Visual Dialogue without Vision or Dialogue

We characterise some of the quirks and shortcomings in the exploration of Visual Dialogue (VD) - a sequential question-answering task where the questions and corresponding answers are related through given visual stimuli. To do so, we develop an embarrassingly simple method based on Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) that, on the standard dataset, achieves near state-of-the-art performance for some standard metric. In direct contrast to current complex and over-parametrised architectures that are both compute and time intensive, our method ignores the visual stimuli, ignores the sequencing of dialogue, does not need gradients, uses off-the-shelf feature extractors, has at least an order of magnitude fewer parameters, and learns in practically no time. We argue that these results are indicative of issues in current approaches to Visual Dialogue relating particularly to implicit dataset biases, under-constrained task objectives, and over-constrained evaluation metrics, and consequently, discuss some avenues to ameliorate these issues.