Multi-modal Latent Space Learning for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has exhibited impressive performance in language models for solving complex tasks and answering questions. However, many real-world questions require multi-modal information, such as text and images. Previous research on multi-modal CoT has primarily focused on extracting fixed image features from off-the-shelf vision models and then fusing them with text using attention mechanisms. This approach has limitations because these vision models were not designed for complex reasoning tasks and do not align well with language thoughts. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel approach for multi-modal CoT reasoning that utilizes latent space learning via diffusion processes to generate effective image features that align with language thoughts. Our method fuses image features and text representations at a deep level and improves the complex reasoning ability of multi-modal CoT. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method on multi-modal ScienceQA and machine translation benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art performance on ScienceQA. Overall, our approach offers a more robust and effective solution for multi-modal reasoning in language models, enhancing their ability to tackle complex real-world problems.

Enhancing Visually-Rich Document Understanding via Layout Structure Modeling

In recent years, the use of multi-modal pre-trained Transformers has led to significant advancements in visually-rich document understanding. However, existing models have mainly focused on features such as text and vision while neglecting the importance of layout relationship between text nodes. In this paper, we propose GraphLayoutLM, a novel document understanding model that leverages the modeling of layout structure graph to inject document layout knowledge into the model. GraphLayoutLM utilizes a graph reordering algorithm to adjust the text sequence based on the graph structure. Additionally, our model uses a layout-aware multi-head self-attention layer to learn document layout knowledge. The proposed model enables the understanding of the spatial arrangement of text elements, improving document comprehension. We evaluate our model on various benchmarks, including FUNSD, XFUND and CORD, and achieve state-of-the-art results among these datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method provides a significant improvement over existing approaches and showcases the importance of incorporating layout information into document understanding models. We also conduct an ablation study to investigate the contribution of each component of our model. The results show that both the graph reordering algorithm and the layout-aware multi-head self-attention layer play a crucial role in achieving the best performance.