IQA: Visual Question Answering in Interactive Environments

We introduce Interactive Question Answering (IQA), the task of answering questions that require an autonomous agent to interact with a dynamic visual environment. IQA presents the agent with a scene and a question, like: “Are there any apples in the fridge?” The agent must navigate around the scene, acquire visual understanding of scene elements, interact with objects (e.g. open refrigerators) and plan for a series of actions conditioned on the question. Popular reinforcement learning approaches with a single controller perform poorly on IQA owing to the large and diverse state space. We propose the Hierarchical Interactive Memory Network (HIMN), consisting of a factorized set of controllers, allowing the system to operate at multiple levels of temporal abstraction, reducing the diversity of the action space available to each controller and enabling an easier training paradigm. We introduce IQADATA, a new Interactive Question Answering dataset built upon AI2-THOR, a simulated photo-realistic environment of configurable indoor scenes [95] with interactive objects. IQADATA has 75,000 questions, each paired with a unique scene configuration. Our experiments show that our proposed model outperforms popular single controller based methods on IQADATA. For sample questions and results, please view our video: https://youtu.be/ pXd3C-1jr98.