The project was funded in 2021-2023 by the National Programme of Estonian Language Technology. Its main aim was to develop spelling and grammar correction tools for the Estonian language. The main challenge was the very small amount of available error correction data needed for such development. To mitigate this, (1) we annotated more correction data for model training and testing, (2) we tested transfer-learning, i.e. retraining machine learning models created for other tasks, so as not to depend solely on correction data, (3) we compared the developed method and model with alternatives, including large language models. We also developed automatic evaluation, which can calculate the accuracy and yield of corrections by error category, so that the effectiveness of different methods can be compared in detail. There has been a breakthrough in large language models during the project: GPT4, a commercial language model with Estonian-language support, has been created. We took into account the existence of the model when adjusting plans and in the report we present a comparison with the ability of GPT4 to improve the Estonian language text. The final results show that the approach we have developed provides better scores than GPT4 and the result is usable but not entirely reliable yet. The report also contains ideas on how GPT4 and other major language models can be implemented in the future, focusing on open-source solutions. All results of this project are open-data/open-source, with licenses that allow them to be used for purposes including commercial ones.
Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) is a nascent multimodal task that aims to identify named entities, entity types and their corresponding visual regions. GMNER task exhibits two challenging properties: 1) The weak correlation between image-text pairs in social media results in a significant portion of named entities being ungroundable. 2) There exists a distinction between coarse-grained referring expressions commonly used in similar tasks (e.g., phrase localization, referring expression comprehension) and fine-grained named entities. In this paper, we propose RiVEG, a unified framework that reformulates GMNER into a joint MNER-VE-VG task by leveraging large language models (LLMs) as a connecting bridge. This reformulation brings two benefits: 1) It maintains the optimal MNER performance and eliminates the need for employing object detection methods to pre-extract regional features, thereby naturally addressing two major limitations of existing GMNER methods. 2) The introduction of entity expansion expression and Visual Entailment (VE) Module unifies Visual Grounding (VG) and Entity Grounding (EG). It enables RiVEG to effortlessly inherit the Visual Entailment and Visual Grounding capabilities of any current or prospective multimodal pretraining models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RiVEG outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the existing GMNER dataset and achieves absolute leads of 10.65%, 6.21%, and 8.83% in all three subtasks.
Although the task of anticipating future actions is highly uncertain, information from additional modalities help to narrow down plausible action choices. Each modality provides different environmental context for the model to learn from. While previous multi-modal methods leverage information from modalities such as video and audio, we primarily explore how text inputs for actions and objects can also enable more accurate action anticipation. Therefore, we propose a Multi-modal Anticipative Transformer (MAT), an attention-based video transformer architecture that jointly learns from multi-modal features and text captions. We train our model in two-stages, where the model first learns to predict actions in the video clip by aligning with captions, and during the second stage, we fine-tune the model to predict future actions. Compared to existing methods, MAT has the advantage of learning additional environmental context from two kinds of text inputs: action descriptions during the pre-training stage, and the text inputs for detected objects and actions during modality feature fusion. Through extensive experiments, we evaluate the effectiveness of the pre-training stage, and show that our model outperforms previous methods on all datasets. In addition, we examine the impact of object and action information obtained via text and perform extensive ablations. We evaluate the performance on on three datasets: EpicKitchens-100, EpicKitchens-55 and EGTEA GAZE+; and show that text descriptions do indeed aid in more effective action anticipation.
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks in recent years. However, their universal nature poses limitations in scenarios requiring personalized responses, such as recommendation systems and chatbots. This paper investigates methods to personalize LLMs, comparing fine-tuning and zero-shot reasoning approaches on subjective tasks. Results demonstrate that personalized fine-tuning improves model reasoning compared to non-personalized models. Experiments on datasets for emotion recognition and hate speech detection show consistent performance gains with personalized methods across different LLM architectures. These findings underscore the importance of personalization for enhancing LLM capabilities in subjective text perception tasks.
Autoencoders (AE) are simple yet powerful class of neural networks that compress data by projecting input into low-dimensional latent space (LS). Whereas LS is formed according to the loss function minimization during training, its properties and topology are not controlled directly. In this paper we focus on AE LS properties and propose two methods for obtaining LS with desired topology, called LS configuration. The proposed methods include loss configuration using a geometric loss term that acts directly in LS, and encoder configuration. We show that the former allows to reliably obtain LS with desired configuration by defining the positions and shapes of LS clusters for supervised AE (SAE). Knowing LS configuration allows to define similarity measure in LS to predict labels or estimate similarity for multiple inputs without using decoders or classifiers. We also show that this leads to more stable and interpretable training. We show that SAE trained for clothes texture classification using the proposed method generalizes well to unseen data from LIP, Market1501, and WildTrack datasets without fine-tuning, and even allows to evaluate similarity for unseen classes. We further illustrate the advantages of pre-configured LS similarity estimation with cross-dataset searches and text-based search using a text query without language models.
Recent advancements in text-to-image models have significantly enhanced image generation capabilities, yet a notable gap of open-source models persists in bilingual or Chinese language support. To address this need, we present Taiyi-Diffusion-XL, a new Chinese and English bilingual text-to-image model which is developed by extending the capabilities of CLIP and Stable-Diffusion-XL through a process of bilingual continuous pre-training. This approach includes the efficient expansion of vocabulary by integrating the most frequently used Chinese characters into CLIP's tokenizer and embedding layers, coupled with an absolute position encoding expansion. Additionally, we enrich text prompts by large vision-language model, leading to better images captions and possess higher visual quality. These enhancements are subsequently applied to downstream text-to-image models. Our empirical results indicate that the developed CLIP model excels in bilingual image-text retrieval.Furthermore, the bilingual image generation capabilities of Taiyi-Diffusion-XL surpass previous models. This research leads to the development and open-sourcing of the Taiyi-Diffusion-XL model, representing a notable advancement in the field of image generation, particularly for Chinese language applications. This contribution is a step forward in addressing the need for more diverse language support in multimodal research. The model and demonstration are made publicly available at \href{https://huggingface.co/IDEA-CCNL/Taiyi-Stable-Diffusion-XL-3.5B/}{this https URL}, fostering further research and collaboration in this domain.
Scene Text Recognition (STR) is a challenging task that involves recognizing text within images of natural scenes. Although current state-of-the-art models for STR exhibit high performance, they typically suffer from low inference efficiency due to their reliance on hybrid architectures comprised of visual encoders and sequence decoders. In this work, we propose the VIsion Permutable extractor for fast and efficient scene Text Recognition (VIPTR), which achieves an impressive balance between high performance and rapid inference speeds in the domain of STR. Specifically, VIPTR leverages a visual-semantic extractor with a pyramid structure, characterized by multiple self-attention layers, while eschewing the traditional sequence decoder. This design choice results in a lightweight and efficient model capable of handling inputs of varying sizes. Extensive experimental results on various standard datasets for both Chinese and English scene text recognition validate the superiority of VIPTR. Notably, the VIPTR-T (Tiny) variant delivers highly competitive accuracy on par with other lightweight models and achieves SOTA inference speeds. Meanwhile, the VIPTR-L (Large) variant attains greater recognition accuracy, while maintaining a low parameter count and favorable inference speed. Our proposed method provides a compelling solution for the STR challenge, which blends high accuracy with efficiency and greatly benefits real-world applications requiring fast and reliable text recognition. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/cxfyxl/VIPTR.
Causal discovery (CD) and Large Language Models (LLMs) represent two emerging fields of study with significant implications for artificial intelligence. Despite their distinct origins, CD focuses on uncovering cause-effect relationships from data, and LLMs on processing and generating humanlike text, the convergence of these domains offers novel insights and methodologies for understanding complex systems. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the integration of LLMs, such as GPT4, into CD tasks. We systematically review and compare existing approaches that leverage LLMs for various CD tasks and highlight their innovative use of metadata and natural language to infer causal structures. Our analysis reveals the strengths and potential of LLMs in both enhancing traditional CD methods and as an imperfect expert, alongside the challenges and limitations inherent in current practices. Furthermore, we identify gaps in the literature and propose future research directions aimed at harnessing the full potential of LLMs in causality research. To our knowledge, this is the first survey to offer a unified and detailed examination of the synergy between LLMs and CD, setting the stage for future advancements in the field.
Large language models (LLMs) predominantly employ decoder-only transformer architectures, necessitating the retention of keys/values information for historical tokens to provide contextual information and avoid redundant computation. However, the substantial size and parameter volume of these LLMs require massive GPU memory. This memory demand increases with the length of the input text, leading to an urgent need for more efficient methods of information storage and processing. This study introduces Anchor-based LLMs (AnLLMs), which utilize an innovative anchor-based self-attention network (AnSAN) and also an anchor-based inference strategy. This approach enables LLMs to compress sequence information into an anchor token, reducing the keys/values cache and enhancing inference efficiency. Experiments on question-answering benchmarks reveal that AnLLMs maintain similar accuracy levels while achieving up to 99% keys/values cache reduction and up to 3.5 times faster inference. Despite a minor compromise in accuracy, the substantial enhancements of AnLLMs employing the AnSAN technique in resource utilization and computational efficiency underscore their potential for practical LLM applications.
The development of state-of-the-art generative large language models (LLMs) disproportionately relies on English-centric tokenizers, vocabulary and pre-training data. Despite the fact that some LLMs have multilingual capabilities, recent studies have shown that their inference efficiency deteriorates when generating text in languages other than English. This results in increased inference time and costs. Cross-lingual vocabulary adaptation methods have been proposed for adapting models to a target language aiming to improve downstream performance. However, the effectiveness of these methods on increasing inference efficiency of generative LLMs has yet to be explored. In this paper, we perform an empirical study of various cross-lingual vocabulary adaptation methods on five generative LLMs (including monolingual and multilingual models) across four typologically-diverse languages and four natural language understanding tasks. We find that cross-lingual vocabulary adaptation substantially contributes to LLM inference speedups of up to 271.5%. We also show that adapting LLMs that have been pre-trained on more balanced multilingual data results in downstream performance comparable to the original models.