Xiaoyu Guo

Xiao-Yu Guo, Yuan-Fang Li, Gholamreza Haffari

Social intelligence is essential for understanding and reasoning about human expressions, intents and interactions. One representative benchmark for its study is Social Intelligence Queries (Social-IQ), a dataset of multiple-choice questions on videos of complex social interactions. We define a comprehensive methodology to study the soundness of Social-IQ, as the soundness of such benchmark datasets is crucial to the investigation of the underlying research problem. Our analysis reveals that Social-IQ contains substantial biases, which can be exploited by a moderately strong language model to learn spurious correlations to achieve perfect performance without being given the context or even the question. We introduce DeSIQ, a new challenging dataset, constructed by applying simple perturbations to Social-IQ. Our empirical analysis shows DeSIQ significantly reduces the biases in the original Social-IQ dataset. Furthermore, we examine and shed light on the effect of model size, model style, learning settings, commonsense knowledge, and multi-modality on the new benchmark performance. Our new dataset, observations and findings open up important research questions for the study of social intelligence.

Fatemeh Shiri, Xiao-Yu Guo, Mona Golestan Far et al.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved strong performance across a range of vision and language tasks. However, their spatial reasoning capabilities are under-investigated. In this paper, we construct a novel VQA dataset, Spatial-MM, to comprehensively study LMMs' spatial understanding and reasoning capabilities. Our analyses on object-relationship and multi-hop reasoning reveal several important findings. Firstly, bounding boxes and scene graphs, even synthetic ones, can significantly enhance LMMs' spatial reasoning. Secondly, LMMs struggle more with questions posed from the human perspective than the camera perspective about the image. Thirdly, chain of thought (CoT) prompting does not improve model performance on complex multi-hop questions involving spatial relations. % Moreover, spatial reasoning steps are much less accurate than non-spatial ones across MLLMs. Lastly, our perturbation analysis on GQA-spatial reveals that LMMs are much stronger at basic object detection than complex spatial reasoning. We believe our benchmark dataset and in-depth analyses can spark further research on LMMs spatial reasoning. Spatial-MM benchmark is available at: https://github.com/FatemehShiri/Spatial-MM

Xiao-Yu Guo, Yuan-Fang Li, Gholamreza Haffari

Numerical reasoning skills are essential for complex question answering (CQA) over text. It requires opertaions including counting, comparison, addition and subtraction. A successful approach to CQA on text, Neural Module Networks (NMNs), follows the programmer-interpreter paradigm and leverages specialised modules to perform compositional reasoning. However, the NMNs framework does not consider the relationship between numbers and entities in both questions and paragraphs. We propose effective techniques to improve NMNs' numerical reasoning capabilities by making the interpreter question-aware and capturing the relationship between entities and numbers. On the same subset of the DROP dataset for CQA on text, experimental results show that our additions outperform the original NMNs by 3.0 points for the overall F1 score.

Xiaoyu Guo, Jing Ma, Arkaitz Zubiaga

This paper describes our contribution to SemEval 2020 Task 8: Memotion Analysis. Our system learns multi-modal embeddings from text and images in order to classify Internet memes by sentiment. Our model learns text embeddings using BERT and extracts features from images with DenseNet, subsequently combining both features through concatenation. We also compare our results with those produced by DenseNet, ResNet, BERT, and BERT-ResNet. Our results show that image classification models have the potential to help classifying memes, with DenseNet outperforming ResNet. Adding text features is however not always helpful for Memotion Analysis.

Xiao-Yu Guo, Yuan-Fang Li, Gholamreza Haffari

Complex question answering (CQA) over raw text is a challenging task. A prominent approach to this task is based on the programmer-interpreter framework, where the programmer maps the question into a sequence of reasoning actions which is then executed on the raw text by the interpreter. Learning an effective CQA model requires large amounts of human-annotated data,consisting of the ground-truth sequence of reasoning actions, which is time-consuming and expensive to collect at scale. In this paper, we address the challenge of learning a high-quality programmer (parser) by projecting natural human-generated questions into unnatural machine-generated questions which are more convenient to parse. We firstly generate synthetic (question,action sequence) pairs by a data generator, and train a semantic parser that associates synthetic questions with their corresponding action sequences. To capture the diversity when applied tonatural questions, we learn a projection model to map natural questions into their most similar unnatural questions for which the parser can work well. Without any natural training data, our projection model provides high-quality action sequences for the CQA task. Experimental results show that the QA model trained exclusively with synthetic data generated by our method outperforms its state-of-the-art counterpart trained on human-labeled data.

Lei Shen, Xiaoyu Guo, Meng Chen

Chinese poetry is an important part of worldwide culture, and classical and modern sub-branches are quite different. The former is a unique genre and has strict constraints, while the latter is very flexible in length, optional to have rhymes, and similar to modern poetry in other languages. Thus, it requires more to control the coherence and improve the novelty. In this paper, we propose a generate-retrieve-then-refine paradigm to jointly improve the coherence and novelty. In the first stage, a draft is generated given keywords (i.e., topics) only. The second stage produces a "refining vector" from retrieval lines. At last, we take into consideration both the draft and the "refining vector" to generate a new poem. The draft provides future sentence-level information for a line to be generated. Meanwhile, the "refining vector" points out the direction of refinement based on impressive words detection mechanism which can learn good patterns from references and then create new ones via insertion operation. Experimental results on a collected large-scale modern Chinese poetry dataset show that our proposed approach can not only generate more coherent poems, but also improve the diversity and novelty.