Event Causality Is Key to Computational Story Understanding

Psychological research suggests the central role of event causality in human story understanding. Further, event causality has been heavily utilized in symbolic story generation. However, few machine learning systems for story understanding employ event causality, partially due to the lack of reliable methods for identifying open-world causal event relations. Leveraging recent progress in large language models (LLMs), we present the first method for event causality identification that leads to material improvements in computational story understanding. We design specific prompts for extracting event causal relations from GPT. Against human-annotated event causal relations in the GLUCOSE dataset, our technique performs on par with supervised models, while being easily generalizable to stories of different types and lengths. The extracted causal relations lead to 5.7\% improvements on story quality evaluation and 8.7\% on story video-text alignment. Our findings indicate enormous untapped potential for event causality in computational story understanding.

Uncovering Prototypical Knowledge for Weakly Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

This paper studies the problem of weakly open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (WOVSS), which learns to segment objects of arbitrary classes using mere image-text pairs. Existing works turn to enhance the vanilla vision transformer by introducing explicit grouping recognition, i.e., employing several group tokens/centroids to cluster the image tokens and perform the group-text alignment. Nevertheless, these methods suffer from a granularity inconsistency regarding the usage of group tokens, which are aligned in the all-to-one v.s. one-to-one manners during the training and inference phases, respectively. We argue that this discrepancy arises from the lack of elaborate supervision for each group token. To bridge this granularity gap, this paper explores explicit supervision for the group tokens from the prototypical knowledge. To this end, this paper proposes the non-learnable prototypical regularization (NPR) where non-learnable prototypes are estimated from source features to serve as supervision and enable contrastive matching of the group tokens. This regularization encourages the group tokens to segment objects with less redundancy and capture more comprehensive semantic regions, leading to increased compactness and richness. Based on NPR, we propose the prototypical guidance segmentation network (PGSeg) that incorporates multi-modal regularization by leveraging prototypical sources from both images and texts at different levels, progressively enhancing the segmentation capability with diverse prototypical patterns. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/Ferenas/PGSeg.

May I Ask a Follow-up Question? Understanding the Benefits of Conversations in Neural Network Explainability

Research in explainable AI (XAI) aims to provide insights into the decision-making process of opaque AI models. To date, most XAI methods offer one-off and static explanations, which cannot cater to the diverse backgrounds and understanding levels of users. With this paper, we investigate if free-form conversations can enhance users' comprehension of static explanations, improve acceptance and trust in the explanation methods, and facilitate human-AI collaboration. Participants are presented with static explanations, followed by a conversation with a human expert regarding the explanations. We measure the effect of the conversation on participants' ability to choose, from three machine learning models, the most accurate one based on explanations and their self-reported comprehension, acceptance, and trust. Empirical results show that conversations significantly improve comprehension, acceptance, trust, and collaboration. Our findings highlight the importance of customized model explanations in the format of free-form conversations and provide insights for the future design of conversational explanations.

Reinforcement Learning-based Non-Autoregressive Solver for Traveling Salesman Problems

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a well-known problem in combinatorial optimization with applications in various domains. However, existing TSP solvers face challenges in producing high-quality solutions with low latency. To address this issue, we propose NAR4TSP, which produces TSP solutions in a Non-Autoregressive (NAR) manner using a specially designed Graph Neural Network (GNN), achieving faster inference speed. Moreover, NAR4TSP is trained using an enhanced Reinforcement Learning (RL) strategy, eliminating the dependency on costly labels used to train conventional supervised learning-based NAR models. To the best of our knowledge, NAR4TSP is the first TSP solver that successfully combines RL and NAR decoding. The experimental results on both synthetic and real-world TSP instances demonstrate that NAR4TSP outperforms four state-of-the-art models in terms of solution quality, inference latency, and generalization ability. Lastly, we present visualizations of NAR4TSP's decoding process and its overall path planning to showcase the feasibility of implementing NAR4TSP in an end-to-end manner and its effectiveness, respectively.

Proof-of-Federated-Learning-Subchain: Free Partner Selection Subchain Based on Federated Learning

The continuous thriving of the Blockchain society motivates research in novel designs of schemes supporting cryptocurrencies. Previously multiple Proof-of-Deep-Learning(PoDL) consensuses have been proposed to replace hashing with useful work such as deep learning model training tasks. The energy will be more efficiently used while maintaining the ledger. However deep learning models are problem-specific and can be extremely complex. Current PoDL consensuses still require much work to realize in the real world. In this paper, we proposed a novel consensus named Proof-of-Federated-Learning-Subchain(PoFLSC) to fill the gap. We applied a subchain to record the training, challenging, and auditing activities and emphasized the importance of valuable datasets in partner selection. We simulated 20 miners in the subchain to demonstrate the effectiveness of PoFLSC. When we reduce the pool size concerning the reservation priority order, the drop rate difference in the performance in different scenarios further exhibits that the miner with a higher Shapley Value (SV) will gain a better opportunity to be selected when the size of the subchain pool is limited. In the conducted experiments, the PoFLSC consensus supported the subchain manager to be aware of reservation priority and the core partition of contributors to establish and maintain a competitive subchain.

Training Multimedia Event Extraction With Generated Images and Captions

Contemporary news reporting increasingly features multimedia content, motivating research on multimedia event extraction. However, the task lacks annotated multimodal training data and artificially generated training data suffer from the distribution shift from the real-world data. In this paper, we propose Cross-modality Augmented Multimedia Event Learning (CAMEL), which successfully utilizes artificially generated multimodal training data and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Conditioned on unimodal training data, we generate multimodal training data using off-the-shelf image generators like Stable Diffusion and image captioners like BLIP. In order to learn robust features that are effective across domains, we devise an iterative and gradual annealing training strategy. Substantial experiments show that CAMEL surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines on the M2E2 benchmark. On multimedia events in particular, we outperform the prior SOTA by 4.2\% F1 on event mention identification and by 9.8\% F1 on argument identification, which demonstrates that CAMEL learns synergistic representations from the two modalities.

Learning Remote Sensing Object Detection with Single Point Supervision

Pointly Supervised Object Detection (PSOD) has attracted considerable interests due to its lower labeling cost as compared to box-level supervised object detection. However, the complex scenes, densely packed and dynamic-scale objects in Remote Sensing (RS) images hinder the development of PSOD methods in RS field. In this paper, we make the first attempt to achieve RS object detection with single point supervision, and propose a PSOD framework tailored with RS images. Specifically, we design a point label upgrader (PLUG) to generate pseudo box labels from single point labels, and then use the pseudo boxes to supervise the optimization of existing detectors. Moreover, to handle the challenge of the densely packed objects in RS images, we propose a sparse feature guided semantic prediction module which can generate high-quality semantic maps by fully exploiting informative cues from sparse objects. Extensive ablation studies on the DOTA dataset have validated the effectiveness of our method. Our method can achieve significantly better performance as compared to state-of-the-art image-level and point-level supervised detection methods, and reduce the performance gap between PSOD and box-level supervised object detection. Code will be available at https://github.com/heshitian/PLUG.

InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning

General-purpose language models that can solve various language-domain tasks have emerged driven by the pre-training and instruction-tuning pipeline. However, building general-purpose vision-language models is challenging due to the increased task discrepancy introduced by the additional visual input. Although vision-language pre-training has been widely studied, vision-language instruction tuning remains relatively less explored. In this paper, we conduct a systematic and comprehensive study on vision-language instruction tuning based on the pre-trained BLIP-2 models. We gather a wide variety of 26 publicly available datasets, transform them into instruction tuning format and categorize them into two clusters for held-in instruction tuning and held-out zero-shot evaluation. Additionally, we introduce instruction-aware visual feature extraction, a crucial method that enables the model to extract informative features tailored to the given instruction. The resulting InstructBLIP models achieve state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across all 13 held-out datasets, substantially outperforming BLIP-2 and the larger Flamingo. Our models also lead to state-of-the-art performance when finetuned on individual downstream tasks (e.g., 90.7% accuracy on ScienceQA IMG). Furthermore, we qualitatively demonstrate the advantages of InstructBLIP over concurrent multimodal models. All InstructBLIP models have been open-sourced at https://github.com/salesforce/LAVIS/tree/main/projects/instructblip.

Movie Box Office Prediction With Self-Supervised and Visually Grounded Pretraining

Investments in movie production are associated with a high level of risk as movie revenues have long-tailed and bimodal distributions. Accurate prediction of box-office revenue may mitigate the uncertainty and encourage investment. However, learning effective representations for actors, directors, and user-generated content-related keywords remains a challenging open problem. In this work, we investigate the effects of self-supervised pretraining and propose visual grounding of content keywords in objects from movie posters as a pertaining objective. Experiments on a large dataset of 35,794 movies demonstrate significant benefits of self-supervised training and visual grounding. In particular, visual grounding pretraining substantially improves learning on movies with content keywords and achieves 14.5% relative performance gains compared to a finetuned BERT model with identical architecture.

Monte Carlo Linear Clustering with Single-Point Supervision is Enough for Infrared Small Target Detection

Single-frame infrared small target (SIRST) detection aims at separating small targets from clutter backgrounds on infrared images. Recently, deep learning based methods have achieved promising performance on SIRST detection, but at the cost of a large amount of training data with expensive pixel-level annotations. To reduce the annotation burden, we propose the first method to achieve SIRST detection with single-point supervision. The core idea of this work is to recover the per-pixel mask of each target from the given single point label by using clustering approaches, which looks simple but is indeed challenging since targets are always insalient and accompanied with background clutters. To handle this issue, we introduce randomness to the clustering process by adding noise to the input images, and then obtain much more reliable pseudo masks by averaging the clustered results. Thanks to this "Monte Carlo" clustering approach, our method can accurately recover pseudo masks and thus turn arbitrary fully supervised SIRST detection networks into weakly supervised ones with only single point annotation. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate that our method can be applied to existing SIRST detection networks to achieve comparable performance with their fully supervised counterparts, which reveals that single-point supervision is strong enough for SIRST detection. Our code will be available at: https://github.com/YeRen123455/SIRST-Single-Point-Supervision.