GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
UMIE: Unified Multimodal Information Extraction with Instruction Tuning
Authors: Lin  Sun; Kai Zhang; Qingyuan Li; Renze Lou
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Multimodal information extraction (MIE) gains significant attention as the popularity of multimedia content increases. However, current MIE methods often resort to using task-specific model structures, which results in limited generalizability across tasks and underutilizes shared knowledge across MIE tasks. To address these issues, we propose UMIE, a unified multimodal information extractor to unify three MIE tasks as a generation problem using instruction tuning, being able to effectively extract both textual and visual mentions. Extensive experiments show that our single UMIE outperforms various state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods across six MIE datasets on three tasks. Furthermore, in-depth analysis demonstrates UMIE's strong generalization in the zero-shot setting, robustness to instruction variants, and interpretability. Our research serves as an initial step towards a unified MIE model and initiates the exploration into both instruction tuning and large language models within the MIE domain. Our code, data, and model are available at https://github.com/ZUCC-AI/UMIE.
InstructDoc: A Dataset for Zero-Shot Generalization of Visual Document Understanding with Instructions
Authors: Ryota Tanaka; Taichi Iki; Kyosuke Nishida; Kuniko Saito; Jun Suzuki
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: We study the problem of completing various visual document understanding (VDU) tasks, e.g., question answering and information extraction, on real-world documents through human-written instructions. To this end, we propose InstructDoc, the first large-scale collection of 30 publicly available VDU datasets, each with diverse instructions in a unified format, which covers a wide range of 12 tasks and includes open document types/formats. Furthermore, to enhance the generalization performance on VDU tasks, we design a new instruction-based document reading and understanding model, InstructDr, that connects document images, image encoders, and large language models (LLMs) through a trainable bridging module. Experiments demonstrate that InstructDr can effectively adapt to new VDU datasets, tasks, and domains via given instructions and outperforms existing multimodal LLMs and ChatGPT without specific training.
Graph Neural Prompting with Large Language Models
Authors: Yijun Tian; Huan Song; Zichen Wang; Haozhu Wang; Ziqing Hu; Fang Wang; Nitesh V. Chawla; Panpan Xu
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable generalization capability with exceptional performance in various language modeling tasks. However, they still exhibit inherent limitations in precisely capturing and returning grounded knowledge. While existing work has explored utilizing knowledge graphs (KGs) to enhance language modeling via joint training and customized model architectures, applying this to LLMs is problematic owing to their large number of parameters and high computational cost. Therefore, how to enhance pre-trained LLMs using grounded knowledge, e.g., retrieval-augmented generation, remains an open question. In this work, we propose Graph Neural Prompting (GNP), a novel plug-and-play method to assist pre-trained LLMs in learning beneficial knowledge from KGs. GNP encompasses various designs, including a standard graph neural network encoder, a cross-modality pooling module, a domain projector, and a self-supervised link prediction objective. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the superiority of GNP on both commonsense and biomedical reasoning tasks across different LLM sizes and settings. Code is available at https://github.com/meettyj/GNP.
Adaptive Graph Learning for Multimodal Conversational Emotion Detection
Authors: Geng Tu; Tian Xie; Bin Liang; Hongpeng Wang; Ruifeng Xu
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) aims to identify the emotions conveyed by each utterance in a conversational video. Current efforts encounter challenges in balancing intra- and inter-speaker context dependencies when tackling intra-modal interactions. This balance is vital as it encompasses modeling self-dependency (emotional inertia) where speakers' own emotions affect them and modeling interpersonal dependencies (empathy) where counterparts' emotions influence a speaker. Furthermore, challenges arise in addressing cross-modal interactions that involve content with conflicting emotions across different modalities. To address this issue, we introduce an adaptive interactive graph network (IGN) called AdaIGN that employs the Gumbel Softmax trick to adaptively select nodes and edges, enhancing intra- and cross-modal interactions. Unlike undirected graphs, we use a directed IGN to prevent future utterances from impacting the current one. Next, we propose Node- and Edge-level Selection Policies (NESP) to guide node and edge selection, along with a Graph-Level Selection Policy (GSP) to integrate the utterance representation from original IGN and NESP-enhanced IGN. Moreover, we design a task-specific loss function that prioritizes text modality and intra-speaker context selection. To reduce computational complexity, we use pre-defined pseudo labels through self-supervised methods to mask unnecessary utterance nodes for selection. Experimental results show that AdaIGN outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two popular datasets. Our code will be available at https://github.com/TuGengs/AdaIGN.
Dependency Structure-Enhanced Graph Attention Networks for Event Detection
Authors: Qizhi Wan; Changxuan Wan; Keli Xiao; Kun Lu; Chenliang Li; Xiping Liu; Dexi Liu
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Existing models on event detection share three-fold limitations, including (1) insufficient consideration of the structures between dependency relations, (2) limited exploration of the directed-edge semantics, and (3) issues in strengthening the event core arguments. To tackle these problems, we propose a dependency structure-enhanced event detection framework. In addition to the traditional token dependency parsing tree, denoted as TDG, our model considers the dependency edges in it as new nodes and constructs a dependency relation graph (DRG). DRG allows the embedding representations of dependency relations to be updated as nodes rather than edges in a graph neural network. 
Moreover, the levels of core argument nodes in the two graphs are adjusted by dependency relation types in TDG to enhance their status. Subsequently, the two graphs are further encoded and jointly trained in graph attention networks (GAT). Importantly, we design an interaction strategy of node embedding for the two graphs and refine the attention coefficient computational method to encode the semantic meaning of directed edges. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our method, and the results confirm its superiority over the state-of-the-art baselines. Our model outperforms the best benchmark with the F1 score increased by 3.5 and 3.4 percentage points on ACE2005 English and Chinese corpus.
ESRL: Efficient Sampling-Based Reinforcement Learning for Sequence Generation
Authors: Chenglong Wang; Hang Zhou; Yimin Hu; Yifu Huo; Bei Li; Tongran Liu; Tong Xiao; Jingbo Zhu
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) to sequence generation models enables the direct optimization of long-term rewards (e.g., BLEU and human feedback), but typically requires large-scale sampling over a space of action sequences. This is a computational challenge as presented by the practice of sequence generation problems, such as machine translation, where we often deal with a large action space (e.g., a vocabulary) and a long action sequence (e.g., a translation). In this work, we introduce two-stage sampling and dynamic sampling approaches to improve the sampling efficiency during training sequence generation models via RL. We experiment with our approaches on the traditional sequence generation tasks, including machine translation and abstractive summarization. Furthermore, we evaluate our approaches in RL from human feedback (RLHF) through training a large language model using the reward model. Experimental results show that the efficient sampling-based RL, referred to as ESRL, can outperform all baselines in terms of both training efficiency and memory consumption. Notably, ESRL yields consistent performance gains over the strong REINFORCE, minimum risk training, and proximal policy optimization methods. The code is available at https://github.com/wangclnlp/DeepSpeed-Chat-Extension/examples/esrl.
Exploring Equation as a Better Intermediate Meaning Representation for Numerical Reasoning of Large Language Models
Authors: Dingzirui Wang; Longxu Dou; Wenbin Zhang; Junyu Zeng; Wanxiang Che
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Numerical reasoning is a vital capability for natural language processing models to understand and process numerical information in real-world scenarios. Most current methods first generate the Intermediate Meaning Representations (IMRs) of questions and then generate answers. Current SOTA methods generate programs as IMRs with large language models (LLMs). Intuitively, equations have fewer restrictions and closer semantics to the question than programs, leading to higher generation accuracy. However, current LLMs generate equations worse than programs, where we assume that the equation data is rare in pre-training data compared to programs. So in this paper, we try to use equations as IMRs to solve the numerical reasoning task by addressing two problems: (1) Theoretically, how to prove that the equation is an IMR with higher generation accuracy than programs; (2) Empirically, how to improve the generation accuracy of equations with LLMs. For the first problem, we propose and prove a proposition to theoretically compare the generation accuracy of different IMRs. For the second problem, we present a method called Boosting Numerical ReasonIng by Decomposing the Generation of Equations Bridge, which can improve the accuracy of LLMs in generating equations as IMRs by reducing the tendency of generating constant expressions and programs. Our method improves the performance by 2.2%, 0.9%, and 1.7% on GSM8K, SVAMP, and Algebra datasets compared to the previous state-of-the-art methods under the single reasoning path setting. Our code and prompts are available at https://github.com/zirui-HIT/Bridge_for_Numerical_Reasoning}.
Manifold-Based Verbalizer Space Re-embedding for Tuning-Free Prompt-Based Classification
Authors: Haochun Wang; Sendong Zhao; Chi Liu; Nuwa Xi; MuZhen Cai; Bing Qin; Ting Liu
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Prompt-based classification adapts tasks to a cloze question format utilizing the [MASK] token and the filled tokens are then mapped to labels through pre-defined verbalizers. Recent studies have explored the use of verbalizer embeddings to reduce labor in this process. However, all existing studies require a tuning process for either the pre-trained models or additional trainable embeddings. Meanwhile, the distance between high-dimensional verbalizer embeddings should not be measured by Euclidean distance due to the potential for non-linear manifolds in the representation space. In this study, we propose a tuning-free manifold-based space re-embedding method called Locally Linear Embedding with Intra-class Neighborhood Constraint (LLE-INC) for verbalizer embeddings, which preserves local properties within the same class as guidance for classification. Experimental results indicate that even without tuning any parameters, our LLE-INC is on par with automated verbalizers with parameter tuning. And with the parameter updating, our approach further enhances prompt-based tuning by up to 3.2%. Furthermore, experiments with the LLaMA-7B&13B indicate that LLE-INC is an efficient tuning-free classification approach for the hyper-scale language models.
Improving the Robustness of Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue via Contrastive Learning
Authors: Jiaan Wang; JIanfeng Qu; Kexin Wang; Zhixu Li; Wen Hua; Ximing Li; An Liu
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Knowledge-grounded dialogue (KGD) learns to generate an informative response based on a given dialogue context and external knowledge (e.g., knowledge graphs; KGs). Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) and pre-training techniques has brought great success to knowledge-grounded dialogue. However, when building KGD systems in real applications, there are various real-world noises that are inevitable to face. For example, the dialogue context might involve perturbations such as misspellings and abbreviations. In addition, KGs typically suffer from incompletion and also might contain erroneous and outdated facts. Such real-world noises pose a challenge to the robustness of KGD systems and hinder their applications in the real world. In this paper, we propose an entity-based contrastive learning framework for improving the robustness of KGD. Specifically, we make use of the entity information in a KGD sample to create both its positive and negative samples which involve semantic-irrelevant and semantic-relevant perturbations, respectively. The contrastive learning framework ensures the KGD model is aware of these two types of perturbations, thus could generate informative responses with the potentially noisy inputs in real applications. Experimental results on three widely-used benchmark datasets show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance in terms of automatic evaluation scores, verifying its effectiveness and potentiality. Furthermore, we show that our method is able to generate better responses than comparison models in both the noisy and the few-shot settings.
Restoring Speaking Lips from Occlusion for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition
Authors: Jiadong Wang; Zexu Pan; Malu Zhang; Robby T. Tan; Haizhou Li
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Prior studies on audio-visual speech recognition typically assume the visibility of speaking lips, ignoring the fact that visual occlusion occurs in real-world videos, thus adversely affecting recognition performance. To address this issue, we propose a framework that restores occluded lips in a video by utilizing both the video itself and the corresponding noisy audio. Specifically, the framework aims to achieve these three tasks: detecting occluded frames, masking occluded areas, and reconstruction of masked regions. We tackle the first two issues by utilizing the Class Activation Map (CAM) obtained from occluded frame detection to facilitate the masking of occluded areas. Additionally, we introduce a novel synthesis-matching strategy for the reconstruction to ensure the compatibility of audio features with different levels of occlusion. Our framework is evaluated in terms of Word Error Rate (WER) on the original videos, the videos corrupted by concealed lips, and the videos restored using the framework with several existing state-of-the-art audio-visual speech recognition methods. Experimental results substantiate that our framework significantly mitigates performance degradation resulting from lip occlusion. Under -5dB noise conditions, AV-Hubert's WER increases from 10.62% to 13.87% due to lip occlusion, but rebounds to 11.87% in conjunction with the proposed framework. Furthermore, the framework also demonstrates its capacity to produce natural synthesized images in qualitative assessments.
Learning from Failure: Improving Meeting Summarization without Good Samples
Authors: Ke Wang; Xiutian Zhao; Wei Peng
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Existing methods aligning language models with various human needs are reliant heavily on high-quality and task-specific data. However, industrial deployment of task-specific language models often encounter challenges in the availability of appropriate training samples. Taking meeting summarization for instance, public datasets are scarce, and private corpora are also hard to obtain due to privacy issues or resource-demanding annotation. To improve meeting summarization in the absence of positively-rated (i.e., ``good'') samples, we propose Score Tuning, a cold start tuning framework that leverages bad samples of distinguishable degrees to incrementally enhance the performance of summary generation without an initial presence of good samples. Our method utilizes asynchronous and numerical human feedback that measure the quality of generated summaries. Formulating data into triplets of (transcript, summary, score), our approach instructs a pre-trained model to learn the association between summary qualities and human-rated scores and hence to generate better summaries corresponding to higher scores. The experiment results show that our method is effective in improving meeting summarization on both English and Chinese corpora while requiring less annotated data and training resources compared to existing alignment methods. Additionally, we also preliminarily explore the transferability of our approach in machine translation tasks and demonstrate its potential for future development and usage in other domains.
T-SciQ: Teaching Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Large Language Model Signals for Science Question Answering
Authors: Lei Wang; Yi Hu; Jiabang He; Xing Xu; Ning Liu; Hui Liu; Heng Tao Shen
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated exceptional performance in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. They have also shown the ability to perform chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex problems. Recent studies have explored CoT reasoning in complex multimodal scenarios, such as the science question answering task, by fine-tuning multimodal models with high-quality human-annotated CoT rationales. However, collecting high-quality COT rationales is usually time-consuming and costly. Besides, the annotated rationales are hardly accurate due to the external essential information missed. To address these issues, we propose a novel method termed T-SciQ that aims at teaching science question answering with LLM signals. The T-SciQ approach generates high-quality CoT rationales as teaching signals and is advanced to train much smaller models to perform CoT reasoning in complex modalities. Additionally, we introduce a novel data mixing strategy to produce more effective teaching data samples for simple and complex science question answer problems. Extensive experimental results show that our T-SciQ method achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on the ScienceQA benchmark, with an accuracy of 96.18%. Moreover, our approach outperforms the most powerful fine-tuned baseline by 4.5%. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/T-SciQ/T-SciQ.
Mitigating the Impact of False Negative in Dense Retrieval with Contrastive Confidence Regularization
Authors: Shiqi Wang; Yeqin Zhang; Cam-Tu Nguyen
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: In open-domain Question Answering (QA), dense text retrieval is crucial for finding relevant passages to generate answers. Typically, contrastive learning is used to train a retrieval model, which maps passages and queries to the same semantic space, making similar ones closer and dissimilar ones further apart. However, training such a system is challenging due to the false negative problem, where relevant passages may be missed during data annotation. Hard negative sampling, commonly used to improve contrastive learning, can introduce more noise in training. This is because hard negatives are those close to a given query, and thus more likely to be false negatives. To address this, we propose a novel contrastive confidence regularizer for Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) loss, a commonly used contrastive loss. Our analysis shows that the regularizer helps make the dense retrieval model more robust against false negatives with a theoretical guarantee. Additionally, we propose a model-agnostic method to filter out noisy negative passages in the dataset, improving any downstream dense retrieval models. Through experiments on three datasets, we demonstrate that our method achieves better retrieval performance in comparison to existing state-of-the-art dense retrieval systems.
DenoSent: A Denoising Objective for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Learning
Authors: Xinghao Wang; Junliang He; Pengyu Wang; Yunhua Zhou; Tianxiang Sun; Xipeng Qiu
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Contrastive-learning-based methods have dominated sentence representation learning. These methods regularize the representation space by pulling similar sentence representations closer and pushing away the dissimilar ones and have been proven effective in various NLP tasks, e.g., semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks. However, it is challenging for these methods to learn fine-grained semantics as they only learn from the inter-sentence perspective, i.e., their supervision signal comes from the relationship between data samples. In this work, we propose a novel denoising objective that inherits from another perspective, i.e., the intra-sentence perspective. By introducing both discrete and continuous noise, we generate noisy sentences and then train our model to restore them to their original form. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that this approach delivers competitive results on both semantic textual similarity (STS) and a wide range of transfer tasks, standing up well in comparison to contrastive-learning-based methods. Notably, the proposed intra-sentence denoising objective complements existing inter-sentence contrastive methodologies and can be integrated with them to further enhance performance.  Our code is available at https://github.com/xinghaow99/DenoSent.
LLMRG: Improving Recommendations through Large Language Model Reasoning Graphs
Authors: Yan Wang; Zhixuan Chu; Xin Ouyang; Simeng Wang; Hongyan Hao; Yue Shen; Jinjie Gu; Siqiao Xue; James Zhang; Qing Cui; Longfei Li; Jun Zhou; Sheng Li
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Recommendation systems aim to provide users with relevant suggestions, but often lack interpretability and fail to capture higher-level semantic relationships between user behaviors and profiles. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that leverages large language models (LLMs) to construct personalized reasoning graphs. These graphs link a user's profile and behavioral sequences through causal and logical inferences, representing the user's interests in an interpretable way. Our approach, LLM reasoning graphs (LLMRG), has four components: chained graph reasoning, divergent extension, self-verification and scoring, and knowledge base self-improvement. The resulting reasoning graph is encoded using graph neural networks, which serves as additional input to improve conventional recommender systems, without requiring extra user or item information. Our approach demonstrates how LLMs can enable more logical and interpretable recommender systems through personalized reasoning graphs. LLMRG allows recommendations to benefit from both engineered recommendation systems and LLM-derived reasoning graphs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLMRG on benchmarks and real-world scenarios in enhancing base recommendation models.