MarioQA: Answering Questions by Watching Gameplay Videos

We present a new benchmark dataset for video question answering (VideoQA) designed to evaluate algorithms' capability of spatio-temporal event understanding. Existing datasets either require very high-level reasoning from multi-modal information to find answers, or is mostly composed of the questions that can be answered by watching a single frame. Therefore, they are not suitable to evaluate models' real capacity and flexibility for VideoQA. To overcome such critical limitations, we focus on event-centric questions that require understanding temporal relation between multiple events in videos. An interesting idea in dataset construction process is that question-answer pairs are automatically generated from Super Mario video gameplays given a set of question templates. We also tackle VideoQA problem in the new dataset, referred to as MarioQA, by proposing spatio-temporal attention models based on deep neural networks. Our experiments show that the proposed deep neural network models with attention have meaningful performance improvement over several baselines.