The advent of generalist Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision Models (VLMs) have streamlined the construction of semantically enriched maps that can enable robots to ground high-level reasoning and planning into their representations. One of the most widely used semantic map formats is the 3D Scene Graph, which captures both metric (low-level) and semantic (high-level) information. However, these maps often assume a static world, while real environments, like homes and offices, are dynamic. Even small changes in these spaces can significantly impact task performance. To integrate robots into dynamic environments, they must detect changes and update the scene graph in real-time. This update process is inherently multimodal, requiring input from various sources, such as human agents, the robot's own perception system, time, and its actions. This work proposes a framework that leverages these multimodal inputs to maintain the consistency of scene graphs during real-time operation, presenting promising initial results and outlining a roadmap for future research.
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance in semantic understanding and generation, yet accurately assessing their output reliability remains a significant challenge. While numerous studies have explored calibration techniques, they primarily focus on White-Box LLMs with accessible parameters. Black-Box LLMs, despite their superior performance, pose heightened requirements for calibration techniques due to their API-only interaction constraints. Although recent researches have achieved breakthroughs in black-box LLMs calibration, a systematic survey of these methodologies is still lacking. To bridge this gap, we presents the first comprehensive survey on calibration techniques for black-box LLMs. We first define the Calibration Process of LLMs as comprising two interrelated key steps: Confidence Estimation and Calibration. Second, we conduct a systematic review of applicable methods within black-box settings, and provide insights on the unique challenges and connections in implementing these key steps. Furthermore, we explore typical applications of Calibration Process in black-box LLMs and outline promising future research directions, providing new perspectives for enhancing reliability and human-machine alignment. This is our GitHub link: //github.com/LiangruXie/Calibration-Process-in-Black-Box-LLMs
The domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has experienced notable progress in the evolution of Bangla Question Answering (QA) systems. This paper presents a comprehensive review of seven research articles that contribute to the progress in this domain. These research studies explore different aspects of creating question-answering systems for the Bangla language. They cover areas like collecting data, preparing it for analysis, designing models, conducting experiments, and interpreting results. The papers introduce innovative methods like using LSTM-based models with attention mechanisms, context-based QA systems, and deep learning techniques based on prior knowledge. However, despite the progress made, several challenges remain, including the lack of well-annotated data, the absence of high-quality reading comprehension datasets, and difficulties in understanding the meaning of words in context. Bangla QA models' precision and applicability are constrained by these challenges. This review emphasizes the significance of these research contributions by highlighting the developments achieved in creating Bangla QA systems as well as the ongoing effort required to get past roadblocks and improve the performance of these systems for actual language comprehension tasks.
Scientific question answering (SQA) is an important task aimed at answering questions based on papers. However, current SQA datasets have limited reasoning types and neglect the relevance between tables and text, creating a significant gap with real scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a QA benchmark for scientific tables and text with diverse reasoning types (SciTaT). To cover more reasoning types, we summarize various reasoning types from real-world questions. To involve both tables and text, we require the questions to incorporate tables and text as much as possible. Based on SciTaT, we propose a strong baseline (CaR), which combines various reasoning methods to address different reasoning types and process tables and text at the same time. CaR brings average improvements of 12.9% over other baselines on SciTaT, validating its effectiveness. Error analysis reveals the challenges of SciTaT, such as complex numerical calculations and domain knowledge.
We propose a novel formalism for describing Structural Causal Models (SCMs) as fixed-point problems on causally ordered variables, eliminating the need for Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), and establish the weakest known conditions for their unique recovery given the topological ordering (TO). Based on this, we design a two-stage causal generative model that first infers in a zero-shot manner a valid TO from observations, and then learns the generative SCM on the ordered variables. To infer TOs, we propose to amortize the learning of TOs on synthetically generated datasets by sequentially predicting the leaves of graphs seen during training. To learn SCMs, we design a transformer-based architecture that exploits a new attention mechanism enabling the modeling of causal structures, and show that this parameterization is consistent with our formalism. Finally, we conduct an extensive evaluation of each method individually, and show that when combined, our model outperforms various baselines on generated out-of-distribution problems. The code is available on \href{//github.com/microsoft/causica/tree/main/research_experiments/fip}{Github}.
Natural Language Inference (NLI) tasks require identifying the relationship between sentence pairs, typically classified as entailment, contradiction, or neutrality. While the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) model, Entailment Few-Shot Learning (EFL), achieves a 93.1% accuracy on the Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) dataset, further advancements are constrained by the dataset's limitations. To address this, we propose a novel approach leveraging synthetic data augmentation to enhance dataset diversity and complexity. We present UnitedSynT5, an advanced extension of EFL that leverages a T5-based generator to synthesize additional premise-hypothesis pairs, which are rigorously cleaned and integrated into the training data. These augmented examples are processed within the EFL framework, embedding labels directly into hypotheses for consistency. We train a GTR-T5-XL model on this expanded dataset, achieving a new benchmark of 94.7% accuracy on the SNLI dataset, 94.0% accuracy on the E-SNLI dataset, and 92.6% accuracy on the MultiNLI dataset, surpassing the previous SOTA models. This research demonstrates the potential of synthetic data augmentation in improving NLI models, offering a path forward for further advancements in natural language understanding tasks.
Despite their remarkable capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to generate responses that contradict verifiable facts, i.e., unfaithful hallucination content. Existing efforts generally focus on optimizing model parameters or editing semantic representations, which compromise the internal factual knowledge of target LLMs. In addition, hallucinations typically exhibit multifaceted patterns in downstream tasks, limiting the model's holistic performance across tasks. In this paper, we propose a Comparator-driven Decoding-Time (CDT) framework to alleviate the response hallucination. Firstly, we construct hallucinatory and truthful comparators with multi-task fine-tuning samples. In this case, we present an instruction prototype-guided mixture of experts strategy to enhance the ability of the corresponding comparators to capture different hallucination or truthfulness patterns in distinct task instructions. CDT constrains next-token predictions to factuality-robust distributions by contrasting the logit differences between the target LLMs and these comparators. Systematic experiments on multiple downstream tasks show that our framework can significantly improve the model performance and response factuality.
This article presents the affordances that Generative Artificial Intelligence can have in disinformation context, one of the major threats to our digitalized society. We present a research framework to generate customized agent-based social networks for disinformation simulations that would enable understanding and evaluation of the phenomena whilst discussing open challenges.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently become increasingly popular due to their ability to learn complex systems of relations or interactions arising in a broad spectrum of problems ranging from biology and particle physics to social networks and recommendation systems. Despite the plethora of different models for deep learning on graphs, few approaches have been proposed thus far for dealing with graphs that present some sort of dynamic nature (e.g. evolving features or connectivity over time). In this paper, we present Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs), a generic, efficient framework for deep learning on dynamic graphs represented as sequences of timed events. Thanks to a novel combination of memory modules and graph-based operators, TGNs are able to significantly outperform previous approaches being at the same time more computationally efficient. We furthermore show that several previous models for learning on dynamic graphs can be cast as specific instances of our framework. We perform a detailed ablation study of different components of our framework and devise the best configuration that achieves state-of-the-art performance on several transductive and inductive prediction tasks for dynamic graphs.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.