Thailand

Existing benchmarks for visual question answering lack in visual grounding and complexity, particularly in evaluating spatial reasoning skills. We introduce FlowVQA, a novel benchmark aimed at assessing the capabilities of visual question-answering multimodal language models in reasoning with flowcharts as visual contexts. FlowVQA comprises 2,272 carefully generated and human-verified flowchart images from three distinct content sources, along with 22,413 diverse question-answer pairs, to test a spectrum of reasoning tasks, including information localization, decision-making, and logical progression. We conduct a thorough baseline evaluation on a suite of both open-source and proprietary multimodal language models using various strategies, followed by an analysis of directional bias. The results underscore the benchmark&#39;s potential as a vital tool for advancing the field of multimodal modeling, providing a focused and challenging environment for enhancing model performance in visual and logical reasoning tasks.

ACL 2024

FlowVQA: Mapping Multimodal Logic in Visual Question Answering with Flowcharts

flowcharts

multimodal

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Existing benchmarks for visual question answering lack in visual grounding and complexity, particularly in evaluating spatial reasoning skills. We introduce FlowVQA, a novel benchmark aimed at assessing the capabilities of visual question-answering multimodal language models in reasoning with flowcharts as visual contexts. FlowVQA comprises 2,272 carefully generated and human-verified flowchart images from three distinct content sources, along with 22,413 diverse question-answer pairs, to test a spectrum of reasoning tasks, including information localization, decision-making, and logical progression. We conduct a thorough baseline evaluation on a suite of both open-source and proprietary multimodal language models using various strategies, followed by an analysis of directional bias. The results underscore the benchmark's potential as a vital tool for advancing the field of multimodal modeling, providing a focused and challenging environment for enhancing model performance in visual and logical reasoning tasks.

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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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.

3D dense captioning is a task to localize objects in a 3D scene and generate descriptive sentences for each object. Recent approaches in 3D dense captioning have adopted transformer encoder-decoder frameworks from object detection to build an end-to-end pipeline without hand-crafted components. However, these approaches struggle with contradicting objectives where a single query attention has to simultaneously view both the tightly localized object regions and contextual environment. To overcome this challenge, we introduce SIA (See-It-All), a transformer pipeline that engages in 3D dense captioning with a novel paradigm called late aggregation. SIA simultaneously decodes two sets of queries—context query and instance query. The instance query focuses on localization and object attribute descriptions, while the context query versatilely captures the region-of-interest of relationships between multiple objects or with the global scene, then aggregated afterwards (i.e., late aggregation) via simple distance-based measures. To further enhance the quality of contextualized caption generation, we design a novel aggregator to generate a fully informed caption based on the surrounding context, the global environment, and object instances. Extensive experiments on two of the most widely-used 3D dense captioning datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves a significant improvement over prior methods.

See It All: Contextualized Late Aggregation for 3D Dense Captioning

Visual hallucination (VH) means that a multi-modal LLM (MLLM) imagines incorrect details about an image in visual question answering. Existing studies find VH instances only in existing image datasets, which results in biased understanding of MLLMs' performance under VH due to limited diversity of such VH instances. In this work, we propose a tool called VHTest to generate a diverse set of VH instances. Specifically, VHTest finds some initial VH instances in existing image datasets (e.g., COCO), generates a text description for each VH mode, and uses a text-to-image generative model (e.g., DALL-E-3) to generate VH images based on the text descriptions. We collect a benchmark dataset with 1,200 VH instances in 8 VH modes using VHTest. We find that existing MLLMs such as GPT-4, LLaVA-1.5, and MiniGPT-v2 hallucinate for a large fraction of the instances in our benchmark. Moreover, we find that fine-tuning an MLLM using our benchmark dataset reduces its likelihood to hallucinate without sacrificing its performance on other benchmarks. Our benchmarks are publicly available: https://github.com/wenhuang2000/VHTest.

Visual Hallucinations of Multi-modal Large Language Models

Prompt recovery in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for understanding how LLMs work and addressing concerns regarding privacy, copyright, etc. The trend towards inference-only APIs complicates this task by restricting access to essential outputs for recovery. To tackle this challenge, we extract prompt-related information from limited outputs and identify a strong(negative) correlation between output probability-based uncertainty and the success of prompt recovery.This finding led to the development of Deliberative PrOmpt RecoverY (DORY), our novel approach that leverages uncertainty to recover prompts accurately. DORY involves reconstructing drafts from outputs, refining these with hints, and filtering out noise based on uncertainty. Our evaluation shows that DORY outperforms existing baselines across diverse LLMs and prompt benchmarks, improving performance by approximately 10.82% and establishing a new state-of-the-art record in prompt recovery tasks. Significantly, DORY operates using a single LLM without any external resources or model, offering a cost-effective, user-friendly prompt recovery solution.

DORY: Deliberative Prompt Recovery for LLM

Cross-document event coreference resolution (CDECR) involves clustering event mentions across multiple documents that refer to the same real-world events. Existing approaches utilize fine-tuning of small language models (SLMs) like BERT to address the compatibility among the contexts of event mentions. However, due to the complexity and diversity of contexts, these models are prone to learning simple co-occurrences. Recently, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have demonstrated impressive contextual understanding, yet they encounter challenges in adapting to specific information extraction (IE) tasks. In this paper, we propose a collaborative approach for CDECR, leveraging the capabilities of both a universally capable LLM and a task-specific SLM. The collaborative strategy begins with the LLM accurately and comprehensively summarizing events through prompting. Then, the SLM refines its learning of event representations based on these insights during fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach surpasses the performance of both the large and small language models individually, forming a complementary advantage. Across various datasets, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, underscoring its effectiveness in diverse scenarios.

Synergetic Event Understanding: A Collaborative Approach to Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution with Large Language Models

A song is a combination of singing voice and accompaniment. However, existing works focus on singing voice synthesis and music generation independently. Little attention was paid to exploring song synthesis. In this work, we propose a novel task called Text-to-Song synthesis which incorporates both vocal and accompaniment generation. We develop Melodist, a two-stage text-to-song method that consists of singing voice synthesis (SVS) and vocal-to-accompaniment (V2A) synthesis. Melodist leverages tri-tower contrastive pretraining to learn more effective text representation for controllable V2A synthesis. A Chinese song dataset mined from a music website is built to alleviate data scarcity for our research. The evaluation results on our dataset demonstrate that Melodist can synthesize songs with comparable quality and style consistency. Audio samples can be found in https://text2songMelodist.github.io/Sample/.

Text-to-Song: Towards Controllable Music Generation Incorporating Vocal and Accompaniment

The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers optimize the communicative properties of their utterances by avoiding spikes in information, thereby maintaining a relatively uniform information profile over time. This paper investigates the impact of UID principles on syntactic reduction, specifically focusing on the optional omission of the connector "that" in English subordinate clauses. Building upon previous research, we extend our investigation to a larger corpus of written English, utilize contemporary large language models (LLMs) and extend the information-uniformity principles by the notion of entropy, to estimate the UID manifestations in the usecase of syntactic reduction choices.

That's Optional: A Contemporary Exploration of "that" Omission in English Subordinate Clauses

While the neural transducer is popular for online speech recognition, simultaneous speech translation (SST) requires both streaming and re-ordering capabilities. This paper presents the LS-Transducer-SST, a label-synchronous neural transducer for SST, which naturally possesses these two properties. The LS-Transducer-SST dynamically decides when to emit translation tokens based on an Auto-regressive Integrate-and-Fire (AIF) mechanism. A latency-controllable AIF is also proposed, which can control the quality-latency trade-off either only during decoding, or it can be used in both decoding and training. The LS-Transducer-SST can naturally utilise monolingual text-only data via its prediction network which helps alleviate the key issue of data sparsity for E2E SST. During decoding, a chunk-based incremental joint decoding technique is designed to refine and expand the search space. Experiments on the Fisher-CallHome Spanish (Es-En) and MuST-C En-De data show that the LS-Transducer-SST gives a better quality-latency trade-off than existing popular methods. For example, the LS-Transducer-SST gives a 3.1/2.9 point BLEU increase (Es-En/En-De) relative to CAAT at a similar latency and a 1.4 s reduction in average lagging latency with similar BLEU scores relative to Wait-k.

Label-Synchronous Neural Transducer for E2E Simultaneous Speech Translation

Understanding the reason for emotional support response is crucial for establishing connections between users and emotional support dialogue systems. Previous works mostly focus on generating better responses but ignore interpretability, which is extremely important for constructing reliable dialogue systems. To empower the system with better interpretability, we propose an emotional support response generation scheme, named $\textbf{E}$motion-Focused and $\textbf{S}$trategy-Driven $\textbf{C}$hain-$\textbf{o}$f-$\textbf{T}$hought ($\textbf{ESCoT}$), mimicking the process of $\textit{identifying}$, $\textit{understanding}$, and $\textit{regulating}$ emotions. Specially, we construct a new dataset with ESCoT in two steps: (1) $\textit{Dialogue Generation}$ where we first generate diverse conversation situations, then enhance dialogue generation using richer emotional support strategies based on these situations; (2) $\textit{Chain Supplement}$ where we focus on supplementing selected dialogues with elements such as emotion, stimuli, appraisal, and strategy reason, forming the manually verified chains. Additionally, we further develop a model to generate dialogue responses with better interpretability. We also conduct extensive experiments and human evaluations to validate the effectiveness of the proposed ESCoT and generated dialogue responses. Our dataset, code, and model will be released.

ESCoT: Towards Interpretable Emotional Support Dialogue Systems

Taxonomy Expansion, which relies on modeling concepts and concept relations, can be formulated as a set representation learning task. The generalization of set, fuzzy set, incorporates uncertainty and measures the information within a semantic concept, making it suitable for concept modeling. Existing works usually model sets as vectors or geometric objects such as boxes, which are not closed under set operations. In this work, we propose a sound and efficient formulation of set representation learning based on its volume approximation as a fuzzy set. The resulting embedding framework, \textit{\underline{Fu}zzy \underline{S}et \underline{E}mbedding}, satisfies all set operations and compactly approximates the underlying fuzzy set, hence preserving information while being efficient to learn, relying on minimum neural architecture. We empirically demonstrate the power of FUSE on the task of taxonomy expansion, where FUSE achieves remarkable improvements up to 23% compared with existing baselines. Our work marks the first attempt to understand and efficiently compute the embeddings of fuzzy sets.

FUSE: Measure-Theoretic Compact Fuzzy Set Representation for Taxonomy Expansion

In the rapidly evolving landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring robust safety measures is paramount. To meet this crucial need, we propose SALAD-Bench, a safety benchmark specifically designed for evaluating LLMs, attack, and defense methods. Distinguished by its breadth, SALAD-Bench transcends conventional benchmarks through its large scale, rich diversity, intricate taxonomy spanning three levels, and versatile functionalities.SALAD-Bench is crafted with a meticulous array of questions, from standard queries to complex ones enriched with attack, defense modifications and multiple-choice. To effectively manage the inherent complexity, we introduce an innovative evaluators: the LLM-based MD-Judge for QA pairs with a particular focus on attack-enhanced queries, ensuring a seamless, and reliable evaluation. Above components extend SALAD-Bench from standard LLM safety evaluation to both LLM attack and defense methods evaluation, ensuring the joint-purpose utility. Our extensive experiments shed light on the resilience of LLMs against emerging threats and the efficacy of contemporary defense tactics. Data and evaluator are released under https://github.com/OpenSafetyLab/SALAD-BENCH

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See It All: Contextualized Late Aggregation for 3D Dense Captioning

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