Attention-based Context Aware Reasoning for Situation Recognition

Situation Recognition (SR) is a fine-grained action recognition task where the model is expected to not only predict the salient action of the image, but also predict values of all associated semantic roles of the action. Predicting semantic roles is very challenging: a vast variety of possibilities can be the match for a semantic role. Existing work has focused on dependency modelling architectures to solve this issue. Inspired by the success achieved by query-based visual reasoning (e.g., Visual Question Answering), we propose to address semantic role prediction as a query-based visual reasoning problem. However, existing query-based reasoning methods have not considered handling of inter-dependent queries which is a unique requirement of semantic role prediction in SR. Therefore, to the best of our knowledge, we propose the first set of methods to address inter-dependent queries in query-based visual reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method which achieves outstanding performance on Situation Recognition task. Furthermore, leveraging query inter-dependency, our methods improve upon a state-of-the-art method that answers queries separately. Our code: https://github.com/thilinicooray/context-aware-reasoning-for-sr