Abstract: Vision and Language are broadly regarded as cornerstones of intelligence. Even though language and vision have different aims – language having the purpose of communication, transmission of information and vision having the purpose of constructing mental representations around us to navigate and interact with objects – they cooperate and depend on one another in many tasks we perform effortlessly. This reliance is actively being studied in various Computer Vision tasks, e.g. image captioning, visual question answering, image-sentence retrieval, phrase grounding, just to name a few. All of these tasks share the inherent difficulty of the aligning the two modalities, while being robust to language
priors and various biases existing in the datasets. One of the ultimate goal for vision and language research is to be able to inject world knowledge while getting rid of the biases that come with the datasets. In this thesis, we mainly focus on two vision and language tasks, namely Image Captioning and Scene-Text Visual Question Answering (STVQA).
In both domains, we start by defining a new task that requires the utilization of world knowledge and in both tasks, we find that the models commonly employed are prone to biases that exist in the data. Concretely, we introduce new tasks and discover several problems that impede performance at each level and provide remedies or possible solutions in each chapter: i) We define a new task to move beyond Image Captioning to Image Interpretation that can utilize Named Entities in the form of world knowledge. ii) We study the object hallucination problem in classic Image Captioning systems and develop an architecture-agnostic solution. iii) We define a sub-task of Visual Question Answering that requires reading the text in the image (STVQA), where we highlight the limitations of current models. iv) We propose an architecture for the STVQA task that can point to the answer in the image and show how to combine it with classic VQA models. v) We show how far language can get us in STVQA and discover yet another bias which causes the models to disregard the image while doing Visual Question Answering.

Abstract: Explaining an image with missing or non-existent objects is known as object bias (hallucination) in image captioning. This behaviour is quite common in the state-of-the-art captioning models which is not desirable by humans. To decrease the object hallucination in captioning, we propose three simple yet efficient training augmentation method for sentences which requires no new training data or increase
in the model size. By extensive analysis, we show that the proposed methods can significantly diminish our models’ object bias on hallucination metrics. Moreover, we experimentally demonstrate that our methods decrease the dependency on the visual features. All of our code, configuration files and model weights are available online.

Abstract: Geometric Deep Learning has recently attracted significant interest in a wide range of machine learning fields, including document analysis. The application of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has become crucial in various document-related tasks since they can unravel important structural patterns, fundamental in key information extraction processes. Previous works in the literature propose task-driven models and do not take into account the full power of graphs. We propose Doc2Graph, a task-agnostic document understanding framework based on a GNN model, to solve different tasks given different types of documents. We evaluated our approach on two challenging datasets for key information extraction in form understanding, invoice layout analysis and table detection.

Abstract: The transcription of sheet music into some machine-readable format can be carried out manually. However, the complexity of music notation inevitably leads to burdensome software for music score editing, which makes the whole process
very time-consuming and prone to errors. Consequently, automatic transcription
systems for musical documents represent interesting tools.
Document analysis is the subject that deals with the extraction and processing
of documents through image and pattern recognition. It is a branch of computer
vision. Taking music scores as source, the field devoted to address this task is
known as Optical Music Recognition (OMR). Typically, an OMR system takes an
image of a music score and automatically extracts its content into some symbolic
structure such as MEI or MusicXML.
In this dissertation, we have investigated different methods for recognizing a
single staff section (e.g. scores for violin, flute, etc.), much in the same way as most text recognition research focuses on recognizing words appearing in a given line image. These methods are based in two different methodologies. On the one hand, we present two methods based on Recurrent Neural Networks, in particular, the
Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network. On the other hand, a method based on Sequence to Sequence models is detailed.
Music context is needed to improve the OMR results, just like language models
and dictionaries help in handwriting recognition. For example, syntactical rules
and grammars could be easily defined to cope with the ambiguities in the rhythm.
In music theory, for example, the time signature defines the amount of beats per
bar unit. Thus, in the second part of this dissertation, different methodologies
have been investigated to improve the OMR recognition. We have explored three
different methods: (a) a graphic tree-structure representation, Dendrograms, that
joins, at each level, its primitives following a set of rules, (b) the incorporation of Language Models to model the probability of a sequence of tokens, and (c) graph neural networks to analyze the music scores to avoid meaningless relationships between music primitives.
Finally, to train all these methodologies, and given the method-specificity of
the datasets in the literature, we have created four different music datasets. Two of them are synthetic with a modern or old handwritten appearance, whereas the
other two are real handwritten scores, being one of them modern and the other
old.