With the rise of powerful pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, it becomes essential to investigate ways to adapt these models to downstream datasets. A recently proposed method named Context Optimization (CoOp) introduces the concept of prompt learning -- a recent trend in NLP -- to the vision domain for adapting pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, CoOp turns context words in a prompt into a set of learnable vectors and, with only a few labeled images for learning, can achieve huge improvements over intensively-tuned manual prompts. In our study we identify a critical problem of CoOp: the learned context is not generalizable to wider unseen classes within the same dataset, suggesting that CoOp overfits base classes observed during training. To address the problem, we propose Conditional Context Optimization (CoCoOp), which extends CoOp by further learning a lightweight neural network to generate for each image an input-conditional token (vector). Compared to CoOp's static prompts, our dynamic prompts adapt to each instance and are thus less sensitive to class shift. Extensive experiments show that CoCoOp generalizes much better than CoOp to unseen classes, even showing promising transferability beyond a single dataset; and yields stronger domain generalization performance as well. Code is available at //github.com/KaiyangZhou/CoOp.
Recent state-of-the-art computer vision systems are trained from natural language supervision, ranging from simple object category names to descriptive captions. This free form of supervision ensures high generality and usability of the learned visual models, based on extensive heuristics on data collection to cover as many visual concepts as possible. Alternatively, learning with external knowledge about images is a promising way which leverages a much more structured source of supervision. In this paper, we propose K-LITE (Knowledge-augmented Language-Image Training and Evaluation), a simple strategy to leverage external knowledge to build transferable visual systems: In training, it enriches entities in natural language with WordNet and Wiktionary knowledge, leading to an efficient and scalable approach to learning image representations that can understand both visual concepts and their knowledge; In evaluation, the natural language is also augmented with external knowledge and then used to reference learned visual concepts (or describe new ones) to enable zero-shot and few-shot transfer of the pre-trained models. We study the performance of K-LITE on two important computer vision problems, image classification and object detection, benchmarking on 20 and 13 different existing datasets, respectively. The proposed knowledge-augmented models show significant improvement in transfer learning performance over existing methods.
Many adaptations of transformers have emerged to address the single-modal vision tasks, where self-attention modules are stacked to handle input sources like images. Intuitively, feeding multiple modalities of data to vision transformers could improve the performance, yet the inner-modal attentive weights may also be diluted, which could thus undermine the final performance. In this paper, we propose a multimodal token fusion method (TokenFusion), tailored for transformer-based vision tasks. To effectively fuse multiple modalities, TokenFusion dynamically detects uninformative tokens and substitutes these tokens with projected and aggregated inter-modal features. Residual positional alignment is also adopted to enable explicit utilization of the inter-modal alignments after fusion. The design of TokenFusion allows the transformer to learn correlations among multimodal features, while the single-modal transformer architecture remains largely intact. Extensive experiments are conducted on a variety of homogeneous and heterogeneous modalities and demonstrate that TokenFusion surpasses state-of-the-art methods in three typical vision tasks: multimodal image-to-image translation, RGB-depth semantic segmentation, and 3D object detection with point cloud and images.
Pretrained language models can be effectively stimulated by textual prompts or demonstrations, especially in low-data scenarios. Recent works have focused on automatically searching discrete or continuous prompts or optimized verbalizers, yet studies for the demonstration are still limited. Concretely, the demonstration examples are crucial for an excellent final performance of prompt-tuning. In this paper, we propose a novel pluggable, extensible, and efficient approach named contrastive demonstration tuning, which is free of demonstration sampling. Furthermore, the proposed approach can be: (i) Plugged to any previous prompt-tuning approaches; (ii) Extended to widespread classification tasks with a large number of categories. Experimental results on 16 datasets illustrate that our method integrated with previous approaches LM-BFF and P-tuning can yield better performance. Code is available in //github.com/zjunlp/PromptKG/tree/main/research/Demo-Tuning.
We study multimodal few-shot object detection (FSOD) in this paper, using both few-shot visual examples and class semantic information for detection. Most of previous works focus on either few-shot or zero-shot object detection, ignoring the complementarity of visual and semantic information. We first show that meta-learning and prompt-based learning, the most commonly-used methods for few-shot learning and zero-shot transferring from pre-trained vision-language models to downstream tasks, are conceptually similar. They both reformulate the objective of downstream tasks the same as the pre-training tasks, and mostly without tuning the parameters of pre-trained models. Based on this observation, we propose to combine meta-learning with prompt-based learning for multimodal FSOD without fine-tuning, by learning transferable class-agnostic multimodal FSOD models over many-shot base classes. Specifically, to better exploit the pre-trained vision-language models, the meta-learning based cross-modal prompting is proposed to generate soft prompts and further used to extract the semantic prototype, conditioned on the few-shot visual examples. Then, the extracted semantic prototype and few-shot visual prototype are fused to generate the multimodal prototype for detection. Our models can efficiently fuse the visual and semantic information at both token-level and feature-level. We comprehensively evaluate the proposed multimodal FSOD models on multiple few-shot object detection benchmarks, achieving promising results.
Although Transformers with fully connected self-attentions are powerful to model long-term dependencies, they are struggling to scale to long texts with thousands of words in language modeling. One of the solutions is to equip the model with a recurrence memory. However, existing approaches directly reuse hidden states from the previous segment that encodes contexts in a uni-directional way. As a result, this prohibits the memory to dynamically interact with the current context that provides up-to-date information for token prediction. To remedy this issue, we propose Look-Ahead Memory (LaMemo) that enhances the recurrence memory by incrementally attending to the right-side tokens, and interpolating with the old memory states to maintain long-term information in the history. LaMemo embraces bi-directional attention and segment recurrence with an additional computation overhead only linearly proportional to the memory length. Experiments on widely used language modeling benchmarks demonstrate its superiority over the baselines equipped with different types of memory.
Due to the superior performance, large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been widely adopted in many aspects of human society. However, we still lack effective tools to understand the potential bias embedded in the black-box models. Recent advances in prompt tuning show the possibility to explore the internal mechanism of the PLMs. In this work, we propose two token-level sentiment tests: Sentiment Association Test (SAT) and Sentiment Shift Test (SST) which utilize the prompt as a probe to detect the latent bias in the PLMs. Our experiments on the collection of sentiment datasets show that both SAT and SST can identify sentiment bias in PLMs and SST is able to quantify the bias. The results also suggest that fine-tuning can possibly augment the existing bias in PLMs.
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question answering or machine translation). However, it builds upon the assumption that the data distribution is stationary, ie. that the data is sampled from a fixed distribution both at training and test time. This way of training is inconsistent with how we as humans are able to learn from and operate within a constantly changing stream of information. Moreover, it is ill-adapted to real-world use cases where the data distribution is expected to shift over the course of a model's lifetime. The first goal of this thesis is to characterize the different forms this shift can take in the context of natural language processing, and propose benchmarks and evaluation metrics to measure its effect on current deep learning architectures. We then proceed to take steps to mitigate the effect of distributional shift on NLP models. To this end, we develop methods based on parametric reformulations of the distributionally robust optimization framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that these approaches yield more robust models as demonstrated on a selection of realistic problems. In the third and final part of this thesis, we explore ways of efficiently adapting existing models to new domains or tasks. Our contribution to this topic takes inspiration from information geometry to derive a new gradient update rule which alleviate catastrophic forgetting issues during adaptation.
This paper surveys and organizes research works in a new paradigm in natural language processing, which we dub "prompt-based learning". Unlike traditional supervised learning, which trains a model to take in an input x and predict an output y as P(y|x), prompt-based learning is based on language models that model the probability of text directly. To use these models to perform prediction tasks, the original input x is modified using a template into a textual string prompt x' that has some unfilled slots, and then the language model is used to probabilistically fill the unfilled information to obtain a final string x, from which the final output y can be derived. This framework is powerful and attractive for a number of reasons: it allows the language model to be pre-trained on massive amounts of raw text, and by defining a new prompting function the model is able to perform few-shot or even zero-shot learning, adapting to new scenarios with few or no labeled data. In this paper we introduce the basics of this promising paradigm, describe a unified set of mathematical notations that can cover a wide variety of existing work, and organize existing work along several dimensions, e.g.the choice of pre-trained models, prompts, and tuning strategies. To make the field more accessible to interested beginners, we not only make a systematic review of existing works and a highly structured typology of prompt-based concepts, but also release other resources, e.g., a website //pretrain.nlpedia.ai/ including constantly-updated survey, and paperlist.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which generalize deep neural networks to graph-structured data, have drawn considerable attention and achieved state-of-the-art performance in numerous graph related tasks. However, existing GNN models mainly focus on designing graph convolution operations. The graph pooling (or downsampling) operations, that play an important role in learning hierarchical representations, are usually overlooked. In this paper, we propose a novel graph pooling operator, called Hierarchical Graph Pooling with Structure Learning (HGP-SL), which can be integrated into various graph neural network architectures. HGP-SL incorporates graph pooling and structure learning into a unified module to generate hierarchical representations of graphs. More specifically, the graph pooling operation adaptively selects a subset of nodes to form an induced subgraph for the subsequent layers. To preserve the integrity of graph's topological information, we further introduce a structure learning mechanism to learn a refined graph structure for the pooled graph at each layer. By combining HGP-SL operator with graph neural networks, we perform graph level representation learning with focus on graph classification task. Experimental results on six widely used benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.
Deep learning has yielded state-of-the-art performance on many natural language processing tasks including named entity recognition (NER). However, this typically requires large amounts of labeled data. In this work, we demonstrate that the amount of labeled training data can be drastically reduced when deep learning is combined with active learning. While active learning is sample-efficient, it can be computationally expensive since it requires iterative retraining. To speed this up, we introduce a lightweight architecture for NER, viz., the CNN-CNN-LSTM model consisting of convolutional character and word encoders and a long short term memory (LSTM) tag decoder. The model achieves nearly state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets for the task while being computationally much more efficient than best performing models. We carry out incremental active learning, during the training process, and are able to nearly match state-of-the-art performance with just 25\% of the original training data.