We address the problem of retrieving images with both a sketch and a text query. We present TASK-former (Text And SKetch transformer), an end-to-end trainable model for image retrieval using a text description and a sketch as input. We argue that both input modalities complement each other in a manner that cannot be achieved easily by either one alone. TASK-former follows the late-fusion dual-encoder approach, similar to CLIP, which allows efficient and scalable retrieval since the retrieval set can be indexed independently of the queries. We empirically demonstrate that using an input sketch (even a poorly drawn one) in addition to text considerably increases retrieval recall compared to traditional text-based image retrieval. To evaluate our approach, we collect 5,000 hand-drawn sketches for images in the test set of the COCO dataset. The collected sketches are available a https://janesjanes.github.io/tsbir/.
We address the challenge of building domain-specific knowledge models for industrial use cases, where labelled data and taxonomic information is initially scarce. Our focus is on inductive link prediction models as a basis for practical tools that support knowledge engineers with exploring text collections and discovering and linking new (so-called open-world) entities to the knowledge graph. We argue that - though neural approaches to text mining have yielded impressive results in the past years - current benchmarks do not reflect the typical challenges encountered in the industrial wild properly. Therefore, our first contribution is an open benchmark coined IRT2 (inductive reasoning with text) that (1) covers knowledge graphs of varying sizes (including very small ones), (2) comes with incidental, low-quality text mentions, and (3) includes not only triple completion but also ranking, which is relevant for supporting experts with discovery tasks. We investigate two neural models for inductive link prediction, one based on end-to-end learning and one that learns from the knowledge graph and text data in separate steps. These models compete with a strong bag-of-words baseline. The results show a significant advance in performance for the neural approaches as soon as the available graph data decreases for linking. For ranking, the results are promising, and the neural approaches outperform the sparse retriever by a wide margin.
We propose two frameworks to deal with problem settings in which both structured and unstructured data are available. Structured data problems are best solved by traditional machine learning models such as boosting and tree-based algorithms, whereas deep learning has been widely applied to problems dealing with images, text, audio, and other unstructured data sources. However, for the setting in which both structured and unstructured data are accessible, it is not obvious what the best modeling approach is to enhance performance on both data sources simultaneously. Our proposed frameworks allow joint learning on both kinds of data by integrating the paradigms of boosting models and deep neural networks. The first framework, the boosted-feature-vector deep learning network, learns features from the structured data using gradient boosting and combines them with embeddings from unstructured data via a two-branch deep neural network. Secondly, the two-weak-learner boosting framework extends the boosting paradigm to the setting with two input data sources. We present and compare first- and second-order methods of this framework. Our experimental results on both public and real-world datasets show performance gains achieved by the frameworks over selected baselines by magnitudes of 0.1% - 4.7%.
We present GLM-Dialog, a large-scale language model (LLM) with 10B parameters capable of knowledge-grounded conversation in Chinese using a search engine to access the Internet knowledge. GLM-Dialog offers a series of applicable techniques for exploiting various external knowledge including both helpful and noisy knowledge, enabling the creation of robust knowledge-grounded dialogue LLMs with limited proper datasets. To evaluate the GLM-Dialog more fairly, we also propose a novel evaluation method to allow humans to converse with multiple deployed bots simultaneously and compare their performance implicitly instead of explicitly rating using multidimensional metrics.Comprehensive evaluations from automatic to human perspective demonstrate the advantages of GLM-Dialog comparing with existing open source Chinese dialogue models. We release both the model checkpoint and source code, and also deploy it as a WeChat application to interact with users. We offer our evaluation platform online in an effort to prompt the development of open source models and reliable dialogue evaluation systems. The additional easy-to-use toolkit that consists of short text entity linking, query generation, and helpful knowledge classification is also released to enable diverse applications. All the source code is available on Github.
In this paper, we re-examine the task of cross-modal clip-sentence retrieval, where the clip is part of a longer untrimmed video. When the clip is short or visually ambiguous, knowledge of its local temporal context (i.e. surrounding video segments) can be used to improve the retrieval performance. We propose Context Transformer (ConTra); an encoder architecture that models the interaction between a video clip and its local temporal context in order to enhance its embedded representations. Importantly, we supervise the context transformer using contrastive losses in the cross-modal embedding space. We explore context transformers for video and text modalities. Results consistently demonstrate improved performance on three datasets: YouCook2, EPIC-KITCHENS and a clip-sentence version of ActivityNet Captions. Exhaustive ablation studies and context analysis show the efficacy of the proposed method.
In the real-world question answering scenarios, hybrid form combining both tabular and textual contents has attracted more and more attention, among which numerical reasoning problem is one of the most typical and challenging problems. Existing methods usually adopt encoder-decoder framework to represent hybrid contents and generate answers. However, it can not capture the rich relationship among numerical value, table schema, and text information on the encoder side. The decoder uses a simple predefined operator classifier which is not flexible enough to handle numerical reasoning processes with diverse expressions. To address these problems, this paper proposes a \textbf{Re}lational \textbf{G}raph enhanced \textbf{H}ybrid table-text \textbf{N}umerical reasoning model with \textbf{T}ree decoder (\textbf{RegHNT}). It models the numerical question answering over table-text hybrid contents as an expression tree generation task. Moreover, we propose a novel relational graph modeling method, which models alignment between questions, tables, and paragraphs. We validated our model on the publicly available table-text hybrid QA benchmark (TAT-QA). The proposed RegHNT significantly outperform the baseline model and achieve state-of-the-art results\footnote{We openly released the source code and data at~\url{https://github.com/lfy79001/RegHNT}}~(2022-05-05).
Potential harms of large language models can be mitigated by watermarking model output, i.e., embedding signals into generated text that are invisible to humans but algorithmically detectable from a short span of tokens. We propose a watermarking framework for proprietary language models. The watermark can be embedded with negligible impact on text quality, and can be detected using an efficient open-source algorithm without access to the language model API or parameters. The watermark works by selecting a randomized set of whitelist tokens before a word is generated, and then softly promoting use of whitelist tokens during sampling. We propose a statistical test for detecting the watermark with interpretable p-values, and derive an information-theoretic framework for analyzing the sensitivity of the watermark. We test the watermark using a multi-billion parameter model from the Open Pretrained Transformer (OPT) family, and discuss robustness and security.
Mobile app stores produce a tremendous amount of data in the form of user reviews, which is a huge source of user requirements and sentiments; such reviews allow app developers to proactively address issues in their apps. However, only a small number of reviews capture common issues and sentiments which creates a need for automatically identifying prominent reviews. Unfortunately, most existing work in text ranking and popularity prediction focuses on social contexts where other signals are available, which renders such works ineffective in the context of app reviews. In this work, we propose a new framework, PPrior, that enables proactive prioritization of app issues through identifying prominent reviews (ones predicted to receive a large number of votes in a given time window). Predicting highly-voted reviews is challenging given that, unlike social posts, social network features of users are not available. Moreover, there is an issue of class imbalance, since a large number of user reviews receive little to no votes. PPrior employs a pre-trained T5 model and works in three phases. Phase one adapts the pre-trained T5 model to the user reviews data in a self-supervised fashion. In phase two, we leverage contrastive training to learn a generic and task-independent representation of user reviews. Phase three uses radius neighbors classifier t o m ake t he final predictions. This phase also uses FAISS index for scalability and efficient search. To conduct extensive experiments, we acquired a large dataset of over 2.1 million user reviews from Google Play. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework when compared against several state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, the accuracy of PPrior in predicting prominent reviews is comparable to that of experienced app developers.
We demonstrate a proof-of-concept of a large language model conducting corporate lobbying related activities. An autoregressive large language model (OpenAI's text-davinci-003) determines if proposed U.S. Congressional bills are relevant to specific public companies and provides explanations and confidence levels. For the bills the model deems as relevant, the model drafts a letter to the sponsor of the bill in an attempt to persuade the congressperson to make changes to the proposed legislation. We use hundreds of novel ground-truth labels of the relevance of a bill to a company to benchmark the performance of the model, which outperforms the baseline of predicting the most common outcome of irrelevance. We also benchmark the performance of the previous OpenAI GPT-3 model (text-davinci-002), which was the state-of-the-art model on many academic natural language tasks until text-davinci-003 was recently released. The performance of text-davinci-002 is worse than a simple benchmark. These results suggest that, as large language models continue to exhibit improved natural language understanding capabilities, performance on lobbying related tasks will continue to improve. Longer-term, if AI begins to influence law in a manner that is not a direct extension of human intentions, this threatens the critical role that law as information could play in aligning AI with humans. Initially, AI is being used to simply augment human lobbyists for a small portion of their daily tasks. However, firms have an incentive to use less and less human oversight over automated assessments of policy ideas and the written communication to regulatory agencies and Congressional staffers. The core question raised is where to draw the line between human-driven and AI-driven policy influence.
Teaching neural models to generate narrative coherent texts is a critical problem. Recent pre-trained language models have achieved promising results, but there is still a gap between human written texts and machine-generated outputs. In this work, we propose a novel multi-task training strategy for coherent text generation grounded on the cognitive theory of writing, which empowers the model to learn essential subskills needed for writing including planning and reviewing besides end-to-end generation. We extensively evaluate our model on three open-ended generation tasks including story generation, news article writing and argument generation. Experiments show that our model achieves better results on both few-shot and fully-supervised settings than strong baselines, and human evaluations confirm that our model can generate more coherent outputs.