SS-Bench: A Benchmark for Social Story Generation and Evaluation

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often misunderstand social situations and struggle to participate in daily routines. Psychology experts write Social Stories under strict constraints of structural clarity, descriptive orientation, and situational safety to enhance their abilities in these regimes. However, Social Stories are costly in creation and often limited in diversity and timeliness. As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly powerful, there is a growing need for more automated, affordable, and accessible methods to generate Social Stories in real-time with broad coverage. Adapting LLMs to meet the unique and strict constraints of Social Stories is a challenging issue. To this end, we propose \textbf{SS-Bench}, a \textbf{S}ocial \textbf{S}tory \textbf{Bench}mark for generating and evaluating Social Stories. Specifically, we develop a constraint-driven strategy named \textbf{\textsc{StarSow}} to hierarchically prompt LLMs to generate Social Stories and build a benchmark, which has been validated through experiments to fine-tune smaller models for generating qualified Social Stories. Additionally, we introduce \textbf{Quality Assessment Criteria}, employed in human and GPT evaluations, to verify the effectiveness of the generated stories. We hope this work benefits the autism community and catalyzes future research focusing on particular groups.

A Preliminary Empirical Study on Prompt-based Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction

Pre-trained large language models can perform natural language processing downstream tasks by conditioning on human-designed prompts. However, a prompt-based approach often requires "prompt engineering" to design different prompts, primarily hand-crafted through laborious trial and error, requiring human intervention and expertise. It is a challenging problem when constructing a prompt-based keyphrase extraction method. Therefore, we investigate and study the effectiveness of different prompts on the keyphrase extraction task to verify the impact of the cherry-picked prompts on the performance of extracting keyphrases. Extensive experimental results on six benchmark keyphrase extraction datasets and different pre-trained large language models demonstrate that (1) designing complex prompts may not necessarily be more effective than designing simple prompts; (2) individual keyword changes in the designed prompts can affect the overall performance; (3) designing complex prompts achieve better performance than designing simple prompts when facing long documents.

DriveWorld: 4D Pre-trained Scene Understanding via World Models for Autonomous Driving

Vision-centric autonomous driving has recently raised wide attention due to its lower cost. Pre-training is essential for extracting a universal representation. However, current vision-centric pre-training typically relies on either 2D or 3D pre-text tasks, overlooking the temporal characteristics of autonomous driving as a 4D scene understanding task. In this paper, we address this challenge by introducing a world model-based autonomous driving 4D representation learning framework, dubbed \emph{DriveWorld}, which is capable of pre-training from multi-camera driving videos in a spatio-temporal fashion. Specifically, we propose a Memory State-Space Model for spatio-temporal modelling, which consists of a Dynamic Memory Bank module for learning temporal-aware latent dynamics to predict future changes and a Static Scene Propagation module for learning spatial-aware latent statics to offer comprehensive scene contexts. We additionally introduce a Task Prompt to decouple task-aware features for various downstream tasks. The experiments demonstrate that DriveWorld delivers promising results on various autonomous driving tasks. When pre-trained with the OpenScene dataset, DriveWorld achieves a 7.5% increase in mAP for 3D object detection, a 3.0% increase in IoU for online mapping, a 5.0% increase in AMOTA for multi-object tracking, a 0.1m decrease in minADE for motion forecasting, a 3.0% increase in IoU for occupancy prediction, and a 0.34m reduction in average L2 error for planning.

BSDP: Brain-inspired Streaming Dual-level Perturbations for Online Open World Object Detection

Humans can easily distinguish the known and unknown categories and can recognize the unknown object by learning it once instead of repeating it many times without forgetting the learned object. Hence, we aim to make deep learning models simulate the way people learn. We refer to such a learning manner as OnLine Open World Object Detection(OLOWOD). Existing OWOD approaches pay more attention to the identification of unknown categories, while the incremental learning part is also very important. Besides, some neuroscience research shows that specific noises allow the brain to form new connections and neural pathways which may improve learning speed and efficiency. In this paper, we take the dual-level information of old samples as perturbations on new samples to make the model good at learning new knowledge without forgetting the old knowledge. Therefore, we propose a simple plug-and-play method, called Brain-inspired Streaming Dual-level Perturbations(BSDP), to solve the OLOWOD problem. Specifically, (1) we first calculate the prototypes of previous categories and use the distance between samples and the prototypes as the sample selecting strategy to choose old samples for replay; (2) then take the prototypes as the streaming feature-level perturbations of new samples, so as to improve the plasticity of the model through revisiting the old knowledge; (3) and also use the distribution of the features of the old category samples to generate adversarial data in the form of streams as the data-level perturbations to enhance the robustness of the model to new categories. We empirically evaluate BSDP on PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO, and the excellent results demonstrate the promising performance of our proposed method and learning manner.

Retrieval Augmented Cross-Modal Tag Recommendation in Software Q&A Sites

Posts in software Q\&A sites often consist of three main parts: title, description and code, which are interconnected and jointly describe the question. Existing tag recommendation methods often treat different modalities as a whole or inadequately consider the interaction between different modalities. Additionally, they focus on extracting information directly from the post itself, neglecting the information from external knowledge sources. Therefore, we propose a Retrieval Augmented Cross-Modal (RACM) Tag Recommendation Model in Software Q\&A Sites. Specifically, we first use the input post as a query and enhance the representation of different modalities by retrieving information from external knowledge sources. For the retrieval-augmented representations, we employ a cross-modal context-aware attention to leverage the main modality description for targeted feature extraction across the submodalities title and code. In the fusion process, a gate mechanism is employed to achieve fine-grained feature selection, controlling the amount of information extracted from the submodalities. Finally, the fused information is used for tag recommendation. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts.

Large Language Models as Zero-Shot Keyphrase Extractors: A Preliminary Empirical Study

Zero-shot keyphrase extraction aims to build a keyphrase extractor without training by human-annotated data, which is challenging due to the limited human intervention involved. Challenging but worthwhile, zero-shot setting efficiently reduces the time and effort that data labeling takes. Recent efforts on pre-trained large language models (e.g., ChatGPT and ChatGLM) show promising performance on zero-shot settings, thus inspiring us to explore prompt-based methods. In this paper, we ask whether strong keyphrase extraction models can be constructed by directly prompting the large language model ChatGPT. Through experimental results, it is found that ChatGPT still has a lot of room for improvement in the keyphrase extraction task compared to existing state-of-the-art unsupervised and supervised models.

Overcoming Recency Bias of Normalization Statistics in Continual Learning: Balance and Adaptation

Continual learning entails learning a sequence of tasks and balancing their knowledge appropriately. With limited access to old training samples, much of the current work in deep neural networks has focused on overcoming catastrophic forgetting of old tasks in gradient-based optimization. However, the normalization layers provide an exception, as they are updated interdependently by the gradient and statistics of currently observed training samples, which require specialized strategies to mitigate recency bias. In this work, we focus on the most popular Batch Normalization (BN) and provide an in-depth theoretical analysis of its sub-optimality in continual learning. Our analysis demonstrates the dilemma between balance and adaptation of BN statistics for incremental tasks, which potentially affects training stability and generalization. Targeting on these particular challenges, we propose Adaptive Balance of BN (AdaB$^2$N), which incorporates appropriately a Bayesian-based strategy to adapt task-wise contributions and a modified momentum to balance BN statistics, corresponding to the training and testing stages. By implementing BN in a continual learning fashion, our approach achieves significant performance gains across a wide range of benchmarks, particularly for the challenging yet realistic online scenarios (e.g., up to 7.68%, 6.86% and 4.26% on Split CIFAR-10, Split CIFAR-100 and Split Mini-ImageNet, respectively). Our code is available at https://github.com/lvyilin/AdaB2N.

Sequential Tag Recommendation

With the development of Internet technology and the expansion of social networks, online platforms have become an important way for people to obtain information. The introduction of tags facilitates information categorization and retrieval. Meanwhile, the development of tag recommendation systems not only enables users to input tags more efficiently, but also improves the quality of tags. However, current tag recommendation methods only consider the content of the current post and do not take into account the influence of user preferences. Since the main body of tag recommendation is the user, it is very necessary to obtain the user's tagging habits. Therefore, this paper proposes a tag recommendation algorithm (MLP4STR) based on the dynamic preference of user's behavioral sequence, which models the user's historical post information and historical tag information to obtain the user's dynamic interest changes. A pure MLP structure across feature dimensions is used in sequence modeling to model the interaction between tag content and post content to fully extract the user's interests. Finally tag recommendation is performed.

Divert More Attention to Vision-Language Object Tracking

Multimodal vision-language (VL) learning has noticeably pushed the tendency toward generic intelligence owing to emerging large foundation models. However, tracking, as a fundamental vision problem, surprisingly enjoys less bonus from recent flourishing VL learning. We argue that the reasons are two-fold: the lack of large-scale vision-language annotated videos and ineffective vision-language interaction learning of current works. These nuisances motivate us to design more effective vision-language representation for tracking, meanwhile constructing a large database with language annotation for model learning. Particularly, in this paper, we first propose a general attribute annotation strategy to decorate videos in six popular tracking benchmarks, which contributes a large-scale vision-language tracking database with more than 23,000 videos. We then introduce a novel framework to improve tracking by learning a unified-adaptive VL representation, where the cores are the proposed asymmetric architecture search and modality mixer (ModaMixer). To further improve VL representation, we introduce a contrastive loss to align different modalities. To thoroughly evidence the effectiveness of our method, we integrate the proposed framework on three tracking methods with different designs, i.e., the CNN-based SiamCAR, the Transformer-based OSTrack, and the hybrid structure TransT. The experiments demonstrate that our framework can significantly improve all baselines on six benchmarks. Besides empirical results, we theoretically analyze our approach to show its rationality. By revealing the potential of VL representation, we expect the community to divert more attention to VL tracking and hope to open more possibilities for future tracking with diversified multimodal messages.

Recognizable Information Bottleneck

Information Bottlenecks (IBs) learn representations that generalize to unseen data by information compression. However, existing IBs are practically unable to guarantee generalization in real-world scenarios due to the vacuous generalization bound. The recent PAC-Bayes IB uses information complexity instead of information compression to establish a connection with the mutual information generalization bound. However, it requires the computation of expensive second-order curvature, which hinders its practical application. In this paper, we establish the connection between the recognizability of representations and the recent functional conditional mutual information (f-CMI) generalization bound, which is significantly easier to estimate. On this basis we propose a Recognizable Information Bottleneck (RIB) which regularizes the recognizability of representations through a recognizability critic optimized by density ratio matching under the Bregman divergence. Extensive experiments on several commonly used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in regularizing the model and estimating the generalization gap.