Question answering

Commonsense knowledge

Construct (python library)

Knowledge extraction

Bridge (graph theory)

Data mining

Computer science

Relationship extraction

Embedding

Relation (database)

Natural language processing

Mathematics

Pipeline (software)

Domain (mathematical analysis)

Knowledge base

Internal medicine

Mathematical analysis

Artificial intelligence

Information extraction

Medicine

Programming language

Domain knowledge

Knowledge-based visual question answering requires the ability of associating external knowledge for open-ended cross-modal scene understanding. One limitation of existing solutions is that they capture relevant knowledge from text-only knowledge bases, which merely contain facts expressed by first-order predicates or language descriptions while lacking complex but indispensable multimodal knowledge for visual understanding. How to construct vision-relevant and explainable multimodal knowledge for the VQA scenario has been less studied. In this paper, we propose MuKEA to represent multimodal knowledge by an explicit triplet to correlate visual objects and fact answers with implicit relations. To bridge the heterogeneous gap, we propose three objective losses to learn the triplet representations from complementary views: embedding structure, topological relation and semantic space. By adopting a pretraining and fine-tuning learning strategy, both basic and domain-specific multimodal knowledge are progressively accumulated for answer prediction. We outperform the state-of-the-art by 3.35% and 6.08% respectively on two challenging knowledge-required datasets: OK-VQA and KRVQA. Experimental results prove the complementary benefits of the multimodal knowledge with existing knowledge bases and the advantages of our end-to-end framework over the existing pipeline methods. The code is available at https://github.com/AndersonStra/MuKEA.

MuKEA: Multimodal Knowledge Extraction and Accumulation for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering