WinoViz: Probing Visual Properties of Objects Under Different States

Humans perceive and comprehend different visual properties of an object based on specific contexts. For instance, we know that a banana turns brown ``when it becomes rotten,'' whereas it appears green ``when it is unripe.'' Previous studies on probing visual commonsense knowledge have primarily focused on examining language models' understanding of typical properties (e.g., colors and shapes) of objects. We present WinoViz, a text-only evaluation dataset, consisting of 1,380 examples that probe the reasoning abilities of language models regarding variant visual properties of objects under different contexts or states. Our task is challenging since it requires pragmatic reasoning (finding intended meanings) and visual knowledge reasoning. We also present multi-hop data, a more challenging version of our data, which requires multi-step reasoning chains to solve our task. In our experimental analysis, our findings are: a) Large language models such as GPT-4 demonstrate effective performance, but when it comes to multi-hop data, their performance is significantly degraded. b) Large models perform well on pragmatic reasoning, but visual knowledge reasoning is a bottleneck in our task. c) Vision-language models outperform their language-model counterparts. d) A model with machine-generated images performs poorly in our task. This is due to the poor quality of the generated images.

GRILL: Grounded Vision-language Pre-training via Aligning Text and Image Regions

Generalization to unseen tasks is an important ability for few-shot learners to achieve better zero-/few-shot performance on diverse tasks. However, such generalization to vision-language tasks including grounding and generation tasks has been under-explored; existing few-shot VL models struggle to handle tasks that involve object grounding and multiple images such as visual commonsense reasoning or NLVR2. In this paper, we introduce GRILL, GRounded vIsion Language aLigning, a novel VL model that can be generalized to diverse tasks including visual question answering, captioning, and grounding tasks with no or very few training instances. Specifically, GRILL learns object grounding and localization by exploiting object-text alignments, which enables it to transfer to grounding tasks in a zero-/few-shot fashion. We evaluate our model on various zero-/few-shot VL tasks and show that it consistently surpasses the state-of-the-art few-shot methods.

Analyzing Norm Violations in Live-Stream Chat

Toxic language, such as hate speech, can deter users from participating in online communities and enjoying popular platforms. Previous approaches to detecting toxic language and norm violations have been primarily concerned with conversations from online forums and social media, such as Reddit and Twitter. These approaches are less effective when applied to conversations on live-streaming platforms, such as Twitch and YouTube Live, as each comment is only visible for a limited time and lacks a thread structure that establishes its relationship with other comments. In this work, we share the first NLP study dedicated to detecting norm violations in conversations on live-streaming platforms. We define norm violation categories in live-stream chats and annotate 4,583 moderated comments from Twitch. We articulate several facets of live-stream data that differ from other forums, and demonstrate that existing models perform poorly in this setting. By conducting a user study, we identify the informational context humans use in live-stream moderation, and train models leveraging context to identify norm violations. Our results show that appropriate contextual information can boost moderation performance by 35\%.

Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting Without Knowledge Using In-Context Learning

Temporal knowledge graph (TKG) forecasting benchmarks challenge models to predict future facts using knowledge of past facts. In this paper, we apply large language models (LLMs) to these benchmarks using in-context learning (ICL). We investigate whether and to what extent LLMs can be used for TKG forecasting, especially without any fine-tuning or explicit modules for capturing structural and temporal information. For our experiments, we present a framework that converts relevant historical facts into prompts and generates ranked predictions using token probabilities. Surprisingly, we observe that LLMs, out-of-the-box, perform on par with state-of-the-art TKG models carefully designed and trained for TKG forecasting. Our extensive evaluation presents performances across several models and datasets with different characteristics, compares alternative heuristics for preparing contextual information, and contrasts to prominent TKG methods and simple frequency and recency baselines. We also discover that using numerical indices instead of entity/relation names, i.e., hiding semantic information, does not significantly affect the performance ($\pm$0.4\% Hit@1). This shows that prior semantic knowledge is unnecessary; instead, LLMs can leverage the existing patterns in the context to achieve such performance. Our analysis also reveals that ICL enables LLMs to learn irregular patterns from the historical context, going beyond simple predictions based on common or recent information.

Leveraging Visual Knowledge in Language Tasks: An Empirical Study on Intermediate Pre-training for Cross-modal Knowledge Transfer

Pre-trained language models are still far from human performance in tasks that need understanding of properties (e.g. appearance, measurable quantity) and affordances of everyday objects in the real world since the text lacks such information due to reporting bias. In this work, we study whether integrating visual knowledge into a language model can fill the gap. We investigate two types of knowledge transfer: (1) text knowledge transfer using image captions that may contain enriched visual knowledge and (2) cross-modal knowledge transfer using both images and captions with vision-language training objectives. On 5 downstream tasks that may need visual knowledge to solve the problem, we perform extensive empirical comparisons over the presented objectives. Our experiments show that visual knowledge transfer can improve performance in both low-resource and fully supervised settings.

A Good Prompt Is Worth Millions of Parameters? Low-resource Prompt-based Learning for Vision-Language Models

Large pretrained vision-language (VL) models can learn a new task with a handful of examples or generalize to a new task without fine-tuning. However, these gigantic VL models are hard to deploy for real-world applications due to their impractically huge model size and slow inference speed. In this work, we propose FewVLM, a few-shot prompt-based learner on vision-language tasks. We pretrain a sequence-to-sequence Transformer model with both prefix language modeling (PrefixLM) and masked language modeling (MaskedLM), and introduce simple prompts to improve zero-shot and few-shot performance on VQA and image captioning. Experimental results on five VQA and captioning datasets show that \method\xspace outperforms Frozen which is 31 times larger than ours by 18.2% point on zero-shot VQAv2 and achieves comparable results to a 246$\times$ larger model, PICa. We observe that (1) prompts significantly affect zero-shot performance but marginally affect few-shot performance, (2) MaskedLM helps few-shot VQA tasks while PrefixLM boosts captioning performance, and (3) performance significantly increases when training set size is small.

Modality-specific Distillation

Large neural networks are impractical to deploy on mobile devices due to their heavy computational cost and slow inference. Knowledge distillation (KD) is a technique to reduce the model size while retaining performance by transferring knowledge from a large "teacher" model to a smaller "student" model. However, KD on multimodal datasets such as vision-language datasets is relatively unexplored and digesting such multimodal information is challenging since different modalities present different types of information. In this paper, we propose modality-specific distillation (MSD) to effectively transfer knowledge from a teacher on multimodal datasets. Existing KD approaches can be applied to multimodal setup, but a student doesn't have access to modality-specific predictions. Our idea aims at mimicking a teacher's modality-specific predictions by introducing an auxiliary loss term for each modality. Because each modality has different importance for predictions, we also propose weighting approaches for the auxiliary losses; a meta-learning approach to learn the optimal weights on these loss terms. In our experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our MSD and the weighting scheme and show that it achieves better performance than KD.

ForecastQA: Machine Comprehension of Temporal Text for Answering Forecasting Questions

Textual data are often accompanied by time information (e.g., dates in news articles), but the information is easily overlooked on existing question answering datasets. In this paper, we introduce ForecastQA, a new open-domain question answering dataset consisting of 10k questions which requires temporal reasoning. ForecastQA is collected via a crowdsourcing effort based on news articles, where workers were asked to come up with yes-no or multiple-choice questions. We also present baseline models for our dataset, which is based on a pre-trained language model. In our study, our baseline model achieves 61.6% accuracy on the ForecastQA dataset. We expect that our new data will support future research efforts. Our data and code are publicly available at https://inklab.usc.edu/ForecastQA/.

Temporal Attribute Prediction via Joint Modeling of Multi-Relational Structure Evolution

Time series prediction is an important problem in machine learning. Previous methods for time series prediction did not involve additional information. With a lot of dynamic knowledge graphs available, we can use this additional information to predict the time series better. Recently, there has been a focus on the application of deep representation learning on dynamic graphs. These methods predict the structure of the graph by reasoning over the interactions in the graph at previous time steps. In this paper, we propose a new framework to incorporate the information from dynamic knowledge graphs for time series prediction. We show that if the information contained in the graph and the time series data are closely related, then this inter-dependence can be used to predict the time series with improved accuracy. Our framework, DArtNet, learns a static embedding for every node in the graph as well as a dynamic embedding which is dependent on the dynamic attribute value (time-series). Then it captures the information from the neighborhood by taking a relation specific mean and encodes the history information using RNN. We jointly train the model link prediction and attribute prediction. We evaluate our method on five specially curated datasets for this problem and show a consistent improvement in time series prediction results.

Collaborative Policy Learning for Open Knowledge Graph Reasoning

In recent years, there has been a surge of interests in interpretable graph reasoning methods. However, these models often suffer from limited performance when working on sparse and incomplete graphs, due to the lack of evidential paths that can reach target entities. Here we study open knowledge graph reasoning---a task that aims to reason for missing facts over a graph augmented by a background text corpus. A key challenge of the task is to filter out "irrelevant" facts extracted from corpus, in order to maintain an effective search space during path inference. We propose a novel reinforcement learning framework to train two collaborative agents jointly, i.e., a multi-hop graph reasoner and a fact extractor. The fact extraction agent generates fact triples from corpora to enrich the graph on the fly; while the reasoning agent provides feedback to the fact extractor and guides it towards promoting facts that are helpful for the interpretable reasoning. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Source code and datasets used in this paper can be downloaded at https://github.com/shanzhenren/CPL