AVIS: Autonomous Visual Information Seeking with Large Language Models

In this paper, we propose an autonomous information seeking visual question answering framework, AVIS. Our method leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) to dynamically strategize the utilization of external tools and to investigate their outputs, thereby acquiring the indispensable knowledge needed to provide answers to the posed questions. Responding to visual questions that necessitate external knowledge, such as "What event is commemorated by the building depicted in this image?", is a complex task. This task presents a combinatorial search space that demands a sequence of actions, including invoking APIs, analyzing their responses, and making informed decisions. We conduct a user study to collect a variety of instances of human decision-making when faced with this task. This data is then used to design a system comprised of three components: an LLM-powered planner that dynamically determines which tool to use next, an LLM-powered reasoner that analyzes and extracts key information from the tool outputs, and a working memory component that retains the acquired information throughout the process. The collected user behavior serves as a guide for our system in two key ways. First, we create a transition graph by analyzing the sequence of decisions made by users. This graph delineates distinct states and confines the set of actions available at each state. Second, we use examples of user decision-making to provide our LLM-powered planner and reasoner with relevant contextual instances, enhancing their capacity to make informed decisions. We show that AVIS achieves state-of-the-art results on knowledge-intensive visual question answering benchmarks such as Infoseek and OK-VQA.

MetaVL: Transferring In-Context Learning Ability From Language Models to Vision-Language Models

Large-scale language models have shown the ability to adapt to a new task via conditioning on a few demonstrations (i.e., in-context learning). However, in the vision-language domain, most large-scale pre-trained vision-language (VL) models do not possess the ability to conduct in-context learning. How can we enable in-context learning for VL models? In this paper, we study an interesting hypothesis: can we transfer the in-context learning ability from the language domain to VL domain? Specifically, we first meta-trains a language model to perform in-context learning on NLP tasks (as in MetaICL); then we transfer this model to perform VL tasks by attaching a visual encoder. Our experiments suggest that indeed in-context learning ability can be transferred cross modalities: our model considerably improves the in-context learning capability on VL tasks and can even compensate for the size of the model significantly. On VQA, OK-VQA, and GQA, our method could outperform the baseline model while having 20 times fewer parameters.

Efficient Shapley Values Estimation by Amortization for Text Classification

Despite the popularity of Shapley Values in explaining neural text classification models, computing them is prohibitive for large pretrained models due to a large number of model evaluations. In practice, Shapley Values are often estimated with a small number of stochastic model evaluations. However, we show that the estimated Shapley Values are sensitive to random seed choices -- the top-ranked features often have little overlap across different seeds, especially on examples with longer input texts. This can only be mitigated by aggregating thousands of model evaluations, which on the other hand, induces substantial computational overheads. To mitigate the trade-off between stability and efficiency, we develop an amortized model that directly predicts each input feature's Shapley Value without additional model evaluations. It is trained on a set of examples whose Shapley Values are estimated from a large number of model evaluations to ensure stability. Experimental results on two text classification datasets demonstrate that our amortized model estimates Shapley Values accurately with up to 60 times speedup compared to traditional methods. Furthermore, the estimated values are stable as the inference is deterministic. We release our code at https://github.com/yangalan123/Amortized-Interpretability.

Red Teaming Language Model Detectors with Language Models

The prevalence and high capacity of large language models (LLMs) present significant safety and ethical risks when malicious users exploit them for automated content generation. To prevent the potentially deceptive usage of LLMs, recent works have proposed several algorithms to detect machine-generated text. In this paper, we systematically test the reliability of the existing detectors, by designing two types of attack strategies to fool the detectors: 1) replacing words with their synonyms based on the context; 2) altering the writing style of generated text. These strategies are implemented by instructing LLMs to generate synonymous word substitutions or writing directives that modify the style without human involvement, and the LLMs leveraged in the attack can also be protected by detectors. Our research reveals that our attacks effectively compromise the performance of all tested detectors, thereby underscoring the urgent need for the development of more robust machine-generated text detection systems.

MiniSUPERB: Lightweight Benchmark for Self-supervised Speech Models

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a popular research topic in speech processing. Successful SSL speech models must generalize well. SUPERB was proposed to evaluate the ability of SSL speech models across many speech tasks. However, due to the diversity of tasks, the evaluation process requires huge computational costs. We present MiniSUPERB, a lightweight benchmark that efficiently evaluates SSL speech models with comparable results to SUPERB while greatly reducing the computational cost. We select representative tasks and sample datasets and extract model representation offline, achieving 0.954 and 0.982 Spearman's rank correlation with SUPERB Paper and SUPERB Challenge, respectively. In the meanwhile, the computational cost is reduced by 97% in regard to MACs (number of Multiply-ACcumulate operations) in the tasks we choose. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine not only the computational cost of a model itself but the cost of evaluating it on a benchmark.

PIP: Parse-Instructed Prefix for Syntactically Controlled Paraphrase Generation

Syntactically controlled paraphrase generation requires language models to generate paraphrases for sentences according to specific syntactic structures. Existing fine-tuning methods for this task are costly as all the parameters of the model need to be updated during the training process. Inspired by recent studies on parameter-efficient learning, we propose Parse-Instructed Prefix (PIP), a novel adaptation of prefix-tuning to tune large pre-trained language models on syntactically controlled paraphrase generation task in a low-data setting with significantly less training cost. We introduce two methods to instruct a model's encoder prefix to capture syntax-related knowledge: direct initiation (PIP-Direct) and indirect optimization (PIP-Indirect). In contrast to traditional fine-tuning methods for this task, PIP is a compute-efficient alternative with 10 times less learnable parameters. Compared to existing prefix-tuning methods, PIP excels at capturing syntax control information, achieving significantly higher performance at the same level of learnable parameter count.

ABC-KD: Attention-Based-Compression Knowledge Distillation for Deep Learning-Based Noise Suppression

Noise suppression (NS) models have been widely applied to enhance speech quality. Recently, Deep Learning-Based NS, which we denote as Deep Noise Suppression (DNS), became the mainstream NS method due to its excelling performance over traditional ones. However, DNS models face 2 major challenges for supporting the real-world applications. First, high-performing DNS models are usually large in size, causing deployment difficulties. Second, DNS models require extensive training data, including noisy audios as inputs and clean audios as labels. It is often difficult to obtain clean labels for training DNS models. We propose the use of knowledge distillation (KD) to resolve both challenges. Our study serves 2 main purposes. To begin with, we are among the first to comprehensively investigate mainstream KD techniques on DNS models to resolve the two challenges. Furthermore, we propose a novel Attention-Based-Compression KD method that outperforms all investigated mainstream KD frameworks on DNS task.

ParaAMR: A Large-Scale Syntactically Diverse Paraphrase Dataset by AMR Back-Translation

Paraphrase generation is a long-standing task in natural language processing (NLP). Supervised paraphrase generation models, which rely on human-annotated paraphrase pairs, are cost-inefficient and hard to scale up. On the other hand, automatically annotated paraphrase pairs (e.g., by machine back-translation), usually suffer from the lack of syntactic diversity -- the generated paraphrase sentences are very similar to the source sentences in terms of syntax. In this work, we present ParaAMR, a large-scale syntactically diverse paraphrase dataset created by abstract meaning representation back-translation. Our quantitative analysis, qualitative examples, and human evaluation demonstrate that the paraphrases of ParaAMR are syntactically more diverse compared to existing large-scale paraphrase datasets while preserving good semantic similarity. In addition, we show that ParaAMR can be used to improve on three NLP tasks: learning sentence embeddings, syntactically controlled paraphrase generation, and data augmentation for few-shot learning. Our results thus showcase the potential of ParaAMR for improving various NLP applications.

IdealGPT: Iteratively Decomposing Vision and Language Reasoning via Large Language Models

The field of vision-and-language (VL) understanding has made unprecedented progress with end-to-end large pre-trained VL models (VLMs). However, they still fall short in zero-shot reasoning tasks that require multi-step inferencing. To achieve this goal, previous works resort to a divide-and-conquer pipeline. In this paper, we argue that previous efforts have several inherent shortcomings: 1) They rely on domain-specific sub-question decomposing models. 2) They force models to predict the final answer even if the sub-questions or sub-answers provide insufficient information. We address these limitations via IdealGPT, a framework that iteratively decomposes VL reasoning using large language models (LLMs). Specifically, IdealGPT utilizes an LLM to generate sub-questions, a VLM to provide corresponding sub-answers, and another LLM to reason to achieve the final answer. These three modules perform the divide-and-conquer procedure iteratively until the model is confident about the final answer to the main question. We evaluate IdealGPT on multiple challenging VL reasoning tasks under a zero-shot setting. In particular, our IdealGPT outperforms the best existing GPT-4-like models by an absolute 10% on VCR and 15% on SNLI-VE. Code is available at https://github.com/Hxyou/IdealGPT

Text encoders are performance bottlenecks in contrastive vision-language models

Performant vision-language (VL) models like CLIP represent captions using a single vector. How much information about language is lost in this bottleneck? We first curate CompPrompts, a set of increasingly compositional image captions that VL models should be able to capture (e.g., single object, to object+property, to multiple interacting objects). Then, we train text-only recovery probes that aim to reconstruct captions from single-vector text representations produced by several VL models. This approach doesn't require images, allowing us to test on a broader range of scenes compared to prior work. We find that: 1) CLIP's text encoder falls short on object relationships, attribute-object association, counting, and negations; 2) some text encoders work significantly better than others; and 3) text-only recovery performance predicts multi-modal matching performance on ControlledImCaps: a new evaluation benchmark we collect+release consisting of fine-grained compositional images+captions. Specifically -- our results suggest text-only recoverability is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for modeling compositional factors in contrastive vision+language models. We release data+code.