Most multilingual vision-and-language (V&L) research aims to accomplish multilingual and multimodal capabilities within one model. However, the scarcity of multilingual captions for images has hindered the development. To overcome this obstacle, we propose ICU, Image Caption Understanding, which divides a V&L task into two stages: a V&L model performs image captioning in English, and a multilingual language model (mLM), in turn, takes the caption as the alt text and performs cross-lingual language understanding. The burden of multilingual processing is lifted off V&L model and placed on mLM. Since the multilingual text data is relatively of higher abundance and quality, ICU can facilitate the conquering of language barriers for V&L models. In experiments on two tasks across 9 languages in the IGLUE benchmark, we show that ICU can achieve new state-of-the-art results for five languages, and comparable results for the rest.
We explore how reconciling several foundation models (large language models and vision-language models) with a novel unified memory mechanism could tackle the challenging video understanding problem, especially capturing the long-term temporal relations in lengthy videos. In particular, the proposed multimodal agent VideoAgent: 1) constructs a structured memory to store both the generic temporal event descriptions and object-centric tracking states of the video; 2) given an input task query, it employs tools including video segment localization and object memory querying along with other visual foundation models to interactively solve the task, utilizing the zero-shot tool-use ability of LLMs. VideoAgent demonstrates impressive performances on several long-horizon video understanding benchmarks, an average increase of 6.6% on NExT-QA and 26.0% on EgoSchema over baselines, closing the gap between open-sourced models and private counterparts including Gemini 1.5 Pro.
We propose Joint MLP/Attention (JoMA) dynamics, a novel mathematical framework to understand the training procedure of multilayer Transformer architectures. This is achieved by integrating out the self-attention layer in Transformers, producing a modified dynamics of MLP layers only. JoMA removes unrealistic assumptions in previous analysis (e.g., lack of residual connection) and predicts that the attention first becomes sparse (to learn salient tokens), then dense (to learn less salient tokens) in the presence of nonlinear activations, while in the linear case, it is consistent with existing works that show attention becomes sparse over time. We leverage JoMA to qualitatively explains how tokens are combined to form hierarchies in multilayer Transformers, when the input tokens are generated by a latent hierarchical generative model. Experiments on models trained from real-world dataset (Wikitext2/Wikitext103) and various pre-trained models (OPT, Pythia) verify our theoretical findings. Code can be found in //github.com/facebookresearch/luckmatters/tree/yuandong3.
This article explores the dynamic influence of computational entities based on multi-agent systems theory (SMA) combined with large language models (LLM), which are characterized by their ability to simulate complex human interactions, as a possibility to revolutionize human user interaction from the use of specialized artificial agents to support everything from operational organizational processes to strategic decision making based on applied knowledge and human orchestration. Previous investigations reveal that there are limitations, particularly in the autonomous approach of artificial agents, especially when dealing with new challenges and pragmatic tasks such as inducing logical reasoning and problem solving. It is also considered that traditional techniques, such as the stimulation of chains of thoughts, require explicit human guidance. In our approach we employ agents developed from large language models (LLM), each with distinct prototyping that considers behavioral elements, driven by strategies that stimulate the generation of knowledge based on the use case proposed in the scenario (role-play) business, using a discussion approach between agents (guided conversation). We demonstrate the potential of developing agents useful for organizational strategies, based on multi-agent system theories (SMA) and innovative uses based on large language models (LLM based), offering a differentiated and adaptable experiment to different applications, complexities, domains, and capabilities from LLM.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) greatly benefits language models (LMs) by providing additional context for tasks such as document-based question answering (DBQA). Despite its potential, the power of RAG is highly dependent on its configuration, raising the question: What is the optimal RAG configuration? To answer this, we introduce the RAGGED framework to analyze and optimize RAG systems. On a set of representative DBQA tasks, we study two classic sparse and dense retrievers, and four top-performing LMs in encoder-decoder and decoder-only architectures. Through RAGGED, we uncover that different models suit substantially varied RAG setups. While encoder-decoder models monotonically improve with more documents, we find decoder-only models can only effectively use < 5 documents, despite often having a longer context window. RAGGED offers further insights into LMs' context utilization habits, where we find that encoder-decoder models rely more on contexts and are thus more sensitive to retrieval quality, while decoder-only models tend to rely on knowledge memorized during training.
Recent studies have demonstrated Large Language Models (LLMs) can extend their zero-shot generalization capabilities to multimodal learning through instruction tuning. As more modalities and downstream tasks are introduced, negative conflicts and interference may have a worse impact on performance. While this phenomenon has been overlooked in previous work, we propose a novel and extensible framework, called Octavius, for comprehensive studies and experimentation on multimodal learning with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Specifically, we combine the well-known Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) and one of the representative PEFT techniques, i.e., LoRA, designing a novel LLM-based decoder, called LoRA-MoE, for multimodal learning. To the best of our knowledge, we are one of the pioneering efforts to introduce MoE into MLLMs to address this problem. The experimental results (about 20% improvement) have shown the effectiveness and versatility of our design in various 2D and 3D downstream tasks. Code and datasets are available at //openlamm.github.io/paper_list/Octavius.
Dominant Person Search methods aim to localize and recognize query persons in a unified network, which jointly optimizes two sub-tasks, \ie, pedestrian detection and Re-IDentification (ReID). Despite significant progress, current methods face two primary challenges: 1) the pedestrian candidates learned within detectors are suboptimal for the ReID task. 2) the potential for collaboration between two sub-tasks is overlooked. To address these issues, we present a novel Person Search framework based on the Diffusion model, PSDiff. PSDiff formulates the person search as a dual denoising process from noisy boxes and ReID embeddings to ground truths. Distinct from the conventional Detection-to-ReID approach, our denoising paradigm discards prior pedestrian candidates generated by detectors, thereby avoiding the local optimum problem of the ReID task. Following the new paradigm, we further design a new Collaborative Denoising Layer (CDL) to optimize detection and ReID sub-tasks in an iterative and collaborative way, which makes two sub-tasks mutually beneficial. Extensive experiments on the standard benchmarks show that PSDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer parameters and elastic computing overhead.
Much research has highlighted the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs), like GPT and Bard, for solving introductory programming exercises. Recent work has shown that LLMs can effectively solve a range of more complex object-oriented programming (OOP) exercises with text-based specifications. This raises concerns about academic integrity, as students might use these models to complete assignments unethically, neglecting the development of important skills such as program design, problem-solving, and computational thinking. To address this, we propose an innovative approach to formulating OOP tasks using diagrams and videos, as a way to foster problem-solving and deter students from a copy-and-prompt approach in OOP courses. We introduce a novel notation system for specifying OOP assignments, encompassing structural and behavioral requirements, and assess its use in a classroom setting over a semester. Student perceptions of this approach are explored through a survey (n=56). Generally, students responded positively to diagrams and videos, with video-based projects being better received than diagram-based exercises. This notation appears to have several benefits, with students investing more effort in understanding the diagrams and feeling more motivated to engage with the video-based projects. Furthermore, students reported being less inclined to rely on LLM-based code generation tools for these diagram and video-based exercises. Experiments with GPT-4 and Bard's vision abilities revealed that they currently fall short in interpreting these diagrams to generate accurate code solutions.
The incredible development of federated learning (FL) has benefited various tasks in the domains of computer vision and natural language processing, and the existing frameworks such as TFF and FATE has made the deployment easy in real-world applications. However, federated graph learning (FGL), even though graph data are prevalent, has not been well supported due to its unique characteristics and requirements. The lack of FGL-related framework increases the efforts for accomplishing reproducible research and deploying in real-world applications. Motivated by such strong demand, in this paper, we first discuss the challenges in creating an easy-to-use FGL package and accordingly present our implemented package FederatedScope-GNN (FS-G), which provides (1) a unified view for modularizing and expressing FGL algorithms; (2) comprehensive DataZoo and ModelZoo for out-of-the-box FGL capability; (3) an efficient model auto-tuning component; and (4) off-the-shelf privacy attack and defense abilities. We validate the effectiveness of FS-G by conducting extensive experiments, which simultaneously gains many valuable insights about FGL for the community. Moreover, we employ FS-G to serve the FGL application in real-world E-commerce scenarios, where the attained improvements indicate great potential business benefits. We publicly release FS-G, as submodules of FederatedScope, at //github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote FGL's research and enable broad applications that would otherwise be infeasible due to the lack of a dedicated package.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.
We introduce a multi-task setup of identifying and classifying entities, relations, and coreference clusters in scientific articles. We create SciERC, a dataset that includes annotations for all three tasks and develop a unified framework called Scientific Information Extractor (SciIE) for with shared span representations. The multi-task setup reduces cascading errors between tasks and leverages cross-sentence relations through coreference links. Experiments show that our multi-task model outperforms previous models in scientific information extraction without using any domain-specific features. We further show that the framework supports construction of a scientific knowledge graph, which we use to analyze information in scientific literature.