Explainable and Explicit Visual Reasoning over Scene Graphs

We aim to dismantle the prevalent black-box neural architectures used in complex visual reasoning tasks, into the proposed eXplainable and eXplicit Neural Modules (XNMs), which advance beyond existing neural module networks towards using scene graphs --- objects as nodes and the pairwise relationships as edges --- for explainable and explicit reasoning with structured knowledge. XNMs allow us to pay more attention to teach machines how to ``think'', regardless of what they ``look''. As we will show in the paper, by using scene graphs as an inductive bias, 1) we can design XNMs in a concise and flexible fashion, i.e., XNMs merely consist of 4 meta-types, which significantly reduce the number of parameters by 10 to 100 times, and 2) we can explicitly trace the reasoning-flow in terms of graph attentions. XNMs are so generic that they support a wide range of scene graph implementations with various qualities. For example, when the graphs are detected perfectly, XNMs achieve 100% accuracy on both CLEVR and CLEVR CoGenT, establishing an empirical performance upper-bound for visual reasoning; when the graphs are noisily detected from real-world images, XNMs are still robust to achieve a competitive 67.5% accuracy on VQAv2.0, surpassing the popular bag-of-objects attention models without graph structures.