Jing Ding

Xudong Xie, Hao Yan, Liang Yin et al.

Multimodal document understanding is a challenging task to process and comprehend large amounts of textual and visual information. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved the performance of this task. However, existing methods typically focus on either plain text or a limited number of document images, struggling to handle long PDF documents with interleaved text and images, especially for academic papers. In this paper, we introduce PDF-WuKong, a multimodal large language model (MLLM) that is designed to enhance multimodal question-answering (QA) for long PDF documents. PDF-WuKong incorporates a sparse sampler that operates on both text and image representations, significantly improving the efficiency and capability of the MLLM. The sparse sampler selects the paragraphs or diagrams most pertinent to user queries. To effectively train and evaluate our model, we construct PaperPDF, a dataset consisting of a broad collection of English and Chinese academic papers. Multiple strategies are proposed to build high-quality 1.1 million QA pairs along with their corresponding evidence sources. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority and high efficiency of our approach over other models on the task of long multimodal document understanding, surpassing proprietary products by an average of 8.6% on F1. Our code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/yh-hust/PDF-Wukong.

Jing Ding, Kai Feng, Binbin Lin et al.

The application of large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable success in various fields, but their effectiveness in specialized domains like the Chinese insurance industry remains underexplored. The complexity of insurance knowledge, encompassing specialized terminology and diverse data types, poses significant challenges for both models and users. To address this, we introduce InsQABench, a benchmark dataset for the Chinese insurance sector, structured into three categories: Insurance Commonsense Knowledge, Insurance Structured Database, and Insurance Unstructured Documents, reflecting real-world insurance question-answering tasks.We also propose two methods, SQL-ReAct and RAG-ReAct, to tackle challenges in structured and unstructured data tasks. Evaluations show that while LLMs struggle with domain-specific terminology and nuanced clause texts, fine-tuning on InsQABench significantly improves performance. Our benchmark establishes a solid foundation for advancing LLM applications in the insurance domain, with data and code available at https://github.com/HaileyFamo/InsQABench.git.

Ziqiao Ma, Jing Ding, Xuejun Zhang et al.

Referring Expression Generation (REG) is a core task for evaluating the pragmatic competence of vision-language systems, requiring not only accurate semantic grounding but also adherence to principles of cooperative communication (Grice, 1975). However, current evaluations of vision-language models (VLMs) often overlook the pragmatic dimension, reducing REG to a region-based captioning task and neglecting Gricean maxims. In this work, we revisit REG from a pragmatic perspective, introducing a new dataset (RefOI) of 1.5k images annotated with both written and spoken referring expressions. Through a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art VLMs, we identify three key failures of pragmatic competence: (1) failure to uniquely identify the referent, (2) inclusion of excessive or irrelevant information, and (3) misalignment with human pragmatic preference, such as the underuse of minimal spatial cues. We also show that standard automatic evaluations fail to capture these pragmatic violations, reinforcing superficial cues rather than genuine referential success. Our findings call for a renewed focus on pragmatically informed models and evaluation frameworks that align with real human communication.

Jing Ding, Trung Diep

This paper presents the Photonic FabricTM and the Photonic Fabric ApplianceTM (PFA), a photonic-enabled switch and memory subsystem that delivers low latency, high bandwidth, and low per-bit energy. By integrating high-bandwidth HBM3E memory, an on-module photonic switch, and external DDR5 in a 2.5D electro-optical system-in-package, the PFA offers up to 32 TB of shared memory alongside 115 Tbps of all-to-all digital switching. The Photonic FabricTM enables distributed AI training and inference to execute parallelism strategies more efficiently. The Photonic Fabric removes the silicon beachfront constraint that limits the fixed memory-to-compute ratio observed in virtually all current XPU accelerator designs. Replacing a local HBM stack on an XPU with a chiplet that connects to the Photonic Fabric increases its memory capacity and correspondingly its memory bandwidth by offering a flexible path to scaling well beyond the limitations of on-package HBM alone. We introduce CelestiSim, a lightweight analytical simulator validated on NVIDIA H100 and H200 systems. It is used to evaluate the performance of LLM reference and energy savings on PFA, without any significant change to the GPU core design. With the PFA, the simulation results show that up to 3.66x throughput and 1.40x latency improvements in LLM inference at 405B parameters, up to 7.04x throughput and 1.41x latency improvements at 1T parameters, and 60-90% energy savings in data movement for heavy collective operations in all LLM training scenarios. While these results are shown for NVIDIA GPUs, they can be applied similarly to other AI accelerator designs (XPUs) that share the same fundamental limitation of fixed memory to compute.

Neil Dey, Jing Ding, Jack Ferrell et al.

Modern machine learning algorithms are capable of providing remarkably accurate point-predictions; however, questions remain about their statistical reliability. Unlike conventional machine learning methods, conformal prediction algorithms return confidence sets (i.e., set-valued predictions) that correspond to a given significance level. Moreover, these confidence sets are valid in the sense that they guarantee finite sample control over type 1 error probabilities, allowing the practitioner to choose an acceptable error rate. In our paper, we propose inductive conformal prediction (ICP) algorithms for the tasks of text infilling and part-of-speech (POS) prediction for natural language data. We construct new conformal prediction-enhanced bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) and bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) algorithms for POS tagging and a new conformal prediction-enhanced BERT algorithm for text infilling. We analyze the performance of the algorithms in simulations using the Brown Corpus, which contains over 57,000 sentences. Our results demonstrate that the ICP algorithms are able to produce valid set-valued predictions that are small enough to be applicable in real-world applications. We also provide a real data example for how our proposed set-valued predictions can improve machine generated audio transcriptions.