Deep Learning for Visual Question Answering

An year or so ago, a chatbot named Eugene Goostman made it to the mainstream news, after having been reported as the first computer program to have passed the famed Turing Test in an event organized at the University of Reading. While the organizers hailed it as a historical achievement, most of the scientific community wasn't impressed. This leads us to the question: Is the Turing Test, in its original form, a suitable test for AI in the modern day? In the last couple of years, a number of papers (like this paper from JHU/Brown, and this one from MPI) have suggested that the task of Visual Question Answering (VQA, for short) can be used as an alternative Turing Test. The task involves answering an open-ended question (or a series of questions) about an image.