IQA: Visual Question Answering in Interactive Environments
This addresses the challenge of enabling autonomous agents to perform complex visual reasoning through interaction, which is incremental as it builds upon existing reinforcement learning and visual question answering frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of answering questions that require interaction with dynamic visual environments, introducing the Interactive Question Answering (IQA) task and proposing the Hierarchical Interactive Memory Network (HIMN), which outperforms single controller methods on the new IQUAD V1 dataset with 75,000 questions.
We introduce Interactive Question Answering (IQA), the task of answering questions that require an autonomous agent to interact with a dynamic visual environment. IQA presents the agent with a scene and a question, like: "Are there any apples in the fridge?" The agent must navigate around the scene, acquire visual understanding of scene elements, interact with objects (e.g. open refrigerators) and plan for a series of actions conditioned on the question. Popular reinforcement learning approaches with a single controller perform poorly on IQA owing to the large and diverse state space. We propose the Hierarchical Interactive Memory Network (HIMN), consisting of a factorized set of controllers, allowing the system to operate at multiple levels of temporal abstraction. To evaluate HIMN, we introduce IQUAD V1, a new dataset built upon AI2-THOR, a simulated photo-realistic environment of configurable indoor scenes with interactive objects (code and dataset available at https://github.com/danielgordon10/thor-iqa-cvpr-2018). IQUAD V1 has 75,000 questions, each paired with a unique scene configuration. Our experiments show that our proposed model outperforms popular single controller based methods on IQUAD V1. For sample questions and results, please view our video: https://youtu.be/pXd3C-1jr98