned attention distributions further illustrates the model’s dynamic reasoning process, adapting to task complexity. Overall, our study advances the adaptation of Transformer architectures for VQA, enhancing both reasoning capabilities and model interpretability in visual reasoning tasks.https://www.sciopen.com/article/10.26599/BDMA.2024.9020079machine learningdeep learningvisual question answering (vqa)multi-step reasoningcomputer vision
spellingShingle Rufai Yusuf Zakari
Jim Wilson Owusu
Ke Qin
Tao He
Guangchun Luo
Seeing and Reasoning: A Simple Deep Learning Approach to Visual Question Answering
Big Data Mining and Analytics
machine learning
deep learning
visual question answering (vqa)
multi-step reasoning
computer vision
title Seeing and Reasoning: A Simple Deep Learning Approach to Visual Question Answering
title_full Seeing and Reasoning: A Simple Deep Learning Approach to Visual Question Answering
title_fullStr Seeing and Reasoning: A Simple Deep Learning Approach to Visual Question Answering
title_full_unstemmed Seeing and Reasoning: A Simple Deep Learning Approach to Visual Question Answering
title_short Seeing and Reasoning: A Simple Deep Learning Approach to Visual Question Answering
title_sort seeing and reasoning a simple deep learning approach to visual question answering
topic machine learning
deep learning
visual question answering (vqa)
multi-step reasoning
computer vision
url https://www.sciopen.com/article/10.26599/BDMA.2024.9020079
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