Recent work has shown that infusing layout features into language models (LMs) improves processing of visually-rich documents such as scientific papers. Layout-infused LMs are often evaluated on documents with familiar layout features (e.g., papers from the same publisher), but in practice models encounter documents with unfamiliar distributions of layout features, such as new combinations of text sizes and styles, or new spatial configurations of textual elements. In this work we test whether layout-infused LMs are robust to layout distribution shifts. As a case study we use the task of scientific document structure recovery, segmenting a scientific paper into its structural categories (e.g., "title", "caption", "reference"). To emulate distribution shifts that occur in practice we re-partition the GROTOAP2 dataset. We find that under layout distribution shifts model performance degrades by up to 20 F1. Simple training strategies, such as increasing training diversity, can reduce this degradation by over 35% relative F1; however, models fail to reach in-distribution performance in any tested out-of-distribution conditions. This work highlights the need to consider layout distribution shifts during model evaluation, and presents a methodology for conducting such evaluations.
Watermarking the outputs of generative models is a crucial technique for tracing copyright and preventing potential harm from AI-generated content. In this paper, we introduce a novel technique called Tree-Ring Watermarking that robustly fingerprints diffusion model outputs. Unlike existing methods that perform post-hoc modifications to images after sampling, Tree-Ring Watermarking subtly influences the entire sampling process, resulting in a model fingerprint that is invisible to humans. The watermark embeds a pattern into the initial noise vector used for sampling. These patterns are structured in Fourier space so that they are invariant to convolutions, crops, dilations, flips, and rotations. After image generation, the watermark signal is detected by inverting the diffusion process to retrieve the noise vector, which is then checked for the embedded signal. We demonstrate that this technique can be easily applied to arbitrary diffusion models, including text-conditioned Stable Diffusion, as a plug-in with negligible loss in FID. Our watermark is semantically hidden in the image space and is far more robust than watermarking alternatives that are currently deployed. Code is available at https://github.com/YuxinWenRick/tree-ring-watermark.
In our globalized world, a growing number of situations arise where people are required to communicate in one or several foreign languages. In the case of written communication, users with a good command of a foreign language may find assistance from computer-aided translation (CAT) technologies. These technologies often allow users to access external resources, such as dictionaries, terminologies or bilingual concordancers, thereby interrupting and considerably hindering the writing process. In addition, CAT systems assume that the source sentence is fixed and also restrict the possible changes on the target side. In order to make the writing process smoother, we present BiSync, a bilingual writing assistant that allows users to freely compose text in two languages, while maintaining the two monolingual texts synchronized. We also include additional functionalities, such as the display of alternative prefix translations and paraphrases, which are intended to facilitate the authoring of texts. We detail the model architecture used for synchronization and evaluate the resulting tool, showing that high accuracy can be attained with limited computational resources. The interface and models are publicly available at https://github.com/jmcrego/BiSync and a demonstration video can be watched on YouTube at https://youtu.be/_l-ugDHfNgU .
Deaf individuals confront significant communication obstacles on a daily basis. Their inability to hear makes it difficult for them to communicate with those who do not understand sign language. Moreover, it presents difficulties in educational, occupational, and social contexts. By providing alternative communication channels, technology can play a crucial role in overcoming these obstacles. One such technology that can facilitate communication between deaf and hearing individuals is sign language recognition. We will create a robust system for sign language recognition in order to convert Indian Sign Language to text or speech. We will evaluate the proposed system and compare CNN and LSTM models. Since there are both static and gesture sign languages, a robust model is required to distinguish between them. In this study, we discovered that a CNN model captures letters and characters for recognition of static sign language better than an LSTM model, but it outperforms CNN by monitoring hands, faces, and pose in gesture sign language phrases and sentences. The creation of a text-to-sign language paradigm is essential since it will enhance the sign language-dependent deaf and hard-of-hearing population's communication skills. Even though the sign-to-text translation is just one side of communication, not all deaf or hard-of-hearing people are proficient in reading or writing text. Some may have difficulty comprehending written language due to educational or literacy issues. Therefore, a text-to-sign language paradigm would allow them to comprehend text-based information and participate in a variety of social, educational, and professional settings. Keywords: deaf and hard-of-hearing, DHH, Indian sign language, CNN, LSTM, static and gesture sign languages, text-to-sign language model, MediaPipe Holistic, sign language recognition, SLR, SLT
This paper discusses the impact of the Internet on modern trading and the importance of data generated from these transactions for organizations to improve their marketing efforts. The paper uses the example of Divar, an online marketplace for buying and selling products and services in Iran, and presents a competition to predict the percentage of a car sales ad that would be published on the Divar website. Since the dataset provides a rich source of Persian text data, the authors use the Hazm library, a Python library designed for processing Persian text, and two state-of-the-art language models, mBERT and ParsBERT, to analyze it. The paper's primary objective is to compare the performance of mBERT and ParsBERT on the Divar dataset. The authors provide some background on data mining, Persian language, and the two language models, examine the dataset's composition and statistical features, and provide details on their fine-tuning and training configurations for both approaches. They present the results of their analysis and highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the two language models when applied to Persian text data. The paper offers valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities of working with low-resource languages such as Persian and the potential of advanced language models like BERT for analyzing such data. The paper also explains the data mining process, including steps such as data cleaning and normalization techniques. Finally, the paper discusses the types of machine learning problems, such as supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, and the pattern evaluation techniques, such as confusion matrix. Overall, the paper provides an informative overview of the use of language models and data mining techniques for analyzing text data in low-resource languages, using the example of the Divar dataset.
We presented the Treff adapter, a training-efficient adapter for CLAP, to boost zero-shot classification performance by making use of a small set of labelled data. Specifically, we designed CALM to retrieve the probability distribution of text-audio clips over classes using a set of audio-label pairs and combined it with CLAP's zero-shot classification results. Furthermore, we designed a training-free version of the Treff adapter by using CALM as a cosine similarity measure. Experiments showed that the proposed Treff adapter is comparable and even better than fully-supervised methods and adaptation methods in low-shot and data-abundant scenarios. While the Treff adapter shows that combining large-scale pretraining and rapid learning of domain-specific knowledge is non-trivial for obtaining generic representations for few-shot learning, it is still limited to audio classification tasks. In the future, we will explore how to use audio-language models in diverse audio domains.
Text simplification research has mostly focused on sentence-level simplification, even though many desirable edits - such as adding relevant background information or reordering content - may require document-level context. Prior work has also predominantly framed simplification as a single-step, input-to-output task, only implicitly modeling the fine-grained, span-level edits that elucidate the simplification process. To address both gaps, we introduce the SWiPE dataset, which reconstructs the document-level editing process from English Wikipedia (EW) articles to paired Simple Wikipedia (SEW) articles. In contrast to prior work, SWiPE leverages the entire revision history when pairing pages in order to better identify simplification edits. We work with Wikipedia editors to annotate 5,000 EW-SEW document pairs, labeling more than 40,000 edits with proposed 19 categories. To scale our efforts, we propose several models to automatically label edits, achieving an F-1 score of up to 70.6, indicating that this is a tractable but challenging NLU task. Finally, we categorize the edits produced by several simplification models and find that SWiPE-trained models generate more complex edits while reducing unwanted edits.
This paper introduces a novel generator called Perturbation-Assisted Sample Synthesis (PASS), designed for drawing reliable conclusions from complex data, especially when using advanced modeling techniques like deep neural networks. PASS utilizes perturbation to generate synthetic data that closely mirrors the distribution of raw data, encompassing numerical and unstructured data types such as gene expression, images, and text. By estimating the data-generating distribution and leveraging large pre-trained generative models, PASS enhances estimation accuracy, providing an estimated distribution of any statistic through Monte Carlo experiments. Building on PASS, we propose a generative inference framework called Perturbation-Assisted Inference (PAI), which offers a statistical guarantee of validity. In pivotal inference, PAI enables accurate conclusions without knowing a pivotal's distribution as in simulations, even with limited data. In non-pivotal situations, we train PASS using an independent holdout sample, resulting in credible conclusions. To showcase PAI's capability in tackling complex problems, we highlight its applications in three domains: image synthesis inference, sentiment word inference, and multimodal inference via stable diffusion.
Electroencephalography-to-Text generation (EEG-to-Text), which aims to directly generate natural text from EEG signals has drawn increasing attention in recent years due to the enormous potential for Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However, the remarkable discrepancy between the subject-dependent EEG representation and the semantic-dependent text representation poses a great challenge to this task. To mitigate this challenge, we devise a Curriculum Semantic-aware Contrastive Learning strategy (C-SCL), which effectively re-calibrates the subject-dependent EEG representation to the semantic-dependent EEG representation, thus reducing the discrepancy. Specifically, our C-SCL pulls semantically similar EEG representations together while pushing apart dissimilar ones. Besides, in order to introduce more meaningful contrastive pairs, we carefully employ curriculum learning to not only craft meaningful contrastive pairs but also make the learning progressively. We conduct extensive experiments on the ZuCo benchmark and our method combined with diverse models and architectures shows stable improvements across three types of metrics while achieving the new state-of-the-art. Further investigation proves not only its superiority in both the single-subject and low-resource settings but also its robust generalizability in the zero-shot setting.
Recent advancements in Text-to-Image (T2I) generative models have yielded impressive results in generating high-fidelity images based on consistent text prompts. However, there is a growing interest in exploring the potential of these models for more diverse reference-based image manipulation tasks that require spatial understanding and visual context. Previous approaches have achieved this by incorporating additional control modules or fine-tuning the generative models specifically for each task until convergence. In this paper, we propose a different perspective. We conjecture that current large-scale T2I generative models already possess the capability to perform these tasks but are not fully activated within the standard generation process. To unlock these capabilities, we introduce a unified Prompt-Guided In-Context inpainting (PGIC) framework, which leverages large-scale T2I models to re-formulate and solve reference-guided image manipulations. In the PGIC framework, the reference and masked target are stitched together as a new input for the generative models, enabling the filling of masked regions as producing final results. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the self-attention modules in T2I models are well-suited for establishing spatial correlations and efficiently addressing challenging reference-guided manipulations. These large T2I models can be effectively driven by task-specific prompts with minimal training cost or even with frozen backbones. We synthetically evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed PGIC framework across various tasks, including reference-guided image inpainting, faithful inpainting, outpainting, local super-resolution, and novel view synthesis. Our results show that PGIC achieves significantly better performance while requiring less computation compared to other fine-tuning based approaches.