RoNID: New Intent Discovery with Generated-Reliable Labels and Cluster-friendly Representations

New Intent Discovery (NID) strives to identify known and reasonably deduce novel intent groups in the open-world scenario. But current methods face issues with inaccurate pseudo-labels and poor representation learning, creating a negative feedback loop that degrades overall model performance, including accuracy and the adjusted rand index. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose a Robust New Intent Discovery (RoNID) framework optimized by an EM-style method, which focuses on constructing reliable pseudo-labels and obtaining cluster-friendly discriminative representations. RoNID comprises two main modules: reliable pseudo-label generation module and cluster-friendly representation learning module. Specifically, the pseudo-label generation module assigns reliable synthetic labels by solving an optimal transport problem in the E-step, which effectively provides high-quality supervised signals for the input of the cluster-friendly representation learning module. To learn cluster-friendly representation with strong intra-cluster compactness and large inter-cluster separation, the representation learning module combines intra-cluster and inter-cluster contrastive learning in the M-step to feed more discriminative features into the generation module. RoNID can be performed iteratively to ultimately yield a robust model with reliable pseudo-labels and cluster-friendly representations. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate our method brings substantial improvements over previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin of +1~+4 points.

New Intent Discovery with Attracting and Dispersing Prototype

New Intent Discovery (NID) aims to recognize known and infer new intent categories with the help of limited labeled and large-scale unlabeled data. The task is addressed as a feature-clustering problem and recent studies augment instance representation. However, existing methods fail to capture cluster-friendly representations, since they show less capability to effectively control and coordinate within-cluster and between-cluster distances. Tailored to the NID problem, we propose a Robust and Adaptive Prototypical learning (RAP) framework for globally distinct decision boundaries for both known and new intent categories. Specifically, a robust prototypical attracting learning (RPAL) method is designed to compel instances to gravitate toward their corresponding prototype, achieving greater within-cluster compactness. To attain larger between-cluster separation, another adaptive prototypical dispersing learning (APDL) method is devised to maximize the between-cluster distance from the prototype-to-prototype perspective. Experimental results evaluated on three challenging benchmarks (CLINC, BANKING, and StackOverflow) of our method with better cluster-friendly representation demonstrate that RAP brings in substantial improvements over the current state-of-the-art methods (even large language model) by a large margin (average +5.5% improvement).

VIPTR: A Vision Permutable Extractor for Fast and Efficient Scene Text Recognition

Scene Text Recognition (STR) is a challenging task that involves recognizing text within images of natural scenes. Although current state-of-the-art models for STR exhibit high performance, they typically suffer from low inference efficiency due to their reliance on hybrid architectures comprised of visual encoders and sequence decoders. In this work, we propose the VIsion Permutable extractor for fast and efficient scene Text Recognition (VIPTR), which achieves an impressive balance between high performance and rapid inference speeds in the domain of STR. Specifically, VIPTR leverages a visual-semantic extractor with a pyramid structure, characterized by multiple self-attention layers, while eschewing the traditional sequence decoder. This design choice results in a lightweight and efficient model capable of handling inputs of varying sizes. Extensive experimental results on various standard datasets for both Chinese and English scene text recognition validate the superiority of VIPTR. Notably, the VIPTR-T (Tiny) variant delivers highly competitive accuracy on par with other lightweight models and achieves SOTA inference speeds. Meanwhile, the VIPTR-L (Large) variant attains greater recognition accuracy, while maintaining a low parameter count and favorable inference speed. Our proposed method provides a compelling solution for the STR challenge, which blends high accuracy with efficiency and greatly benefits real-world applications requiring fast and reliable text recognition. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/cxfyxl/VIPTR.

xCoT: Cross-lingual Instruction Tuning for Cross-lingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Chain-of-thought (CoT) has emerged as a powerful technique to elicit reasoning in large language models and improve a variety of downstream tasks. CoT mainly demonstrates excellent performance in English, but its usage in low-resource languages is constrained due to poor language generalization. To bridge the gap among different languages, we propose a cross-lingual instruction fine-tuning framework (xCOT) to transfer knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource languages. Specifically, the multilingual instruction training data (xCOT-INSTRUCT) is created to encourage the semantic alignment of multiple languages. We introduce cross-lingual in-context few-shot learning (xICL)) to accelerate multilingual agreement in instruction tuning, where some fragments of source languages in examples are randomly substituted by their counterpart translations of target languages. During multilingual instruction tuning, we adopt the randomly online CoT strategy to enhance the multilingual reasoning ability of the large language model by first translating the query to another language and then answering in English. To further facilitate the language transfer, we leverage the high-resource CoT to supervise the training of low-resource languages with cross-lingual distillation. Experimental results on previous benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of xCoT in reducing the gap among different languages, highlighting its potential to reduce the cross-lingual gap.

Unleashing Potential of Evidence in Knowledge-Intensive Dialogue Generation

Incorporating external knowledge into dialogue generation (KIDG) is crucial for improving the correctness of response, where evidence fragments serve as knowledgeable snippets supporting the factual dialogue replies. However, introducing irrelevant content often adversely impacts reply quality and easily leads to hallucinated responses. Prior work on evidence retrieval and integration in dialogue systems falls short of fully leveraging existing evidence since the model fails to locate useful fragments accurately and overlooks hidden evidence labels within the KIDG dataset. To fully Unleash the potential of evidence, we propose a framework to effectively incorporate Evidence in knowledge-Intensive Dialogue Generation (u-EIDG). Specifically, we introduce an automatic evidence generation framework that harnesses the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) to mine reliable evidence veracity labels from unlabeled data. By utilizing these evidence labels, we train a reliable evidence indicator to effectively identify relevant evidence from retrieved passages. Furthermore, we propose an evidence-augmented generator with an evidence-focused attention mechanism, which allows the model to concentrate on evidenced segments. Experimental results on MultiDoc2Dial demonstrate the efficacy of evidential label augmentation and refined attention mechanisms in improving model performance. Further analysis confirms that the proposed method outperforms other baselines (+3~+5 points) regarding coherence and factual consistency.

MT4CrossOIE: Multi-stage Tuning for Cross-lingual Open Information Extraction

Cross-lingual open information extraction aims to extract structured information from raw text across multiple languages. Previous work uses a shared cross-lingual pre-trained model to handle the different languages but underuses the potential of the language-specific representation. In this paper, we propose an effective multi-stage tuning framework called MT4CrossIE, designed for enhancing cross-lingual open information extraction by injecting language-specific knowledge into the shared model. Specifically, the cross-lingual pre-trained model is first tuned in a shared semantic space (e.g., embedding matrix) in the fixed encoder and then other components are optimized in the second stage. After enough training, we freeze the pre-trained model and tune the multiple extra low-rank language-specific modules using mixture-of-LoRAs for model-based cross-lingual transfer. In addition, we leverage two-stage prompting to encourage the large language model (LLM) to annotate the multi-lingual raw data for data-based cross-lingual transfer. The model is trained with multi-lingual objectives on our proposed dataset OpenIE4++ by combing the model-based and data-based transfer techniques. Experimental results on various benchmarks emphasize the importance of aggregating multiple plug-in-and-play language-specific modules and demonstrate the effectiveness of MT4CrossIE in cross-lingual OIE\footnote{\url{https://github.com/CSJianYang/Multilingual-Multimodal-NLP}}.

Multilingual Entity and Relation Extraction from Unified to Language-specific Training

Entity and relation extraction is a key task in information extraction, where the output can be used for downstream NLP tasks. Existing approaches for entity and relation extraction tasks mainly focus on the English corpora and ignore other languages. Thus, it is critical to improving performance in a multilingual setting. Meanwhile, multilingual training is usually used to boost cross-lingual performance by transferring knowledge from languages (e.g., high-resource) to other (e.g., low-resource) languages. However, language interference usually exists in multilingual tasks as the model parameters are shared among all languages. In this paper, we propose a two-stage multilingual training method and a joint model called Multilingual Entity and Relation Extraction framework (mERE) to mitigate language interference across languages. Specifically, we randomly concatenate sentences in different languages to train a Language-universal Aggregator (LA), which narrows the distance of embedding representations by obtaining the unified language representation. Then, we separate parameters to mitigate interference via tuning a Language-specific Switcher (LS), which includes several independent sub-modules to refine the language-specific feature representation. After that, to enhance the relational triple extraction, the sentence representations concatenated with the relation feature are used to recognize the entities. Extensive experimental results show that our method outperforms both the monolingual and multilingual baseline methods. Besides, we also perform detailed analysis to show that mERE is lightweight but effective on relational triple extraction and mERE{} is easy to transfer to other backbone models of multi-field tasks, which further demonstrates the effectiveness of our method.