Visual Answer Localization with Cross-modal Mutual Knowledge Transfer

The goal of visual answering localization (VAL) in the video is to obtain a relevant and concise time clip from a video as the answer to the given natural language question. Early methods are based on the interaction modeling between video and text to predict the visual answer by the visual predictor. Later, using textual predictor with subtitles for the VAL proves to be more precise. However, these existing methods still have cross-modal knowledge deviations from visual frames or textual subtitles. In this paper, we propose a cross-modal mutual knowledge transfer span localization (MutualSL) method to reduce the knowledge deviation. MutualSL has both visual predictor and textual predictor, where we expect the prediction results of these both to be consistent, so as to promote semantic knowledge understanding between cross-modalities. On this basis, we design a one-way dynamic loss function to dynamically adjust the proportion of knowledge transferring. We have conducted extensive experiments on three public datasets for evaluation. The experimental results show that our method outperforms other competitive state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, demonstrating its effectiveness.