Visual Question Answering (VQA) remains algorithmically challenging while it is effortless for humans. Humans combine visual observations with general and commonsense knowledge to answer questions about a given image. In this paper, we address the problem of incorporating general knowledge into VQA models while leveraging the visual information. We propose a model that captures the interactions between objects in a visual scene and entities in an external knowledge source. Our model is a graph-based approach that combines scene graphs with concept graphs, which learns a question-adaptive graph representation of related knowledge instances. We use Graph Attention Networks to set higher importance to key knowledge instances that are mostly relevant to each question. We exploit ConceptNet as the source of general knowledge and evaluate the performance of our model on the challenging OK-VQA dataset.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a challenging task that has received increasing attention from both the computer vision and the natural language processing communities. A VQA model combines visual and textual features in order to answer questions grounded in an image. Current works in VQA focus on questions which are answerable by direct analysis of the question and image alone. We present a concept-aware algorithm, ConceptBert, for questions which require common sense, or basic factual knowledge from external structured content. Given an image and a question in natural language, ConceptBert requires visual elements of the image and a Knowledge Graph (KG) to infer the correct answer. We introduce a multi-modal representation which learns a joint Concept-Vision-Language embedding inspired by the popular BERT architecture. We exploit ConceptNet KG for encoding the common sense knowledge and evaluate our methodology on the Outside Knowledge-VQA (OK-VQA) and VQA datasets.