Current approaches to question answering rely on pre-trained language models (PLMs) like RoBERTa. This work challenges the existing question-answer encoding convention and explores finer representations. We begin with testing various pooling methods compared to using the begin-of-sentence token as a question representation for better quality. Next, we explore opportunities to simultaneously embed all answer candidates with the question. This enables cross-reference between answer choices and improves inference throughput via reduced memory usage. Despite their simplicity and effectiveness, these methods have yet to be widely studied in current frameworks. We experiment with different PLMs, and with and without the integration of knowledge graphs. Results prove that the memory efficacy of the proposed techniques with little sacrifice in performance. Practically, our work enhances 38-100% throughput with 26-65% speedups on consumer-grade GPUs by allowing for considerably larger batch sizes. Our work sends a message to the community with promising directions in both representation quality and efficiency for the question-answering task in natural language processing.

Visual Question Generation is a task at the crossroads of visual and language learning, impacting broad domains like education, medicine, and social media. While existing pre-trained models excel in fact-based queries with image pairs, they fall short of capturing human-like inference, particularly in understanding causal and temporal relationships within videos. Additionally, the computational demands of prevalent pre-training methods pose challenges. In response, our study introduces a framework that leverages vision-text matching pre-trained models to guide language models in recognizing event-entity relationships within videos and generating inferential questions. Demonstrating efficacy on the NExT-QA dataset, which is designed for causal and temporal inference in visual question answering, our method successfully guides pre-trained language models in recognizing video content. We present methodologies for abstracting causal and temporal relationships between events and entities, pointing out the importance of consistent relationships among input frames during training and inference phases and suggesting an avenue for future exploration.