Large language models (LLM) based end-to-end task-oriented dialog (TOD) systems built using few-shot (in-context) learning perform better than supervised models only when the train data is limited. This is due to the inherent ability of LLMs to learn any task with just a few demonstrations. As the number of train dialogs increases, supervised SoTA models surpass in-context learning LLMs as they learn to better align with the style of the system responses in the training data, which LLMs struggle to mimic. In response, we propose SyncTOD, which synergizes LLMs with useful hints about the task for improved alignment. At a high level, SyncTOD trains auxiliary models to provide these hints and select exemplars for the in-context prompts. With ChatGPT, SyncTOD achieves superior performance compared to LLM-based baselines and SoTA models in low-data settings, while retaining competitive performance in full-data settings
We propose a unified object-aware temporal learning framework for multi-view 3D detection and tracking tasks. Having observed that the efficacy of the temporal fusion strategy in recent multi-view perception methods may be weakened by distractors and background clutters in historical frames, we propose a cyclic learning mechanism to improve the robustness of multi-view representation learning. The essence is constructing a backward bridge to propagate information from model predictions (e.g., object locations and sizes) to image and BEV features, which forms a circle with regular inference. After backward refinement, the responses of target-irrelevant regions in historical frames would be suppressed, decreasing the risk of polluting future frames and improving the object awareness ability of temporal fusion. We further tailor an object-aware association strategy for tracking based on the cyclic learning model. The cyclic learning model not only provides refined features, but also delivers finer clues (e.g., scale level) for tracklet association. The proposed cycle learning method and association module together contribute a novel and unified multi-task framework. Experiments on nuScenes show that the proposed model achieves consistent performance gains over baselines of different designs (i.e., dense query-based BEVFormer, sparse query-based SparseBEV and LSS-based BEVDet4D) on both detection and tracking evaluation.
Large language models (LLMs), known for their exceptional reasoning capabilities, generalizability, and fluency across diverse domains, present a promising avenue for enhancing speech-related tasks. In this paper, we focus on integrating decoder-only LLMs to the task of speech-to-text translation (S2TT). We propose a decoder-only architecture that enables the LLM to directly consume the encoded speech representation and generate the text translation. Additionally, we investigate the effects of different parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques and task formulation. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on CoVoST 2 and FLEURS among models trained without proprietary data. We also conduct analyses to validate the design choices of our proposed model and bring insights to the integration of LLMs to S2TT.
Deep metric learning (DML) aims to learn a discriminative high-dimensional embedding space for downstream tasks like classification, clustering, and retrieval. Prior literature predominantly focuses on pair-based and proxy-based methods to maximize inter-class discrepancy and minimize intra-class diversity. However, these methods tend to suffer from the collapse of the embedding space due to their over-reliance on label information. This leads to sub-optimal feature representation and inferior model performance. To maintain the structure of embedding space and avoid feature collapse, we propose a novel loss function called Anti-Collapse Loss. Specifically, our proposed loss primarily draws inspiration from the principle of Maximal Coding Rate Reduction. It promotes the sparseness of feature clusters in the embedding space to prevent collapse by maximizing the average coding rate of sample features or class proxies. Moreover, we integrate our proposed loss with pair-based and proxy-based methods, resulting in notable performance improvement. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Extensive ablation studies verify the effectiveness of our method in preventing embedding space collapse and promoting generalization performance.
Vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained on extensive datasets can inadvertently learn biases by correlating gender information with specific objects or scenarios. Current methods, which focus on modifying inputs and monitoring changes in the model's output probability scores, often struggle to comprehensively understand bias from the perspective of model components. We propose a framework that incorporates causal mediation analysis to measure and map the pathways of bias generation and propagation within VLMs. This approach allows us to identify the direct effects of interventions on model bias and the indirect effects of interventions on bias mediated through different model components. Our results show that image features are the primary contributors to bias, with significantly higher impacts than text features, specifically accounting for 32.57% and 12.63% of the bias in the MSCOCO and PASCAL-SENTENCE datasets, respectively. Notably, the image encoder's contribution surpasses that of the text encoder and the deep fusion encoder. Further experimentation confirms that contributions from both language and vision modalities are aligned and non-conflicting. Consequently, focusing on blurring gender representations within the image encoder, which contributes most to the model bias, reduces bias efficiently by 22.03% and 9.04% in the MSCOCO and PASCAL-SENTENCE datasets, respectively, with minimal performance loss or increased computational demands.
Recent work has explored the capability of large language models (LLMs) to identify and correct errors in LLM-generated responses. These refinement approaches frequently evaluate what sizes of models are able to do refinement for what problems, but less attention is paid to what effective feedback for refinement looks like. In this work, we propose looking at refinement with feedback as a composition of three distinct LLM competencies: (1) identification of bad generations; (2) fine-grained natural language feedback generation; (3) refining with fine-grained feedback. The first step can be implemented with a high-performing discriminative model and steps 2 and 3 can be implemented either via prompted or fine-tuned LLMs. A key property of this approach is that the step 2 critique model can give fine-grained feedback about errors, made possible by offloading the discrimination to a separate model in step 1. We show that models of different capabilities benefit from refining with this approach on the task of improving factual consistency of document grounded summaries. Overall, our proposed method consistently outperforms existing end-to-end refinement approaches and current trained models not fine-tuned for factuality critiquing.
Large language model (LLM)-based applications consist of both LLM and non-LLM components, each contributing to the end-to-end latency. Despite great efforts to optimize LLM inference, end-to-end workflow optimization has been overlooked. Existing frameworks employ coarse-grained orchestration with task modules, which confines optimizations to within each module and yields suboptimal scheduling decisions. We propose fine-grained end-to-end orchestration, which utilizes task primitives as the basic units and represents each query's workflow as a primitive-level dataflow graph. This explicitly exposes a much larger design space, enables optimizations in parallelization and pipelining across primitives of different modules, and enhances scheduling to improve application-level performance. We build Teola, a novel orchestration framework for LLM-based applications that implements this scheme. Comprehensive experiments show that Teola can achieve up to 2.09x speedup over existing systems across various popular LLM applications.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) which are trained on large text corpus via self-supervised learning method, have yielded promising performance on various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, though PLMs with huge parameters can effectively possess rich knowledge learned from massive training text and benefit downstream tasks at the fine-tuning stage, they still have some limitations such as poor reasoning ability due to the lack of external knowledge. Research has been dedicated to incorporating knowledge into PLMs to tackle these issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KE-PLMs) to provide a clear insight into this thriving field. We introduce appropriate taxonomies respectively for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to highlight these two main tasks of NLP. For NLU, we divide the types of knowledge into four categories: linguistic knowledge, text knowledge, knowledge graph (KG), and rule knowledge. The KE-PLMs for NLG are categorized into KG-based and retrieval-based methods. Finally, we point out some promising future directions of KE-PLMs.
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.
Existing methods for vision-and-language learning typically require designing task-specific architectures and objectives for each task. For example, a multi-label answer classifier for visual question answering, a region scorer for referring expression comprehension, and a language decoder for image captioning, etc. To alleviate these hassles, in this work, we propose a unified framework that learns different tasks in a single architecture with the same language modeling objective, i.e., multimodal conditional text generation, where our models learn to generate labels in text based on the visual and textual inputs. On 7 popular vision-and-language benchmarks, including visual question answering, referring expression comprehension, visual commonsense reasoning, most of which have been previously modeled as discriminative tasks, our generative approach (with a single unified architecture) reaches comparable performance to recent task-specific state-of-the-art vision-and-language models. Moreover, our generative approach shows better generalization ability on answering questions that have rare answers. In addition, we show that our framework allows multi-task learning in a single architecture with a single set of parameters, which achieves similar performance to separately optimized single-task models. Our code will be publicly available at: //github.com/j-min/VL-T5
Most object recognition approaches predominantly focus on learning discriminative visual patterns while overlooking the holistic object structure. Though important, structure modeling usually requires significant manual annotations and therefore is labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose to "look into object" (explicitly yet intrinsically model the object structure) through incorporating self-supervisions into the traditional framework. We show the recognition backbone can be substantially enhanced for more robust representation learning, without any cost of extra annotation and inference speed. Specifically, we first propose an object-extent learning module for localizing the object according to the visual patterns shared among the instances in the same category. We then design a spatial context learning module for modeling the internal structures of the object, through predicting the relative positions within the extent. These two modules can be easily plugged into any backbone networks during training and detached at inference time. Extensive experiments show that our look-into-object approach (LIO) achieves large performance gain on a number of benchmarks, including generic object recognition (ImageNet) and fine-grained object recognition tasks (CUB, Cars, Aircraft). We also show that this learning paradigm is highly generalizable to other tasks such as object detection and segmentation (MS COCO). Project page: //github.com/JDAI-CV/LIO.