Cross-modal learning with prior visual relation knowledge

Visual relational reasoning is a central component in recent cross-modal analysis tasks, which aims at reasoning about the visual relationships between objects and their properties. These relationships provide rich semantics and help to enhance the visual representation for improving cross-modal learning. Previous works have succeeded in modeling latent visual relationships or rigid-categorized visual relationships. However, these kinds of methods leave out the problem of ambiguity inherent in the visual relationships because of the diverse relational semantics of different visual appearances. In this work, we explore to model the visual relationships by context-aware representations based on human prior knowledge. Based on such representations, we novelly propose a plug-and-play visual relational reasoning module to enhance image encoding. Specifically, we design an Anisotropic Graph Convolution to utilize the information of relation embeddings and relation directionality between objects for generating relation-aware image representations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the relational reasoning module by applying it to both Visual Question Answering (VQA) and Cross-Modal Information Retrieval (CMIR) tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted on VQA 2.0 and CMPlaces datasets and superior performance is reported when comparing with state-of-the-art works.