Visual Question Answering (VQA) is multi-task research that requires simultaneous processing of vision and text. Recent research on the VQA models employ a co-attention mechanism to build a model between the context and the image. However, the features of questions and the modeling of the image region force irrelevant information to be calculated in the model, thus affecting the performance. This paper proposes a novel dual self-guided attention with sparse question networks (DSSQN) to address this issue. The aim is to avoid having irrelevant information calculated into the model when modeling the internal dependencies on both the question and image. Simultaneously, it overcomes the coarse interaction between sparse question features and image features. First, the sparse question self-attention (SQSA) unit in the encoder calculates the feature with the highest weight. From the self-attention learning of question words, the question features of larger weights are reserved. Secondly, sparse question features are utilized to guide the focus on image features to obtain fine-grained image features, and to also prevent irrelevant information from being calculated into the model. A dual self-guided attention (DSGA) unit is designed to improve modal interaction between questions and images. Third, the sparse question self-attention of the parameter δ is optimized to select these question-related object regions. Our experiments with VQA 2.0 benchmark datasets demonstrate that DSSQN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. For example, the accuracy of our proposed model on the test-dev and test-std is 71.03% and 71.37%, respectively. In addition, we show through visualization results that our model can pay more attention to important features than other advanced models. At the same time, we also hope that it can promote the development of VQA in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

Visual Question Answering (VQA) usually uses deep attention mechanisms to learn fine-grained visual content of images and textual content of questions. However, the deep attention mechanism can only learn high-level semantic information while ignoring the impact of the low-level semantic information on answer prediction. For such, we design a High- and Low-Level Semantic Information Network (HLSIN), which employs two strategies to achieve the fusion of high-level semantic information and low-level semantic information. Adaptive weight learning is taken as the first strategy to allow different levels of semantic information to learn weights separately. The gate-sum mechanism is used as the second to suppress invalid information in various levels of information and fuse valid information. On the benchmark VQA-v2 dataset, we quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate HLSIN and conduct extensive ablation studies to explore the reasons behind HLSIN's effectiveness. Experimental results demonstrate that HLSIN significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art, with an overall accuracy of 70.93% on test-dev.