Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to segment the novel classes with a few annotated images. Due to CLIP's advantages of aligning visual and textual information, the integration of CLIP can enhance the generalization ability of FSS model. However, even with the CLIP model, the existing CLIP-based FSS methods are still subject to the biased prediction towards base classes, which is caused by the class-specific feature level interactions. To solve this issue, we propose a visual and textual Prior Guided Mask Assemble Network (PGMA-Net). It employs a class-agnostic mask assembly process to alleviate the bias, and formulates diverse tasks into a unified manner by assembling the prior through affinity. Specifically, the class-relevant textual and visual features are first transformed to class-agnostic prior in the form of probability map. Then, a Prior-Guided Mask Assemble Module (PGMAM) including multiple General Assemble Units (GAUs) is introduced. It considers diverse and plug-and-play interactions, such as visual-textual, inter- and intra-image, training-free, and high-order ones. Lastly, to ensure the class-agnostic ability, a Hierarchical Decoder with Channel-Drop Mechanism (HDCDM) is proposed to flexibly exploit the assembled masks and low-level features, without relying on any class-specific information. It achieves new state-of-the-art results in the FSS task, with mIoU of $77.6$ on $\text{PASCAL-}5^i$ and $59.4$ on $\text{COCO-}20^i$ in 1-shot scenario. Beyond this, we show that without extra re-training, the proposed PGMA-Net can solve bbox-level and cross-domain FSS, co-segmentation, zero-shot segmentation (ZSS) tasks, leading an any-shot segmentation framework.
LLMs now exhibit human-like skills in various fields, leading to worries about misuse. Thus, detecting generated text is crucial. However, passive detection methods are stuck in domain specificity and limited adversarial robustness. To achieve reliable detection, a watermark-based method was proposed for white-box LLMs, allowing them to embed watermarks during text generation. The method involves randomly dividing the model vocabulary to obtain a special list and adjusting the probability distribution to promote the selection of words in the list. A detection algorithm aware of the list can identify the watermarked text. However, this method is not applicable in many real-world scenarios where only black-box language models are available. For instance, third-parties that develop API-based vertical applications cannot watermark text themselves because API providers only supply generated text and withhold probability distributions to shield their commercial interests. To allow third-parties to autonomously inject watermarks into generated text, we develop a watermarking framework for black-box language model usage scenarios. Specifically, we first define a binary encoding function to compute a random binary encoding corresponding to a word. The encodings computed for non-watermarked text conform to a Bernoulli distribution, wherein the probability of a word representing bit-1 being approximately 0.5. To inject a watermark, we alter the distribution by selectively replacing words representing bit-0 with context-based synonyms that represent bit-1. A statistical test is then used to identify the watermark. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on both Chinese and English datasets. Furthermore, results under re-translation, polishing, word deletion, and synonym substitution attacks reveal that it is arduous to remove the watermark without compromising the original semantics.
Recent advancements in high-quality, large-scale English resources have pushed the frontier of English Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) research. However, less work has been done on multilingual text simplification due to the lack of a diverse evaluation benchmark that covers complex-simple sentence pairs in many languages. This paper introduces the MultiSim benchmark, a collection of 27 resources in 12 distinct languages containing over 1.7 million complex-simple sentence pairs. This benchmark will encourage research in developing more effective multilingual text simplification models and evaluation metrics. Our experiments using MultiSim with pre-trained multilingual language models reveal exciting performance improvements from multilingual training in non-English settings. We observe strong performance from Russian in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer to low-resource languages. We further show that few-shot prompting with BLOOM-176b achieves comparable quality to reference simplifications outperforming fine-tuned models in most languages. We validate these findings through human evaluation.
Diffusion models have become a new generative paradigm for text generation. Considering the discrete categorical nature of text, in this paper, we propose \textsc{RenderDiffusion}, a novel diffusion approach for text generation via text-guided image generation. Our key idea is to render the target text as a \emph{glyph image} containing visual language content. In this way, conditional text generation can be cast as a glyph image generation task, and it is then natural to apply continuous diffusion models to discrete texts. Specially, we utilize a cascaded architecture (\ie a base and a super-resolution diffusion model) to generate high-fidelity glyph images, conditioned on the input text. Furthermore, we design a text grounding module to transform and refine the visual language content from generated glyph images into the final texts. In experiments over four conditional text generation tasks and two classes of metrics (\ie quality and diversity), \textsc{RenderDiffusion} can achieve comparable or even better results than several baselines, including pretrained language models. Our model also makes significant improvements compared to the recent diffusion model.
Text-guided human motion generation has drawn significant interest because of its impactful applications spanning animation and robotics. Recently, application of diffusion models for motion generation has enabled improvements in the quality of generated motions. However, existing approaches are limited by their reliance on relatively small-scale motion capture data, leading to poor performance on more diverse, in-the-wild prompts. In this paper, we introduce Make-An-Animation, a text-conditioned human motion generation model which learns more diverse poses and prompts from large-scale image-text datasets, enabling significant improvement in performance over prior works. Make-An-Animation is trained in two stages. First, we train on a curated large-scale dataset of (text, static pseudo-pose) pairs extracted from image-text datasets. Second, we fine-tune on motion capture data, adding additional layers to model the temporal dimension. Unlike prior diffusion models for motion generation, Make-An-Animation uses a U-Net architecture similar to recent text-to-video generation models. Human evaluation of motion realism and alignment with input text shows that our model reaches state-of-the-art performance on text-to-motion generation.
Public figures receive a disproportionate amount of abuse on social media, impacting their active participation in public life. Automated systems can identify abuse at scale but labelling training data is expensive, complex and potentially harmful. So, it is desirable that systems are efficient and generalisable, handling both shared and specific aspects of online abuse. We explore the dynamics of cross-group text classification in order to understand how well classifiers trained on one domain or demographic can transfer to others, with a view to building more generalisable abuse classifiers. We fine-tune language models to classify tweets targeted at public figures across DOmains (sport and politics) and DemOgraphics (women and men) using our novel DODO dataset, containing 28,000 labelled entries, split equally across four domain-demographic pairs. We find that (i) small amounts of diverse data are hugely beneficial to generalisation and model adaptation; (ii) models transfer more easily across demographics but models trained on cross-domain data are more generalisable; (iii) some groups contribute more to generalisability than others; and (iv) dataset similarity is a signal of transferability.
Personalized text-to-image generation using diffusion models has recently been proposed and attracted lots of attention. Given a handful of images containing a novel concept (e.g., a unique toy), we aim to tune the generative model to capture fine visual details of the novel concept and generate photorealistic images following a text condition. We present a plug-in method, named ViCo, for fast and lightweight personalized generation. Specifically, we propose an image attention module to condition the diffusion process on the patch-wise visual semantics. We introduce an attention-based object mask that comes almost at no cost from the attention module. In addition, we design a simple regularization based on the intrinsic properties of text-image attention maps to alleviate the common overfitting degradation. Unlike many existing models, our method does not finetune any parameters of the original diffusion model. This allows more flexible and transferable model deployment. With only light parameter training (~6% of the diffusion U-Net), our method achieves comparable or even better performance than all state-of-the-art models both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Warning: This paper contains several contents that may be toxic, harmful, or offensive. In the last few years, text-to-image generative models have gained remarkable success in generating images with unprecedented quality accompanied by a breakthrough of inference speed. Despite their rapid progress, human biases that manifest in the training examples, particularly with regard to common stereotypical biases, like gender and skin tone, still have been found in these generative models. In this work, we seek to measure more complex human biases exist in the task of text-to-image generations. Inspired by the well-known Implicit Association Test (IAT) from social psychology, we propose a novel Text-to-Image Association Test (T2IAT) framework that quantifies the implicit stereotypes between concepts and valence, and those in the images. We replicate the previously documented bias tests on generative models, including morally neutral tests on flowers and insects as well as demographic stereotypical tests on diverse social attributes. The results of these experiments demonstrate the presence of complex stereotypical behaviors in image generations.
Hallucinations in text generation occur when the system produces text that is not grounded in the input. In this work, we tackle the problem of hallucinations in neural chart summarization. Our analysis shows that the target side of chart summarization training datasets often contains additional information, leading to hallucinations. We propose a natural language inference (NLI) based method to preprocess the training data and show through human evaluation that our method significantly reduces hallucinations. We also found that shortening long-distance dependencies in the input sequence and adding chart-related information like title and legends improves the overall performance.
Structured text extraction is one of the most valuable and challenging application directions in the field of Document AI. However, the scenarios of past benchmarks are limited, and the corresponding evaluation protocols usually focus on the submodules of the structured text extraction scheme. In order to eliminate these problems, we organized the ICDAR 2023 competition on Structured text extraction from Visually-Rich Document images (SVRD). We set up two tracks for SVRD including Track 1: HUST-CELL and Track 2: Baidu-FEST, where HUST-CELL aims to evaluate the end-to-end performance of Complex Entity Linking and Labeling, and Baidu-FEST focuses on evaluating the performance and generalization of Zero-shot / Few-shot Structured Text extraction from an end-to-end perspective. Compared to the current document benchmarks, our two tracks of competition benchmark enriches the scenarios greatly and contains more than 50 types of visually-rich document images (mainly from the actual enterprise applications). The competition opened on 30th December, 2022 and closed on 24th March, 2023. There are 35 participants and 91 valid submissions received for Track 1, and 15 participants and 26 valid submissions received for Track 2. In this report we will presents the motivation, competition datasets, task definition, evaluation protocol, and submission summaries. According to the performance of the submissions, we believe there is still a large gap on the expected information extraction performance for complex and zero-shot scenarios. It is hoped that this competition will attract many researchers in the field of CV and NLP, and bring some new thoughts to the field of Document AI.