Kexuan Sun

Kian Ahrabian, Zhivar Sourati, Kexuan Sun et al.

While large language models (LLMs) are still being adopted to new domains and utilized in novel applications, we are experiencing an influx of the new generation of foundation models, namely multi-modal large language models (MLLMs). These models integrate verbal and visual information, opening new possibilities to demonstrate more complex reasoning abilities at the intersection of the two modalities. However, despite the revolutionizing prospect of MLLMs, our understanding of their reasoning abilities is limited. In this study, we assess the nonverbal abstract reasoning abilities of open-source and closed-source MLLMs using variations of Raven's Progressive Matrices. Our experiments reveal the challenging nature of such problems for MLLMs while showcasing the immense gap between open-source and closed-source models. We also uncover critical shortcomings of visual and textual perceptions, subjecting the models to low-performance ceilings. Finally, to improve MLLMs' performance, we experiment with different methods, such as Chain-of-Thought prompting, leading to a significant (up to 100%) boost in performance. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/usc-isi-i2/isi-mmlm-rpm.

Fei Wang, Kexuan Sun, Jay Pujara et al.

Tables provide valuable knowledge that can be used to verify textual statements. While a number of works have considered table-based fact verification, direct alignments of tabular data with tokens in textual statements are rarely available. Moreover, training a generalized fact verification model requires abundant labeled training data. In this paper, we propose a novel system to address these problems. Inspired by counterfactual causality, our system identifies token-level salience in the statement with probing-based salience estimation. Salience estimation allows enhanced learning of fact verification from two perspectives. From one perspective, our system conducts masked salient token prediction to enhance the model for alignment and reasoning between the table and the statement. From the other perspective, our system applies salience-aware data augmentation to generate a more diverse set of training instances by replacing non-salient terms. Experimental results on TabFact show the effective improvement by the proposed salience-aware learning techniques, leading to the new SOTA performance on the benchmark. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/luka-group/Salience-aware-Learning .

Yifan Jiang, Jiarui Zhang, Kexuan Sun et al.

While multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have shown significant progress on many popular visual reasoning benchmarks, whether they possess abstract visual reasoning abilities remains an open question. Similar to the Sudoku puzzles, abstract visual reasoning (AVR) problems require finding high-level patterns (e.g., repetition constraints) that control the input shapes (e.g., digits) in a specific task configuration (e.g., matrix). However, existing AVR benchmarks only considered a limited set of patterns (addition, conjunction), input shapes (rectangle, square), and task configurations (3 by 3 matrices). To evaluate MLLMs' reasoning abilities comprehensively, we introduce MARVEL, a multidimensional AVR benchmark with 770 puzzles composed of six core knowledge patterns, geometric and abstract shapes, and five different task configurations. To inspect whether the model accuracy is grounded in perception and reasoning, MARVEL complements the general AVR question with perception questions in a hierarchical evaluation framework. We conduct comprehensive experiments on MARVEL with nine representative MLLMs in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our experiments reveal that all models show near-random performance on the AVR question, with significant performance gaps (40%) compared to humans across all patterns and task configurations. Further analysis of perception questions reveals that MLLMs struggle to comprehend the visual features (near-random performance) and even count the panels in the puzzle ( <45%), hindering their ability for abstract reasoning. We release our entire code and dataset.

Deren Lei, Gangrong Jiang, Xiaotao Gu et al.

Walk-based models have shown their advantages in knowledge graph (KG) reasoning by achieving decent performance while providing interpretable decisions. However, the sparse reward signals offered by the KG during traversal are often insufficient to guide a sophisticated walk-based reinforcement learning (RL) model. An alternate approach is to use traditional symbolic methods (e.g., rule induction), which achieve good performance but can be hard to generalize due to the limitation of symbolic representation. In this paper, we propose RuleGuider, which leverages high-quality rules generated by symbolic-based methods to provide reward supervision for walk-based agents. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that RuleGuider improves the performance of walk-based models without losing interpretability.