Recently, segmentation-based methods are quite popular in scene text detection, which mainly contain two steps: text kernel segmentation and expansion. However, the segmentation process only considers each pixel independently, and the expansion process is difficult to achieve a favorable accuracy-speed trade-off. In this paper, we propose a Context-aware and Boundary-guided Network (CBN) to tackle these problems. In CBN, a basic text detector is firstly used to predict initial segmentation results. Then, we propose a context-aware module to enhance text kernel feature representations, which considers both global and local contexts. Finally, we introduce a boundary-guided module to expand enhanced text kernels adaptively with only the pixels on the contours, which not only obtains accurate text boundaries but also keeps high speed, especially on high-resolution output maps. In particular, with a lightweight backbone, the basic detector equipped with our proposed CBN achieves state-of-the-art results on several popular benchmarks, and our proposed CBN can be plugged into several segmentation-based methods. Code will be available on https://github.com/XiiZhao/cbn.pytorch.
In this paper, we propose an embarrassingly simple yet highly effective zero-shot semantic segmentation (ZS3) method, based on the pre-trained vision-language model CLIP. First, our study provides a couple of key discoveries: (i) the global tokens (a.k.a [CLS] tokens in Transformer) of the text branch in CLIP provide a powerful representation of semantic information and (ii) these text-side [CLS] tokens can be regarded as category priors to guide CLIP visual encoder pay more attention on the corresponding region of interest. Based on that, we build upon the CLIP model as a backbone which we extend with a One-Way [CLS] token navigation from text to the visual branch that enables zero-shot dense prediction, dubbed \textbf{ClsCLIP}. Specifically, we use the [CLS] token output from the text branch, as an auxiliary semantic prompt, to replace the [CLS] token in shallow layers of the ViT-based visual encoder. This one-way navigation embeds such global category prior earlier and thus promotes semantic segmentation. Furthermore, to better segment tiny objects in ZS3, we further enhance ClsCLIP with a local zoom-in strategy, which employs a region proposal pre-processing and we get ClsCLIP+. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed ZS3 method achieves a SOTA performance, and it is even comparable with those few-shot semantic segmentation methods.
Recent research has suggested that there are clear differences in the language used in the Dark Web compared to that of the Surface Web. As studies on the Dark Web commonly require textual analysis of the domain, language models specific to the Dark Web may provide valuable insights to researchers. In this work, we introduce DarkBERT, a language model pretrained on Dark Web data. We describe the steps taken to filter and compile the text data used to train DarkBERT to combat the extreme lexical and structural diversity of the Dark Web that may be detrimental to building a proper representation of the domain. We evaluate DarkBERT and its vanilla counterpart along with other widely used language models to validate the benefits that a Dark Web domain specific model offers in various use cases. Our evaluations show that DarkBERT outperforms current language models and may serve as a valuable resource for future research on the Dark Web.
Large language models are powerful text processors and reasoners, but are still subject to limitations including outdated knowledge and hallucinations, which necessitates connecting them to the world. Retrieval-augmented large language models have raised extensive attention for grounding model generation on external knowledge. However, retrievers struggle to capture relevance, especially for queries with complex information needs. Recent work has proposed to improve relevance modeling by having large language models actively involved in retrieval, i.e., to improve retrieval with generation. In this paper, we show that strong performance can be achieved by a method we call Iter-RetGen, which synergizes retrieval and generation in an iterative manner. A model output shows what might be needed to finish a task, and thus provides an informative context for retrieving more relevant knowledge which in turn helps generate a better output in the next iteration. Compared with recent work which interleaves retrieval with generation when producing an output, Iter-RetGen processes all retrieved knowledge as a whole and largely preserves the flexibility in generation without structural constraints. We evaluate Iter-RetGen on multi-hop question answering, fact verification, and commonsense reasoning, and show that it can flexibly leverage parametric knowledge and non-parametric knowledge, and is superior to or competitive with state-of-the-art retrieval-augmented baselines while causing fewer overheads of retrieval and generation. We can further improve performance via generation-augmented retrieval adaptation.
Sentiment analysis (SA) is the automated process of detecting and understanding the emotions conveyed through written text. Over the past decade, SA has gained significant popularity in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). With the widespread use of social media and online platforms, SA has become crucial for companies to gather customer feedback and shape their marketing strategies. Additionally, researchers rely on SA to analyze public sentiment on various topics. In this particular research study, a comprehensive survey was conducted to explore the latest trends and techniques in SA. The survey encompassed a wide range of methods, including lexicon-based, graph-based, network-based, machine learning, deep learning, ensemble-based, rule-based, and hybrid techniques. The paper also addresses the challenges and opportunities in SA, such as dealing with sarcasm and irony, analyzing multi-lingual data, and addressing ethical concerns. To provide a practical case study, Twitter was chosen as one of the largest online social media platforms. Furthermore, the researchers shed light on the diverse application areas of SA, including social media, healthcare, marketing, finance, and politics. The paper also presents a comparative and comprehensive analysis of existing trends and techniques, datasets, and evaluation metrics. The ultimate goal is to offer researchers and practitioners a systematic review of SA techniques, identify existing gaps, and suggest possible improvements. This study aims to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of SA processes, leading to smoother and error-free outcomes.
Translating natural language sentences to first-order logic (NL-FOL translation) is a longstanding challenge in the NLP and formal logic literature. This paper introduces LogicLLaMA, a LLaMA-7B model fine-tuned for NL-FOL translation using LoRA on a single GPU. LogicLLaMA is capable of directly translating natural language into FOL rules, which outperforms GPT-3.5. LogicLLaMA is also equipped to correct FOL rules predicted by GPT-3.5, and can achieve similar performance as GPT-4 with a fraction of the cost. This correction ability was achieved by a novel supervised fine-tuning (SFT) + reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) framework, which initially trains on synthetically perturbed NL-FOL pairs to encourage chain-of-thought reasoning and then fine-tunes with RLHF on GPT-3.5 outputs using a FOL verifier as the reward model. To train LogicLLaMA, we present MALLS (large language $\textbf{M}$odel gener$\textbf{A}$ted N$\textbf{L}$-FO$\textbf{L}$ pair$\textbf{S}$), a dataset of 34K high-quality and diverse sentence-level NL-FOL pairs collected from GPT-4. The dataset was created by implementing a pipeline that prompts GPT-4 for pairs, and dynamically adjusts the prompts to ensure the collection of pairs with rich and diverse contexts at different levels of complexity, and verifies the validity of the generated FOL rules. Codes, weights, and data are available at $\href{https://github.com/gblackout/LogicLLaMA}{{\small \text{https://github.com/gblackout/LogicLLaMA}}}$.
Biomedical entity linking and event extraction are two crucial tasks to support text understanding and retrieval in the biomedical domain. These two tasks intrinsically benefit each other: entity linking disambiguates the biomedical concepts by referring to external knowledge bases and the domain knowledge further provides additional clues to understand and extract the biological processes, while event extraction identifies a key trigger and entities involved to describe each biological process which also captures the structural context to better disambiguate the biomedical entities. However, previous research typically solves these two tasks separately or in a pipeline, leading to error propagation. What's more, it's even more challenging to solve these two tasks together as there is no existing dataset that contains annotations for both tasks. To solve these challenges, we propose joint biomedical entity linking and event extraction by regarding the event structures and entity references in knowledge bases as latent variables and updating the two task-specific models in a hard Expectation-Maximization (EM) fashion: (1) predicting the missing variables for each partially annotated dataset based on the current two task-specific models, and (2) updating the parameters of each model on the corresponding pseudo completed dataset. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets: Genia 2011 for event extraction and BC4GO for entity linking, show that our joint framework significantly improves the model for each individual task and outperforms the strong baselines for both tasks. We will make the code and model checkpoints publicly available once the paper is accepted.
This work studies how to transform an album to vivid and coherent stories, a task we refer to as "album storytelling". While this task can help preserve memories and facilitate experience sharing, it remains an underexplored area in current literature. With recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), it is now possible to generate lengthy, coherent text, opening up the opportunity to develop an AI assistant for album storytelling. One natural approach is to use caption models to describe each photo in the album, and then use LLMs to summarize and rewrite the generated captions into an engaging story. However, we find this often results in stories containing hallucinated information that contradicts the images, as each generated caption ("story-agnostic") is not always about the description related to the whole story or miss some necessary information. To address these limitations, we propose a new iterative album storytelling pipeline. Specifically, we start with an initial story and build a story-aware caption model to refine the captions using the whole story as guidance. The polished captions are then fed into the LLMs to generate a new refined story. This process is repeated iteratively until the story contains minimal factual errors while maintaining coherence. To evaluate our proposed pipeline, we introduce a new dataset of image collections from vlogs and a set of systematic evaluation metrics. Our results demonstrate that our method effectively generates more accurate and engaging stories for albums, with enhanced coherence and vividness.
Finding an agreement among diverse opinions is a challenging topic in multiagent systems. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in addressing this challenge due to their remarkable capabilities in comprehending human opinions and generating human-like text. However, they typically rely on extensive human-annotated data. In this paper, we propose Self-Agreement, a novel framework for fine-tuning LLMs to autonomously find agreement using data generated by LLM itself. Specifically, our approach employs the generative pre-trained transformer-3 (GPT-3) to generate multiple opinions for each question in a question dataset and create several agreement candidates among these opinions. Then, a bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT)-based model evaluates the agreement score of each agreement candidate and selects the one with the highest agreement score. This process yields a dataset of question-opinion-agreements, which we use to fine-tune a pre-trained LLM for discovering agreements among diverse opinions. Remarkably, a pre-trained LLM fine-tuned by our Self-Agreement framework achieves comparable performance to GPT-3 with only 1/25 of its parameters, showcasing its ability to identify agreement among various opinions without the need for human-annotated data.
Recent language models have shown impressive multilingual performance, even when not explicitly trained for it. Despite this, concerns have been raised about the quality of their outputs across different languages. In this paper, we show how disparity in the treatment of different languages arises at the tokenization stage, well before a model is even invoked. The same text translated into different languages can have drastically different tokenization lengths, with differences up to 15 times in some cases. These disparities persist across the 17 tokenizers we evaluate, even if they are intentionally trained for multilingual support. Character-level and byte-level models also exhibit over 4 times the difference in the encoding length for some language pairs. This induces unfair treatment for some language communities in regard to the cost of accessing commercial language services, the processing time and latency, as well as the amount of content that can be provided as context to the models. Therefore, we make the case that we should train future language models using multilingually fair tokenizers.