Large language models produce human-like text that drive a growing number of applications. However, recent literature and, increasingly, real world observations, have demonstrated that these models can generate language that is toxic, biased, untruthful or otherwise harmful. Though work to evaluate language model harms is under way, translating foresight about which harms may arise into rigorous benchmarks is not straightforward. To facilitate this translation, we outline six ways of characterizing harmful text which merit explicit consideration when designing new benchmarks. We then use these characteristics as a lens to identify trends and gaps in existing benchmarks. Finally, we apply them in a case study of the Perspective API, a toxicity classifier that is widely used in harm benchmarks. Our characteristics provide one piece of the bridge that translates between foresight and effective evaluation.
Machine learning is the science of credit assignment: finding patterns in observations that predict the consequences of actions and help to improve future performance. Credit assignment is also required for human understanding of how the world works, not only for individuals navigating daily life, but also for academic professionals like historians who interpret the present in light of past events. Here I focus on the history of modern artificial intelligence (AI) which is dominated by artificial neural networks (NNs) and deep learning, both conceptually closer to the old field of cybernetics than to what's been called AI since 1956 (e.g., expert systems and logic programming). A modern history of AI will emphasize breakthroughs outside of the focus of traditional AI text books, in particular, mathematical foundations of today's NNs such as the chain rule (1676), the first NNs (linear regression, circa 1800), and the first working deep learners (1965-). From the perspective of 2022, I provide a timeline of the -- in hindsight -- most important relevant events in the history of NNs, deep learning, AI, computer science, and mathematics in general, crediting those who laid foundations of the field. The text contains numerous hyperlinks to relevant overview sites from my AI Blog. It supplements my previous deep learning survey (2015) which provides hundreds of additional references. Finally, to round it off, I'll put things in a broader historic context spanning the time since the Big Bang until when the universe will be many times older than it is now.
The understanding capabilities of current state-of-the-art 3D models are limited by datasets with a small number of annotated data and a pre-defined set of categories. In its 2D counterpart, recent advances have shown that similar problems can be significantly alleviated by employing knowledge from other modalities, such as language. Inspired by this, leveraging multimodal information for 3D modality could be promising to improve 3D understanding under the restricted data regime, but this line of research is not well studied. Therefore, we introduce ULIP to learn a unified representation of image, text, and 3D point cloud by pre-training with object triplets from the three modalities. To overcome the shortage of training triplets, ULIP leverages a pre-trained vision-language model that has already learned a common visual and textual space by training with massive image-text pairs. Then, ULIP learns a 3D representation space aligned with the common image-text space, using a small number of automatically synthesized triplets. ULIP is agnostic to 3D backbone networks and can easily be integrated into any 3D architecture. Experiments show that ULIP effectively improves the performance of multiple recent 3D backbones by simply pre-training them on ShapeNet55 using our framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both standard 3D classification and zero-shot 3D classification on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN. ULIP also improves the performance of PointMLP by around 3% in 3D classification on ScanObjectNN, and outperforms PointCLIP by 28.8% on top-1 accuracy for zero-shot 3D classification on ModelNet40. Our code and pre-trained models will be released.
Text-to-image models offer unprecedented freedom to guide creation through natural language. Yet, it is unclear how such freedom can be exercised to generate images of specific unique concepts, modify their appearance, or compose them in new roles and novel scenes. In other words, we ask: how can we use language-guided models to turn our cat into a painting, or imagine a new product based on our favorite toy? Here we present a simple approach that allows such creative freedom. Using only 3-5 images of a user-provided concept, like an object or a style, we learn to represent it through new "words" in the embedding space of a frozen text-to-image model. These "words" can be composed into natural language sentences, guiding personalized creation in an intuitive way. Notably, we find evidence that a single word embedding is sufficient for capturing unique and varied concepts. We compare our approach to a wide range of baselines, and demonstrate that it can more faithfully portray the concepts across a range of applications and tasks. Our code, data and new words will be available at: https://textual-inversion.github.io
Recent text-to-image diffusion models are able to generate convincing results of unprecedented quality. However, it is nearly impossible to control the shapes of different regions/objects or their layout in a fine-grained fashion. Previous attempts to provide such controls were hindered by their reliance on a fixed set of labels. To this end, we present SpaText - a new method for text-to-image generation using open-vocabulary scene control. In addition to a global text prompt that describes the entire scene, the user provides a segmentation map where each region of interest is annotated by a free-form natural language description. Due to lack of large-scale datasets that have a detailed textual description for each region in the image, we choose to leverage the current large-scale text-to-image datasets and base our approach on a novel CLIP-based spatio-textual representation, and show its effectiveness on two state-of-the-art diffusion models: pixel-based and latent-based. In addition, we show how to extend the classifier-free guidance method in diffusion models to the multi-conditional case and present an alternative accelerated inference algorithm. Finally, we offer several automatic evaluation metrics and use them, in addition to FID scores and a user study, to evaluate our method and show that it achieves state-of-the-art results on image generation with free-form textual scene control.
This paper presents a solution to the GenChal 2022 shared task dedicated to feedback comment generation for writing learning. In terms of this task given a text with an error and a span of the error, a system generates an explanatory note that helps the writer (language learner) to improve their writing skills. Our solution is based on fine-tuning the T5 model on the initial dataset augmented according to syntactical dependencies of the words located within indicated error span. The solution of our team "nigula" obtained second place according to manual evaluation by the organizers.
Extreme multi-label text classification (XMTC) refers to the problem of tagging a given text with the most relevant subset of labels from a large label set. A majority of labels only have a few training instances due to large label dimensionality in XMTC. To solve this data sparsity issue, most existing XMTC methods take advantage of fixed label clusters obtained in early stage to balance performance on tail labels and head labels. However, such label clusters provide static and coarse-grained semantic scope for every text, which ignores distinct characteristics of different texts and has difficulties modelling accurate semantics scope for texts with tail labels. In this paper, we propose a novel framework TReaderXML for XMTC, which adopts dynamic and fine-grained semantic scope from teacher knowledge for individual text to optimize text conditional prior category semantic ranges. TReaderXML dynamically obtains teacher knowledge for each text by similar texts and hierarchical label information in training sets to release the ability of distinctly fine-grained label-oriented semantic scope. Then, TReaderXML benefits from a novel dual cooperative network that firstly learns features of a text and its corresponding label-oriented semantic scope by parallel Encoding Module and Reading Module, secondly embeds two parts by Interaction Module to regularize the text's representation by dynamic and fine-grained label-oriented semantic scope, and finally find target labels by Prediction Module. Experimental results on three XMTC benchmark datasets show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art results and especially performs well for severely imbalanced and sparse datasets.
We present an efficient text-to-video generation framework based on latent diffusion models, termed MagicVideo. Given a text description, MagicVideo can generate photo-realistic video clips with high relevance to the text content. With the proposed efficient latent 3D U-Net design, MagicVideo can generate video clips with 256x256 spatial resolution on a single GPU card, which is 64x faster than the recent video diffusion model (VDM). Unlike previous works that train video generation from scratch in the RGB space, we propose to generate video clips in a low-dimensional latent space. We further utilize all the convolution operator weights of pre-trained text-to-image generative U-Net models for faster training. To achieve this, we introduce two new designs to adapt the U-Net decoder to video data: a framewise lightweight adaptor for the image-to-video distribution adjustment and a directed temporal attention module to capture frame temporal dependencies. The whole generation process is within the low-dimension latent space of a pre-trained variation auto-encoder. We demonstrate that MagicVideo can generate both realistic video content and imaginary content in a photo-realistic style with a trade-off in terms of quality and computational cost. Refer to https://magicvideo.github.io/# for more examples.
Language understanding is a key scientific issue in the fields of cognitive and computer science. However, the two disciplines differ substantially in the specific research questions. Cognitive science focuses on analyzing the specific mechanism of the brain and investigating the brain's response to language; few studies have examined the brain's language system as a whole. By contrast, computer scientists focus on the efficiency of practical applications when choosing research questions but may ignore the most essential laws of language. Given these differences, can a combination of the disciplines offer new insights for building intelligent language models and studying language cognitive mechanisms? In the following text, we first review the research questions, history, and methods of language understanding in cognitive and computer science, focusing on the current progress and challenges. We then compare and contrast the research of language understanding in cognitive and computer sciences. Finally, we review existing work that combines insights from language cognition and language computation and offer prospects for future development trends.
We introduce Patch Aligned Contrastive Learning (PACL), a modified compatibility function for CLIP's contrastive loss, intending to train an alignment between the patch tokens of the vision encoder and the CLS token of the text encoder. With such an alignment, a model can identify regions of an image corresponding to a given text input, and therefore transfer seamlessly to the task of open vocabulary semantic segmentation without requiring any segmentation annotations during training. Using pre-trained CLIP encoders with PACL, we are able to set the state-of-the-art on the task of open vocabulary zero-shot segmentation on 4 different segmentation benchmarks: Pascal VOC, Pascal Context, COCO Stuff and ADE20K. Furthermore, we show that PACL is also applicable to image-level predictions and when used with a CLIP backbone, provides a general improvement in zero-shot classification accuracy compared to CLIP, across a suite of 12 image classification datasets.