Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Coarse-to-Fine Contrastive Learning in Image-Text-Graph Space for Improved Vision-Language Compositionality

Contrastively trained vision-language models have achieved remarkable progress in vision and language representation learning. However, recent research has highlighted severe limitations of these models in their ability to perform compositional reasoning over objects, attributes, and relations. Scene graphs have emerged as an effective way to understand images compositionally. These are graph-structured semantic representations of images that contain objects, their attributes, and relations with other objects in a scene. In this work, we consider the scene graph parsed from text as a proxy for the image scene graph and propose a graph decomposition and augmentation framework along with a coarse-to-fine contrastive learning objective between images and text that aligns sentences of various complexities to the same image. We also introduce novel negative mining techniques in the scene graph space for improving attribute binding and relation understanding. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach that significantly improves attribute binding, relation understanding, systematic generalization, and productivity on multiple recently proposed benchmarks (For example, improvements up to 18% for systematic generalization, 16.5% for relation understanding over a strong baseline), while achieving similar or better performance than CLIP on various general multimodal tasks.
MacLaSa: Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation via Efficient Sampling from Compact Latent Space

Multi-aspect controllable text generation aims to generate fluent sentences that possess multiple desired attributes simultaneously. Traditional methods either require expensive iteration / searching within the discrete text space during the decoding stage, or train separate controllers for each aspect, resulting in a degradation of text quality due to the discrepancy between different aspects. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel approach for Multi-aspect control, namely MacLaSa, that estimates compact Latent space for multiple aspects, and performs efficient Sampling with a fast sampler. To eliminate the domain discrepancies between different aspects, we first utilize a variational autoencoder (VAE) network to map text sequences from various data sources into close latent representations. The estimated latent space enables the formulation of joint energy-based models and the plugging in of arbitrary attribute discriminators to achieve multi-aspect control. Afterwards, we draw latent samples with a fast sampler based on ordinary differential equations and feed sampled examples to the VAE decoder to produce target text sequences. Experimental results demonstrate that MacLaSa outperforms strong baselines on both attribute relevance and textual quality while maintaining a high inference speed.
GROVE: A Retrieval-augmented Complex Story Generation Framework with A Forest of Evidence

Conditional story generation is significant in human-machine interaction, particularly in producing stories with complex plots. While Large language models (LLMs) perform well on multiple NLP tasks, including story generation, it is challenging to generate stories with both complex and creative plots. Existing methods often rely on detailed prompts to guide LLMs to meet target conditions, which inadvertently restrict the creative potential of the generated stories. We argue that leveraging information from exemplary human-written stories facilitates generating more diverse plotlines. Delving deeper into story details helps build complex and credible plots. In this paper, we propose a retrieval-auGmented stoRy generation framework with a fOrest of eVidEnce (GROVE) to enhance stories’ complexity. We build a retrieval repository for target conditions to produce few-shot examples to prompt LLMs. Additionally, we design an “asking-why” prompting scheme that extracts a forest of evidence, providing compensation for the ambiguities that may occur in the generated story. This iterative process uncovers underlying story backgrounds. Finally, we select the most fitting chains of evidence from the evidence forest and integrate them into the generated story, thereby enhancing the narrative’s complexity and credibility. Experimental results and numerous examples verify the effectiveness of our method.
Understanding HTML with Large Language Models

Izzeddin Gur, Ofir Nachum, Yingjie Miao, Mustafa Safdari, Austin Huang, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Sharan Narang, Noah Fiedel, Aleksandra Faust. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023. 2023.
InterroLang: Exploring NLP Models and Datasets through Dialogue-based Explanations

While recently developed NLP explainability methods let us open the black box in various ways (Madsen et al., 2022), a missing ingredient in this endeavor is an interactive tool offering a conversational interface. Such a dialogue system can help users explore datasets and models with explanations in a contextualized manner, e.g. via clarification or follow-up questions, and through a natural language interface. We adapt the conversational explanation framework TalkToModel (Slack et al., 2022) to the NLP domain, add new NLP-specific operations such as free-text rationalization, and illustrate its generalizability on three NLP tasks (dialogue act classification, question answering, hate speech detection). To recognize user queries for explanations, we evaluate fine-tuned and few-shot prompting models and implement a novel adapter-based approach. We then conduct two user studies on (1) the perceived correctness and helpfulness of the dialogues, and (2) the simulatability, i.e. how objectively helpful dialogical explanations are for humans in figuring out the model’s predicted label when it’s not shown. We found rationalization and feature attribution were helpful in explaining the model behavior. Moreover, users could more reliably predict the model outcome based on an explanation dialogue rather than one-off explanations.
From Relevance to Utility: Evidence Retrieval with Feedback for Fact Verification

Retrieval-enhanced methods have become a primary approach in fact verification (FV); it requires reasoning over multiple retrieved pieces of evidence to verify the integrity of a claim. To retrieve evidence, existing work often employs off-the-shelf retrieval models whose design is based on the probability ranking principle. We argue that, rather than relevance, for FV we need to focus on the utility that a claim verifier derives from the retrieved evidence. We introduce the feedback-based evidence retriever (FER) that optimizes the evidence retrieval process by incorporating feedback from the claim verifier. As a feedback signal we use the divergence in utility between how effectively the verifier utilizes the retrieved evidence and the ground-truth evidence to produce the final claim label. Empirical studies demonstrate the superiority of FER over prevailing baselines.
InheritSumm: A General, Versatile and Compact Summarizer by Distilling from GPT

While large models such as GPT-3 demonstrate exceptional performance in zeroshot and fewshot summarization tasks, their extensive serving and fine-tuning costs hinder their utilization in various applications. Conversely, previous studies have found that although automatic metrics tend to favor smaller fine-tuned models, the quality of the summaries they generate is inferior to that of larger models like GPT-3 when assessed by human evaluators. To address this issue, we propose InheritSumm, a versatile and compact summarization model derived from GPT-3.5 through distillation. InheritSumm not only exhibits comparable zeroshot and fewshot summarization capabilities to GPT-3.5 but is also sufficiently compact for fine-tuning purposes. Experimental results demonstrate that InheritSumm achieves similar or superior performance to GPT-3.5 in zeroshot and fewshot settings. Furthermore, it outperforms the previously established best small models in both prefix-tuning and full-data fine-tuning scenarios.
UPRISE: Universal Prompt Retrieval for Improving Zero-Shot Evaluation

Daixuan Cheng, Shaohan Huang, Junyu Bi, Yuefeng Zhan, Jianfeng Liu, Yujing Wang, Hao Sun, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2023.
Improving Bias Mitigation through Bias Experts in Natural Language Understanding

Biases in the dataset often enable the model to achieve high performance on in-distribution data, while poorly performing on out-of-distribution data. To mitigate the detrimental effect of the bias on the networks, previous works have proposed debiasing methods that down-weight the biased examples identified by an auxiliary model, which is trained with explicit bias labels. However, finding a type of bias in datasets is a costly process. Therefore, recent studies have attempted to make the auxiliary model biased without the guidance (or annotation) of bias labels, by constraining the model’s training environment or the capability of the model itself. Despite the promising debiasing results of recent works, the multi-class learning objective, which has been naively used to train the auxiliary model, may harm the bias mitigation effect due to its regularization effect and competitive nature across classes. As an alternative, we propose a new debiasing framework that introduces binary classifiers between the auxiliary model and the main model, coined bias experts. Specifically, each bias expert is trained on a binary classification task derived from the multi-class classification task via the One-vs-Rest approach. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed strategy improves the bias identification ability of the auxiliary model. Consequently, our debiased model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art on various challenge datasets.
Exploring Prompt Engineering with GPT Language Models for Document-Level Machine Translation: Insights and Findings

This paper describes Lan-Bridge Translation systems for the WMT 2023 General Translation shared task. We participate in 2 directions: English to and from Chinese. With the emergence of large-scale models, various industries have undergone significant transformations, particularly in the realm of document-level machine translation. This has introduced a novel research paradigm that we have embraced in our participation in the WMT23 competition. Focusing on advancements in models such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, we have undertaken numerous prompt-based experiments. Our objective is to achieve optimal human evaluation results for document-level machine translation, resulting in our submission of the final outcomes in the general track.
Large Language Models are Better Reasoners with Self-Verification

Recently, with the chain of thought (CoT) prompting, large language models (LLMs), e.g., GPT-3, have shown strong reasoning ability in several natural language processing tasks such as arithmetic, commonsense, and logical reasoning. However, LLMs with CoT require multi-step prompting and multi-token prediction, which is highly sensitive to individual mistakes and vulnerable to error accumulation. The above issues make the LLMs need the ability to verify the answers. In fact, after inferring conclusions in some thinking decision tasks, people often check them by re-verifying steps to avoid some mistakes. In this paper, we propose and prove that LLMs also have similar self-verification abilities. We take the conclusion obtained by CoT as one of the conditions for solving the original problem. By performing a backward verification of the answers that LLM deduced for itself, we can obtain interpretable answer validation scores to select the candidate answer with the highest score. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the reasoning performance on various arithmetic, commonsense, and logical reasoning datasets. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/WENGSYX/Self-Verification.
Using In-Context Learning to Improve Dialogue Safety

While large neural-based conversational models have become increasingly proficient dialogue agents, recent work has highlighted safety issues with these systems. For example, these systems can be goaded into generating toxic content, often perpetuating social biases or stereotypes. We investigate a retrieval-based approach for reducing bias and toxicity in responses from chatbots. It uses in-context learning to steer a model towards safer generations. Concretely, to generate a response to an unsafe dialogue context, we retrieve demonstrations of safe responses to similar dialogue contexts. We find our method performs competitively with existing approaches to dialogue safety without requiring training. We also show, using automatic and human evaluation, that reductions in toxicity obtained using our approach are not at the cost engagingness or coherency. Finally, we note our method can be used in compliment to existing dialogue safety approaches, such as RLHF.
Reading Order Matters: Information Extraction from Visually-rich Documents by Token Path Prediction

Recent advances in multimodal pre-trained models have significantly improved information extraction from visually-rich documents (VrDs), in which named entity recognition (NER) is treated as a sequence-labeling task of predicting the BIO entity tags for tokens, following the typical setting of NLP. However, BIO-tagging scheme relies on the correct order of model inputs, which is not guaranteed in real-world NER on scanned VrDs where text are recognized and arranged by OCR systems. Such reading order issue hinders the accurate marking of entities by BIO-tagging scheme, making it impossible for sequence-labeling methods to predict correct named entities. To address the reading order issue, we introduce Token Path Prediction (TPP), a simple prediction head to predict entity mentions as token sequences within documents. Alternative to token classification, TPP models the document layout as a complete directed graph of tokens, and predicts token paths within the graph as entities. For better evaluation of VrD-NER systems, we also propose two revised benchmark datasets of NER on scanned documents which can reflect real-world scenarios. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and suggest its potential to be a universal solution to various information extraction tasks on documents.
Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questions

Question answering plays a pivotal role in human daily life because it involves our acquisition of knowledge about the world. However, due to the dynamic and ever-changing nature of real-world facts, the answer can be completely different when the time constraint in the question changes. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable intelligence in question answering, while our experiments reveal that the aforementioned problems still pose a significant challenge to existing LLMs. This can be attributed to the LLMs’ inability to perform rigorous reasoning based on surface-level text semantics. To overcome this limitation, rather than requiring LLMs to directly answer the question, we propose a novel approach where we reframe the Question Answering task as Programming (QAaP). Concretely, by leveraging modern LLMs’ superior capability in understanding both natural language and programming language, we endeavor to harness LLMs to represent diversely expressed text as well-structured code and select the best matching answer from multiple candidates through programming. We evaluate our QAaP framework on several time-sensitive question answering datasets and achieve decent improvement, up to 14.5% over strong baselines.
UML Artifact Extraction for Activity Diagram Based on Step Performed Using Text Mining: Case Study of SRS Sipranta Application

This study focuses on extracting Unified Modeling Language artifacts for evaluation related to the consistency of interaction design and functionality flow of an application in the software development process. Specifically, the study focuses on extracting two types of artifacts, namely Activity Diagram and Use Case Description, with emphasis on the Step Performed section. As these two artifacts have varying rules and formats, the study proposes a text mining approach to extract that artifacts while standardizing the extraction format to enable the evaluation. The software requirement specification document for the Sipranta software development project is used as the research object, which focuses on managing growth and development data for toddlers in Integrated Health Posts (Posyandu). The extraction results for each artifact comprise eleven sets of extracted information, labeled as documents D1 to D11 for Activity Diagram and D12 to D22 for Step Performed. The reliability of the extraction results is assessed using two approaches: Python programming and expert questionnaires and is found to be in the “Almost Perfect Agreement” category with respective values of 0.8127 and 0.8930. The similarity measurement using cosine similarity based on the extraction results indicates that the two artifacts are aligned and consistent, with similarity scores above 0.85.
All-optical quantitative phase imaging (QPI) through random unknown diffusers using a diffractive network

We report a diffractive optical network to perform quantitative phase imaging (QPI) through random unknown phase diffusers, solving the inverse imaging problem at the speed of light propagation through a thin passive diffractive material.
Improved Retinex algorithm for low illumination image enhancement in the chemical plant area

Abstract Due to the complexity of the chemical plant area at night and the harsh lighting environment, the images obtained by monitoring equipment have issues such as blurred details and insufficient contrast, which is not conducive to the subsequent target detection work. A low illumination image enhancement model based on an improved Retinex algorithm is proposed to address the above issues. The model consists of a decomposition network, an adjustment network, and a reconstruction network. In the decomposition network, a new decomposition network USD-Net is established based on U-Net, which decomposes the original image into illumination and reflection maps, enhancing the extraction of image details and low-frequency information; Using an adjustment network to enhance the decomposed lighting image, and introducing a Mobilenetv3 lightweight network and residual structure to simplify the network model and improve the contrast of the image; In the reconstruction network, the BM3D method is used for image denoising to enhance the ability to restore image detail features; The enhanced illumination and reflection images were fused based on the Retinex algorithm to achieve low illumination image enhancement in the chemical plant area. This article uses five image quality evaluation indicators, namely Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio, Structural Similarity Index, Natural Image Quality Evaluator, Interpolation Error, and Level of Effort, to compare eight traditional or modern algorithms and evaluate three different types of datasets. The experimental results show that the improved algorithm enhances the texture details of the image, improves the contrast and saturation of the image, and has good stability and robustness, which can effectively meet the needs of low illumination image enhancement in chemical plant areas.
Pengaruh Pendekatan Permainan dalam Kartu Pinmat Math Hero terhadap Pemahaman Matematika di Tingkat Sekolah Dasar

This qualitative research investigates the use of the Math Hero Flashcards in elementary school children's mathematics education. Math Hero Flashcards are specially designed learning tools aimed at enhancing mathematical understanding, accuracy, and mastery of arithmetic operations for numbers 1-10 through interactive games. The study involves direct observation, interviews, and interactive play with children with the aim of understanding the effects of Math Hero Flashcards on children's mathematical understanding, learning motivation, and interest. The results of the research indicate that the use of Math Hero Flashcards enhances elementary school children's mathematical understanding, fosters motivation for learning, and creates a more enjoyable learning experience. However, some interview participants mentioned that they had found alternatives in the form of math game apps on their phones. Therefore, this research underscores the need for integration between physical learning tools like Math Hero Flashcards and learning technology to achieve holistic and engaging mathematics education for children.
Learnable Central Similarity Quantization for Efficient Image and Video Retrieval

Data-dependent hashing methods aim to learn hash functions from the pairwise or triplet relationships among the data, which often lead to low efficiency and low collision rate by only capturing the local distribution of the data. To solve the limitation, we propose central similarity, in which the hash codes of similar data pairs are encouraged to approach a common center and those of dissimilar pairs to converge to different centers. As a new global similarity metric, central similarity can improve the efficiency and retrieval accuracy of hash learning. By introducing a new concept, hash centers, we principally formulate the computation of the proposed central similarity metric, in which the hash centers refer to a set of points scattered in the Hamming space with a sufficient mutual distance between each other. To construct well-separated hash centers, we provide two efficient methods: 1) leveraging the Hadamard matrix and Bernoulli distributions to generate data-independent hash centers and 2) learning data-dependent hash centers from data representations. Based on the proposed similarity metric and hash centers, we propose central similarity quantization (CSQ) that optimizes the central similarity between data points with respect to their hash centers instead of optimizing the local similarity to generate a high-quality deep hash function. We also further improve the CSQ with data-dependent hash centers, dubbed as CSQ with learnable center (CSQ [Formula: see text] ). The proposed CSQ and CSQ [Formula: see text] are generic and applicable to image and video hashing scenarios. We conduct extensive experiments on large-scale image and video retrieval tasks, and the proposed CSQ yields noticeably boosted retrieval performance, i.e., 3%-20% in mean average precision (mAP) over the previous state-of-the-art methods, which also demonstrates that our methods can generate cohesive hash codes for similar data pairs and dispersed hash codes for dissimilar pairs.