When provided with sufficient explanatory context, smaller Language Models have been shown to exhibit strong reasoning ability on challenging short-answer question-answering tasks where the questions are unseen in training. We evaluate two methods for further improvement in this setting. Both methods focus on combining rationales generated by a larger Language Model with longer contexts created from a multi-hop dense retrieval system. The first method ($\textit{RR}$) involves training a Rationale Ranking model to score both generated rationales and retrieved contexts with respect to relevance and truthfulness. We then use the scores to derive combined contexts from both knowledge sources using a number of combinatory strategies. For the second method ($\textit{RATD}$) we train a smaller Reasoning model using retrieval-augmented training datasets such that it becomes proficient at utilising relevant information from longer text sequences that may be only partially evidential and frequently contain many irrelevant sentences. Generally we find that both methods are effective but that the $\textit{RATD}$ method is more straightforward to apply and produces the strongest results in the unseen setting on which we focus. Our single best Reasoning model using only 440 million parameters materially improves upon strong comparable prior baselines for unseen evaluation datasets (StrategyQA 58.9 $\rightarrow$ 61.7 acc., CommonsenseQA 63.6 $\rightarrow$ 72.7 acc., ARC-DA 31.6 $\rightarrow$ 52.1 F1, IIRC 25.5 $\rightarrow$ 27.3 F1) and a version utilising our prior knowledge of each type of question in selecting a context combination strategy does even better. Our proposed models also generally outperform direct prompts against much larger models (BLOOM 175B and StableVicuna 13B) in both few-shot chain-of-thought and few-shot answer-only settings.
Multi-modal recommendation systems, which integrate diverse types of information, have gained widespread attention in recent years. However, compared to traditional collaborative filtering-based multi-modal recommendation systems, research on multi-modal sequential recommendation is still in its nascent stages. Unlike traditional sequential recommendation models that solely rely on item identifier (ID) information and focus on network structure design, multi-modal recommendation models need to emphasize item representation learning and the fusion of heterogeneous data sources. This paper investigates the impact of item representation learning on downstream recommendation tasks and examines the disparities in information fusion at different stages. Empirical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the need to design a framework suitable for collaborative learning and fusion of diverse information. Based on this, we propose a new model-agnostic framework for multi-modal sequential recommendation tasks, called Online Distillation-enhanced Multi-modal Transformer (ODMT), to enhance feature interaction and mutual learning among multi-source input (ID, text, and image), while avoiding conflicts among different features during training, thereby improving recommendation accuracy. To be specific, we first introduce an ID-aware Multi-modal Transformer module in the item representation learning stage to facilitate information interaction among different features. Secondly, we employ an online distillation training strategy in the prediction optimization stage to make multi-source data learn from each other and improve prediction robustness. Experimental results on a video content recommendation dataset and three e-commerce recommendation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two modules, which is approximately 10% improvement in performance compared to baseline models.
We propose a novel framework for few-shot learning by leveraging large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP. Motivated by the unimodal prototypical networks for few-shot learning, we introduce PROTO-CLIP that utilizes image prototypes and text prototypes for few-shot learning. Specifically, PROTO-CLIP adapts the image encoder and text encoder in CLIP in a joint fashion using few-shot examples. The two encoders are used to compute prototypes of image classes for classification. During adaptation, we propose aligning the image and text prototypes of corresponding classes. Such a proposed alignment is beneficial for few-shot classification due to the contributions from both types of prototypes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by conducting experiments on benchmark datasets for few-shot learning as well as in the real world for robot perception.
Pre-trained transformer language models (LMs) have in recent years become the dominant paradigm in applied NLP. These models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on tasks such as information extraction, question answering, sentiment analysis, document classification and many others. In the biomedical domain, significant progress has been made in adapting this paradigm to NLP tasks that require the integration of domain-specific knowledge as well as statistical modelling of language. In particular, research in this area has focused on the question of how best to construct LMs that take into account not only the patterns of token distribution in medical text, but also the wealth of structured information contained in terminology resources such as the UMLS. This work contributes a data-centric paradigm for enriching the language representations of biomedical transformer-encoder LMs by extracting text sequences from the UMLS. This allows for graph-based learning objectives to be combined with masked-language pre-training. Preliminary results from experiments in the extension of pre-trained LMs as well as training from scratch show that this framework improves downstream performance on multiple biomedical and clinical Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks.
Differentially private (DP) training methods like DP-SGD can protect sensitive training data by ensuring that ML models will not reveal private information. An alternative approach, which this paper studies, is to use a sensitive dataset to generate a new synthetic dataset which is differentially private with respect to the original data. Doing so has several advantages: synthetic data can be reused for other tasks (including for hyper parameter tuning), retained indefinitely, or shared with third parties without sacrificing privacy. However, obtaining DP data is much harder than introducing DP during training. To make it feasible for text, recent work has utilized public data by starting with a pre-trained generative language model and privately finetuning it on sensitive data. This model can be used to sample a DP synthetic dataset. While this strategy seems straightforward, executing it has proven problematic. Previous approaches either show significant performance loss, or have, as we show, critical design flaws. In this paper we demonstrate that a proper training objective along with tuning fewer parameters results in excellent DP synthetic data quality. Our approach is competitive with direct DP-training of downstream classifiers in terms of performance on downstream tasks. We also demonstrate that our DP synthetic data is not only useful for downstream classifier training, but also to tune those same models.
Text classification has become a crucial task in various fields, leading to a significant amount of research on developing automated text classification systems for national and international languages. However, there is a growing need for automated text classification systems that can handle local languages. This study aims to establish an automated classification system for Pashto text. To achieve this goal, we constructed a dataset of Pashto documents and applied various models, including statistical and neural machine learning models such as DistilBERT-base-multilingual-cased, Multilayer Perceptron, Support Vector Machine, K Nearest Neighbor, decision tree, Gaussian na\"ive Bayes, multinomial na\"ive Bayes, random forest, and logistic regression, to identify the most effective approach. We also evaluated two different feature extraction methods, bag of words and Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency. The study achieved an average testing accuracy rate of 94% using the MLP classification algorithm and TFIDF feature extraction method in single-label multiclass classification. Similarly, MLP+TFIDF yielded the best results, with an F1-measure of 0.81. Furthermore, the use of pre-trained language representation models, such as DistilBERT, showed promising results for Pashto text classification; however, the study highlights the importance of developing a specific tokenizer for a particular language to achieve reasonable results.
This paper investigates the problem of the current HOI detection methods and introduces DiffHOI, a novel HOI detection scheme grounded on a pre-trained text-image diffusion model, which enhances the detector's performance via improved data diversity and HOI representation. We demonstrate that the internal representation space of a frozen text-to-image diffusion model is highly relevant to verb concepts and their corresponding context. Accordingly, we propose an adapter-style tuning method to extract the various semantic associated representation from a frozen diffusion model and CLIP model to enhance the human and object representations from the pre-trained detector, further reducing the ambiguity in interaction prediction. Moreover, to fill in the gaps of HOI datasets, we propose SynHOI, a class-balance, large-scale, and high-diversity synthetic dataset containing over 140K HOI images with fully triplet annotations. It is built using an automatic and scalable pipeline designed to scale up the generation of diverse and high-precision HOI-annotated data. SynHOI could effectively relieve the long-tail issue in existing datasets and facilitate learning interaction representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffHOI significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in regular detection (i.e., 41.50 mAP) and zero-shot detection. Furthermore, SynHOI can improve the performance of model-agnostic and backbone-agnostic HOI detection, particularly exhibiting an outstanding 11.55% mAP improvement in rare classes.
Existing efforts on text synthesis for code-switching mostly require training on code-switched texts in the target language pairs, limiting the deployment of the models to cases lacking code-switched data. In this work, we study the problem of synthesizing code-switched texts for language pairs absent from the training data. We introduce GLOSS, a model built on top of a pre-trained multilingual machine translation model (PMMTM) with an additional code-switching module. This module, either an adapter or extra prefixes, learns code-switching patterns from code-switched data during training, while the primary component of GLOSS, i.e., the PMMTM, is frozen. The design of only adjusting the code-switching module prevents our model from overfitting to the constrained training data for code-switching. Hence, GLOSS exhibits the ability to generalize and synthesize code-switched texts across a broader spectrum of language pairs. Additionally, we develop a self-training algorithm on target language pairs further to enhance the reliability of GLOSS. Automatic evaluations on four language pairs show that GLOSS achieves at least 55% relative BLEU and METEOR scores improvements compared to strong baselines. Human evaluations on two language pairs further validate the success of GLOSS.
Few-shot classification aims to adapt to new tasks with limited labeled examples. To fully use the accessible data, recent methods explore suitable measures for the similarity between the query and support images and better high-dimensional features with meta-training and pre-training strategies. However, the potential of multi-modality information has barely been explored, which may bring promising improvement for few-shot classification. In this paper, we propose a Language-guided Prototypical Network (LPN) for few-shot classification, which leverages the complementarity of vision and language modalities via two parallel branches. Concretely, to introduce language modality with limited samples in the visual task, we leverage a pre-trained text encoder to extract class-level text features directly from class names while processing images with a conventional image encoder. Then, a language-guided decoder is introduced to obtain text features corresponding to each image by aligning class-level features with visual features. In addition, to take advantage of class-level features and prototypes, we build a refined prototypical head that generates robust prototypes in the text branch for follow-up measurement. Finally, we aggregate the visual and text logits to calibrate the deviation of a single modality. Extensive experiments demonstrate the competitiveness of LPN against state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.
The use of knowledge graphs (KGs) enhances the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the responses provided by a conversational agent. While generating answers during conversations consists in generating text from these KGs, it is still regarded as a challenging task that has gained significant attention in recent years. In this document, we provide a review of different architectures used for knowledge graph-to-text generation including: Graph Neural Networks, the Graph Transformer, and linearization with seq2seq models. We discuss the advantages and limitations of each architecture and conclude that the choice of architecture will depend on the specific requirements of the task at hand. We also highlight the importance of considering constraints such as execution time and model validity, particularly in the context of conversational agents. Based on these constraints and the availability of labeled data for the domains of DAVI, we choose to use seq2seq Transformer-based models (PLMs) for the Knowledge Graph-to-Text Generation task. We aim to refine benchmark datasets of kg-to-text generation on PLMs and to explore the emotional and multilingual dimensions in our future work. Overall, this review provides insights into the different approaches for knowledge graph-to-text generation and outlines future directions for research in this area.