Kentaro Takemoto

Amir Rahimi, Vanessa D'Amario, Moyuru Yamada et al.

Systematic generalization is a crucial aspect of intelligence, which refers to the ability to generalize to novel tasks by combining known subtasks and concepts. One critical factor that has been shown to influence systematic generalization is the diversity of training data. However, diversity can be defined in various ways, as data have many factors of variation. A more granular understanding of how different aspects of data diversity affect systematic generalization is lacking. We present new evidence in the problem of Visual Question Answering (VQA) that reveals that the diversity of simple tasks (i.e. tasks formed by a few subtasks and concepts) plays a key role in achieving systematic generalization. This implies that it may not be essential to gather a large and varied number of complex tasks, which could be costly to obtain. We demonstrate that this result is independent of the similarity between the training and testing data and applies to well-known families of neural network architectures for VQA (i.e. monolithic architectures and neural module networks). Additionally, we observe that neural module networks leverage all forms of data diversity we evaluated, while monolithic architectures require more extensive amounts of data to do so. These findings provide a first step towards understanding the interactions between data diversity design, neural network architectures, and systematic generalization capabilities.

Kentaro Takemoto, Moyuru Yamada, Tomotake Sasaki et al.

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection is a task to localize humans and objects in an image and predict the interactions in human-object pairs. In real-world scenarios, HOI detection models need systematic generalization, i.e., generalization to novel combinations of objects and interactions, because the train data are expected to cover a limited portion of all possible combinations. To evaluate the systematic generalization performance of HOI detection models, we created two new sets of HOI detection data splits named HICO-DET-SG and V-COCO-SG based on the HICO-DET and V-COCO datasets, respectively. When evaluated on the new data splits, HOI detection models with various characteristics performed much more poorly than when evaluated on the original splits. This shows that systematic generalization is a challenging goal in HOI detection. By analyzing the evaluation results, we also gain insights for improving the systematic generalization performance and identify four possible future research directions. We hope that our new data splits and presented analysis will encourage further research on systematic generalization in HOI detection.

Moyuru Yamada, Vanessa D'Amario, Kentaro Takemoto et al.

Transformers achieve great performance on Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, their systematic generalization capabilities, i.e., handling novel combinations of known concepts, is unclear. We reveal that Neural Module Networks (NMNs), i.e., question-specific compositions of modules that tackle a sub-task, achieve better or similar systematic generalization performance than the conventional Transformers, even though NMNs' modules are CNN-based. In order to address this shortcoming of Transformers with respect to NMNs, in this paper we investigate whether and how modularity can bring benefits to Transformers. Namely, we introduce Transformer Module Network (TMN), a novel NMN based on compositions of Transformer modules. TMNs achieve state-of-the-art systematic generalization performance in three VQA datasets, improving more than 30% over standard Transformers for novel compositions of sub-tasks. We show that not only the module composition but also the module specialization for each sub-task are the key of such performance gain.

Atsushi Kanehira, Kentaro Takemoto, Sho Inayoshi et al.

This study addresses generating counterfactual explanations with multimodal information. Our goal is not only to classify a video into a specific category, but also to provide explanations on why it is not categorized to a specific class with combinations of visual-linguistic information. Requirements that the expected output should satisfy are referred to as counterfactuality in this paper: (1) Compatibility of visual-linguistic explanations, and (2) Positiveness/negativeness for the specific positive/negative class. Exploiting a spatio-temporal region (tube) and an attribute as visual and linguistic explanations respectively, the explanation model is trained to predict the counterfactuality for possible combinations of multimodal information in a post-hoc manner. The optimization problem, which appears during training/inference, can be efficiently solved by inserting a novel neural network layer, namely the maximum subpath layer. We demonstrated the effectiveness of this method by comparison with a baseline of the action recognition datasets extended for this task. Moreover, we provide information-theoretical insight into the proposed method.