  Modeling textual or visual information with vector representations trained
from large language or visual datasets has been successfully explored in recent
years. However, tasks such as visual question answering require combining these
vector representations with each other. Approaches to multimodal pooling
include element-wise product or sum, as well as concatenation of the visual and
textual representations. We hypothesize that these methods are not as
expressive as an outer product of the visual and textual vectors. As the outer
product is typically infeasible due to its high dimensionality, we instead
propose utilizing Multimodal Compact Bilinear pooling (MCB) to efficiently and
expressively combine multimodal features. We extensively evaluate MCB on the
visual question answering and grounding tasks. We consistently show the benefit
of MCB over ablations without MCB. For visual question answering, we present an
architecture which uses MCB twice, once for predicting attention over spatial
features and again to combine the attended representation with the question
representation. This model outperforms the state-of-the-art on the Visual7W
dataset and the VQA challenge.
