GPT-3 and several other language models (LMs) can effectively address various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including machine translation and text summarization. Recently, they have also been successfully employed in the business process management (BPM) domain, e.g., for predictive process monitoring and process extraction from text. This, however, typically requires fine-tuning the employed LM, which, among others, necessitates large amounts of suitable training data. A possible solution to this problem is the use of prompt engineering, which leverages pre-trained LMs without fine-tuning them. Recognizing this, we argue that prompt engineering can help bring the capabilities of LMs to BPM research. We use this position paper to develop a research agenda for the use of prompt engineering for BPM research by identifying the associated potentials and challenges.
Detecting actions in untrimmed videos should not be limited to a small, closed set of classes. We present a simple, yet effective strategy for open-vocabulary temporal action detection utilizing pretrained image-text co-embeddings. Despite being trained on static images rather than videos, we show that image-text co-embeddings enable openvocabulary performance competitive with fully-supervised models. We show that the performance can be further improved by ensembling the image-text features with features encoding local motion, like optical flow based features, or other modalities, like audio. In addition, we propose a more reasonable open-vocabulary evaluation setting for the ActivityNet data set, where the category splits are based on similarity rather than random assignment.
Scene text images have different shapes and are subjected to various distortions, e.g. perspective distortions. To handle these challenges, the state-of-the-art methods rely on a rectification network, which is connected to the text recognition network. They form a linear pipeline which uses text rectification on all input images, even for images that can be recognized without it. Undoubtedly, the rectification network improves the overall text recognition performance. However, in some cases, the rectification network generates unnecessary distortions on images, resulting in incorrect predictions in images that would have otherwise been correct without it. In order to alleviate the unnecessary distortions, the portmanteauing of features is proposed. The portmanteau feature, inspired by the portmanteau word, is a feature containing information from both the original text image and the rectified image. To generate the portmanteau feature, a non-linear input pipeline with a block matrix initialization is presented. In this work, the transformer is chosen as the recognition network due to its utilization of attention and inherent parallelism, which can effectively handle the portmanteau feature. The proposed method is examined on 6 benchmarks and compared with 13 state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on various of the benchmarks.
Bibliometric and Scientometric analyses offer invaluable perspectives on the complex research terrain and collaborative dynamics spanning diverse academic disciplines. This paper presents pyBibX, a python library devised to conduct comprehensive bibliometric and scientometric analyses on raw data files sourced from Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed, seamlessly integrating state of the art AI capabilities into its core functionality. The library executes a comprehensive EDA, presenting outcomes via visually appealing graphical illustrations. Network capabilities have been deftly integrated, encompassing Citation, Collaboration, and Similarity Analysis. Furthermore, the library incorporates AI capabilities, including Embedding vectors, Topic Modeling, Text Summarization, and other general Natural Language Processing tasks, employing models such as Sentence-BERT, BerTopic, BERT, chatGPT, and PEGASUS. As a demonstration, we have analyzed 184 documents associated with multiple-criteria decision analysis published between 1984 and 2023. The EDA emphasized a growing fascination with decision-making and fuzzy logic methodologies. Next, Network Analysis further accentuated the significance of central authors and intra-continental collaboration, identifying Canada and China as crucial collaboration hubs. Finally, AI Analysis distinguished two primary topics and chatGPT preeminence in Text Summarization. It also proved to be an indispensable instrument for interpreting results, as our library enables researchers to pose inquiries to chatGPT regarding bibliometric outcomes. Even so, data homogeneity remains a daunting challenge due to database inconsistencies. PyBibX is the first application integrating cutting-edge AI capabilities for analyzing scientific publications, enabling researchers to examine and interpret these outcomes more effectively.
As text-to-image systems continue to grow in popularity with the general public, questions have arisen about bias and diversity in the generated images. Here, we investigate properties of images generated in response to prompts which are visually under-specified, but contain salient social attributes (e.g., 'a portrait of a threatening person' versus 'a portrait of a friendly person'). Grounding our work in social cognition theory, we find that in many cases, images contain similar demographic biases to those reported in the stereotype literature. However, trends are inconsistent across different models and further investigation is warranted.
In argumentative writing, writers must brainstorm hierarchical writing goals, ensure the persuasiveness of their arguments, and revise and organize their plans through drafting. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have made interactive text generation through a chat interface (e.g., ChatGPT) possible. However, this approach often neglects implicit writing context and user intent, lacks support for user control and autonomy, and provides limited assistance for sensemaking and revising writing plans. To address these challenges, we introduce VISAR, an AI-enabled writing assistant system designed to help writers brainstorm and revise hierarchical goals within their writing context, organize argument structures through synchronized text editing and visual programming, and enhance persuasiveness with argumentation spark recommendations. VISAR allows users to explore, experiment with, and validate their writing plans using automatic draft prototyping. A controlled lab study confirmed the usability and effectiveness of VISAR in facilitating the argumentative writing planning process.
Large decoder-only language models (LMs) can be largely improved in terms of perplexity by retrieval (e.g., RETRO), but its impact on text generation quality and downstream task accuracy is unclear. Thus, it is still an open question: shall we pretrain large autoregressive LMs with retrieval? To answer it, we perform a comprehensive study on a scalable pre-trained retrieval-augmented LM (i.e., RETRO) compared with standard GPT and retrieval-augmented GPT incorporated at fine-tuning or inference stages. We first provide the recipe to reproduce RETRO up to 9.5B parameters while retrieving a text corpus with 330B tokens. Based on that, we have the following novel findings: i) RETRO outperforms GPT on text generation with much less degeneration (i.e., repetition), moderately higher factual accuracy, and slightly lower toxicity with a nontoxic retrieval database. ii) On the LM Evaluation Harness benchmark, RETRO largely outperforms GPT on knowledge-intensive tasks, but is on par with GPT on other tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a simple variant of the model, RETRO++, which largely improves open-domain QA results of original RETRO (e.g., EM score +8.6 on Natural Question) and significantly outperforms retrieval-augmented GPT across different model sizes. Our findings highlight the promising direction of pretraining autoregressive LMs with retrieval as future foundation models. We release our implementation at: https://github.com/NVIDIA/Megatron-LM#retro
Understanding 3D scenes from multi-view inputs has been proven to alleviate the view discrepancy issue in 3D visual grounding. However, existing methods normally neglect the view cues embedded in the text modality and fail to weigh the relative importance of different views. In this paper, we propose ViewRefer, a multi-view framework for 3D visual grounding exploring how to grasp the view knowledge from both text and 3D modalities. For the text branch, ViewRefer leverages the diverse linguistic knowledge of large-scale language models, e.g., GPT, to expand a single grounding text to multiple geometry-consistent descriptions. Meanwhile, in the 3D modality, a transformer fusion module with inter-view attention is introduced to boost the interaction of objects across views. On top of that, we further present a set of learnable multi-view prototypes, which memorize scene-agnostic knowledge for different views, and enhance the framework from two perspectives: a view-guided attention module for more robust text features, and a view-guided scoring strategy during the final prediction. With our designed paradigm, ViewRefer achieves superior performance on three benchmarks and surpasses the second-best by +2.8%, +1.2%, and +0.73% on Sr3D, Nr3D, and ScanRefer. Code will be released at https://github.com/ZiyuGuo99/ViewRefer3D.
Position embeddings, encoding the positional relationships among tokens in text sequences, make great contributions to modeling local context features in Transformer-based pre-trained language models. However, in Extractive Question Answering, position embeddings trained with instances of varied context lengths may not perform well as we expect. Since the embeddings of rear positions are updated fewer times than the front position embeddings, the rear ones may not be properly trained. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective strategy, Random Padding, without any modifications to architectures of existing pre-trained language models. We adjust the token order of input sequences when fine-tuning, to balance the number of updating times of every position embedding. Experiments show that Random Padding can significantly improve model performance on the instances whose answers are located at rear positions, especially when models are trained on short contexts but evaluated on long contexts. Our code and data will be released for future research.
Code execution is a fundamental aspect of programming language semantics that reflects the exact behavior of the code. However, most pre-trained models for code intelligence ignore the execution trace and only rely on source code and syntactic structures. In this paper, we investigate how well pre-trained models can understand and perform code execution. We develop a mutation-based data augmentation technique to create a large-scale and realistic Python dataset and task for code execution, which challenges existing models such as Codex. We then present CodeExecutor, a Transformer model that leverages code execution pre-training and curriculum learning to enhance its semantic comprehension. We evaluate CodeExecutor on code execution and show its promising performance and limitations. We also demonstrate its potential benefits for code intelligence tasks such as zero-shot code-to-code search and text-to-code generation. Our analysis provides insights into the learning and generalization abilities of pre-trained models for code execution.