NewsDialogues: Towards Proactive News Grounded Conversation

Hot news is one of the most popular topics in daily conversations. However, news grounded conversation has long been stymied by the lack of well-designed task definition and scarce data. In this paper, we propose a novel task, Proactive News Grounded Conversation, in which a dialogue system can proactively lead the conversation based on some key topics of the news. In addition, both information-seeking and chit-chat scenarios are included realistically, where the user may ask a series of questions about the news details or express their opinions and be eager to chat. To further develop this novel task, we collect a human-to-human Chinese dialogue dataset \ts{NewsDialogues}, which includes 1K conversations with a total of 14.6K utterances and detailed annotations for target topics and knowledge spans. Furthermore, we propose a method named Predict-Generate-Rank, consisting of a generator for grounded knowledge prediction and response generation, and a ranker for the ranking of multiple responses to alleviate the exposure bias. We conduct comprehensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and further present several key findings and challenges to prompt future research.

Global and Local Semantic Completion Learning for Vision-Language Pre-training

Cross-modal alignment plays a crucial role in vision-language pre-training (VLP) models, enabling them to capture meaningful associations across different modalities. For this purpose, inspired by the success of masked language modeling (MLM) tasks in the NLP pre-training area, numerous masked modeling tasks have been proposed for VLP to further promote cross-modal interactions. The core idea of previous masked modeling tasks is to focus on reconstructing the masked tokens based on visible context for learning local-local alignment, i.e., associations between image patches and text tokens. However, most of them pay little attention to the global semantic features generated for the masked data, resulting in a limited cross-modal alignment ability of global representations to local features of the other modality. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel Global and Local Semantic Completion Learning (GLSCL) task to facilitate global-local alignment and local-local alignment simultaneously. Specifically, the GLSCL task complements the missing semantics of masked data and recovers global and local features by cross-modal interactions. Our GLSCL consists of masked global semantic completion (MGSC) and masked local token completion (MLTC). MGSC promotes learning more representative global features which have a great impact on the performance of downstream tasks, and MLTC can further enhance accurate comprehension on multimodal data. Moreover, we present a flexible vision encoder, enabling our model to simultaneously perform image-text and video-text multimodal tasks. Experimental results show that our proposed method obtains state-of-the-art performance on various vision-language benchmarks, such as visual question answering, image-text retrieval, and video-text retrieval.

D2Match: Leveraging Deep Learning and Degeneracy for Subgraph Matching

Subgraph matching is a fundamental building block for graph-based applications and is challenging due to its high-order combinatorial nature. Existing studies usually tackle it by combinatorial optimization or learning-based methods. However, they suffer from exponential computational costs or searching the matching without theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we develop D2Match by leveraging the efficiency of Deep learning and Degeneracy for subgraph matching. More specifically, we first prove that subgraph matching can degenerate to subtree matching, and subsequently is equivalent to finding a perfect matching on a bipartite graph. We can then yield an implementation of linear time complexity by the built-in tree-structured aggregation mechanism on graph neural networks. Moreover, circle structures and node attributes can be easily incorporated in D2Match to boost the matching performance. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to show the superior performance of our D2Match and confirm that our D2Match indeed exploits the subtrees and differs from existing GNNs-based subgraph matching methods that depend on memorizing the data distribution divergence

Efficient Text-Guided 3D-Aware Portrait Generation with Score Distillation Sampling on Distribution

Text-to-3D is an emerging task that allows users to create 3D content with infinite possibilities. Existing works tackle the problem by optimizing a 3D representation with guidance from pre-trained diffusion models. An apparent drawback is that they need to optimize from scratch for each prompt, which is computationally expensive and often yields poor visual fidelity. In this paper, we propose DreamPortrait, which aims to generate text-guided 3D-aware portraits in a single-forward pass for efficiency. To achieve this, we extend Score Distillation Sampling from datapoint to distribution formulation, which injects semantic prior into a 3D distribution. However, the direct extension will lead to the mode collapse problem since the objective only pursues semantic alignment. Hence, we propose to optimize a distribution with hierarchical condition adapters and GAN loss regularization. For better 3D modeling, we further design a 3D-aware gated cross-attention mechanism to explicitly let the model perceive the correspondence between the text and the 3D-aware space. These elaborated designs enable our model to generate portraits with robust multi-view semantic consistency, eliminating the need for optimization-based methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate our model's highly competitive performance and significant speed boost against existing methods.

Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate

Modern large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have shown remarkable performance on general language tasks but still struggle on complex reasoning tasks, which drives the research on cognitive behaviors of LLMs to explore human-like problem-solving strategies. Along this direction, one representative strategy is self-reflection, which asks an LLM to refine the solution with the feedback generated by itself iteratively. However, our study shows that such reflection-style methods suffer from the Degeneration-of-Thought (DoT) problem: once the LLM has established confidence in its solutions, it is unable to generate novel thoughts later through reflection even if its initial stance is incorrect. To address the DoT problem, we propose a Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) framework, in which multiple agents express their arguments in the state of "tit for tat" and a judge manages the debate process to obtain a final solution. Clearly, our MAD framework encourages divergent thinking in LLMs which would be helpful for tasks that require deep levels of contemplation. Experiment results on two challenging datasets, commonsense machine translation and counter-intuitive arithmetic reasoning, demonstrate the effectiveness of our MAD framework. Extensive analyses suggest that the adaptive break of debate and the modest level of "tit for tat" state are required for MAD to obtain good performance. Moreover, we find that LLMs might not be a fair judge if different LLMs are used for agents. Codes: https://github.com/Skytliang/Multi-Agents-Debate

TaleCrafter: Interactive Story Visualization with Multiple Characters

Accurate Story visualization requires several necessary elements, such as identity consistency across frames, the alignment between plain text and visual content, and a reasonable layout of objects in images. Most previous works endeavor to meet these requirements by fitting a text-to-image (T2I) model on a set of videos in the same style and with the same characters, e.g., the FlintstonesSV dataset. However, the learned T2I models typically struggle to adapt to new characters, scenes, and styles, and often lack the flexibility to revise the layout of the synthesized images. This paper proposes a system for generic interactive story visualization, capable of handling multiple novel characters and supporting the editing of layout and local structure. It is developed by leveraging the prior knowledge of large language and T2I models, trained on massive corpora. The system comprises four interconnected components: story-to-prompt generation (S2P), text-to-layout generation (T2L), controllable text-to-image generation (C-T2I), and image-to-video animation (I2V). First, the S2P module converts concise story information into detailed prompts required for subsequent stages. Next, T2L generates diverse and reasonable layouts based on the prompts, offering users the ability to adjust and refine the layout to their preference. The core component, C-T2I, enables the creation of images guided by layouts, sketches, and actor-specific identifiers to maintain consistency and detail across visualizations. Finally, I2V enriches the visualization process by animating the generated images. Extensive experiments and a user study are conducted to validate the effectiveness and flexibility of interactive editing of the proposed system.

SOC: Semantic-Assisted Object Cluster for Referring Video Object Segmentation

This paper studies referring video object segmentation (RVOS) by boosting video-level visual-linguistic alignment. Recent approaches model the RVOS task as a sequence prediction problem and perform multi-modal interaction as well as segmentation for each frame separately. However, the lack of a global view of video content leads to difficulties in effectively utilizing inter-frame relationships and understanding textual descriptions of object temporal variations. To address this issue, we propose Semantic-assisted Object Cluster (SOC), which aggregates video content and textual guidance for unified temporal modeling and cross-modal alignment. By associating a group of frame-level object embeddings with language tokens, SOC facilitates joint space learning across modalities and time steps. Moreover, we present multi-modal contrastive supervision to help construct well-aligned joint space at the video level. We conduct extensive experiments on popular RVOS benchmarks, and our method outperforms state-of-the-art competitors on all benchmarks by a remarkable margin. Besides, the emphasis on temporal coherence enhances the segmentation stability and adaptability of our method in processing text expressions with temporal variations. Code will be available.

Accelerating Diffusion Models for Inverse Problems through Shortcut Sampling

Recently, diffusion models have demonstrated a remarkable ability to solve inverse problems in an unsupervised manner. Existing methods mainly focus on modifying the posterior sampling process while neglecting the potential of the forward process. In this work, we propose Shortcut Sampling for Diffusion (SSD), a novel pipeline for solving inverse problems. Instead of initiating from random noise, the key concept of SSD is to find the "Embryo", a transitional state that bridges the measurement image y and the restored image x. By utilizing the "shortcut" path of "input-Embryo-output", SSD can achieve precise and fast restoration. To obtain the Embryo in the forward process, We propose Distortion Adaptive Inversion (DA Inversion). Moreover, we apply back projection and attention injection as additional consistency constraints during the generation process. Experimentally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of SSD on several representative tasks, including super-resolution, deblurring, and colorization. Compared to state-of-the-art zero-shot methods, our method achieves competitive results with only 30 NFEs. Moreover, SSD with 100 NFEs can outperform state-of-the-art zero-shot methods in certain tasks.

Assessor360: Multi-sequence Network for Blind Omnidirectional Image Quality Assessment

Blind Omnidirectional Image Quality Assessment (BOIQA) aims to objectively assess the human perceptual quality of omnidirectional images (ODIs) without relying on pristine-quality image information. It is becoming more significant with the increasing advancement of virtual reality (VR) technology. However, the quality assessment of ODIs is severely hampered by the fact that the existing BOIQA pipeline lacks the modeling of the observer's browsing process. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel multi-sequence network for BOIQA called Assessor360, which is derived from the realistic multi-assessor ODI quality assessment procedure. Specifically, we propose a generalized Recursive Probability Sampling (RPS) method for the BOIQA task, combining content and detailed information to generate multiple pseudo viewport sequences from a given starting point. Additionally, we design a Multi-scale Feature Aggregation (MFA) module with Distortion-aware Block (DAB) to fuse distorted and semantic features of each viewport. We also devise TMM to learn the viewport transition in the temporal domain. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Assessor360 outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple OIQA datasets.

Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questions

In this work we try to apply Large Language Models (LLMs) to reframe the Question Answering task as Programming (QAaP). Due to the inherent dynamic nature of the real world, factual questions frequently involve a symbolic constraint: time, solving these questions necessitates not only extensive world knowledge, but also advanced reasoning ability to satisfy the temporal constraints. Despite the remarkable intelligence exhibited by LLMs in various NLP tasks, our experiments reveal that the aforementioned problems continue to pose a significant challenge to existing LLMs. To solve these time-sensitive factual questions, considering that modern LLMs possess superior ability in both natural language understanding and programming,we endeavor to leverage LLMs to represent diversely expressed text as well-structured code, and thereby grasp the desired knowledge along with the underlying symbolic constraint.