MuMuQA: Multimedia Multi-Hop News Question Answering via Cross-Media Knowledge Extraction and Grounding

By Revanth Reddy Gangi Reddy, Xilin Rui, Manling Li, Xudong Lin, Haoyang Wen, Jaemin Cho, Lifu Huang, Mohit Bansal, Avirup Sil, Shih-Fu Chang and 2 more. 2021

37 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in building question answering (QA) models that reason across multiple modalities, such as text and images. However, QA using images is often limited to just picking the answer from a pre-defined set of options. In addition, images in the real world, especially in news, have objects that are co-referential to the text, with complementary information from both modalities. In this paper, we present a new QA evaluation benchmark with 1,384 questions over news articles that require cross-media grounding of objects in images onto text. Specifically, the task involves multi-hop questions that require reasoning over image-caption pairs to identify the grounded visual object being referred to and then predicting a span from the news body text to answer the question. In addition, we introduce a novel multimedia data augmentation framework, based on cross-media knowledge extraction and synthetic question-answer generation, to automatically augment data that can provide weak supervision for this task. We evaluate both pipeline-based and end-to-end pretraining-based multimedia QA models on our benchmark, and show that they achieve promising performance, while considerably lagging behind human performance hence leaving large room for future work on this challenging new task.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Multimodal Learning, Question Answering & Reading Comprehension

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Citations in the corpus

ViperGPT: Visual Inference via Python Execution for Reasoning (2023, background): “Other recent works [63, 45, 55, 35, 37, 15] show that large pretrained models can be used together to great effect, but hand-specify the particular way models are combined.”
MuRAG: Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generator for Open Question Answering over Images and Text (2022, methodology): “The method uses RoBERTa-large (Roberts et al., 2022) for text-questions and VilBERT (Lu et al., 2019) with features extracted from Faster-RCNN (Ren et al., 2015) for image questions.”