Align and Aggregate: Compositional Reasoning with Video Alignment and Answer Aggregation for Video Question-Answering
Authors: Zhaohe Liao, Jiangtong Li, Li Niu, Liqing Zhang

Despite the recent progress made in Video Question-Answering (VideoQA) these methods typically function as black-boxes making it difficult to understand their reasoning processes and perform consistent compositional reasoning. To address these challenges we propose a model-agnostic Video Alignment and Answer Aggregation (VA3) framework which is capable of enhancing both compositional consistency and accuracy of existing VidQA methods by integrating video aligner and answer aggregator modules. The video aligner hierarchically selects the relevant video clips based on the question while the answer aggregator deduces the answer to the question based on its sub-questions with compositional consistency ensured by the information flow along the question decompose graph and the contrastive learning strategy. We evaluate our framework on three settings of the AGQA-Decomp dataset with three baseline methods and propose new metrics to measure the compositional consistency of VidQA methods more comprehensively. Moreover we propose a large language model (LLM) based automatic question decompose pipeline to apply our framework on any VidQA data. We extend MSVD and NExT-QA datasets with it to evaluate such scheme and our VA3 framework on broader scenarios. Extensive experiments show that our framework improves both compositional consistency and accuracy of existing methods leading to more interpretable models in real-world applications.