Visual Question Answering(VQA) is a highly complex problem set, relying on many sub-problems to produce reasonable answers. In this paper, we present the hypothesis that Visual Question Answering should be viewed as a multi-task problem, and provide evidence to support this hypothesis. We demonstrate this by reformatting two commonly used Visual Question Answering datasets, COCO-QA and DAQUAR, into a multi-task format and train these reformatted datasets on two baseline networks, with one designed specifically to eliminate other possible causes for performance changes as a result of the reformatting. Though the networks demonstrated in this paper do not achieve strongly competitive results, we find that the multi-task approach to Visual Question Answering results in increases in performance of 5-9% against the single-task formatting, and that the networks reach convergence much faster than in the single-task case. Finally we discuss possible reasons for the observed difference in performance, and perform additional experiments which rule out causes not associated with the learning of the dataset as a multi-task problem.

Animal data on delayed-reward conditioning experiments shows a striking property - the data for different time intervals collapses into a single curve when the data is scaled by the time interval. This is called the scalar property of interval timing. Here a simple model of a neural clock is presented and shown to give rise to the scalar property. The model is an accumulator consisting of noisy, linear spiking neurons. It is analytically tractable and contains only three parameters.

Animal data on delayed-reward conditioning experiments shows a striking property - the data for different time intervals collapses into a single curve when the data is scaled by the time interval. This is called the scalar property of interval timing. Here a simple model of a neural clock is presented and shown to give rise to the scalar property. The model is an accumulator consisting of noisy, linear spiking neurons. It is analytically tractable and contains only three parameters.

Linear neurons learning under an unsupervised Hebbian rule can learn to perform a linear statistical analysis ofthe input data. This was first shown by Oja (1982), who proposed a learning rule which finds the first principal component of the variance matrix of the input data. Based on this model, Oja (1989), Sanger (1989), and many others have devised numerous neural networks which find many components of this matrix. These networks perform principal component analysis (PCA), a well-known method of statistical analysis.

Linear neurons learning under an unsupervised Hebbian rule can learn to perform a linear statistical analysis ofthe input data. This was first shown by Oja (1982), who proposed a learning rule which finds the first principal component of the variance matrix of the input data. Based on this model, Oja (1989), Sanger (1989), and many others have devised numerous neural networks which find many components of this matrix. These networks perform principal component analysis (PCA), a well-known method of statistical analysis.