Existing contrastive language-image pre-training aims to learn a joint representation by matching abundant image-text pairs. However, the number of image-text pairs in medical datasets is usually orders of magnitude smaller than that in natural datasets. Besides, medical image-text pairs often involve numerous complex fine-grained correspondences. This paper aims to enhance the data efficiency by introducing multiple-to-multiple local relationship modeling to capture denser supervisions. More specifically, we propose a Medical Language-Image Pre-training (MLIP) framework, which exploits the limited image-text medical data more efficiently through patch-sentence matching. Furthermore, we introduce a masked contrastive learning strategy with semantic integrity estimation to reduce redundancy in images while preserving the underlying semantics. Our evaluation results show that MLIP outperforms previous work in zero/few-shot classification and few-shot segmentation tasks by a large margin.
Label smoothing is a widely used technique in various domains, such as image classification and speech recognition, known for effectively combating model overfitting. However, there is few research on its application to text sentiment classification. To fill in the gap, this study investigates the implementation of label smoothing for sentiment classification by utilizing different levels of smoothing. The primary objective is to enhance sentiment classification accuracy by transforming discrete labels into smoothed label distributions. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the superior performance of label smoothing in text sentiment classification tasks across eight diverse datasets and deep learning architectures: TextCNN, BERT, and RoBERTa, under two learning schemes: training from scratch and fine-tuning.
Diffusion models have exhibited impressive prowess in the text-to-image task. Recent methods add image-level controls, e.g., edge and depth maps, to manipulate the generation process together with text prompts to obtain desired images. This controlling process is globally operated on the entire image, which limits the flexibility of control regions. In this paper, we introduce a new simple yet practical task setting: local control. It focuses on controlling specific local areas according to user-defined image conditions, where the rest areas are only conditioned by the original text prompt. This manner allows the users to flexibly control the image generation in a fine-grained way. However, it is non-trivial to achieve this goal. The naive manner of directly adding local conditions may lead to the local control dominance problem. To mitigate this problem, we propose a training-free method that leverages the updates of noised latents and parameters in the cross-attention map during the denosing process to promote concept generation in non-control areas. Moreover, we use feature mask constraints to mitigate the degradation of synthesized image quality caused by information differences inside and outside the local control area. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can synthesize high-quality images to the prompt under local control conditions. Code is available at https://github.com/YibooZhao/Local-Control.
Scene text detection techniques have garnered significant attention due to their wide-ranging applications. However, existing methods have a high demand for training data, and obtaining accurate human annotations is labor-intensive and time-consuming. As a solution, researchers have widely adopted synthetic text images as a complementary resource to real text images during pre-training. Yet there is still room for synthetic datasets to enhance the performance of scene text detectors. We contend that one main limitation of existing generation methods is the insufficient integration of foreground text with the background. To alleviate this problem, we present the Diffusion Model based Text Generator (DiffText), a pipeline that utilizes the diffusion model to seamlessly blend foreground text regions with the background's intrinsic features. Additionally, we propose two strategies to generate visually coherent text with fewer spelling errors. With fewer text instances, our produced text images consistently surpass other synthetic data in aiding text detectors. Extensive experiments on detecting horizontal, rotated, curved, and line-level texts demonstrate the effectiveness of DiffText in producing realistic text images.
While contrastive language image pretraining (CLIP) have exhibited impressive performance by learning highly semantic and generalized representations, recent works have exposed a fundamental drawback in its syntactic properties, that includes interpreting fine-grained attributes, actions, spatial relations, states, and details that require compositional reasoning. One reason for this is that natural captions often do not capture all the visual details of a scene. This leads to unaddressed visual concepts being misattributed to the wrong words. And the pooled image and text features, ends up acting as a bag of words, hence losing the syntactic information. In this work, we ask: Is it possible to enhance CLIP's fine-grained and syntactic abilities without compromising its semantic properties? We show that this is possible by adapting CLIP efficiently on a high-quality, comprehensive, and relatively small dataset. We demonstrate our adaptation strategy on VidSitu, a video situation recognition dataset annotated with verbs and rich semantic role labels (SRL). We use the SRL and verb information to create rule-based detailed captions, making sure they capture most of the visual concepts. Combined with hard negatives and hierarchical losses, these annotations allow us to learn a powerful visual representation, dubbed Fine-Grained CLIP (FiGCLIP), that preserves semantic understanding while being detail-oriented. We evaluate on five diverse vision-language tasks in both fine-tuning and zero-shot settings, achieving consistent improvements over the base CLIP model.
ChatGPT explores a strategic blueprint of question answering (QA) in delivering medical diagnosis, treatment recommendations, and other healthcare support. This is achieved through the increasing incorporation of medical domain data via natural language processing (NLP) and multimodal paradigms. By transitioning the distribution of text, images, videos, and other modalities from the general domain to the medical domain, these techniques have expedited the progress of medical domain question answering (MDQA). They bridge the gap between human natural language and sophisticated medical domain knowledge or expert manual annotations, handling large-scale, diverse, unbalanced, or even unlabeled data analysis scenarios in medical contexts. Central to our focus is the utilizing of language models and multimodal paradigms for medical question answering, aiming to guide the research community in selecting appropriate mechanisms for their specific medical research requirements. Specialized tasks such as unimodal-related question answering, reading comprehension, reasoning, diagnosis, relation extraction, probability modeling, and others, as well as multimodal-related tasks like vision question answering, image caption, cross-modal retrieval, report summarization, and generation, are discussed in detail. Each section delves into the intricate specifics of the respective method under consideration. This paper highlights the structures and advancements of medical domain explorations against general domain methods, emphasizing their applications across different tasks and datasets. It also outlines current challenges and opportunities for future medical domain research, paving the way for continued innovation and application in this rapidly evolving field.
The widespread use of Text-to-Image (T2I) models in content generation requires careful examination of their safety, including their robustness to adversarial attacks. Despite extensive research into this, the reasons for their effectiveness are underexplored. This paper presents an empirical study on adversarial attacks against T2I models, focusing on analyzing factors associated with attack success rates (ASRs). We introduce a new attack objective - entity swapping using adversarial suffixes and two gradient-based attack algorithms. Human and automatic evaluations reveal the asymmetric nature of ASRs on entity swap: for example, it is easier to replace "human" with "robot" in the prompt "a human dancing in the rain." with an adversarial suffix but is significantly harder in reverse. We further propose probing metrics to establish indicative signals from the model's beliefs to the adversarial ASR. We identify conditions resulting in a 60% success probability for adversarial attacks and others where this likelihood drops below 5%.
This research paper focuses on the development and evaluation of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology using the XLS-R 300m model. The study aims to improve ASR performance in converting spoken language into written text, specifically for Indonesian, Javanese, and Sundanese languages. The paper discusses the testing procedures, datasets used, and methodology employed in training and evaluating the ASR systems. The results show that the XLS-R 300m model achieves competitive Word Error Rate (WER) measurements, with a slight compromise in performance for Javanese and Sundanese languages. The integration of a 5-gram KenLM language model significantly reduces WER and enhances ASR accuracy. The research contributes to the advancement of ASR technology by addressing linguistic diversity and improving performance across various languages. The findings provide insights into optimizing ASR accuracy and applicability for diverse linguistic contexts.
The deployment and scaling of large language models (LLMs) have become critical as they permeate various applications, demanding high-throughput and low-latency serving systems. Existing frameworks struggle to balance these requirements, especially for workloads with long prompts. This paper introduces DeepSpeed-FastGen, a system that employs Dynamic SplitFuse, a novel prompt and generation composition strategy, to deliver up to 2.3x higher effective throughput, 2x lower latency on average, and up to 3.7x lower (token-level) tail latency, compared to state-of-the-art systems like vLLM. We leverage a synergistic combination of DeepSpeed-MII and DeepSpeed-Inference to provide an efficient and easy-to-use serving system for LLMs. DeepSpeed-FastGen's advanced implementation supports a range of models and offers both non-persistent and persistent deployment options, catering to diverse user scenarios from interactive sessions to long-running applications. We present a detailed benchmarking methodology, analyze the performance through latency-throughput curves, and investigate scalability via load balancing. Our evaluations demonstrate substantial improvements in throughput and latency across various models and hardware configurations. We discuss our roadmap for future enhancements, including broader model support and new hardware backends. The DeepSpeed-FastGen code is readily available for community engagement and contribution.
Automatic text simplification (TS) aims to automate the process of rewriting text to make it easier for people to read. A pre-requisite for TS to be useful is that it should convey information that is consistent with the meaning of the original text. However, current TS evaluation protocols assess system outputs for simplicity and meaning preservation without regard for the document context in which output sentences occur and for how people understand them. In this work, we introduce a human evaluation framework to assess whether simplified texts preserve meaning using reading comprehension questions. With this framework, we conduct a thorough human evaluation of texts by humans and by nine automatic systems. Supervised systems that leverage pre-training knowledge achieve the highest scores on the reading comprehension (RC) tasks amongst the automatic controllable TS systems. However, even the best-performing supervised system struggles with at least 14% of the questions, marking them as "unanswerable'' based on simplified content. We further investigate how existing TS evaluation metrics and automatic question-answering systems approximate the human judgments we obtained.