Revisiting Large Language Models as Zero-shot Relation Extractors

Relation extraction (RE) consistently involves a certain degree of labeled or unlabeled data even if under zero-shot setting. Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) transfer well to new tasks out-of-the-box simply given a natural language prompt, which provides the possibility of extracting relations from text without any data and parameter tuning. This work focuses on the study of exploring LLMs, such as ChatGPT, as zero-shot relation extractors. On the one hand, we analyze the drawbacks of existing RE prompts and attempt to incorporate recent prompt techniques such as chain-of-thought (CoT) to improve zero-shot RE. We propose the summarize-and-ask (\textsc{SumAsk}) prompting, a simple prompt recursively using LLMs to transform RE inputs to the effective question answering (QA) format. On the other hand, we conduct comprehensive experiments on various benchmarks and settings to investigate the capabilities of LLMs on zero-shot RE. Specifically, we have the following findings: (i) \textsc{SumAsk} consistently and significantly improves LLMs performance on different model sizes, benchmarks and settings; (ii) Zero-shot prompting with ChatGPT achieves competitive or superior results compared with zero-shot and fully supervised methods; (iii) LLMs deliver promising performance in extracting overlapping relations; (iv) The performance varies greatly regarding different relations. Different from small language models, LLMs are effective in handling challenge none-of-the-above (NoTA) relation.

Efficient Adaptation of Large Vision Transformer via Adapter Re-Composing

The advent of high-capacity pre-trained models has revolutionized problem-solving in computer vision, shifting the focus from training task-specific models to adapting pre-trained models. Consequently, effectively adapting large pre-trained models to downstream tasks in an efficient manner has become a prominent research area. Existing solutions primarily concentrate on designing lightweight adapters and their interaction with pre-trained models, with the goal of minimizing the number of parameters requiring updates. In this study, we propose a novel Adapter Re-Composing (ARC) strategy that addresses efficient pre-trained model adaptation from a fresh perspective. Our approach considers the reusability of adaptation parameters and introduces a parameter-sharing scheme. Specifically, we leverage symmetric down-/up-projections to construct bottleneck operations, which are shared across layers. By learning low-dimensional re-scaling coefficients, we can effectively re-compose layer-adaptive adapters. This parameter-sharing strategy in adapter design allows us to significantly reduce the number of new parameters while maintaining satisfactory performance, thereby offering a promising approach to compress the adaptation cost. We conduct experiments on 24 downstream image classification tasks using various Vision Transformer variants to evaluate our method. The results demonstrate that our approach achieves compelling transfer learning performance with a reduced parameter count. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/DavidYanAnDe/ARC}{https://github.com/DavidYanAnDe/ARC}.

USB-NeRF: Unrolling Shutter Bundle Adjusted Neural Radiance Fields

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has received much attention recently due to its impressive capability to represent 3D scene and synthesize novel view images. Existing works usually assume that the input images are captured by a global shutter camera. Thus, rolling shutter (RS) images cannot be trivially applied to an off-the-shelf NeRF algorithm for novel view synthesis. Rolling shutter effect would also affect the accuracy of the camera pose estimation (e.g. via COLMAP), which further prevents the success of NeRF algorithm with RS images. In this paper, we propose Unrolling Shutter Bundle Adjusted Neural Radiance Fields (USB-NeRF). USB-NeRF is able to correct rolling shutter distortions and recover accurate camera motion trajectory simultaneously under the framework of NeRF, by modeling the physical image formation process of a RS camera. Experimental results demonstrate that USB-NeRF achieves better performance compared to prior works, in terms of RS effect removal, novel view image synthesis as well as camera motion estimation. Furthermore, our algorithm can also be used to recover high-fidelity high frame-rate global shutter video from a sequence of RS images.

Consistent-1-to-3: Consistent Image to 3D View Synthesis via Geometry-aware Diffusion Models

Zero-shot novel view synthesis (NVS) from a single image is an essential problem in 3D object understanding. While recent approaches that leverage pre-trained generative models can synthesize high-quality novel views from in-the-wild inputs, they still struggle to maintain 3D consistency across different views. In this paper, we present Consistent-1-to-3, which is a generative framework that significantly mitigate this issue. Specifically, we decompose the NVS task into two stages: (i) transforming observed regions to a novel view, and (ii) hallucinating unseen regions. We design a scene representation transformer and view-conditioned diffusion model for performing these two stages respectively. Inside the models, to enforce 3D consistency, we propose to employ epipolor-guided attention to incorporate geometry constraints, and multi-view attention to better aggregate multi-view information. Finally, we design a hierarchy generation paradigm to generate long sequences of consistent views, allowing a full 360 observation of the provided object image. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation over multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanisms against state-of-the-art approaches. Our project page is at https://jianglongye.com/consistent123/

Human-centric Behavior Description in Videos: New Benchmark and Model

In the domain of video surveillance, describing the behavior of each individual within the video is becoming increasingly essential, especially in complex scenarios with multiple individuals present. This is because describing each individual's behavior provides more detailed situational analysis, enabling accurate assessment and response to potential risks, ensuring the safety and harmony of public places. Currently, video-level captioning datasets cannot provide fine-grained descriptions for each individual's specific behavior. However, mere descriptions at the video-level fail to provide an in-depth interpretation of individual behaviors, making it challenging to accurately determine the specific identity of each individual. To address this challenge, we construct a human-centric video surveillance captioning dataset, which provides detailed descriptions of the dynamic behaviors of 7,820 individuals. Specifically, we have labeled several aspects of each person, such as location, clothing, and interactions with other elements in the scene, and these people are distributed across 1,012 videos. Based on this dataset, we can link individuals to their respective behaviors, allowing for further analysis of each person's behavior in surveillance videos. Besides the dataset, we propose a novel video captioning approach that can describe individual behavior in detail on a person-level basis, achieving state-of-the-art results. To facilitate further research in this field, we intend to release our dataset and code.

Selective Feature Adapter for Dense Vision Transformers

Fine-tuning pre-trained transformer models, e.g., Swin Transformer, are successful in numerous downstream for dense prediction vision tasks. However, one major issue is the cost/storage of their huge amount of parameters, which becomes increasingly challenging to handle with the growing amount of vision tasks. In this paper, we propose an effective approach to alleviate the issue, namely selective feature adapter (SFA). It achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance under any given budget of trainable parameters, and demonstrates comparable or better performance than fully fine-tuned models across various dense tasks. Specifically, SFA consists of external adapters and internal adapters which are sequentially operated over a transformer model. For external adapters, we properly select the places and amount of additional multilayer perception (MLP). For internal adapters, we transform a few task-important parameters inside the transformer, which are automatically discovered through a simple yet effective lottery ticket algorithm. Our experiments show that the dual adapter module, a.k.a SFA, is essential to achieve the best trade-off on dense vision tasks, such as segmentation, detection and depth-estimation, outperforming other adapters with a single module.

MMPI: a Flexible Radiance Field Representation by Multiple Multi-plane Images Blending

This paper presents a flexible representation of neural radiance fields based on multi-plane images (MPI), for high-quality view synthesis of complex scenes. MPI with Normalized Device Coordinate (NDC) parameterization is widely used in NeRF learning for its simple definition, easy calculation, and powerful ability to represent unbounded scenes. However, existing NeRF works that adopt MPI representation for novel view synthesis can only handle simple forward-facing unbounded scenes, where the input cameras are all observing in similar directions with small relative translations. Hence, extending these MPI-based methods to more complex scenes like large-range or even 360-degree scenes is very challenging. In this paper, we explore the potential of MPI and show that MPI can synthesize high-quality novel views of complex scenes with diverse camera distributions and view directions, which are not only limited to simple forward-facing scenes. Our key idea is to encode the neural radiance field with multiple MPIs facing different directions and blend them with an adaptive blending operation. For each region of the scene, the blending operation gives larger blending weights to those advantaged MPIs with stronger local representation abilities while giving lower weights to those with weaker representation abilities. Such blending operation automatically modulates the multiple MPIs to appropriately represent the diverse local density and color information. Experiments on the KITTI dataset and ScanNet dataset demonstrate that our proposed MMPI synthesizes high-quality images from diverse camera pose distributions and is fast to train, outperforming the previous fast-training NeRF methods for novel view synthesis. Moreover, we show that MMPI can encode extremely long trajectories and produce novel view renderings, demonstrating its potential in applications like autonomous driving.

Qwen Technical Report

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence, enabling natural language processing tasks that were previously thought to be exclusive to humans. In this work, we introduce Qwen, the first installment of our large language model series. Qwen is a comprehensive language model series that encompasses distinct models with varying parameter counts. It includes Qwen, the base pretrained language models, and Qwen-Chat, the chat models finetuned with human alignment techniques. The base language models consistently demonstrate superior performance across a multitude of downstream tasks, and the chat models, particularly those trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), are highly competitive. The chat models possess advanced tool-use and planning capabilities for creating agent applications, showcasing impressive performance even when compared to bigger models on complex tasks like utilizing a code interpreter. Furthermore, we have developed coding-specialized models, Code-Qwen and Code-Qwen-Chat, as well as mathematics-focused models, Math-Qwen-Chat, which are built upon base language models. These models demonstrate significantly improved performance in comparison with open-source models, and slightly fall behind the proprietary models.

Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond

We introduce the Qwen-VL series, a set of large-scale vision-language models (LVLMs) designed to perceive and understand both text and images. Comprising Qwen-VL and Qwen-VL-Chat, these models exhibit remarkable performance in tasks like image captioning, question answering, visual localization, and flexible interaction. The evaluation covers a wide range of tasks including zero-shot captioning, visual or document visual question answering, and grounding. We demonstrate the Qwen-VL outperforms existing LVLMs. We present their architecture, training, capabilities, and performance, highlighting their contributions to advancing multimodal artificial intelligence. Code, demo and models are available at https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen-VL.

Incorporating Class-based Language Model for Named Entity Recognition in Factorized Neural Transducer

In spite of the excellent strides made by end-to-end (E2E) models in speech recognition in recent years, named entity recognition is still challenging but critical for semantic understanding. In order to enhance the ability to recognize named entities in E2E models, previous studies mainly focus on various rule-based or attention-based contextual biasing algorithms. However, their performance might be sensitive to the biasing weight or degraded by excessive attention to the named entity list, along with a risk of false triggering. Inspired by the success of the class-based language model (LM) in named entity recognition in conventional hybrid systems and the effective decoupling of acoustic and linguistic information in the factorized neural Transducer (FNT), we propose a novel E2E model to incorporate class-based LMs into FNT, which is referred as C-FNT. In C-FNT, the language model score of named entities can be associated with the name class instead of its surface form. The experimental results show that our proposed C-FNT presents significant error reduction in named entities without hurting performance in general word recognition.