Natural language questions are inherently compositional, and many are most easily answered by reasoning about their decomposition into modular sub-problems. For example, to answer "is there an equal number of balls and boxes?" we can look for balls, look for boxes, count them, and compare the results. The recently proposed Neural Module Network (NMN) architecture implements this approach to question answering by parsing questions into linguistic substructures and assembling question-specific deep networks from smaller modules that each solve one subtask. However, existing NMN implementations rely on brittle off-the-shelf parsers, and are restricted to the module configurations proposed by these parsers rather than learning them from data. In this paper, we propose End-to-End Module Networks (N2NMNs), which learn to reason by directly predicting instance-specific network layouts without the aid of a parser. Our model learns to generate network structures (by imitating expert demonstrations) while simultaneously learning network parameters (using the downstream task loss). Experimental results on the new CLEVR dataset targeted at compositional question answering show that N2NMNs achieve an error reduction of nearly 50 relative to state-of-the-art attentional approaches, while discovering interpretable network architectures specialized for each question.
We additionally modify the representation of the assembled module networks themselves: where @cite_9 and @cite_14 parameterized individual modules with a fixed embedding supplied by the parser, here we these parameters jointly with network structures using a soft attention mechanism. This parameterization resembles the approach used in the compositional modular network'' architecture @cite_22 for grounding referential expressions. However, the model proposed in @cite_22 is restricted to a fixed layout structure of (subject, relationship, object) for every referential expression, and includes no structure search.
@cite_9 @cite_14 @cite_22
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People often refer to entities in an image in terms of their relationships with other entities. For example, the black cat sitting under the table refers to both a black cat entity and its relationship with another table entity. Understanding these relationships is essential for interpreting and grounding such natural language expressions. Most prior work focuses on either grounding entire referential expressions holistically to one region, or localizing relationships based on a fixed set of categories. In this paper we instead present a modular deep architecture capable of analyzing referential expressions into their component parts, identifying entities and relationships mentioned in the input expression and grounding them all in the scene. We call this approach Compositional Modular Networks (CMNs): a novel architecture that learns linguistic analysis and visual inference end-to-end. Our approach is built around two types of neural modules that inspect local regions and pairwise interactions between regions. We evaluate CMNs on multiple referential expression datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches on all tasks. People often refer to entities in an image in terms of their relationships with other entities. For example, "the black cat sitting under the table" refers to both a "black cat" entity and its relationship with another "table" entity. Understanding these relationships is essential for interpreting and grounding such natural language expressions. Most prior work focuses on either grounding entire referential expressions holistically to one region, or localizing relationships based on a fixed set of categories. In this paper we instead present a modular deep architecture capable of analyzing referential expressions into their component parts, identifying entities and relationships mentioned in the input expression and grounding them all in the scene. We call this approach Compositional Modular Networks (CMNs): a novel architecture that learns linguistic analysis and visual inference end-to-end. Our approach is built around two types of neural modules that inspect local regions and pairwise interactions between regions. We evaluate CMNs on multiple referential expression datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches on all tasks. Natural language questions are inherently compositional, and many are most easily answered by reasoning about their decomposition into modular sub-problems. For example, to answer "is there an equal number of balls and boxes?" we can look for balls, look for boxes, count them, and compare the results. The recently proposed Neural Module Network (NMN) architecture implements this approach to question answering by parsing questions into linguistic substructures and assembling question-specific deep networks from smaller modules that each solve one subtask. However, existing NMN implementations rely on brittle off-the-shelf parsers, and are restricted to the module configurations proposed by these parsers rather than learning them from data. In this paper, we propose End-to-End Module Networks (N2NMNs), which learn to reason by directly predicting instance-specific network layouts without the aid of a parser. Our model learns to generate network structures (by imitating expert demonstrations) while simultaneously learning network parameters (using the downstream task loss). Experimental results on the new CLEVR dataset targeted at compositional question answering show that N2NMNs achieve an error reduction of nearly 50 relative to state-of-the-art attentional approaches, while discovering interpretable network architectures specialized for each question. Natural language questions are inherently compositional, and many are most easily answered by reasoning about their decomposition into modular sub-problems. For example, to answer “is there an equal number of balls and boxes?” we can look for balls, look for boxes, count them, and compare the results. The recently proposed Neural Module Network (NMN) architecture [3, 2] implements this approach to question answering by parsing questions into linguistic substructures and assembling question-specific deep networks from smaller modules that each solve one subtask. However, existing NMN implementations rely on brittle off-the-shelf parsers, and are restricted to the module configurations proposed by these parsers rather than learning them from data. In this paper, we propose End-to-End Module Networks (N2NMNs), which learn to reason by directly predicting instance-specific network layouts without the aid of a parser. Our model learns to generate network structures (by imitating expert demonstrations) while simultaneously learning network parameters (using the downstream task loss). Experimental results on the new CLEVR dataset targeted at compositional question answering show that N2NMNs achieve an error reduction of nearly 50 relative to state-of-theart attentional approaches, while discovering interpretable network architectures specialized for each question.