Neural text-to-SQL models have achieved remarkable performance in translating natural language questions into SQL queries. However, recent studies reveal that text-to-SQL models are vulnerable to task-specific perturbations. Previous curated robustness test sets usually focus on individual phenomena. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive robustness benchmark based on Spider, a cross-domain text-to-SQL benchmark, to diagnose the model robustness. We design 17 perturbations on databases, natural language questions, and SQL queries to measure the robustness from different angles. In order to collect more diversified natural question perturbations, we utilize large pretrained language models (PLMs) to simulate human behaviors in creating natural questions. We conduct a diagnostic study of the state-of-the-art models on the robustness set. Experimental results reveal that even the most robust model suffers from a 14.0% performance drop overall and a 50.7% performance drop on the most challenging perturbation. We also present a breakdown analysis regarding text-to-SQL model designs and provide insights for improving model robustness.
The techniques for 3D indoor scene capturing are widely used, but the meshes produced leave much to be desired. In this paper, we propose "RoomDreamer", which leverages powerful natural language to synthesize a new room with a different style. Unlike existing image synthesis methods, our work addresses the challenge of synthesizing both geometry and texture aligned to the input scene structure and prompt simultaneously. The key insight is that a scene should be treated as a whole, taking into account both scene texture and geometry. The proposed framework consists of two significant components: Geometry Guided Diffusion and Mesh Optimization. Geometry Guided Diffusion for 3D Scene guarantees the consistency of the scene style by applying the 2D prior to the entire scene simultaneously. Mesh Optimization improves the geometry and texture jointly and eliminates the artifacts in the scanned scene. To validate the proposed method, real indoor scenes scanned with smartphones are used for extensive experiments, through which the effectiveness of our method is demonstrated.
Learning to represent free text is a core task in many clinical machine learning (ML) applications, as clinical text contains observations and plans not otherwise available for inference. State-of-the-art methods use large language models developed with immense computational resources and training data; however, applying these models is challenging because of the highly varying syntax and vocabulary in clinical free text. Structured information such as International Classification of Disease (ICD) codes often succinctly abstracts the most important facts of a clinical encounter and yields good performance, but is often not as available as clinical text in real-world scenarios. We propose a \textbf{multi-view learning framework} that jointly learns from codes and text to combine the availability and forward-looking nature of text and better performance of ICD codes. The learned text embeddings can be used as inputs to predictive algorithms independent of the ICD codes during inference. Our approach uses a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to process ICD codes, and Bi-LSTM to process text. We apply Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis (DCCA) to enforce the two views to learn a similar representation of each patient. In experiments using planned surgical procedure text, our model outperforms BERT models fine-tuned to clinical data, and in experiments using diverse text in MIMIC-III, our model is competitive to a fine-tuned BERT at a tiny fraction of its computational effort.
Causal structure learning, a prominent technique for encoding cause and effect relationships among variables, through Bayesian Networks (BNs). Merely recovering causal structures from real-world observed data lacks precision, while the development of Large Language Models (LLM) is opening a new frontier of causality. LLM presents strong capability in discovering causal relationships between variables with the "text" inputs defining the investigated variables, leading to a potential new hierarchy and new ladder of causality. We aim an critical issue in the emerging topic of LLM based causal structure learning, to tackle erroneous prior causal statements from LLM, which is seldom considered in the current context of expert dominating prior resources. As a pioneer attempt, we propose a BN learning strategy resilient to prior errors without need of human intervention. Focusing on the edge-level prior, we classify the possible prior errors into three types: order-consistent, order-reversed, and irrelevant, and provide their theoretical impact on the Structural Hamming Distance (SHD) under the presumption of sufficient data. Intriguingly, we discover and prove that only the order-reversed error contributes to an increase in a unique acyclic closed structure, defined as a "quasi-circle". Leveraging this insight, a post-hoc strategy is employed to identify the order-reversed prior error by its impact on the increment of "quasi-circles". Through empirical evaluation on both real and synthetic datasets, we demonstrate our strategy's robustness against prior errors. Specifically, we highlight its substantial ability to resist order-reversed errors while maintaining the majority of correct prior knowledge.
Prompt engineering is an essential technique for enhancing the abilities of large language models (LLMs) by providing explicit and specific instructions. It enables LLMs to excel in various tasks, such as arithmetic reasoning, question answering, summarization, relation extraction, machine translation, and sentiment analysis. Researchers have been actively exploring different prompt engineering strategies, such as Chain of Thought (CoT), Zero-CoT, and In-context learning. However, an unresolved problem arises from the fact that current approaches lack a solid theoretical foundation for determining optimal prompts. To address this issue in prompt engineering, we propose a new and effective approach called Prompt Space. Our methodology utilizes text embeddings to obtain basis vectors by matrix decomposition, and then constructs a space for representing all prompts. Prompt Space significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prompt paradigms on ten public reasoning benchmarks. Notably, without the help of the CoT method and the prompt "Let's think step by step", Prompt Space shows superior performance over the few-shot method. Overall, our approach provides a robust and fundamental theoretical framework for selecting simple and effective prompts. This advancement marks a significant step towards improving prompt engineering for a wide variety of applications in LLMs.
The pursuit of controllability as a higher standard of visual content creation has yielded remarkable progress in customizable image synthesis. However, achieving controllable video synthesis remains challenging due to the large variation of temporal dynamics and the requirement of cross-frame temporal consistency. Based on the paradigm of compositional generation, this work presents VideoComposer that allows users to flexibly compose a video with textual conditions, spatial conditions, and more importantly temporal conditions. Specifically, considering the characteristic of video data, we introduce the motion vector from compressed videos as an explicit control signal to provide guidance regarding temporal dynamics. In addition, we develop a Spatio-Temporal Condition encoder (STC-encoder) that serves as a unified interface to effectively incorporate the spatial and temporal relations of sequential inputs, with which the model could make better use of temporal conditions and hence achieve higher inter-frame consistency. Extensive experimental results suggest that VideoComposer is able to control the spatial and temporal patterns simultaneously within a synthesized video in various forms, such as text description, sketch sequence, reference video, or even simply hand-crafted motions. The code and models will be publicly available at https://videocomposer.github.io.
Factual correctness is often the limiting factor in practical applications of natural language generation in high-stakes domains such as healthcare. An essential requirement for maintaining factuality is the ability to deal with rare tokens. This paper focuses on rare tokens that appear in both the source and the reference sequences, and which, when missed during generation, decrease the factual correctness of the output text. For high-stake domains that are also knowledge-rich, we show how to use knowledge to (a) identify which rare tokens that appear in both source and reference are important and (b) uplift their conditional probability. We introduce the ``utilization rate'' that encodes knowledge and serves as a regularizer by maximizing the marginal probability of selected tokens. We present a study in a knowledge-rich domain of healthcare, where we tackle the problem of generating after-visit care instructions based on patient-doctor dialogues. We verify that, in our dataset, specific medical concepts with high utilization rates are underestimated by conventionally trained sequence-to-sequence models. We observe that correcting this with our approach to knowledge injection reduces the uncertainty of the model as well as improves factuality and coherence without negatively impacting fluency.
On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, starting what is now known as the Russo-Ukrainian War, initiating an online discourse on social media. Twitter as one of the most popular SNs, with an open and democratic character, enables a transparent discussion among its large user base. Unfortunately, this often leads to Twitter's policy violations, propaganda, abusive actions, civil integrity violation, and consequently to user accounts' suspension and deletion. This study focuses on the Twitter suspension mechanism and the analysis of shared content and features of the user accounts that may lead to this. Toward this goal, we have obtained a dataset containing 107.7M tweets, originating from 9.8 million users, using Twitter API. We extract the categories of shared content of the suspended accounts and explain their characteristics, through the extraction of text embeddings in junction with cosine similarity clustering. Our results reveal scam campaigns taking advantage of trending topics regarding the Russia-Ukrainian conflict for Bitcoin and Ethereum fraud, spam, and advertisement campaigns. Additionally, we apply a machine learning methodology including a SHapley Additive explainability model to understand and explain how user accounts get suspended.
Recent work has shown that prompting language models with code-like representations of natural language leads to performance improvements on structured reasoning tasks. However, such tasks comprise only a small subset of all natural language tasks. In our work, we seek to answer whether or not code-prompting is the preferred way of interacting with language models in general. We compare code and text prompts across three popular GPT models (davinci, code-davinci-002, and text-davinci-002) on a broader selection of tasks (e.g., QA, sentiment, summarization) and find that with few exceptions, code prompts do not consistently outperform text prompts. Furthermore, we show that the style of code prompt has a large effect on performance for some but not all tasks and that fine-tuning on text instructions leads to better relative performance of code prompts.
In this paper, we propose Multi-Modal Databases (MMDBs), which is a new class of database systems that can seamlessly query text and tables using SQL. To enable seamless querying of textual data using SQL in an MMDB, we propose to extend relational databases with so-called multi-modal operators (MMOps) which are based on the advances of recent large language models such as GPT-3. The main idea of MMOps is that they allow text collections to be treated as tables without the need to manually transform the data. As we show in our evaluation, our MMDB prototype can not only outperform state-of-the-art approaches such as text-to-table in terms of accuracy and performance but it also requires significantly less training data to fine-tune the model for an unseen text collection.