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VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language

Liunian Harold Li, Mark Yatskar, Da Yin, Cho-Jui Hsieh, and Kai-Wei Chang, in Arxiv, 2019.

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Abstract

We propose VisualBERT, a simple and flexible framework for modeling a broad range of vision-and-language tasks. VisualBERT consists of a stack of Transformer layers that implicitly align elements of an input text and regions in an associated input image with self-attention. We further propose two visually-grounded language model objectives for pre-training VisualBERT on image caption data. Experiments on four vision-and-language tasks including VQA, VCR, NLVR2, and Flickr30K show that VisualBERT outperforms or rivals with state-of-the-art models while being significantly simpler. Further analysis demonstrates that VisualBERT can ground elements of language to image regions without any explicit supervision and is even sensitive to syntactic relationships, tracking, for example, associations between verbs and image regions corresponding to their arguments.

A short version is publised at ACL 2020.
VisualBERT is intergrated into Facebook MMF library
Please see more anlaysis about VisualBERT in a recent paper by A. Singh, V. Goswami, V., and D. Parikh (2019)
VisualBERT is used as a baseline in Hateful Memes by Facebook Research

Bib Entry

@inproceedings{li2019visualbert,
  author = {Li, Liunian Harold and Yatskar, Mark and Yin, Da and Hsieh, Cho-Jui and Chang, Kai-Wei},
  title = {VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language},
  booktitle = {Arxiv},
  year = {2019}
}

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  year = {2019}
}
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