DNTextSpotter: Arbitrary-Shaped Scene Text Spotting via Improved Denoising Training

More and more end-to-end text spotting methods based on Transformer architecture have demonstrated superior performance. These methods utilize a bipartite graph matching algorithm to perform one-to-one optimal matching between predicted objects and actual objects. However, the instability of bipartite graph matching can lead to inconsistent optimization targets, thereby affecting the training performance of the model. Existing literature applies denoising training to solve the problem of bipartite graph matching instability in object detection tasks. Unfortunately, this denoising training method cannot be directly applied to text spotting tasks, as these tasks need to perform irregular shape detection tasks and more complex text recognition tasks than classification. To address this issue, we propose a novel denoising training method (DNTextSpotter) for arbitrary-shaped text spotting. Specifically, we decompose the queries of the denoising part into noised positional queries and noised content queries. We use the four Bezier control points of the Bezier center curve to generate the noised positional queries. For the noised content queries, considering that the output of the text in a fixed positional order is not conducive to aligning position with content, we employ a masked character sliding method to initialize noised content queries, thereby assisting in the alignment of text content and position. To improve the model's perception of the background, we further utilize an additional loss function for background characters classification in the denoising training part.Although DNTextSpotter is conceptually simple, it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on four benchmarks (Total-Text, SCUT-CTW1500, ICDAR15, and Inverse-Text), especially yielding an improvement of 11.3% against the best approach in Inverse-Text dataset.

AIM: Let Any Multi-modal Large Language Models Embrace Efficient In-Context Learning

In-context learning (ICL) facilitates Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibiting emergent ability on downstream tasks without updating billions of parameters. However, in the area of multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), two problems hinder the application of multi-modal ICL: (1) Most primary MLLMs are only trained on single-image datasets, making them unable to read multi-modal demonstrations. (2) With the demonstrations increasing, thousands of visual tokens highly challenge hardware and degrade ICL performance. During preliminary explorations, we discovered that the inner LLM tends to focus more on the linguistic modality within multi-modal demonstrations to generate responses. Therefore, we propose a general and light-weighted framework \textbf{AIM} to tackle the mentioned problems through \textbf{A}ggregating \textbf{I}mage information of \textbf{M}ultimodal demonstrations to the dense latent space of the corresponding linguistic part. Specifically, AIM first uses the frozen backbone MLLM to read each image-text demonstration and extracts the vector representations on top of the text. These vectors naturally fuse the information of the image-text pair, and AIM transforms them into fused virtual tokens acceptable for the inner LLM via a trainable projection layer. Ultimately, these fused tokens function as variants of multi-modal demonstrations, fed into the MLLM to direct its response to the current query as usual. Because these fused tokens stem from the textual component of the image-text pair, a multi-modal demonstration is nearly reduced to a pure textual demonstration, thus seamlessly applying to any MLLMs. With its de facto MLLM frozen, AIM is parameter-efficient and we train it on public multi-modal web corpora which have nothing to do with downstream test tasks.

Guiding ChatGPT to Generate Salient Domain Summaries

ChatGPT is instruct-tuned to generate general and human-expected content to align with human preference through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), meanwhile resulting in generated responses not salient enough. Therefore, in this case, ChatGPT may fail to satisfy domain requirements in zero-shot settings, leading to poor ROUGE scores. Inspired by the In-Context Learning (ICL) and retelling ability of ChatGPT, this paper proposes PADS, a \textbf{P}ipeline for \textbf{A}ssisting ChatGPT in \textbf{D}omain \textbf{S}ummarization. PADS consists of a retriever to retrieve similar examples from corpora and a rank model to rerank the multiple candidate summaries generated by ChatGPT. Specifically, given an inference document, we first retrieve an in-context demonstration via the retriever. Then, we require ChatGPT to generate $k$ candidate summaries for the inference document at a time under the guidance of the retrieved demonstration. Finally, the rank model independently scores the $k$ candidate summaries according to their quality and selects the optimal one. We extensively explore dense and sparse retrieval methods to select effective demonstrations for reference and efficiently train the rank model to reflect the quality of candidate summaries for each given summarized document. Additionally, PADS contains merely 400M trainable parameters originating from the rank model and we merely collect 2.5k data to train it. We evaluate PADS on five datasets from different domains, and the result indicates that each module in PADS is committed to effectively guiding ChatGPT to generate salient summaries fitting different domain requirements. Specifically, in the popular summarization dataset Gigaword, PADS achieves over +8 gain on ROUGE-L, compared with the naive ChatGPT in the zero-shot setting. \footnote{Our code are available at \url{https://github.com/jungao1106/PADS}}

Prompt Chaining or Stepwise Prompt? Refinement in Text Summarization

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the capacity to improve summary quality by mirroring a human-like iterative process of critique and refinement starting from the initial draft. Two strategies are designed to perform this iterative process: Prompt Chaining and Stepwise Prompt. Prompt chaining orchestrates the drafting, critiquing, and refining phases through a series of three discrete prompts, while Stepwise prompt integrates these phases within a single prompt. However, the relative effectiveness of the two methods has not been extensively studied. This paper is dedicated to examining and comparing these two methods in the context of text summarization to ascertain which method stands out as the most effective. Experimental results show that the prompt chaining method can produce a more favorable outcome. This might be because stepwise prompt might produce a simulated refinement process according to our various experiments. Since refinement is adaptable to diverse tasks, our conclusions have the potential to be extrapolated to other applications, thereby offering insights that may contribute to the broader development of LLMs.

CoUDA: Coherence Evaluation via Unified Data Augmentation

Coherence evaluation aims to assess the organization and structure of a discourse, which remains challenging even in the era of large language models. Due to the scarcity of annotated data, data augmentation is commonly used for training coherence evaluation models. However, previous augmentations for this task primarily rely on heuristic rules, lacking designing criteria as guidance. In this paper, we take inspiration from linguistic theory of discourse structure, and propose a data augmentation framework named CoUDA. CoUDA breaks down discourse coherence into global and local aspects, and designs augmentation strategies for both aspects, respectively. Especially for local coherence, we propose a novel generative strategy for constructing augmentation samples, which involves post-pretraining a generative model and applying two controlling mechanisms to control the difficulty of generated samples. During inference, CoUDA also jointly evaluates both global and local aspects to comprehensively assess the overall coherence of a discourse. Extensive experiments in coherence evaluation show that, with only 233M parameters, CoUDA achieves state-of-the-art performance in both pointwise scoring and pairwise ranking tasks, even surpassing recent GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 based metrics.

Evolving Large Language Model Assistant with Long-Term Conditional Memory

With the rapid development of large language models, AI assistants like ChatGPT have widely entered people's works and lives. In this paper, we present an evolving large language model assistant that utilizes verbal long-term memory. It focuses on preserving the knowledge and experience from the history dialogue between the user and AI assistant, which can be applied to future dialogue for generating a better response. The model generates a set of records for each finished dialogue and stores them in the memory. In later usage, given a new user input, the model uses it to retrieve its related memory to improve the quality of the response. To find the best form of memory, we explore different ways of constructing the memory and propose a new memorizing mechanism called conditional memory to solve the problems in previous methods. We also investigate the retrieval and usage of memory in the generation process. The assistant uses GPT-4 as the backbone and we evaluate it on three constructed test datasets focusing on different abilities required by an AI assistant with long-term memory.

KBioXLM: A Knowledge-anchored Biomedical Multilingual Pretrained Language Model

Most biomedical pretrained language models are monolingual and cannot handle the growing cross-lingual requirements. The scarcity of non-English domain corpora, not to mention parallel data, poses a significant hurdle in training multilingual biomedical models. Since knowledge forms the core of domain-specific corpora and can be translated into various languages accurately, we propose a model called KBioXLM, which transforms the multilingual pretrained model XLM-R into the biomedical domain using a knowledge-anchored approach. We achieve a biomedical multilingual corpus by incorporating three granularity knowledge alignments (entity, fact, and passage levels) into monolingual corpora. Then we design three corresponding training tasks (entity masking, relation masking, and passage relation prediction) and continue training on top of the XLM-R model to enhance its domain cross-lingual ability. To validate the effectiveness of our model, we translate the English benchmarks of multiple tasks into Chinese. Experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms monolingual and multilingual pretrained models in cross-lingual zero-shot and few-shot scenarios, achieving improvements of up to 10+ points. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ngwlh-gl/KBioXLM.

RSpell: Retrieval-augmented Framework for Domain Adaptive Chinese Spelling Check

Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) refers to the detection and correction of spelling errors in Chinese texts. In practical application scenarios, it is important to make CSC models have the ability to correct errors across different domains. In this paper, we propose a retrieval-augmented spelling check framework called RSpell, which searches corresponding domain terms and incorporates them into CSC models. Specifically, we employ pinyin fuzzy matching to search for terms, which are combined with the input and fed into the CSC model. Then, we introduce an adaptive process control mechanism to dynamically adjust the impact of external knowledge on the model. Additionally, we develop an iterative strategy for the RSpell framework to enhance reasoning capabilities. We conducted experiments on CSC datasets in three domains: law, medicine, and official document writing. The results demonstrate that RSpell achieves state-of-the-art performance in both zero-shot and fine-tuning scenarios, demonstrating the effectiveness of the retrieval-augmented CSC framework. Our code is available at https://github.com/47777777/Rspell.

RaSa: Relation and Sensitivity Aware Representation Learning for Text-based Person Search

Text-based person search aims to retrieve the specified person images given a textual description. The key to tackling such a challenging task is to learn powerful multi-modal representations. Towards this, we propose a Relation and Sensitivity aware representation learning method (RaSa), including two novel tasks: Relation-Aware learning (RA) and Sensitivity-Aware learning (SA). For one thing, existing methods cluster representations of all positive pairs without distinction and overlook the noise problem caused by the weak positive pairs where the text and the paired image have noise correspondences, thus leading to overfitting learning. RA offsets the overfitting risk by introducing a novel positive relation detection task (i.e., learning to distinguish strong and weak positive pairs). For another thing, learning invariant representation under data augmentation (i.e., being insensitive to some transformations) is a general practice for improving representation's robustness in existing methods. Beyond that, we encourage the representation to perceive the sensitive transformation by SA (i.e., learning to detect the replaced words), thus promoting the representation's robustness. Experiments demonstrate that RaSa outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by 6.94%, 4.45% and 15.35% in terms of Rank@1 on CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES and RSTPReid datasets, respectively. Code is available at: https://github.com/Flame-Chasers/RaSa.

Text-based Person Search without Parallel Image-Text Data

Text-based person search (TBPS) aims to retrieve the images of the target person from a large image gallery based on a given natural language description. Existing methods are dominated by training models with parallel image-text pairs, which are very costly to collect. In this paper, we make the first attempt to explore TBPS without parallel image-text data ($\mu$-TBPS), in which only non-parallel images and texts, or even image-only data, can be adopted. Towards this end, we propose a two-stage framework, generation-then-retrieval (GTR), to first generate the corresponding pseudo text for each image and then perform the retrieval in a supervised manner. In the generation stage, we propose a fine-grained image captioning strategy to obtain an enriched description of the person image, which firstly utilizes a set of instruction prompts to activate the off-the-shelf pretrained vision-language model to capture and generate fine-grained person attributes, and then converts the extracted attributes into a textual description via the finetuned large language model or the hand-crafted template. In the retrieval stage, considering the noise interference of the generated texts for training model, we develop a confidence score-based training scheme by enabling more reliable texts to contribute more during the training. Experimental results on multiple TBPS benchmarks (i.e., CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES and RSTPReid) show that the proposed GTR can achieve a promising performance without relying on parallel image-text data.