FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer

Understand

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.