Exploring Duality in Visual Question-Driven Top-Down Saliency

Top-down, goal-driven visual saliency exerts a huge influence on the human visual system for performing visual tasks. Text generations, like visual question answering (VQA) and visual question generation (VQG), have intrinsic connections with top-down saliency, which is usually involved in both VQA and VQG processes in an unsupervised manner. However, it is shown that the regions that humans choose to look at to answer questions are very different from the unsupervised attention models. In this brief, we aim to explore the intrinsic relationship between top-down saliency and text generations, and to figure out whether an accurate saliency response benefits text generation. To this end, we propose a dual supervised network with dynamic parameter prediction. Dual-supervision explicitly exploits the probabilistic correlation between the primal task top-down saliency detection and the dual task text generation, while dynamic parameter prediction encodes the given text (i.e., question or answer) into the fully convolutional network. Extensive experiments show the proposed top-down saliency method achieves the best correlation with human attention among various baselines. In addition, the proposed model can be guided by either questions or answers, and output the counterpart. Furthermore, we show that combining human-like visual question-saliency improves the performance of both answer and question generations.