We consider the task of text generation in language models with constraints specified in natural language. To this end, we first create a challenging benchmark Cognac that provides as input to the model a topic with example text, along with a constraint on text to be avoided. Unlike prior work, our benchmark contains knowledge-intensive constraints sourced from databases like Wordnet and Wikidata, which allows for straightforward evaluation while striking a balance between broad attribute-level and narrow lexical-level controls. We find that even state-of-the-art language models like GPT-3 fail often on this task, and propose a solution to leverage a language model's own internal knowledge to guide generation. Our method, called CognacGen, first queries the language model to generate guidance terms for a specified topic or constraint, and uses the guidance to modify the model's token generation probabilities. We propose three forms of guidance (binary verifier, top-k tokens, textual example), and employ prefix-tuning approaches to distill the guidance to tackle diverse natural language constraints. Through extensive empirical evaluations, we demonstrate that CognacGen can successfully generalize to unseen instructions and outperform competitive baselines in generating constraint conforming text.
Keeping track of how states and relations of entities change as a text or dialog unfolds is a key prerequisite to discourse understanding. Despite this fact, there have been few systematic investigations into the ability of large language models (LLMs) to track discourse entities. In this work, we present a task to probe to what extent a language model can infer the final state of an entity given an English description of the initial state and a series of state-changing operations. We use this task to first investigate whether Flan-T5, GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 can track the state of entities, and find that only GPT-3.5 models, which have been pretrained on large amounts of code, exhibit this ability. We then investigate whether smaller models pretrained primarily on text can learn to track entities, through finetuning T5 on several training/evaluation splits. While performance degrades for more complex splits, we find that even for splits with almost no lexical overlap between training and evaluation, a finetuned model can often perform non-trivial entity tracking. Taken together, these results suggest that language models can learn to track entities but pretraining on large text corpora alone does not make this capacity surface.
Memes are a widely popular tool for web users to express their thoughts using visual metaphors. Understanding memes requires recognizing and interpreting visual metaphors with respect to the text inside or around the meme, often while employing background knowledge and reasoning abilities. We present the task of meme captioning and release a new dataset, MemeCap. Our dataset contains 6.3K memes along with the title of the post containing the meme, the meme captions, the literal image caption, and the visual metaphors. Despite the recent success of vision and language (VL) models on tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering, our extensive experiments using state-of-the-art VL models show that they still struggle with visual metaphors, and perform substantially worse than humans.
Large pre-trained language models have exhibited unprecedented capabilities in producing high-quality text via prompting techniques. This fact introduces new possibilities for data collection and annotation, particularly in situations where such data is scarce, complex to gather, expensive, or even sensitive. In this paper, we explore the potential of these models to generate and annotate goal-oriented dialogues, and conduct an in-depth analysis to evaluate their quality. Our experiments employ ChatGPT, and encompass three categories of goal-oriented dialogues (task-oriented, collaborative, and explanatory), two generation modes (interactive and one-shot), and two languages (English and Italian). Based on extensive human-based evaluations, we demonstrate that the quality of generated dialogues and annotations is on par with those generated by humans.
In this paper, we propose a novel framework to pre-train language models for enhancing their abilities of comparative reasoning over texts. While recent research has developed models for NLP tasks that require comparative reasoning, they suffer from costly manual data labeling and limited generalizability to different tasks. Our approach involves a scalable method for collecting data for text-based entity comparison, which leverages both structured and unstructured data, and the design of three novel pre-training tasks. Evaluation on a range of downstream tasks including comparative question answering, question generation, and summarization shows that our pre-training framework significantly improves the comparative reasoning abilities of language models, especially under low-resource conditions. This work also releases the first integrated benchmark for comparative reasoning over texts.
Two fundamental questions in neurolinguistics concerns the brain regions that integrate information beyond the lexical level, and the size of their window of integration. To address these questions we introduce a new approach named masked-attention generation. It uses GPT-2 transformers to generate word embeddings that capture a fixed amount of contextual information. We then tested whether these embeddings could predict fMRI brain activity in humans listening to naturalistic text. The results showed that most of the cortex within the language network is sensitive to contextual information, and that the right hemisphere is more sensitive to longer contexts than the left. Masked-attention generation supports previous analyses of context-sensitivity in the brain, and complements them by quantifying the window size of context integration per voxel.
Removing degradation from document images not only improves their visual quality and readability, but also enhances the performance of numerous automated document analysis and recognition tasks. However, existing regression-based methods optimized for pixel-level distortion reduction tend to suffer from significant loss of high-frequency information, leading to distorted and blurred text edges. To compensate for this major deficiency, we propose DocDiff, the first diffusion-based framework specifically designed for diverse challenging document enhancement problems, including document deblurring, denoising, and removal of watermarks and seals. DocDiff consists of two modules: the Coarse Predictor (CP), which is responsible for recovering the primary low-frequency content, and the High-Frequency Residual Refinement (HRR) module, which adopts the diffusion models to predict the residual (high-frequency information, including text edges), between the ground-truth and the CP-predicted image. DocDiff is a compact and computationally efficient model that benefits from a well-designed network architecture, an optimized training loss objective, and a deterministic sampling process with short time steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DocDiff achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on multiple benchmark datasets, and can significantly enhance the readability and recognizability of degraded document images. Furthermore, our proposed HRR module in pre-trained DocDiff is plug-and-play and ready-to-use, with only 4.17M parameters. It greatly sharpens the text edges generated by SOTA deblurring methods without additional joint training. Available codes: https://github.com/Royalvice/DocDiff
This study focuses on improving the optical character recognition (OCR) data for panels in the COMICS dataset, the largest dataset containing text and images from comic books. To do this, we developed a pipeline for OCR processing and labeling of comic books and created the first text detection and recognition datasets for western comics, called "COMICS Text+: Detection" and "COMICS Text+: Recognition". We evaluated the performance of state-of-the-art text detection and recognition models on these datasets and found significant improvement in word accuracy and normalized edit distance compared to the text in COMICS. We also created a new dataset called "COMICS Text+", which contains the extracted text from the textboxes in the COMICS dataset. Using the improved text data of COMICS Text+ in the comics processing model from resulted in state-of-the-art performance on cloze-style tasks without changing the model architecture. The COMICS Text+ dataset can be a valuable resource for researchers working on tasks including text detection, recognition, and high-level processing of comics, such as narrative understanding, character relations, and story generation. All the data and inference instructions can be accessed in https://github.com/gsoykan/comics_text_plus.
Most recent self-supervised learning~(SSL) methods are pre-trained on the well-curated ImageNet-1K dataset. In this work, we consider SSL pre-training on noisy web image-text paired data due to the excellent scalability of web data. First, we conduct a benchmark study of representative SSL pre-training methods on large-scale web data in a fair condition. Methods include single-modal ones such as MAE and multi-modal ones such as CLIP. We observe that multi-modal methods cannot outperform single-modal ones on vision transfer learning tasks. We derive an information-theoretical view to explain the benchmarking results, which provides insights into designing novel vision learners. Inspired by the above explorations, we present a visual representation pre-training method, MUlti-modal Generator~(MUG), for scalable web image-text data. MUG achieves state-of-the-art transferring performances on a variety of tasks and shows promising scaling behavior. Models and codes will be made public. Demo available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/tennant/MUG_caption
Computational complexity and overthinking problems have become the bottlenecks for pre-training language models (PLMs) with millions or even trillions of parameters. A Flexible-Patience-Based Early Exiting method (F-PABEE) has been proposed to alleviate the problems mentioned above for single-label classification (SLC) and multi-label classification (MLC) tasks. F-PABEE makes predictions at the classifier and will exit early if predicted distributions of cross-layer are consecutively similar. It is more flexible than the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) early exiting method PABEE because it can simultaneously adjust the similarity score thresholds and the patience parameters. Extensive experiments show that: (1) F-PABEE makes a better speedup-accuracy balance than existing early exiting strategies on both SLC and MLC tasks. (2) F-PABEE achieves faster inference and better performances on different PLMs such as BERT and ALBERT. (3) F-PABEE-JSKD performs best for F-PABEE with different similarity measures.