Query and Attention Augmentation for Knowledge-Based Explainable Reasoning

Explainable visual question answering (VQA) models have been developed with neural modules and query-based knowledge incorporation to answer knowledge-requiring questions. Yet, most reasoning methods cannot effectively generate queries or incorporate external knowledge during the reasoning process, which may lead to suboptimal results. To bridge this research gap, we present Query and Attention Augmentation, a general approach that augments neural module networks to jointly reason about visual and external knowledge. To take both knowledge sources into account during reasoning, it parses the input question into a functional program with queries augmented through a novel reinforcement learning method, and jointly directs augmented attention to visual and external knowledge based on intermediate reasoning results. With extensive experiments on multiple VQA datasets, our method demonstrates significant performance, explainability, and generalizability over state-of-the-art models in answering questions requiring different extents of knowledge. Our source code is available at https://github.com/SuperJohnZhang/QAA.