We present CM3Leon (pronounced "Chameleon"), a retrieval-augmented, token-based, decoder-only multi-modal language model capable of generating and infilling both text and images. CM3Leon uses the CM3 multi-modal architecture but additionally shows the extreme benefits of scaling up and tuning on more diverse instruction-style data. It is the first multi-modal model trained with a recipe adapted from text-only language models, including a large-scale retrieval-augmented pre-training stage and a second multi-task supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage. It is also a general-purpose model that can do both text-to-image and image-to-text generation, allowing us to introduce self-contained contrastive decoding methods that produce high-quality outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this recipe is highly effective for multi-modal models. CM3Leon achieves state-of-the-art performance in text-to-image generation with 5x less training compute than comparable methods (zero-shot MS-COCO FID of 4.88). After SFT, CM3Leon can also demonstrate unprecedented levels of controllability in tasks ranging from language-guided image editing to image-controlled generation and segmentation.
We present RECAP (REtrieval-Augmented Audio CAPtioning), a novel and effective audio captioning system that generates captions conditioned on an input audio and other captions similar to the audio retrieved from a datastore. Additionally, our proposed method can transfer to any domain without the need for any additional fine-tuning. To generate a caption for an audio sample, we leverage an audio-text model CLAP to retrieve captions similar to it from a replaceable datastore, which are then used to construct a prompt. Next, we feed this prompt to a GPT-2 decoder and introduce cross-attention layers between the CLAP encoder and GPT-2 to condition the audio for caption generation. Experiments on two benchmark datasets, Clotho and AudioCaps, show that RECAP achieves competitive performance in in-domain settings and significant improvements in out-of-domain settings. Additionally, due to its capability to exploit a large text-captions-only datastore in a \textit{training-free} fashion, RECAP shows unique capabilities of captioning novel audio events never seen during training and compositional audios with multiple events. To promote research in this space, we also release 150,000+ new weakly labeled captions for AudioSet, AudioCaps, and Clotho.
With the increasing need for text summarization techniques that are both efficient and accurate, it becomes crucial to explore avenues that enhance the quality and precision of pre-trained models specifically tailored for summarizing Bengali texts. When it comes to text summarization tasks, there are numerous pre-trained transformer models at one's disposal. Consequently, it becomes quite a challenge to discern the most informative and relevant summary for a given text among the various options generated by these pre-trained summarization models. This paper aims to identify the most accurate and informative summary for a given text by utilizing a simple but effective ranking-based approach that compares the output of four different pre-trained Bengali text summarization models. The process begins by carrying out preprocessing of the input text that involves eliminating unnecessary elements such as special characters and punctuation marks. Next, we utilize four pre-trained summarization models to generate summaries, followed by applying a text ranking algorithm to identify the most suitable summary. Ultimately, the summary with the highest ranking score is chosen as the final one. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, the generated summaries are compared against human-annotated summaries using standard NLG metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE, BERTScore, WIL, WER, and METEOR. Experimental results suggest that by leveraging the strengths of each pre-trained transformer model and combining them using a ranking-based approach, our methodology significantly improves the accuracy and effectiveness of the Bengali text summarization.
Large training sets have become a cornerstone of machine learning and are the foundation for recent advances in language modeling and multimodal learning. While data curation for pre-training is often still ad-hoc, one common paradigm is to first collect a massive pool of data from the Web and then filter this candidate pool down to an actual training set via various heuristics. In this work, we study the problem of learning a data filtering network (DFN) for this second step of filtering a large uncurated dataset. Our key finding is that the quality of a network for filtering is distinct from its performance on downstream tasks: for instance, a model that performs well on ImageNet can yield worse training sets than a model with low ImageNet accuracy that is trained on a small amount of high-quality data. Based on our insights, we construct new data filtering networks that induce state-of-the-art image-text datasets. Specifically, our best performing dataset DFN-5B enables us to train state-of-the-art models for their compute budgets: among other improvements on a variety of tasks, a ViT-H trained on our dataset achieves 83.0% zero-shot transfer accuracy on ImageNet, out-performing models trained on other datasets such as LAION-2B, DataComp-1B, or OpenAI's WIT. In order to facilitate further research in dataset design, we also release a new 2 billion example dataset DFN-2B and show that high performance data filtering networks can be trained from scratch using only publicly available data.
ASR systems have become increasingly widespread in recent years. However, their textual outputs often require post-processing tasks before they can be practically utilized. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the multifaceted capabilities of LLMs and Whisper, and focus on integrating multiple ASR text processing tasks related to speech recognition into the ASR model. This integration not only shortens the multi-stage pipeline, but also prevents the propagation of cascading errors, resulting in direct generation of post-processed text. In this study, we focus on ASR-related processing tasks, including Contextual ASR and multiple ASR post processing tasks. To achieve this objective, we introduce the CPPF model, which offers a versatile and highly effective alternative to ASR processing. CPPF seamlessly integrates these tasks without any significant loss in recognition performance.
Recent advances in generative pre-trained transformer large language models have emphasised the potential risks of unfair use of artificial intelligence (AI) generated content in an academic environment and intensified efforts in searching for solutions to detect such content. The paper examines the general functionality of detection tools for artificial intelligence generated text and evaluates them based on accuracy and error type analysis. Specifically, the study seeks to answer research questions about whether existing detection tools can reliably differentiate between human-written text and ChatGPT-generated text, and whether machine translation and content obfuscation techniques affect the detection of AI-generated text. The research covers 12 publicly available tools and two commercial systems (Turnitin and PlagiarismCheck) that are widely used in the academic setting. The researchers conclude that the available detection tools are neither accurate nor reliable and have a main bias towards classifying the output as human-written rather than detecting AI-generated text. Furthermore, content obfuscation techniques significantly worsen the performance of tools. The study makes several significant contributions. First, it summarises up-to-date similar scientific and non-scientific efforts in the field. Second, it presents the result of one of the most comprehensive tests conducted so far, based on a rigorous research methodology, an original document set, and a broad coverage of tools. Third, it discusses the implications and drawbacks of using detection tools for AI-generated text in academic settings.
As recent advances in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have enabled high-fidelity 3D face reconstruction and novel view synthesis, its manipulation also became an essential task in 3D vision. However, existing manipulation methods require extensive human labor, such as a user-provided semantic mask and manual attribute search unsuitable for non-expert users. Instead, our approach is designed to require a single text to manipulate a face reconstructed with NeRF. To do so, we first train a scene manipulator, a latent code-conditional deformable NeRF, over a dynamic scene to control a face deformation using the latent code. However, representing a scene deformation with a single latent code is unfavorable for compositing local deformations observed in different instances. As so, our proposed Position-conditional Anchor Compositor (PAC) learns to represent a manipulated scene with spatially varying latent codes. Their renderings with the scene manipulator are then optimized to yield high cosine similarity to a target text in CLIP embedding space for text-driven manipulation. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to address the text-driven manipulation of a face reconstructed with NeRF. Extensive results, comparisons, and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
In this work, we investigate the usefulness of vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models for binary few-shot classification of medical images. We utilize the GPT-4 model to generate text descriptors that encapsulate the shape and texture characteristics of objects in medical images. Subsequently, these GPT-4 generated descriptors, alongside VLMs pre-trained on natural images, are employed to classify chest X-rays and breast ultrasound images. Our results indicate that few-shot classification of medical images using VLMs and GPT-4 generated descriptors is a viable approach. However, accurate classification requires to exclude certain descriptors from the calculations of the classification scores. Moreover, we assess the ability of VLMs to evaluate shape features in breast mass ultrasound images. We further investigate the degree of variability among the sets of text descriptors produced by GPT-4. Our work provides several important insights about the application of VLMs for medical image analysis.
Causal explanations of the predictions of NLP systems are essential to ensure safety and establish trust. Yet, existing methods often fall short of explaining model predictions effectively or efficiently and are often model-specific. In this paper, we address model-agnostic explanations, proposing two approaches for counterfactual (CF) approximation. The first approach is CF generation, where a large language model (LLM) is prompted to change a specific text concept while keeping confounding concepts unchanged. While this approach is demonstrated to be very effective, applying LLM at inference-time is costly. We hence present a second approach based on matching, and propose a method that is guided by an LLM at training-time and learns a dedicated embedding space. This space is faithful to a given causal graph and effectively serves to identify matches that approximate CFs. After showing theoretically that approximating CFs is required in order to construct faithful explanations, we benchmark our approaches and explain several models, including LLMs with billions of parameters. Our empirical results demonstrate the excellent performance of CF generation models as model-agnostic explainers. Moreover, our matching approach, which requires far less test-time resources, also provides effective explanations, surpassing many baselines. We also find that Top-K techniques universally improve every tested method. Finally, we showcase the potential of LLMs in constructing new benchmarks for model explanation and subsequently validate our conclusions. Our work illuminates new pathways for efficient and accurate approaches to interpreting NLP systems.
Conditional generative models typically demand large annotated training sets to achieve high-quality synthesis. As a result, there has been significant interest in designing models that perform plug-and-play generation, i.e., to use a predefined or pretrained model, which is not explicitly trained on the generative task, to guide the generative process (e.g., using language). However, such guidance is typically useful only towards synthesizing high-level semantics rather than editing fine-grained details as in image-to-image translation tasks. To this end, and capitalizing on the powerful fine-grained generative control offered by the recent diffusion-based generative models, we introduce Steered Diffusion, a generalized framework for photorealistic zero-shot conditional image generation using a diffusion model trained for unconditional generation. The key idea is to steer the image generation of the diffusion model at inference time via designing a loss using a pre-trained inverse model that characterizes the conditional task. This loss modulates the sampling trajectory of the diffusion process. Our framework allows for easy incorporation of multiple conditions during inference. We present experiments using steered diffusion on several tasks including inpainting, colorization, text-guided semantic editing, and image super-resolution. Our results demonstrate clear qualitative and quantitative improvements over state-of-the-art diffusion-based plug-and-play models while adding negligible additional computational cost.