Cited by 2,490Multimodal Machine Learning ApplicationsAdvanced Neural Network ApplicationsDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning

Film: Visual reasoning with a general conditioning layer

Open access
Perez, Ethan, Strub, Florian, De Vries, Harm, Dumoulin, Vincent, Courville, Aaron·2018·Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

We introduce a general-purpose conditioning method for neural networks called FiLM: Feature-wise Linear Modulation. FiLM layers influence neural network computation via a simple, feature-wise affine transformation based on conditioning information. We show that FiLM layers are highly effective for visual reasoning - answering image-related questions which require a multi-step, high-level process - a task which has proven difficult for standard deep learning methods that do not explicitly model reasoning. Specifically, we show on visual reasoning tasks that FiLM layers 1) halve state-of-the-art error for the CLEVR benchmark, 2) modulate features in a coherent manner, 3) are robust to ablations and architectural modifications, and 4) generalize well to challenging, new data from few examples or even zero-shot.

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Crossref · 10.1609/aaai.v32i1.11671

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55 of 55 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

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  • The original FILM layer uses multiple non-linear layers instead of a single linear transformation in MI-VECTOR, which has been shown to improve performance.

    “While MI-VECTOR (i.e., diagonal parameters in a MI layer which results in a vector output) corresponds to the most basic implementation of FILM, the original FILM layer uses multiple non-linear layers instead of a single linear transformation in MI-VECTOR which has been shown to improve performance [120].”

    From MultiBench: Multiscale Benchmarks for Multimodal Representation Learning (2021) · cites this paper as [120]

    Section 2.2 (p. 2) says the model predicts its conditioning parameters from the question embedding by linear projection with a weight matrix and bias, contrary to the claim that it uses multiple nonlinear layers instead of a single linear transformation. The cited passages do not report a performance improvement from making that substitution. (LLM, conf=0.87)

    Checked by a reasoning model — may be wrong.

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • By appropriately constraining the rank and structure of MI parameters, MI recovers HyperNetworks, FiLM, and Sigmoid units.

    “By appropriately constraining the rank and structure of these parameters, MI recovers HyperNetworks [61] (unconstrained parameters resulting in a matrix output), Feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) [120, 188] (diagonal parameters resulting in vector output), and Sigmoid units [37] (scalar parameters resulting in scalar output).”

    From MultiBench: Multiscale Benchmarks for Multimodal Representation Learning (2021) · cites this paper as [120]

    The Related Work section (p. 4) describes feature-wise affine conditioning through scaling and shifting, which supports the feature-wise modulation aspect of the cited FiLM example. Our copy does not state that constraining MI parameters to a diagonal form recovers FiLM or yields a vector output. (LLM, conf=0.76)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Cites

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Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. [1][1] A. Krizhevsky, I. Sutskever, and G. E. Hinton, 'Imagenet classification with deep convolutional neural networks,' in Proc. of NIPS , 2012. -
  2. [4][4] I. Sutskever, O. Vinyals, and Q. V. Le, 'Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks,' in Proc. of NIPS , 2014. -
  3. [33][33] S. Reed, A. van den Oord, N. Kalchbrenner, V. Bapst, M. Botvinick, and N. de Freitas, 'Generating interpretable images with controllable structure,' in Proc. of ICLR , 2017.

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Authors
Perez, E., Strub, F., De Vries, H., Dumoulin, V., & Courville, A.
Affiliations
  • Université de Montréal (CA)
  • Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR)
  • Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute (CA)
Venue
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Published
2018-04-29
Volume
32
Issue
1
ISSN
  • 2159-5399 (ISSN-L)
  • 2374-3468
OpenAlex
W2760103357
Cited by
2,490
References
55
Citations by year
2026: 823 · 2025: 412 · 2024: 280 · 2023: 221 · 2022: 158 · 2021: 244 · 2020: 179 · 2019: 120 · 2018: 52 · 2017: 1
FWCI
44.92
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • AAAI Publications (The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)) (submittedVersion)
Funders
  • Nvidia
  • Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies
  • CHIST-ERA
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
Keywords
cinema, feature-wise linear modulation, visual reasoning, visual question answering, feature modulation, zero-shot generalization, few-shot learning

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