Imagination Augmented Generation: Learning to Imagine Richer Context for Question Answering over Large Language Models

Retrieval-Augmented-Generation and Gener-ation-Augmented-Generation have been proposed to enhance the knowledge required for question answering over Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the former depends on external resources, and both require incorporating the explicit documents into the context, which results in longer contexts that lead to more resource consumption. Recent works indicate that LLMs have modeled rich knowledge, albeit not effectively triggered or activated. Inspired by this, we propose a novel knowledge-augmented framework, Imagination-Augmented-Generation (IAG), which simulates the human capacity to compensate for knowledge deficits while answering questions solely through imagination, without relying on external resources. Guided by IAG, we propose an imagine richer context method for question answering (IMcQA), which obtains richer context through the following two modules: explicit imagination by generating a short dummy document with long context compress and implicit imagination with HyperNetwork for generating adapter weights. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that IMcQA exhibits significant advantages in both open-domain and closed-book settings, as well as in both in-distribution performance and out-of-distribution generalizations. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Xnhyacinth/IAG.

Query2Triple: Unified Query Encoding for Answering Diverse Complex Queries over Knowledge Graphs

Complex Query Answering (CQA) is a challenge task of Knowledge Graph (KG). Due to the incompleteness of KGs, query embedding (QE) methods have been proposed to encode queries and entities into the same embedding space, and treat logical operators as neural set operators to obtain answers. However, these methods train KG embeddings and neural set operators concurrently on both simple (one-hop) and complex (multi-hop and logical) queries, which causes performance degradation on simple queries and low training efficiency. In this paper, we propose Query to Triple (Q2T), a novel approach that decouples the training for simple and complex queries. Q2T divides the training into two stages: (1) Pre-training a neural link predictor on simple queries to predict tail entities based on the head entity and relation. (2) Training a query encoder on complex queries to encode diverse complex queries into a unified triple form that can be efficiently solved by the pretrained neural link predictor. Our proposed Q2T is not only efficient to train, but also modular, thus easily adaptable to various neural link predictors that have been studied well. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, even without explicit modeling for neural set operators, Q2T still achieves state-of-the-art performance on diverse complex queries over three public benchmarks.

GeoGLUE: A GeoGraphic Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark

With a fast developing pace of geographic applications, automatable and intelligent models are essential to be designed to handle the large volume of information. However, few researchers focus on geographic natural language processing, and there has never been a benchmark to build a unified standard. In this work, we propose a GeoGraphic Language Understanding Evaluation benchmark, named GeoGLUE. We collect data from open-released geographic resources and introduce six natural language understanding tasks, including geographic textual similarity on recall, geographic textual similarity on rerank, geographic elements tagging, geographic composition analysis, geographic where what cut, and geographic entity alignment. We also pro vide evaluation experiments and analysis of general baselines, indicating the effectiveness and significance of the GeoGLUE benchmark.

Performance of OTFS-NOMA Scheme for Coordinated Direct and Relay Transmission Networks in High-Mobility Scenarios

In this letter, an orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) based non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme is investigated for the coordinated direct and relay transmission system, where a source directly communicates with a near user with high mobile speed, and it needs the relaying assistance to serve the far user also having high mobility. Due to the coexistence of signal superposition coding and multi-domain transformation, the performance of OTFS-based NOMA is usually challenging to be measured from a theoretical perspective. To accurately evaluate the system performance of the proposed scheme, we derive the closed-form expressions for the outage probability and the outage sum rate by using the Inversion formula and characteristic function. Numerical results verify the performance superiority and the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

A Multi-Modal Geographic Pre-Training Method

As a core task in location-based services (LBS) (e.g., navigation maps), query and point of interest (POI) matching connects users' intent with real-world geographic information. Recently, pre-trained models (PTMs) have made advancements in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Generic text-based PTMs do not have enough geographic knowledge for query-POI matching. To overcome this limitation, related literature attempts to employ domain-adaptive pre-training based on geo-related corpus. However, a query generally contains mentions of multiple geographic objects, such as nearby roads and regions of interest (ROIs). The geographic context (GC), i.e., these diverse geographic objects and their relationships, is therefore pivotal to retrieving the most relevant POI. Single-modal PTMs can barely make use of the important GC and therefore have limited performance. In this work, we propose a novel query-POI matching method Multi-modal Geographic language model (MGeo), which comprises a geographic encoder and a multi-modal interaction module. MGeo represents GC as a new modality and is able to fully extract multi-modal correlations for accurate query-POI matching. Besides, there is no publicly available benchmark for this topic. In order to facilitate further research, we build a new open-source large-scale benchmark Geographic TExtual Similarity (GeoTES). The POIs come from an open-source geographic information system (GIS). The queries are manually generated by annotators to prevent privacy issues. Compared with several strong baselines, the extensive experiment results and detailed ablation analyses on GeoTES demonstrate that our proposed multi-modal pre-training method can significantly improve the query-POI matching capability of generic PTMs, even when the queries' GC is not provided. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/PhantomGrapes/MGeo.

Hyper-GST: Predict Metro Passenger Flow Incorporating GraphSAGE, Hypergraph, Social-meaningful Edge Weights and Temporal Exploitation

Predicting metro passenger flow precisely is of great importance for dynamic traffic planning. Deep learning algorithms have been widely applied due to their robust performance in modelling non-linear systems. However, traditional deep learning algorithms completely discard the inherent graph structure within the metro system. Graph-based deep learning algorithms could utilise the graph structure but raise a few challenges, such as how to determine the weights of the edges and the shallow receptive field caused by the over-smoothing issue. To further improve these challenges, this study proposes a model based on GraphSAGE with an edge weights learner applied. The edge weights learner utilises socially meaningful features to generate edge weights. Hypergraph and temporal exploitation modules are also constructed as add-ons for better performance. A comparison study is conducted on the proposed algorithm and other state-of-art graph neural networks, where the proposed algorithm could improve the performance.

The QXS-SAROPT Dataset for Deep Learning in SAR-Optical Data Fusion

Deep learning techniques have made an increasing impact on the field of remote sensing. However, deep neural networks based fusion of multimodal data from different remote sensors with heterogenous characteristics has not been fully explored, due to the lack of availability of big amounts of perfectly aligned multi-sensor image data with diverse scenes of high resolution, especially for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data and optical imagery. In this paper, we publish the QXS-SAROPT dataset to foster deep learning research in SAR-optical data fusion. QXS-SAROPT comprises 20,000 pairs of corresponding image patches, collected from three port cities: San Diego, Shanghai and Qingdao acquired by the SAR satellite GaoFen-3 and optical satellites of Google Earth. Besides a detailed description of the dataset, we show exemplary results for two representative applications, namely SAR-optical image matching and SAR ship detection boosted by cross-modal information from optical images. Since QXS-SAROPT is a large open dataset with multiple scenes of the highest resolution of this kind, we believe it will support further developments in the field of deep learning based SAR-optical data fusion for remote sensing.

Boosting ship detection in SAR images with complementary pretraining techniques

Deep learning methods have made significant progress in ship detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The pretraining technique is usually adopted to support deep neural networks-based SAR ship detectors due to the scarce labeled SAR images. However, directly leveraging ImageNet pretraining is hardly to obtain a good ship detector because of different imaging perspective and geometry. In this paper, to resolve the problem of inconsistent imaging perspective between ImageNet and earth observations, we propose an optical ship detector (OSD) pretraining technique, which transfers the characteristics of ships in earth observations to SAR images from a large-scale aerial image dataset. On the other hand, to handle the problem of different imaging geometry between optical and SAR images, we propose an optical-SAR matching (OSM) pretraining technique, which transfers plentiful texture features from optical images to SAR images by common representation learning on the optical-SAR matching task. Finally, observing that the OSD pretraining based SAR ship detector has a better recall on sea area while the OSM pretraining based SAR ship detector can reduce false alarms on land area, we combine the predictions of the two detectors through weighted boxes fusion to further improve detection results. Extensive experiments on four SAR ship detection datasets and two representative CNN-based detection benchmarks are conducted to show the effectiveness and complementarity of the two proposed detectors, and the state-of-the-art performance of the combination of the two detectors. The proposed method won the sixth place of ship detection in SAR images in 2020 Gaofen challenge.

Truncation-Free Matching System for Display Advertising at Alibaba

Matching module plays a critical role in display advertising systems. Without query from user, it is challenging for system to match user traffic and ads suitably. System packs up a group of users with common properties such as the same gender or similar shopping interests into a crowd. Here term crowd can be viewed as a tag over users. Then advertisers bid for different crowds and deliver their ads to those targeted users. Matching module in most industrial display advertising systems follows a two-stage paradigm. When receiving a user request, matching system (i) finds the crowds that the user belongs to; (ii) retrieves all ads that have targeted those crowds. However, in applications such as display advertising at Alibaba, with very large volumes of crowds and ads, both stages of matching have to truncate the long-tailed parts for online serving, under limited latency. That's to say, not all ads have the chance to participate in online matching. This results in sub-optimal result for both advertising performance and platform revenue. In this paper, we study the truncation problem and propose a Truncation Free Matching System (TFMS). The basic idea is to decouple the matching computation from the online pipeline. Instead of executing the two-stage matching when user visits, TFMS utilizes a near-line truncation-free matching to pre-calculate and store those top valuable ads for each user. Then the online pipeline just needs to fetch the pre-stored ads as matching results. In this way, we can jump out of online system's latency and computation cost limitations, and leverage flexible computation resource to finish the user-ad matching. TFMS has been deployed in our productive system since 2019, bringing (i) more than 50% improvement of impressions for advertisers who encountered truncation before, (ii) 9.4% Revenue Per Mile gain, which is significant enough for the business.

Training few-shot classification via the perspective of minibatch and pretraining

Few-shot classification is a challenging task which aims to formulate the ability of humans to learn concepts from limited prior data and has drawn considerable attention in machine learning. Recent progress in few-shot classification has featured meta-learning, in which a parameterized model for a learning algorithm is defined and trained to learn the ability of handling classification tasks on extremely large or infinite episodes representing different classification task, each with a small labeled support set and its corresponding query set. In this work, we advance this few-shot classification paradigm by formulating it as a supervised classification learning problem. We further propose multi-episode and cross-way training techniques, which respectively correspond to the minibatch and pretraining in classification problems. Experimental results on a state-of-the-art few-shot classification method (prototypical networks) demonstrate that both the proposed training strategies can highly accelerate the training process without accuracy loss for varying few-shot classification problems on Omniglot and miniImageNet.