Visual Question Answering System using ViT, GPT, BERT, CLIP (LLMs/VLMs)

Tasks and questions to ponder:

1. Late Fusion - process modalities separtely through Language or Vision models then merge their outputs
2. Early Fusion like Chameleon VLM (requires high computation power) - process modalities together after merging in the beginning itself.
3. (Fine-tuning) Final layer: Classification vs Generation layer (some design changes)
4. Can we utilize pre-trained VLM such as BLIP or MiniGPT (simiar to late fusion)?

1. BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers): Encoder-only language model trained on masked language modeling (MLM) and next sentence prediction (NSP).
2. ViT (Vision Transformer): Encoder-only vision model that treats image patches as tokens for efficient image processing.
3. GPT-2 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2): Decoder-only language model designed for coherent text generation.
4. CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training): Model jointly trained an image and text encoder to understand and align visual and textual data in a shared latent space.

vqa_classification.ipynb

The late fusion model for Visual Question Answering (VQA) treats the task as a classification problem. It uses separate encoders for text and image inputs, which are fused together before making a classification prediction.

Architecture:

• Text Encoder: Pre-trained BERT model (bert-base-uncased).
• Image Encoder: Pre-trained Vision Transformer model (google/vit-base-patch16-224-in21k).
• Fusion Layer: Combines the outputs from the text and image encoders using a linear layer, followed by ReLU activation and dropout.
• Classifier: A linear layer that maps the fused representation to a fixed set of answer classes.

vqa_generation.ipynb

The generation model treats VQA as a sequence generation problem. It integrates separate encoders for text and image inputs and uses a decoder to generate textual answers.

Architecture:

• Text Encoder: Pre-trained BERT model (bert-base-uncased).
• Image Encoder: Pre-trained Vision Transformer model (google/vit-base-patch16-224-in21k).
• Fusion Layer: Combines the outputs from the text and image encoders using a linear layer, followed by ReLU activation and dropout.
• Text Decoder: Pre-trained GPT-2 model (gpt2) for generating the answer text.

Create conda env

conda env create -f environment.yml

Using docker

# run app
python app.py

# use docker
transformers-cli serve --task=fill-mask --model=bert-base-uncased

curl -X POST http://localhost:8888/forward -H "accept: application/json" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"inputs": "Today is going to be a [MASK] day"}' | jq

docker build --platform linux/amd64 -t vqa:v1 .
# check port from docker ps and use the curl command to get output