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A multimodal large language model MLLMs may struggle with answering visual-based (personal) entity questions (VEQA), such as &#39;&#39;who is A?&#39;&#39; or &#39;&#39;who is A that B is talking to?&#39;&#39; for various reasons, e.g., the absence of the name of A in the caption or the inability of MLLMs to recognize A, particularly for less common entities. Furthermore, even if the MLLMs can identify A, it may refrain from answering due to privacy concerns. In this paper, we introduce a novel method called Matching-Augmented Reasoning (MAR) to enhance VEQA. Given a collection of visual objects with captions, MAR preprocesses each object individually, identifying faces, names, and their alignments within the object. It encodes this information and stores their vector representations in vector databases. When handling VEQA, MAR retrieves matching faces and names and organizes these entities into a matching graph. MAR then derives the answer to the query by reasoning over this matching graph. Extensive experiments show that MAR significantly improves VEQA compared with the state-of-the-art methods using MLLMs.

EMNLP 2024

MAR: Matching-Augmented Reasoning for Enhancing Visual-based Entity Question Answering

model evalaution

hard-to-easy consistency

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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ACL 2023

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.

A multimodal large language model MLLMs may struggle with answering visual-based (personal) entity questions (VEQA), such as ''who is A?'' or ''who is A that B is talking to?'' for various reasons, e.g., the absence of the name of A in the caption or the inability of MLLMs to recognize A, particularly for less common entities. Furthermore, even if the MLLMs can identify A, it may refrain from answering due to privacy concerns. In this paper, we introduce a novel method called Matching-Augmented Reasoning (MAR) to enhance VEQA. Given a collection of visual objects with captions, MAR preprocesses each object individually, identifying faces, names, and their alignments within the object. It encodes this information and stores their vector representations in vector databases. When handling VEQA, MAR retrieves matching faces and names and organizes these entities into a matching graph. MAR then derives the answer to the query by reasoning over this matching graph. Extensive experiments show that MAR significantly improves VEQA compared with the state-of-the-art methods using MLLMs.

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
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EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

Scaling the rotary position embedding (RoPE) has become a common method for extending the context window of RoPE-based large language models (LLMs). However, existing scaling methods often rely on empirical approaches and lack a profound understanding of the internal distribution within RoPE, resulting in suboptimal performance in extending the context window length. In this paper, we propose to optimize the context window extending task from the view of rotary angle distribution. Specifically, we first estimate the distribution of the rotary angles within the model and analyze the extent to which length extension perturbs this distribution. Then, we present a novel extension strategy that minimizes the disturbance between rotary angle distributions to maintain consistency with the pre-training phase, enhancing the model's capability to generalize to longer sequences. Experimental results compared to the strong baseline methods demonstrate that our approach reduces by up to 72% of the distributional disturbance when extending LLaMA2's context window to 8k, and reduces by up to 32% when extending to 16k. On the LongBench-E benchmark, our method achieves an average improvement of up to 4.33% over existing state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, Our method maintains the model's performance on the Hugging Face Open LLM benchmark after context window extension, with only an average performance fluctuation ranging from -0.12 to +0.22.

Extending Context Window of Large Language Models from a Distributional Perspective

Diffusion-based text-to-image models have demonstrated impressive achievements in diversity and aesthetics but struggle to generate images with legible visual texts. Existing backbone models have limitations such as misspelling, failing to generate texts, and lack of support for Chinese texts, but their development shows promising potential. In this paper, we propose a series of methods, aiming to empower backbone models to generate visual texts in English and Chinese. We first conduct a preliminary study revealing that BPE tokenization and insufficient learning of cross-attention modules restrict the performance of the backbone models. Based on these observations, we make the following improvements: (1) We design a mixed granularity input strategy to provide more suitable text representations; (2) We propose to augment the conventional training objective with three glyph-aware training losses, which enhance the learning of cross-attention modules and encourage the model to focus on visual texts. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our methods can effectively empower backbone models to generate semantic relevant, aesthetically appealing, and accurate visual text images, while maintaining their fundamental image generation quality.

Empowering Backbone Models for Visual Text Generation with Input Granularity Control and Glyph-Aware Training

Weakly-supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding(STVG) aims to localize target object tube given a text query, without densely annotated training data. Existing methods extract each candidate tube feature independently by cropping objects from video frame feature, discarding all contextual information such as position change and inter-entity relationship. In this paper, we propose Video-Text Prompting(VTP) to construct candidate feature. Instead of cropping tube region from feature map, we draw visual markers(e.g. red circle) over objects tubes as video prompts; corresponding text prompt(e.g. in red circle) is also inserted after the subject word of query text to highlight its presence. Nevertheless, each candidate feature may look similar without cropping. To address this, we further propose Contrastive VTP(CVTP) by introducing negative contrastive samples whose candidate object is erased instead of being highlighted; by comparing the difference between VTP candidate and the contrastive sample, the gap of matching score between correct candidate and the rest is enlarged. Extensive experiments and ablations are conducted on several STVG datasets and our results surpass existing weakly-supervised methods by a great margin, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

Video-Text Prompting for Weakly Supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding

Machine translation (MT) in the medical domain plays a pivotal role in enhancing healthcare quality and disseminating medical knowledge. Despite advancements in English-Thai MT technology, common MT approaches often underperform in the medical field due to their inability to precisely translate medical terminologies. Our research prioritizes not merely improving translation accuracy but also maintaining medical terminology in English within the translated text through code-switched (CS) translation. We developed a method to produce CS medical translation data, fine-tuned a CS translation model with this data, and evaluated its performance against strong baselines, such as Google Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and GPT-3.5/GPT-4. Our model demonstrated competitive performance in automatic metrics and was highly favored in human preference evaluations. Our evaluation result also shows that medical professionals significantly prefer CS translations that maintain critical English terms accurately, even if it slightly compromises fluency. Our code and test set are publicly available https://github.com/preceptorai-org/NLLB_CS_EM_NLP2024.

On Creating an English-Thai Code-switched Machine Translation in Medical Domain

Language models often struggle with handling factual knowledge, exhibiting factual hallucination issue. This makes it vital to evaluate the models’ ability to recall its parametric knowledge about facts. In this study, we introduce a knowledge probing benchmark, BELIEF(ICL), to evaluate the knowledge recall ability of both encoder- and decoder-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) from diverse perspectives. BELIEFs utilize a multi-prompt dataset to evaluate PLM’s accuracy, consistency, and reliability in factual knowledge recall. To enable a more reliable evaluation with BELIEFs, we semi-automatically create MyriadLAMA, which has massively diverse prompts. We validate the effectiveness of BELIEFs in comprehensively evaluating PLM’s knowledge recall ability on diverse PLMs, including recent large language models (LLMs). We then investigate key factors in memorizing and recalling facts in PLMs, such as model size, pretraining strategy and corpora, instruction-tuning process and in-context learning settings. Finally, we reveal the limitation of the prompt-based knowledge probing. The MyriadLAMA is publicized.

What Matters in Learning Facts in Language Models? Multifaceted Knowledge Probing with Diverse Multi-Prompt Datasets

Computational notebooks became indispensable tools for research-related development, offering unprecedented interactivity and flexibility in the development process. However, these benefits come at the cost of reproducibility and an increased potential for bugs. With the rise of code-fluent Large Language Models empowered with agentic techniques, smart bug-fixing tools with a high level of autonomy have emerged. However, those tools are tuned for classical script programming and still struggle with non-linear computational notebooks. In this paper, we present an AI agent designed specifically for error resolution in a computational notebook. We have developed an agentic system capable of exploring a notebook environment by interacting with it---similar to how a user would---and integrated the system into the JetBrains service for collaborative data science called Datalore. We evaluate our approach against the pre-existing single-action solution by comparing costs and conducting a user study. Users rate the error resolution capabilities of the agentic system higher but experience difficulties with UI. We share the results of the study and consider them valuable for further improving user-agent collaboration.

Debug Smarter, Not Harder: AI Agents for Error Resolution in Computational Notebooks

We introduce GenerativeDictionary, a novel dictionary system that generates word sense interpretations based on the given context. Our approach involves transforming context sentences to highlight the meaning of target words within their specific context. The method involves automatically transforming context sentences into sequences of low-dimensional vector token representations, automatically processing the input embeddings through multiple layers of transformers, and automatically generate the word senses based on the latent representations derived from the context. At runtime, context sentences with target words are processed through a transformer model that outputs the relevant word senses. Blind evaluations on a combined set of dictionary example sentences and generated sentences based on given word senses demonstrate that our method is comparable to traditional word sense disambiguation (WSD) methods. By framing WSD as a generative problem, GenerativeDictionary delivers more precise and contextually appropriate word senses, enhancing the effectiveness of language learning tools.

Generative Dictionary: Improving Language Learner Understanding with Contextual Definitions

WalledEval is a comprehensive AI safety testing toolkit designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs). It accommodates a diverse range of models, including both open-weight and API-based ones, and features over 35 safety benchmarks covering areas such as multilingual safety, exaggerated safety, and prompt injections. The framework supports both LLM and judge benchmarking, and incorporates custom mutators to test safety against various text-style mutations such as future tense and paraphrasing. Additionally, WalledEval introduces WalledGuard, a new, small and performant content moderation tool, and SGXSTest, a benchmark for assessing exaggerated safety in cultural contexts. We make WalledEval publicly available at https://github.com/walledai/walledeval with a demonstration video at https://youtu.be/50Zy97kj1MA.

WalledEval: A Comprehensive Safety Evaluation Toolkit for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate human-level capabilities in dialogue, reasoning, and knowledge retention. However, even the most advanced LLMs face challenges such as hallucinations and real-time updating of their knowledge. Current research addresses this bottleneck by equipping LLMs with external knowledge, a technique known as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). However, two key issues constrained the development of RAG. First, there is a growing lack of comprehensive and fair comparisons between novel RAG algorithms. Second, open-source tools such as LlamaIndex and LangChain employ high-level abstractions, which results in a lack of transparency and limits the ability to develop novel algorithms and evaluation metrics. To close this gap, we introduce RAGLAB, a modular and research-oriented open-source library. RAGLAB reproduces 6 existing algorithms and provides a comprehensive ecosystem for investigating RAG algorithms. Leveraging RAGLAB, we conduct a fair comparison of 6 RAG algorithms across 10 benchmarks. With RAGLAB, researchers can efficiently compare the performance of various algorithms and develop novel algorithms.

xRAGLAB: A Modular and Research-Oriented Unified Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

We present Sailor, a family of open language models ranging from 0.5B to 14B parameters, tailored for South-East Asian (SEA) languages. From Qwen1.5, Sailor models accept 200B to 400B tokens during continual pre-training, primarily covering the languages of English, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Malay, and Lao. The training leverages several techniques, including BPE dropout for improving the model robustness, aggressive data cleaning and deduplication, and small proxy models to optimize the data mixture. Experimental results on four typical tasks indicate that Sailor models demonstrate strong performance across different benchmarks, including commonsense reasoning, question answering, reading comprehension and examination. We share our insights to spark a wider interest in developing large language models for multilingual use cases.

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