Thailand

Neural image classifiers can often learn to make predictions by overly relying on non-predictive features that are spuriously correlated with the class labels in the training data. This leads to poor performance in real-world atypical scenarios where such features are absent. This paper presents ASPIRE (Language-guided Data Augmentation for SPurIous correlation REmoval), a simple yet effective solution for supplementing the training dataset with images without spurious features, for robust learning against spurious correlations via better generalization. ASPIRE, guided by language at various steps, can generate non-spurious images without requiring any group labeling or existing non-spurious images in the training set. Precisely, we employ LLMs to first extract foreground and background features from textual descriptions of an image, followed by advanced language-guided image editing to discover the features that are spuriously correlated with the class label. Finally, we personalize a text-to-image generation model using the edited images to generate diverse in-domain images without spurious features. ASPIRE is complementary to all prior robust training methods in literature, and we demonstrate its effectiveness across 4 datasets and 9 baselines and show that ASPIRE improves the worst-group classification accuracy of prior methods by 1% - 38%. We also contribute a novel test set for the challenging Hard ImageNet dataset.

ACL 2024

ASPIRE: Language-Guided Data Augmentation for Improving Robustness Against Spurious Correlations

spurious correlations

image classification

synthetic data

data augmentation

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
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ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

poster

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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Please register!

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Tables contrast with unstructured text data by its structure to organize the information.
In this paper, we investigate the efficiency of various LLMs in interpreting tabular data through different prompting strategies and data formats. 
Our analysis extends across six benchmarks for table-related tasks such as question-answering and fact-checking. 
We pioneer in the assessment of LLMs' performance on image-based table representation. 
Specifically, we compare five text-based and three image-based table representations, revealing the influence of representation and prompting on LLM performance. 
We hope our study provides researchers insights into optimizing LLMs' application in table-related tasks.

Tables as Texts or Images: Evaluating the Table Reasoning Ability of LLMs and MLLMs

In this work, we present InfiMM, an advanced Multimodal Large Language Model that adapts to intricate vision-language tasks. InfiMM, inspired by the Flamingo architecture, distinguishes itself through the utilization of large-scale training data, comprehensive training strategies, and diverse large language models. This approach ensures the preservation of Flamingo's foundational strengths while simultaneously introducing augmented capabilities. Empirical evaluations across a variety of benchmarks underscore InfiMM's remarkable capability in multimodal understanding. The code can be found at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/infimm-zephyr-F60C/.

InfiMM: Advancing Multimodal Understanding with an Open-Sourced Visual Language Model

Although achieving great success, Large Language Models (LLMs) usually suffer from unreliable hallucinations. Although language attribution can be a potential solution, there are no suitable benchmarks and evaluation metrics to attribute LLMs to structured knowledge. In this paper, we define a new task of Knowledge-aware Language Model Attribution (KaLMA) that improves upon three core concerns with conventional attributed LMs. First, we extend attribution source from unstructured texts to Knowledge Graph (KG), whose rich structures benefit both the attribution performance and working scenarios. Second, we propose a new ``Conscious Incompetence" setting considering the incomplete knowledge repository, where the model identifies the need for supporting knowledge beyond the provided KG. Third, we propose a comprehensive automatic evaluation metric encompassing text quality, citation quality, and text citation alignment. To implement the above innovations, we build a dataset in biography domain BioKaLMA via evolutionary question generation strategy, to control the question complexity and necessary knowledge to the answer. For evaluation, we develop a baseline solution and demonstrate the room for improvement in LLMs' citation generation, emphasizing the importance of incorporating the "Conscious Incompetence" setting, and the critical role of retrieval accuracy.

Towards Verifiable Generation: A Benchmark for Knowledge-aware Language Model Attribution

Large language models respond well in high-resource languages like English but struggle in low-resource languages. It may arise from the lack of high-quality instruction following data in these languages. Directly translating English samples into these languages can be a solution but unreliable, leading to responses with translation errors and lacking language-specific or cultural knowledge. To address this issue, we propose a novel method to construct cross-lingual instruction following samples with instruction in English and response in low-resource languages. Specifically, the language model first learns to generate appropriate English instructions according to the natural web texts in other languages as responses. The candidate cross-lingual instruction tuning samples are further refined and diversified. We have employed this method to build a large-scale cross-lingual instruction tuning dataset on 10 languages, namely X-Instruction. The instruction data built using our method incorporate more language-specific knowledge compared with the naive translation method. Experimental results have shown that the response quality of the model tuned on X-Instruction greatly exceeds the model distilled from a powerful teacher model, reaching or even surpassing the ones of ChatGPT. In addition, we find that models tuned on cross-lingual instruction following samples can follow the instruction in the output language without further tuning.

X-Instruction: Aligning Language Model in Low-resource Languages with Self-curated Cross-lingual Instructions

Advances in large vision-language models (LVLMs) have led to significant progress in generating natural language descriptions for visual contents. These powerful models are known for producing texts that are factually inconsistent with the visual input. While some efforts mitigate such inconsistencies in natural image captioning, the factuality of generated captions for structured visuals, such as charts, has not received as much scrutiny. This work introduces a comprehensive typology of factual errors in generated chart captions. A large-scale human annotation effort provides insight into the error patterns in captions generated by various models, ultimately forming the foundation of a dataset, CHOCOLATE. Our analysis reveals that even advanced models like GPT-4V frequently produce captions laced with factual inaccuracies. To combat this, we establish the task of Chart Caption Factual Error Correction and introduce CHARTVE, a visual entailment model that outperforms current LVLMs in evaluating caption factuality. Furthermore, we propose C2TFEC, an interpretable two-stage framework that excels at correcting factual errors. This work inaugurates a new domain in factual error correction for chart captions, presenting a novel evaluation metric, and demonstrating an effective approach to ensuring the factuality of generated chart captions. The code and data as well as the continuously updated benchmark can be found at: https://khuangaf.github.io/CHOCOLATE/.

Do LVLMs Understand Charts? Analyzing and Correcting Factual Errors in Chart Captioning

Visual grounding (VG) aims at locating the foreground entities that match the given natural language expression. Previous datasets and methods for classic VG task mainly rely on the prior assumption that the given expression must literally refer to the target object, which greatly impedes the practical deployment of agents in real-world scenarios. Since users usually prefer to provide the intention-based expressions for the desired object instead of covering all the details, it is necessary for the agents to interpret the intention-driven instructions. Thus, in this work, we take a step further to the intention-driven visual-language (V-L) understanding. To promote classic VG towards human intention interpretation, we propose a new intention-driven visual grounding (IVG) task and build a largest-scale IVG dataset named IntentionVG with free-form intention expressions. Considering that practical agents need to move and find specific targets among various scenarios to realize the grounding task, our IVG task and IntentionVG dataset have taken the crucial properties of both multi-scenario perception and egocentric view into consideration. Besides, various types of models are set up as the baselines to realize our IVG task. Extensive experiments on our IntentionVG dataset and baselines demonstrate the necessity and efficacy of our method for the V-L field. To foster future research in this direction, our newly built dataset and baselines will be publicly available at https://github.com/Rubics-Xuan/IVG.

Beyond Literal Descriptions: Understanding and Locating Open-World Objects Aligned with Human Intentions

Understanding the internal mechanisms by which multi-modal large language models (LLMs) interpret different modalities and integrate cross-modal representations is becoming increasingly critical for continuous improvements in both academia and industry. In this paper, we propose a novel method to identify key neurons for interpretability --- how multi-modal LLMs bridge visual and textual concepts for captioning. Our method improves conventional works upon efficiency and applied range by removing needs of costly gradient computation. Based on those identified neurons, we further design a multi-modal knowledge editing method, beneficial to mitigate sensitive words or hallucination. For rationale of our design, we provide theoretical assumption. For empirical evaluation, we have conducted extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments. The results not only validate the effectiveness of our methods, but also offer insightful findings that highlight three key properties of multi-modal neurons: sensitivity, specificity and causal-effect, to shed light for future research.

Finding and Editing Multi-Modal Neurons in Pre-Trained Transformers

The remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) and instruction tuning drives the evolution of Vision Language Models (VLMs) towards a versatile general-purpose model. Yet, it remains unexplored whether current VLMs genuinely possess quality object-level image understanding capabilities determined from 'what objects are in the image?' or 'which object corresponds to a specified bounding box?'. Our findings reveal that the image understanding capabilities of current VLMs are strongly correlated with their zero-shot performance on vision language (VL) tasks. This suggests that prioritizing basic image understanding is crucial for VLMs to excel at VL tasks. To enhance object-level image understanding, we propose Crayon Large Language and Vision mOdel (CoLLaVO), which incorporates instruction tuning with Crayon Prompt as a new visual prompt tuning scheme based on panoptic color maps. Furthermore, we present a learning strategy of Dual QLoRA to preserve object-level image understanding without forgetting it during visual instruction tuning, thereby achieving a significant leap in numerous VL benchmarks in a zero-shot setting.

CoLLaVO: Crayon Large Language and Vision mOdel

Named entity recognition (NER) is a pivotal task reliant on textual data, often impeding the disambiguation of entities due to the absence of context. To tackle this challenge, conventional methods often incorporate images crawled from the internet as auxiliary information. However, the images often lack sufficient entities or would introduce noise. Even with high-quality images, it is still challenging to efficiently use images as auxiliaries (i.e., fine-grained alignment with texts). We introduce a novel method named InstructNER to address these issues. Leveraging the rich real-world knowledge and image synthesis capabilities of a large pre-trained stable diffusion (SD) model, InstructNER transforms the text-only NER into a multimodal NER (MNER) task. A selection process automatically identifies the best synthetic image by comparing fine-grained similarities with internet-crawled images through a visual bag-of-words strategy. Note, during the image synthesis, a cross-attention matrix between synthetic images and raw text emerges, which inspires a soft attention guidance alignment (AGA) mechanism. AGA optimizes the MNER task and concurrently facilitates instructive alignment in MNER. Empirical experiments on prominent MNER datasets show that our method surpasses all text-only baselines, improving F1-score by 1.4% to 2.3%. Remarkably, even when compared to fully multimodal baselines, our approach maintains competitive. Furthermore, we open-source a comprehensive synthetic image dataset and the code to supplement existing raw dataset. 
The code and datasets are available in https://github.com/Heyest/InstructNER.

Boosting Textural NER with Synthetic Image and Instructive Alignment

We show that content on the web is often translated into many languages, and the low quality of these multi-way translations indicates they were likely created using Machine Translation (MT). Multi-way parallel, machine generated content not only dominates the translations in lower resource languages; it also constitutes a large fraction of the total web content in those languages. We also find evidence of a selection bias in the type of content which is translated into many languages, consistent with low quality English content being translated en masse into many lower resource languages, via MT. Our work raises serious concerns about training models such as multilingual large language models on both monolingual and bilingual data scraped from the web.

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Next from ACL 2024

Tables as Texts or Images: Evaluating the Table Reasoning Ability of LLMs and MLLMs

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Spurious Correlations