Large language models (LLMs) enable zero-shot approaches in open-domain question answering (ODQA), yet with limited advancements as the reader is compared to the retriever. This study aims at the feasibility of a zero-shot reader that addresses the challenges of computational cost and the need for labeled data. We find that LLMs are distracted due to irrelevant documents in the retrieved set and the overconfidence of the generated answers when they are exploited as zero-shot readers. To tackle these problems, we mitigate the impact of such documents via Distraction-aware Answer Selection (DAS) with a negation-based instruction and score adjustment for proper answer selection. Experimental results show that our approach successfully handles distraction across diverse scenarios, enhancing the performance of zero-shot readers. Furthermore, unlike supervised readers struggling with unseen data, zero-shot readers demonstrate outstanding transferability without any training.
The global multi-object tracking (MOT) system can consider interaction, occlusion, and other ``visual blur'' scenarios to ensure effective object tracking in long videos. Among them, graph-based tracking-by-detection paradigms achieve surprising performance. However, their fully-connected nature poses storage space requirements that challenge algorithm handling long videos. Currently, commonly used methods are still generated trajectories by building one-forward associations across frames. Such matches produced under the guidance of first-order similarity information may not be optimal from a longer-time perspective. Moreover, they often lack an end-to-end scheme for correcting mismatches. This paper proposes the Composite Node Message Passing Network (CoNo-Link), a multi-scene generalized framework for modeling ultra-long frames information for association. CoNo-Link's solution is a low-storage overhead method for building constrained connected graphs. In addition to the previous method of treating objects as nodes, the network innovatively treats object trajectories as nodes for information interaction, improving the graph neural network's feature representation capability. Specifically, we formulate the graph-building problem as a top-k selection task for some reliable objects or trajectories. Our model can learn better predictions on longer-time scales by adding composite nodes. As a result, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art in several commonly used datasets.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks. However, even the most advanced open-source LLMs, such as the LLaMA family models, still face challenges when it comes to accurately solving complex multi-step mathematical problems. In this paper, we present an innovative process-oriented math verifier called \textbf{Math-Shepherd}, which assigns a reward score to each step of the LLM's outputs on math problems. The training of Math-Shepherd is achieved using automatically constructed process-wise supervision data, breaking the bottleneck of heavy reliance on manual annotation in existing work. With the guidance of Math-Shepherd, a series of open-source LLMs demonstrate exceptional performance. Among them, DeepSeek 67B \citep{DeepSeek-llm} stands out by achieving accuracy rates of 93.3\% on the GSM8K dataset and 48.1\% on the MATH dataset, without external enhancement such as tool usage. Our Math-Shepherd also outperforms the self-consistency method and other existing verification models. We believe that automatic process supervision holds significant potential for the future evolution of LLMs.
Building artificial intelligence (AI) systems on top of a set of foundation models (FMs) is becoming a new paradigm in AI research. Their representative and generative abilities learnt from vast amounts of data can be easily adapted and transferred to a wide range of downstream tasks without extra training from scratch. However, leveraging FMs in cross-modal generation remains under-researched when audio modality is involved. On the other hand, automatically generating semantically-relevant sound from visual input is an important problem in cross-modal generation studies. To solve this vision-to-audio (V2A) generation problem, existing methods tend to design and build complex systems from scratch using modestly sized datasets. In this paper, we propose a lightweight solution to this problem by leveraging foundation models, specifically CLIP, CLAP, and AudioLDM. We first investigate the domain gap between the latent space of the visual CLIP and the auditory CLAP models. Then we propose a simple yet effective mapper mechanism (V2A-Mapper) to bridge the domain gap by translating the visual input between CLIP and CLAP spaces. Conditioned on the translated CLAP embedding, pretrained audio generative FM AudioLDM is adopted to produce high-fidelity and visually-aligned sound. Compared to previous approaches, our method only requires a quick training of the V2A-Mapper. We further analyze and conduct extensive experiments on the choice of the V2A-Mapper and show that a generative mapper is better at fidelity and variability (FD) while a regression mapper is slightly better at relevance (CS). Both objective and subjective evaluation on two V2A datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method compared to current state-of-the-art approaches - trained with 86% fewer parameters but achieving 53% and 19% improvement in FD and CS, respectively.
Learning Nash equilibrium (NE) in complex zero-sum games with multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) can be extremely computationally expensive. Curriculum learning is an effective way to accelerate learning, but an under-explored dimension for generating a curriculum is the difficulty-to-learn of the subgames -- games induced by starting from a specific state. In this work, we present a novel subgame curriculum learning framework for zero-sum games. It adopts an adaptive initial state distribution by resetting agents to some previously visited states where they can quickly learn to improve performance. Building upon this framework, we derive a subgame selection metric that approximates the squared distance to NE values and further adopt a particle-based state sampler for subgame generation. Integrating these techniques leads to our new algorithm, Subgame Automatic Curriculum Learning (SACL), which is a realization of the subgame curriculum learning framework. SACL can be combined with any MARL algorithm such as MAPPO. Experiments in the particle-world environment and Google Research Football environment show SACL produces much stronger policies than baselines. In the challenging hide-and-seek quadrant environment, SACL produces all four emergent stages and uses only half the samples of MAPPO with self-play. The project website is at //sites.google.com/view/sacl-rl.
Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) aims to recognize novel named entities in low-resource domains utilizing existing knowledge. However, the present few-shot NER models assume that the labeled data are all clean without noise or outliers, and there are few works focusing on the robustness of the cross-domain transfer learning ability to textual adversarial attacks in Few-shot NER. In this work, we comprehensively explore and assess the robustness of few-shot NER models under textual adversarial attack scenario, and found the vulnerability of existing few-shot NER models. Furthermore, we propose a robust two-stage few-shot NER method with Boundary Discrimination and Correlation Purification (BDCP). Specifically, in the span detection stage, the entity boundary discriminative module is introduced to provide a highly distinguishing boundary representation space to detect entity spans. In the entity typing stage, the correlations between entities and contexts are purified by minimizing the interference information and facilitating correlation generalization to alleviate the perturbations caused by textual adversarial attacks. In addition, we construct adversarial examples for few-shot NER based on public datasets Few-NERD and Cross-Dataset. Comprehensive evaluations on those two groups of few-shot NER datasets containing adversarial examples demonstrate the robustness and superiority of the proposed method.
Information retrieval (IR) plays a crucial role in locating relevant resources from vast amounts of data, and its applications have evolved from traditional knowledge bases to modern retrieval models (RMs). The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has further revolutionized the IR field by enabling users to interact with search systems in natural languages. In this paper, we explore the advantages and disadvantages of LLMs and RMs, highlighting their respective strengths in understanding user-issued queries and retrieving up-to-date information. To leverage the benefits of both paradigms while circumventing their limitations, we propose InteR, a novel framework that facilitates information refinement through synergy between RMs and LLMs. InteR allows RMs to expand knowledge in queries using LLM-generated knowledge collections and enables LLMs to enhance prompt formulation using retrieved documents. This iterative refinement process augments the inputs of RMs and LLMs, leading to more accurate retrieval. Experiments on large-scale retrieval benchmarks involving web search and low-resource retrieval tasks demonstrate that InteR achieves overall superior zero-shot retrieval performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, even those using relevance judgment. Source code is available at //github.com/Cyril-JZ/InteR
While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of downstream tasks, a significant concern revolves around their propensity to exhibit hallucinations: LLMs occasionally generate content that diverges from the user input, contradicts previously generated context, or misaligns with established world knowledge. This phenomenon poses a substantial challenge to the reliability of LLMs in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we survey recent efforts on the detection, explanation, and mitigation of hallucination, with an emphasis on the unique challenges posed by LLMs. We present taxonomies of the LLM hallucination phenomena and evaluation benchmarks, analyze existing approaches aiming at mitigating LLM hallucination, and discuss potential directions for future research.
Few-shot learning (FSL) methods typically assume clean support sets with accurately labeled samples when training on novel classes. This assumption can often be unrealistic: support sets, no matter how small, can still include mislabeled samples. Robustness to label noise is therefore essential for FSL methods to be practical, but this problem surprisingly remains largely unexplored. To address mislabeled samples in FSL settings, we make several technical contributions. (1) We offer simple, yet effective, feature aggregation methods, improving the prototypes used by ProtoNet, a popular FSL technique. (2) We describe a novel Transformer model for Noisy Few-Shot Learning (TraNFS). TraNFS leverages a transformer's attention mechanism to weigh mislabeled versus correct samples. (3) Finally, we extensively test these methods on noisy versions of MiniImageNet and TieredImageNet. Our results show that TraNFS is on-par with leading FSL methods on clean support sets, yet outperforms them, by far, in the presence of label noise.
This paper introduces an online model for object detection in videos designed to run in real-time on low-powered mobile and embedded devices. Our approach combines fast single-image object detection with convolutional long short term memory (LSTM) layers to create an interweaved recurrent-convolutional architecture. Additionally, we propose an efficient Bottleneck-LSTM layer that significantly reduces computational cost compared to regular LSTMs. Our network achieves temporal awareness by using Bottleneck-LSTMs to refine and propagate feature maps across frames. This approach is substantially faster than existing detection methods in video, outperforming the fastest single-frame models in model size and computational cost while attaining accuracy comparable to much more expensive single-frame models on the Imagenet VID 2015 dataset. Our model reaches a real-time inference speed of up to 15 FPS on a mobile CPU.
In this paper, we propose the joint learning attention and recurrent neural network (RNN) models for multi-label classification. While approaches based on the use of either model exist (e.g., for the task of image captioning), training such existing network architectures typically require pre-defined label sequences. For multi-label classification, it would be desirable to have a robust inference process, so that the prediction error would not propagate and thus affect the performance. Our proposed model uniquely integrates attention and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models, which not only addresses the above problem but also allows one to identify visual objects of interests with varying sizes without the prior knowledge of particular label ordering. More importantly, label co-occurrence information can be jointly exploited by our LSTM model. Finally, by advancing the technique of beam search, prediction of multiple labels can be efficiently achieved by our proposed network model.