Abstract:As a cross-modal understanding task, video question answering (VideoQA) requires the interaction of semantic information with different modalities to generate answers to questions given a video and the questions associated with it. In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have made remarkable progress in VideoQA tasks due to their powerful capabilities in cross-modal information fusion and inference. However, most existing GNN approaches fail to improve the performance of VideoQA models due to their inherent deficiencies of overfitting or over-smoothing, as well as weak robustness and generalization. In view of the effectiveness and robustness of self-supervised contrastive learning methods in pre-training techniques, this study proposes a self-supervised graph contrastive learning framework GMC based on the idea of graph data augmentation in VideoQA tasks. The framework uses two independent data augmentation operations for nodes and edges to generate dissimilar subsamples and improves the consistency between predicted graph data distributions of the original samples and augmented subsamples for higher accuracy and robustness of the VideoQA models. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is verified by experimental comparisons with existing state-of-the-art VideoQA models and different GMC variants on the public dataset for VideoQA tasks.