Abstract:Text-based hyperbole and metaphor detection are of great significance for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, due to their semantic obscurity and expressive diversity, it is rather challenging to identify them. Existing methods mostly focus on superficial text features, ignoring the associations of hyperbole and metaphor as well as the effect of implicit emotion on perceiving these rhetorical devices. To implement these hypotheses, we propose an emotion-guided hyperbole and metaphor detection framework based on bidirectional dynamic interaction (EmoBi). Firstly, the emotion analysis module deeply mines the emotion connotations behind hyperbole and metaphor. Next, the emotion-based domain mapping module identifies the target and source domains to gain a deeper understanding of the implicit meanings of hyperbole and metaphor. Finally, the bidirectional dynamic interaction module enables the mutual promotion between hyperbole and metaphor. Meanwhile, a verification mechanism is designed to ensure detection accuracy and reliability. Experiments show that EmoBi outperforms all baseline methods on four datasets. Specifically, compared to the current SoTA, the F1 score increased by 28.1% for hyperbole detection on the TroFi dataset and 23.1% for metaphor detection on the HYPO-L dataset. These results, underpinned by in-depth analyses, underscore the effectiveness and potential of our approach for advancing hyperbole and metaphor detection.
Abstract:Vision-Language Models (VLMs) now generate discourse-level, multi-sentence visual descriptions, challenging text scene graph parsers originally designed for single-sentence caption-to-graph mapping. Current approaches typically merge sentence-level parsing outputs for discourse input, often missing phenomena like cross-sentence coreference, resulting in fragmented graphs and degraded downstream VLM task performance. To address this, we introduce a new task, Discourse-level text Scene Graph parsing (DiscoSG), supported by our dataset DiscoSG-DS, which comprises 400 expert-annotated and 8,430 synthesised multi-sentence caption-graph pairs for images. Each caption averages 9 sentences, and each graph contains at least 3 times more triples than those in existing datasets. While fine-tuning large PLMs (i.e., GPT-4) on DiscoSG-DS improves SPICE by approximately 48% over the best sentence-merging baseline, high inference cost and restrictive licensing hinder its open-source use, and smaller fine-tuned PLMs struggle with complex graphs. We propose DiscoSG-Refiner, which drafts a base graph using one small PLM, then employs a second PLM to iteratively propose graph edits, reducing full-graph generation overhead. Using two Flan-T5-Base models, DiscoSG-Refiner still improves SPICE by approximately 30% over the best baseline while achieving 86 times faster inference than GPT-4. It also consistently improves downstream VLM tasks like discourse-level caption evaluation and hallucination detection. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/ShaoqLin/DiscoSG
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various natural language processing tasks but remain vulnerable to generating harmful content or being exploited for malicious purposes. Although safety alignment datasets have been introduced to mitigate such risks through supervised fine-tuning (SFT), these datasets often lack comprehensive risk coverage. Most existing datasets focus primarily on lexical diversity while neglecting other critical dimensions. To address this limitation, we propose a novel analysis framework to systematically measure the risk coverage of alignment datasets across three essential dimensions: Lexical Diversity, Malicious Intent, and Jailbreak Tactics. We further introduce TRIDENT, an automated pipeline that leverages persona-based, zero-shot LLM generation to produce diverse and comprehensive instructions spanning these dimensions. Each harmful instruction is paired with an ethically aligned response, resulting in two datasets: TRIDENT-Core, comprising 26,311 examples, and TRIDENT-Edge, with 18,773 examples. Fine-tuning Llama 3.1-8B on TRIDENT-Edge demonstrates substantial improvements, achieving an average 14.29% reduction in Harm Score, and a 20% decrease in Attack Success Rate compared to the best-performing baseline model fine-tuned on the WildBreak dataset.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) frequently refuse to respond to pseudo-malicious instructions: semantically harmless input queries triggering unnecessary LLM refusals due to conservative safety alignment, significantly impairing user experience. Collecting such instructions is crucial for evaluating and mitigating over-refusals, but existing instruction curation methods, like manual creation or instruction rewriting, either lack scalability or fail to produce sufficiently diverse and effective refusal-inducing prompts. To address these limitations, we introduce EVOREFUSE, a prompt optimization approach that generates diverse pseudo-malicious instructions consistently eliciting confident refusals across LLMs. EVOREFUSE employs an evolutionary algorithm exploring the instruction space in more diverse directions than existing methods via mutation strategies and recombination, and iteratively evolves seed instructions to maximize evidence lower bound on LLM refusal probability. Using EVOREFUSE, we create two novel datasets: EVOREFUSE-TEST, a benchmark of 582 pseudo-malicious instructions that outperforms the next-best benchmark with 140.41% higher average refusal triggering rate across 9 LLMs, 34.86% greater lexical diversity, and 40.03% improved LLM response confidence scores; and EVOREFUSE-ALIGN, which provides 3,000 pseudo-malicious instructions with responses for supervised and preference-based alignment training. LLAMA3.1-8B-INSTRUCT supervisedly fine-tuned on EVOREFUSE-ALIGN achieves up to 14.31% fewer over-refusals than models trained on the second-best alignment dataset, without compromising safety. Our analysis with EVOREFUSE-TEST reveals models trigger over-refusals by overly focusing on sensitive keywords while ignoring broader context.
Abstract:Natural Language Inference (NLI) is a fundamental task in both natural language processing and information retrieval. While NLI has developed many sub-directions such as sentence-level NLI, document-level NLI and cross-lingual NLI, Cross-Document Cross-Lingual NLI (CDCL-NLI) remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm for CDCL-NLI that extends traditional NLI capabilities to multi-document, multilingual scenarios. To support this task, we construct a high-quality CDCL-NLI dataset including 1,110 instances and spanning 26 languages. To build a baseline for this task, we also propose an innovative method that integrates RST-enhanced graph fusion and interpretability prediction. Our method employs RST (Rhetorical Structure Theory) on RGAT (Relation-aware Graph Attention Network) for cross-document context modeling, coupled with a structure-aware semantic alignment mechanism based on lexical chains for cross-lingual understanding. For NLI interpretability, we develop an EDU-level attribution framework that generates extractive explanations. Extensive experiments demonstrate our approach's superior performance, achieving significant improvements over both traditional NLI models such as DocNLI and R2F, as well as LLMs like Llama3 and GPT-4o. Our work sheds light on the study of NLI and will bring research interest on cross-document cross-lingual context understanding, semantic retrieval and interpretability inference. Our dataset and code are available at \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CDCL-NLI-637E/}{CDCL-NLI-Link for peer review}.
Abstract:With the continuous emergence of various social media platforms frequently used in daily life, the multimodal meme understanding (MMU) task has been garnering increasing attention. MMU aims to explore and comprehend the meanings of memes from various perspectives by performing tasks such as metaphor recognition, sentiment analysis, intention detection, and offensiveness detection. Despite making progress, limitations persist due to the loss of fine-grained metaphorical visual clue and the neglect of multimodal text-image weak correlation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a multi-granular multimodal clue fusion model (MGMCF) to advance MMU. Firstly, we design an object-level semantic mining module to extract object-level image feature clues, achieving fine-grained feature clue extraction and enhancing the model's ability to capture metaphorical details and semantics. Secondly, we propose a brand-new global-local cross-modal interaction model to address the weak correlation between text and images. This model facilitates effective interaction between global multimodal contextual clues and local unimodal feature clues, strengthening their representations through a bidirectional cross-modal attention mechanism. Finally, we devise a dual-semantic guided training strategy to enhance the model's understanding and alignment of multimodal representations in the semantic space. Experiments conducted on the widely-used MET-MEME bilingual dataset demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines. Specifically, there is an 8.14% increase in precision for offensiveness detection task, and respective accuracy enhancements of 3.53%, 3.89%, and 3.52% for metaphor recognition, sentiment analysis, and intention detection tasks. These results, underpinned by in-depth analyses, underscore the effectiveness and potential of our approach for advancing MMU.
Abstract:The current generation of large language models (LLMs) is typically designed for broad, general-purpose applications, while domain-specific LLMs, especially in vertical fields like medicine, remain relatively scarce. In particular, the development of highly efficient and practical LLMs for the medical domain is challenging due to the complexity of medical knowledge and the limited availability of high-quality data. To bridge this gap, we introduce Baichuan-M1, a series of large language models specifically optimized for medical applications. Unlike traditional approaches that simply continue pretraining on existing models or apply post-training to a general base model, Baichuan-M1 is trained from scratch with a dedicated focus on enhancing medical capabilities. Our model is trained on 20 trillion tokens and incorporates a range of effective training methods that strike a balance between general capabilities and medical expertise. As a result, Baichuan-M1 not only performs strongly across general domains such as mathematics and coding but also excels in specialized medical fields. We have open-sourced Baichuan-M1-14B, a mini version of our model, which can be accessed through the following links.
Abstract:Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) is an open-world task that aims to assign each pixel within an image to a specific class defined by arbitrary text descriptions. Recent advancements in large-scale vision-language models have demonstrated their open-vocabulary understanding capabilities, significantly facilitating the development of OVSS. However, most existing methods suffer from either suboptimal performance or long latency. This study introduces ERR-Seg, a novel framework that effectively reduces redundancy to balance accuracy and efficiency. ERR-Seg incorporates a training-free Channel Reduction Module (CRM) that leverages prior knowledge from vision-language models like CLIP to identify the most relevant classes while discarding others. Moreover, it incorporates Efficient Semantic Context Fusion (ESCF) with spatial-level and class-level sequence reduction strategies. CRM and ESCF result in substantial memory and computational savings without compromising accuracy. Additionally, recognizing the significance of hierarchical semantics extracted from middle-layer features for closed-set semantic segmentation, ERR-Seg introduces the Hierarchical Semantic Module (HSM) to exploit hierarchical semantics in the context of OVSS. Compared to previous state-of-the-art methods under the ADE20K-847 setting, ERR-Seg achieves +$5.6\%$ mIoU improvement and reduces latency by $67.3\%$.
Abstract:We introduce Baichuan-Omni-1.5, an omni-modal model that not only has omni-modal understanding capabilities but also provides end-to-end audio generation capabilities. To achieve fluent and high-quality interaction across modalities without compromising the capabilities of any modality, we prioritized optimizing three key aspects. First, we establish a comprehensive data cleaning and synthesis pipeline for multimodal data, obtaining about 500B high-quality data (text, audio, and vision). Second, an audio-tokenizer (Baichuan-Audio-Tokenizer) has been designed to capture both semantic and acoustic information from audio, enabling seamless integration and enhanced compatibility with MLLM. Lastly, we designed a multi-stage training strategy that progressively integrates multimodal alignment and multitask fine-tuning, ensuring effective synergy across all modalities. Baichuan-Omni-1.5 leads contemporary models (including GPT4o-mini and MiniCPM-o 2.6) in terms of comprehensive omni-modal capabilities. Notably, it achieves results comparable to leading models such as Qwen2-VL-72B across various multimodal medical benchmarks.
Abstract:Multimodal information extraction (IE) tasks have attracted increasing attention because many studies have shown that multimodal information benefits text information extraction. However, existing multimodal IE datasets mainly focus on sentence-level image-facilitated IE in English text, and pay little attention to video-based multimodal IE and fine-grained visual grounding. Therefore, in order to promote the development of multimodal IE, we constructed a multimodal multilingual multitask dataset, named M$^{3}$D, which has the following features: (1) It contains paired document-level text and video to enrich multimodal information; (2) It supports two widely-used languages, namely English and Chinese; (3) It includes more multimodal IE tasks such as entity recognition, entity chain extraction, relation extraction and visual grounding. In addition, our dataset introduces an unexplored theme, i.e., biography, enriching the domains of multimodal IE resources. To establish a benchmark for our dataset, we propose an innovative hierarchical multimodal IE model. This model effectively leverages and integrates multimodal information through a Denoised Feature Fusion Module (DFFM). Furthermore, in non-ideal scenarios, modal information is often incomplete. Thus, we designed a Missing Modality Construction Module (MMCM) to alleviate the issues caused by missing modalities. Our model achieved an average performance of 53.80% and 53.77% on four tasks in English and Chinese datasets, respectively, which set a reasonable standard for subsequent research. In addition, we conducted more analytical experiments to verify the effectiveness of our proposed module. We believe that our work can promote the development of the field of multimodal IE.