Generative agents that simulate human society show tremendous potential for further research and practical applications. Specifically, the generative agent architecture comprising several meticulously designed modules constitutes the most critical component. To facilitate progress in this research, this report presents our integrated perspective on comprehending generative agents through summarization, since we believe summarization is the most fundamental and indispensable capacity of generative agents manifested across diverse scenarios. We hope this report can provide insight into understanding the importance of summarization capacity in generative agents and motivate future research.
Multi-document scientific summarization can extract and organize important information from an abundant collection of papers, arousing widespread attention recently. However, existing efforts focus on producing lengthy overviews lacking a clear and logical hierarchy. To alleviate this problem, we present an atomic and challenging task named Hierarchical Catalogue Generation for Literature Review (HiCatGLR), which aims to generate a hierarchical catalogue for a review paper given various references. We carefully construct a novel English Hierarchical Catalogues of Literature Reviews Dataset (HiCaD) with 13.8k literature review catalogues and 120k reference papers, where we benchmark diverse experiments via the end-to-end and pipeline methods. To accurately assess the model performance, we design evaluation metrics for similarity to ground truth from semantics and structure. Besides, our extensive analyses verify the high quality of our dataset and the effectiveness of our evaluation metrics. Furthermore, we discuss potential directions for this task to motivate future research.
Although large-scale video-language pre-training models, which usually build a global alignment between the video and the text, have achieved remarkable progress on various downstream tasks, the idea of adopting fine-grained information during the pre-training stage is not well explored. In this work, we propose STOA-VLP, a pre-training framework that jointly models object and action information across spatial and temporal dimensions. More specifically, the model regards object trajectories across frames and multiple action features from the video as fine-grained features. Besides, We design two auxiliary tasks to better incorporate both kinds of information into the pre-training process of the video-language model. The first is the dynamic object-text alignment task, which builds a better connection between object trajectories and the relevant noun tokens. The second is the spatial-temporal action set prediction, which guides the model to generate consistent action features by predicting actions found in the text. Extensive experiments on three downstream tasks (video captioning, text-video retrieval, and video question answering) demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed STOA-VLP (e.g. 3.7 Rouge-L improvements on MSR-VTT video captioning benchmark, 2.9% accuracy improvements on MSVD video question answering benchmark, compared to previous approaches).
Electroencephalography-to-Text generation (EEG-to-Text), which aims to directly generate natural text from EEG signals has drawn increasing attention in recent years due to the enormous potential for Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However, the remarkable discrepancy between the subject-dependent EEG representation and the semantic-dependent text representation poses a great challenge to this task. To mitigate this challenge, we devise a Curriculum Semantic-aware Contrastive Learning strategy (C-SCL), which effectively re-calibrates the subject-dependent EEG representation to the semantic-dependent EEG representation, thus reducing the discrepancy. Specifically, our C-SCL pulls semantically similar EEG representations together while pushing apart dissimilar ones. Besides, in order to introduce more meaningful contrastive pairs, we carefully employ curriculum learning to not only craft meaningful contrastive pairs but also make the learning progressively. We conduct extensive experiments on the ZuCo benchmark and our method combined with diverse models and architectures shows stable improvements across three types of metrics while achieving the new state-of-the-art. Further investigation proves not only its superiority in both the single-subject and low-resource settings but also its robust generalizability in the zero-shot setting.
Previous work on controllable text generation has explored the idea of control from the latent space, such as optimizing a representation with attribute-related classifiers or sampling a representation from relevant discrete samples. However, they are not effective enough in modeling both the latent space and the control, leaving controlled text with low quality and diversity. In this work, we propose a novel control framework using probability density estimation in the latent space. Our method utilizes an invertible transformation function, the Normalizing Flow, that maps the complex distributions in the latent space to simple Gaussian distributions in the prior space. Thus, we can perform sophisticated and flexible control in the prior space and feed the control effects back into the latent space owing to the one-one-mapping property of invertible transformations. Experiments on single-attribute controls and multi-attribute control reveal that our method outperforms several strong baselines on attribute relevance and text quality and achieves the SOTA. Further analysis of control strength adjustment demonstrates the flexibility of our control strategy.
Multi-aspect controllable text generation is a more challenging and practical task than single-aspect control. Existing methods achieve complex multi-aspect control by fusing multiple controllers learned from single-aspect, but suffer from attribute degeneration caused by the mutual interference of these controllers. To address this, we provide observations on attribute fusion from a distributional perspective and propose to directly search for the intersection areas of multiple attribute distributions as their combination for generation. Our method first estimates the attribute space with an autoencoder structure. Afterward, we iteratively approach the intersections by jointly minimizing distances to points representing different attributes. Finally, we map them to attribute-relevant sentences with a prefix-tuning-based decoder. Experiments on the three-aspect control task, including sentiment, topic, and detoxification aspects, reveal that our method outperforms several strong baselines on attribute relevance and text quality and achieves the SOTA. Further analysis also supplies some explanatory support for the effectiveness of our approach.
Although all-in-one-model multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) has achieved remarkable progress in recent years, its selected best overall checkpoint fails to achieve the best performance simultaneously in all language pairs. It is because that the best checkpoints for each individual language pair (i.e., language-specific best checkpoints) scatter in different epochs. In this paper, we present a novel training strategy dubbed Language-Specific Self-Distillation (LSSD) for bridging the gap between language-specific best checkpoints and the overall best checkpoint. In detail, we regard each language-specific best checkpoint as a teacher to distill the overall best checkpoint. Moreover, we systematically explore three variants of our LSSD, which perform distillation statically, selectively, and adaptively. Experimental results on two widely-used benchmarks show that LSSD obtains consistent improvements towards all language pairs and achieves the state-of-the-art
The standard BERT adopts subword-based tokenization, which may break a word into two or more wordpieces (e.g., converting "lossless" to "loss" and "less"). This will bring inconvenience in following situations: (1) what is the best way to obtain the contextual vector of a word that is divided into multiple wordpieces? (2) how to predict a word via cloze test without knowing the number of wordpieces in advance? In this work, we explore the possibility of developing BERT-style pretrained model over a vocabulary of words instead of wordpieces. We call such word-level BERT model as WordBERT. We train models with different vocabulary sizes, initialization configurations and languages. Results show that, compared to standard wordpiece-based BERT, WordBERT makes significant improvements on cloze test and machine reading comprehension. On many other natural language understanding tasks, including POS tagging, chunking and NER, WordBERT consistently performs better than BERT. Model analysis indicates that the major advantage of WordBERT over BERT lies in the understanding for low-frequency words and rare words. Furthermore, since the pipeline is language-independent, we train WordBERT for Chinese language and obtain significant gains on five natural language understanding datasets. Lastly, the analyse on inference speed illustrates WordBERT has comparable time cost to BERT in natural language understanding tasks.
With the development of dialogue systems and natural language generation techniques, the resurgence of dialogue summarization has attracted significant research attentions, which aims to condense the original dialogue into a shorter version covering salient information. However, there remains a lack of comprehensive survey for this task. To this end, we take the first step and present a thorough review of this research field. In detail, we provide an overview of publicly available research datasets, summarize existing works according to the domain of input dialogue as well as organize leaderboards under unified metrics. Furthermore, we discuss some future directions and give our thoughts. We hope that this first survey of dialogue summarization can provide the community with a quick access and a general picture to this task and motivate future researches.
Current dialogue summarization systems usually encode the text with a number of general semantic features (e.g., keywords and topics) to gain more powerful dialogue modeling capabilities. However, these features are obtained via open-domain toolkits that are dialog-agnostic or heavily relied on human annotations. In this paper, we show how DialoGPT, a pre-trained model for conversational response generation, can be developed as an unsupervised dialogue annotator, which takes advantage of dialogue background knowledge encoded in DialoGPT. We apply DialoGPT to label three types of features on two dialogue summarization datasets, SAMSum and AMI, and employ pre-trained and non pre-trained models as our summarizes. Experimental results show that our proposed method can obtain remarkable improvements on both datasets and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the SAMSum dataset.