mbrs: A Library for Minimum Bayes Risk DecodingHiroyuki Deguchi, Yusuke Sakai, Hidetaka Kamigaito et al.
Minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding is a decision rule of text generation tasks that outperforms conventional maximum a posterior (MAP) decoding using beam search by selecting high-quality outputs based on a utility function rather than those with high-probability. Typically, it finds the most suitable hypothesis from the set of hypotheses under the sampled pseudo-references. mbrs is a library of MBR decoding, which can flexibly combine various metrics, alternative expectation estimations, and algorithmic variants. It is designed with a focus on speed measurement and calling count of code blocks, transparency, reproducibility, and extensibility, which are essential for researchers and developers. We published our mbrs as an MIT-licensed open-source project, and the code is available on GitHub. GitHub: https://github.com/naist-nlp/mbrs
10.4CLSep 3, 2024Code
Towards Cross-Lingual Explanation of Artwork in Large-scale Vision Language ModelsShintaro Ozaki, Kazuki Hayashi, Yusuke Sakai et al.
As the performance of Large-scale Vision Language Models (LVLMs) improves, they are increasingly capable of responding in multiple languages, and there is an expectation that the demand for explanations generated by LVLMs will grow. However, pre-training of Vision Encoder and the integrated training of LLMs with Vision Encoder are mainly conducted using English training data, leaving it uncertain whether LVLMs can completely handle their potential when generating explanations in languages other than English. In addition, multilingual QA benchmarks that create datasets using machine translation have cultural differences and biases, remaining issues for use as evaluation tasks. To address these challenges, this study created an extended dataset in multiple languages without relying on machine translation. This dataset that takes into account nuances and country-specific phrases was then used to evaluate the generation explanation abilities of LVLMs. Furthermore, this study examined whether Instruction-Tuning in resource-rich English improves performance in other languages. Our findings indicate that LVLMs perform worse in languages other than English compared to English. In addition, it was observed that LVLMs struggle to effectively manage the knowledge learned from English data. Our dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/naist-nlp/MultiExpArt
Universal Automatic Phonetic Transcription into the International Phonetic AlphabetChihiro Taguchi, Yusuke Sakai, Parisa Haghani et al.
This paper presents a state-of-the-art model for transcribing speech in any language into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Transcription of spoken languages into IPA is an essential yet time-consuming process in language documentation, and even partially automating this process has the potential to drastically speed up the documentation of endangered languages. Like the previous best speech-to-IPA model (Wav2Vec2Phoneme), our model is based on wav2vec 2.0 and is fine-tuned to predict IPA from audio input. We use training data from seven languages from CommonVoice 11.0, transcribed into IPA semi-automatically. Although this training dataset is much smaller than Wav2Vec2Phoneme's, its higher quality lets our model achieve comparable or better results. Furthermore, we show that the quality of our universal speech-to-IPA models is close to that of human annotators.
6.5LGApr 14
Wolkowicz-Styan Upper Bound on the Hessian Eigenspectrum for Cross-Entropy Loss in Nonlinear Smooth Neural NetworksYuto Omae, Kazuki Sakai, Yohei Kakimoto et al.
Neural networks (NNs) are central to modern machine learning and achieve state-of-the-art results in many applications. However, the relationship between loss geometry and generalization is still not well understood. The local geometry of the loss function near a critical point is well-approximated by its quadratic form, obtained through a second-order Taylor expansion. The coefficients of the quadratic term correspond to the Hessian matrix, whose eigenspectrum allows us to evaluate the sharpness of the loss at the critical point. Extensive research suggests flat critical points generalize better, while sharp ones lead to higher generalization error. However, sharpness requires the Hessian eigenspectrum, but general matrix characteristic equations have no closed-form solution. Therefore, most existing studies on evaluating loss sharpness rely on numerical approximation methods. Existing closed-form analyses of the eigenspectrum are primarily limited to simplified architectures, such as linear or ReLU-activated networks; consequently, theoretical analysis of smooth nonlinear multilayer neural networks remains limited. Against this background, this study focuses on nonlinear, smooth multilayer neural networks and derives a closed-form upper bound for the maximum eigenvalue of the Hessian with respect to the cross-entropy loss by leveraging the Wolkowicz-Styan bound. Specifically, the derived upper bound is expressed as a function of the affine transformation parameters, hidden layer dimensions, and the degree of orthogonality among the training samples. The primary contribution of this paper is an analytical characterization of loss sharpness in smooth nonlinear multilayer neural networks via a closed-form expression, avoiding explicit numerical eigenspectrum computation. We hope that this work provides a small yet meaningful step toward unraveling the mysteries of deep learning.
13.2CLAug 19, 2024
How to Make the Most of LLMs' Grammatical Knowledge for Acceptability JudgmentsYusuke Ide, Yuto Nishida, Justin Vasselli et al.
The grammatical knowledge of language models (LMs) is often measured using a benchmark of linguistic minimal pairs, where the LMs are presented with a pair of acceptable and unacceptable sentences and required to judge which is more acceptable. Conventional approaches directly compare sentence probabilities assigned by LMs, but recent large language models (LLMs) are trained to perform tasks via prompting, and thus, the raw probabilities they assign may not fully reflect their grammatical knowledge. In this study, we attempt to derive more accurate acceptability judgments from LLMs using prompts and templates. Through extensive experiments in English and Chinese, we compare nine judgment methods and find two of them, a probability readout method -- in-template LP and a prompt-based method -- Yes/No probability computing, achieve higher accuracy than the conventional ones. Our analysis reveals that these methods excel in different linguistic phenomena, suggesting they access different aspects of LLMs' knowledge. We also find that ensembling the two methods outperforms single methods. Consequently, we recommend these techniques, either individually or ensembled, as more effective alternatives to conventional approaches for assessing grammatical knowledge in LLMs.
14.9CLAug 22, 2024
Toward the Evaluation of Large Language Models Considering Score Variance across Instruction TemplatesYusuke Sakai, Adam Nohejl, Jiangnan Hang et al.
The natural language understanding (NLU) performance of large language models (LLMs) has been evaluated across various tasks and datasets. The existing evaluation methods, however, do not take into account the variance in scores due to differences in prompts, which leads to unfair evaluation and comparison of NLU performance. Moreover, evaluation designed for specific prompts is inappropriate for instruction tuning, which aims to perform well with any prompt. It is therefore necessary to find a way to measure NLU performance in a fair manner, considering score variance between different instruction templates. In this study, we provide English and Japanese cross-lingual datasets for evaluating the NLU performance of LLMs, which include multiple instruction templates for fair evaluation of each task, along with regular expressions to constrain the output format. Furthermore, we propose the Sharpe score as an evaluation metric that takes into account the variance in scores between templates. Comprehensive analysis of English and Japanese LLMs reveals that the high variance among templates has a significant impact on the fair evaluation of LLMs.
5.3CLApr 13
CArtBench: Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Chinese Art Understanding, Interpretation, and AuthenticityXuefeng Wei, Zhixuan Wang, Xuan Zhou et al.
We introduce CARTBENCH, a museum-grounded benchmark for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) on Chinese artworks beyond short-form recognition and QA. CARTBENCH comprises four subtasks: CURATORQA for evidence-grounded recognition and reasoning, CATALOGCAPTION for structured four-section expert-style appreciation, REINTERPRET for defensible reinterpretation with expert ratings, and CONNOISSEURPAIRS for diagnostic authenticity discrimination under visually similar confounds. CARTBENCH is built by aligning image-bearing Palace Museum objects from Wikidata with authoritative catalog pages, spanning five art categories across multiple dynasties. Across nine representative VLMs, we find that high overall CURATORQA accuracy can mask sharp drops on hard evidence linking and style-to-period inference; long-form appreciation remains far from expert references; and authenticity-oriented diagnostic discrimination stays near chance, underscoring the difficulty of connoisseur-level reasoning for current models.
9.8CLNov 15, 2023
Does Pre-trained Language Model Actually Infer Unseen Links in Knowledge Graph Completion?Yusuke Sakai, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Katsuhiko Hayashi et al.
Knowledge graphs (KGs) consist of links that describe relationships between entities. Due to the difficulty of manually enumerating all relationships between entities, automatically completing them is essential for KGs. Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) is a task that infers unseen relationships between entities in a KG. Traditional embedding-based KGC methods, such as RESCAL, TransE, DistMult, ComplEx, RotatE, HAKE, HousE, etc., infer missing links using only the knowledge from training data. In contrast, the recent Pre-trained Language Model (PLM)-based KGC utilizes knowledge obtained during pre-training. Therefore, PLM-based KGC can estimate missing links between entities by reusing memorized knowledge from pre-training without inference. This approach is problematic because building KGC models aims to infer unseen links between entities. However, conventional evaluations in KGC do not consider inference and memorization abilities separately. Thus, a PLM-based KGC method, which achieves high performance in current KGC evaluations, may be ineffective in practical applications. To address this issue, we analyze whether PLM-based KGC methods make inferences or merely access memorized knowledge. For this purpose, we propose a method for constructing synthetic datasets specified in this analysis and conclude that PLMs acquire the inference abilities required for KGC through pre-training, even though the performance improvements mostly come from textual information of entities and relations.
AdTEC: A Unified Benchmark for Evaluating Text Quality in Search Engine AdvertisingPeinan Zhang, Yusuke Sakai, Masato Mita et al.
With the increase in the fluency of ad texts automatically created by natural language generation technology, there is high demand to verify the quality of these creatives in a real-world setting. We propose AdTEC (Ad Text Evaluation Benchmark by CyberAgent), the first public benchmark to evaluate ad texts from multiple perspectives within practical advertising operations. Our contributions are as follows: (i) Defining five tasks for evaluating the quality of ad texts, as well as building a Japanese dataset based on the practical operational experiences of building a Japanese dataset based on the practical operational experiences of advertising agencies, which are typically kept in-house. (ii) Validating the performance of existing pre-trained language models (PLMs) and human evaluators on the dataset. (iii) Analyzing the characteristics and providing challenges of the benchmark. The results show that while PLMs have already reached practical usage level in several tasks, humans still outperform in certain domains, implying that there is significant room for improvement in this area.
Simultaneous Interpretation Corpus Construction by Large Language Models in Distant Language PairYusuke Sakai, Mana Makinae, Hidetaka Kamigaito et al.
In Simultaneous Machine Translation (SiMT) systems, training with a simultaneous interpretation (SI) corpus is an effective method for achieving high-quality yet low-latency systems. However, it is very challenging to curate such a corpus due to limitations in the abilities of annotators, and hence, existing SI corpora are limited. Therefore, we propose a method to convert existing speech translation corpora into interpretation-style data, maintaining the original word order and preserving the entire source content using Large Language Models (LLM-SI-Corpus). We demonstrate that fine-tuning SiMT models in text-to-text and speech-to-text settings with the LLM-SI-Corpus reduces latencies while maintaining the same level of quality as the models trained with offline datasets. The LLM-SI-Corpus is available at \url{https://github.com/yusuke1997/LLM-SI-Corpus}.
4.9CLDec 1, 2025
Agreement-Constrained Probabilistic Minimum Bayes Risk DecodingKoki Natsumi, Hiroyuki Deguchi, Yusuke Sakai et al.
Minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding generates high-quality translations by maximizing the expected utility of output candidates, but it evaluates all pairwise scores over the candidate set; hence, it takes quadratic time with respect to the number of candidates. To reduce the number of utility function calls, probabilistic MBR (PMBR) decoding partially evaluates quality scores using sampled pairs of candidates and completes the missing scores with a matrix completion algorithm. Nevertheless, it degrades the translation quality as the number of utility function calls is reduced. Therefore, to improve the trade-off between quality and cost, we propose agreement-constrained PMBR (AC-PMBR) decoding, which leverages a knowledge distilled model to guide the completion of the score matrix. Our AC-PMBR decoding improved approximation errors of matrix completion by up to 3 times and achieved higher translation quality compared with PMBR decoding at a comparable computational cost on the WMT'23 En$\leftrightarrow$De translation tasks.
3.7CVFeb 29, 2024Code
Artwork Explanation in Large-scale Vision Language ModelsKazuki Hayashi, Yusuke Sakai, Hidetaka Kamigaito et al.
Large-scale vision-language models (LVLMs) output text from images and instructions, demonstrating advanced capabilities in text generation and comprehension. However, it has not been clarified to what extent LVLMs understand the knowledge necessary for explaining images, the complex relationships between various pieces of knowledge, and how they integrate these understandings into their explanations. To address this issue, we propose a new task: the artwork explanation generation task, along with its evaluation dataset and metric for quantitatively assessing the understanding and utilization of knowledge about artworks. This task is apt for image description based on the premise that LVLMs are expected to have pre-existing knowledge of artworks, which are often subjects of wide recognition and documented information. It consists of two parts: generating explanations from both images and titles of artworks, and generating explanations using only images, thus evaluating the LVLMs' language-based and vision-based knowledge. Alongside, we release a training dataset for LVLMs to learn explanations that incorporate knowledge about artworks. Our findings indicate that LVLMs not only struggle with integrating language and visual information but also exhibit a more pronounced limitation in acquiring knowledge from images alone. The datasets (ExpArt=Explain Artworks) are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/naist-nlp/ExpArt.
Tonguescape: Exploring Language Models Understanding of Vowel ArticulationHaruki Sakajo, Yusuke Sakai, Hidetaka Kamigaito et al.
Vowels are primarily characterized by tongue position. Humans have discovered these features of vowel articulation through their own experience and explicit objective observation such as using MRI. With this knowledge and our experience, we can explain and understand the relationship between tongue positions and vowels, and this knowledge is helpful for language learners to learn pronunciation. Since language models (LMs) are trained on a large amount of data that includes linguistic and medical fields, our preliminary studies indicate that an LM is able to explain the pronunciation mechanisms of vowels. However, it is unclear whether multi-modal LMs, such as vision LMs, align textual information with visual information. One question arises: do LMs associate real tongue positions with vowel articulation? In this study, we created video and image datasets from the existing real-time MRI dataset and investigated whether LMs can understand vowel articulation based on tongue positions using vision-based information. Our findings suggest that LMs exhibit potential for understanding vowels and tongue positions when reference examples are provided while they have difficulties without them. Our code for dataset building is available on GitHub.
Diversity Explains Inference Scaling Laws: Through a Case Study of Minimum Bayes Risk DecodingHidetaka Kamigaito, Hiroyuki Deguchi, Yusuke Sakai et al.
Inference methods play an important role in eliciting the performance of large language models (LLMs). Currently, LLMs use inference methods utilizing generated multiple samples, which can be derived from Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) Decoding. Previous studies have conducted empirical analyses to clarify the improvements in generation performance achieved by MBR decoding and have reported various observations. However, the theoretical underpinnings of these findings remain uncertain. To address this, we offer a new theoretical interpretation of MBR decoding from the perspective of bias-diversity decomposition. In this interpretation, the error in the quality estimation of hypotheses by MBR decoding is decomposed into two main factors: bias, which considers the closeness between the utility function and human evaluation, and diversity, which represents the variability in the quality estimation of the utility function. The theoretical analysis reveals the difficulty of simultaneously improving bias and diversity, confirming the validity of enhancing MBR decoding performance by increasing diversity. Furthermore, we reveal that diversity can explain one aspect of inference scaling laws that describe performance improvement by increasing sample size. Moreover, experiments across multiple NLP tasks yielded results consistent with these theoretical characteristics. Our code is available at https://github.com/naist-nlp/mbr-bias-diversity.
gec-metrics: A Unified Library for Grammatical Error Correction EvaluationTakumi Goto, Yusuke Sakai, Taro Watanabe
We introduce gec-metrics, a library for using and developing grammatical error correction (GEC) evaluation metrics through a unified interface. Our library enables fair system comparisons by ensuring that everyone conducts evaluations using a consistent implementation. Moreover, it is designed with a strong focus on API usage, making it highly extensible. It also includes meta-evaluation functionalities and provides analysis and visualization scripts, contributing to developing GEC evaluation metrics. Our code is released under the MIT license and is also distributed as an installable package. The video is available on YouTube.
16.6CLJun 6, 2024Code
mCSQA: Multilingual Commonsense Reasoning Dataset with Unified Creation Strategy by Language Models and HumansYusuke Sakai, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Taro Watanabe
It is very challenging to curate a dataset for language-specific knowledge and common sense in order to evaluate natural language understanding capabilities of language models. Due to the limitation in the availability of annotators, most current multilingual datasets are created through translation, which cannot evaluate such language-specific aspects. Therefore, we propose Multilingual CommonsenseQA (mCSQA) based on the construction process of CSQA but leveraging language models for a more efficient construction, e.g., by asking LM to generate questions/answers, refine answers and verify QAs followed by reduced human efforts for verification. Constructed dataset is a benchmark for cross-lingual language-transfer capabilities of multilingual LMs, and experimental results showed high language-transfer capabilities for questions that LMs could easily solve, but lower transfer capabilities for questions requiring deep knowledge or commonsense. This highlights the necessity of language-specific datasets for evaluation and training. Finally, our method demonstrated that multilingual LMs could create QA including language-specific knowledge, significantly reducing the dataset creation cost compared to manual creation. The datasets are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/yusuke1997/mCSQA.
Centroid-Based Efficient Minimum Bayes Risk DecodingHiroyuki Deguchi, Yusuke Sakai, Hidetaka Kamigaito et al.
Minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding achieved state-of-the-art translation performance by using COMET, a neural metric that has a high correlation with human evaluation. However, MBR decoding requires quadratic time since it computes the expected score between a translation hypothesis and all reference translations. We propose centroid-based MBR (CBMBR) decoding to improve the speed of MBR decoding. Our method clusters the reference translations in the feature space, and then calculates the score using the centroids of each cluster. The experimental results show that our CBMBR not only improved the decoding speed of the expected score calculation 5.7 times, but also outperformed vanilla MBR decoding in translation quality by up to 0.5 COMET in the WMT'22 En$\leftrightarrow$Ja, En$\leftrightarrow$De, En$\leftrightarrow$Zh, and WMT'23 En$\leftrightarrow$Ja translation tasks.
Rethinking Evaluation Metrics for Grammatical Error Correction: Why Use a Different Evaluation Process than Human?Takumi Goto, Yusuke Sakai, Taro Watanabe
One of the goals of automatic evaluation metrics in grammatical error correction (GEC) is to rank GEC systems such that it matches human preferences. However, current automatic evaluations are based on procedures that diverge from human evaluation. Specifically, human evaluation derives rankings by aggregating sentence-level relative evaluation results, e.g., pairwise comparisons, using a rating algorithm, whereas automatic evaluation averages sentence-level absolute scores to obtain corpus-level scores, which are then sorted to determine rankings. In this study, we propose an aggregation method for existing automatic evaluation metrics which aligns with human evaluation methods to bridge this gap. We conducted experiments using various metrics, including edit-based metrics, n-gram based metrics, and sentence-level metrics, and show that resolving the gap improves results for the most of metrics on the SEEDA benchmark. We also found that even BERT-based metrics sometimes outperform the metrics of GPT-4. The proposed ranking method is integrated gec-metrics.
4.2CLOct 17, 2024
BQA: Body Language Question Answering Dataset for Video Large Language ModelsShintaro Ozaki, Kazuki Hayashi, Miyu Oba et al.
A large part of human communication relies on nonverbal cues such as facial expressions, eye contact, and body language. Unlike language or sign language, such nonverbal communication lacks formal rules, requiring complex reasoning based on commonsense understanding. Enabling current Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) to accurately interpret body language is a crucial challenge, as human unconscious actions can easily cause the model to misinterpret their intent. To address this, we propose a dataset, BQA, a body language question answering dataset, to validate whether the model can correctly interpret emotions from short clips of body language comprising 26 emotion labels of videos of body language. We evaluated various VideoLLMs on BQA and revealed that understanding body language is challenging, and our analyses of the wrong answers by VideoLLMs show that certain VideoLLMs made significantly biased answers depending on the age group and ethnicity of the individuals in the video. The dataset is available.
13.0CLJun 18, 2025
Revisiting Compositional Generalization Capability of Large Language Models Considering Instruction Following AbilityYusuke Sakai, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Taro Watanabe
In generative commonsense reasoning tasks such as CommonGen, generative large language models (LLMs) compose sentences that include all given concepts. However, when focusing on instruction-following capabilities, if a prompt specifies a concept order, LLMs must generate sentences that adhere to the specified order. To address this, we propose Ordered CommonGen, a benchmark designed to evaluate the compositional generalization and instruction-following abilities of LLMs. This benchmark measures ordered coverage to assess whether concepts are generated in the specified order, enabling a simultaneous evaluation of both abilities. We conducted a comprehensive analysis using 36 LLMs and found that, while LLMs generally understand the intent of instructions, biases toward specific concept order patterns often lead to low-diversity outputs or identical results even when the concept order is altered. Moreover, even the most instruction-compliant LLM achieved only about 75% ordered coverage, highlighting the need for improvements in both instruction-following and compositional generalization capabilities.
8.3CLJun 3, 2025
IMPARA-GED: Grammatical Error Detection is Boosting Reference-free Grammatical Error Quality EstimatorYusuke Sakai, Takumi Goto, Taro Watanabe
We propose IMPARA-GED, a novel reference-free automatic grammatical error correction (GEC) evaluation method with grammatical error detection (GED) capabilities. We focus on the quality estimator of IMPARA, an existing automatic GEC evaluation method, and construct that of IMPARA-GED using a pre-trained language model with enhanced GED capabilities. Experimental results on SEEDA, a meta-evaluation dataset for automatic GEC evaluation methods, demonstrate that IMPARA-GED achieves the highest correlation with human sentence-level evaluations.
4.9CLSep 26, 2025
Multilingual Dialogue Generation and Localization with Dialogue Act ScriptingJustin Vasselli, Eunike Andriani Kardinata, Yusuke Sakai et al.
Non-English dialogue datasets are scarce, and models are often trained or evaluated on translations of English-language dialogues, an approach which can introduce artifacts that reduce their naturalness and cultural appropriateness. This work proposes Dialogue Act Script (DAS), a structured framework for encoding, localizing, and generating multilingual dialogues from abstract intent representations. Rather than translating dialogue utterances directly, DAS enables the generation of new dialogues in the target language that are culturally and contextually appropriate. By using structured dialogue act representations, DAS supports flexible localization across languages, mitigating translationese and enabling more fluent, naturalistic conversations. Human evaluations across Italian, German, and Chinese show that DAS-generated dialogues consistently outperform those produced by both machine and human translators on measures of cultural relevance, coherence, and situational appropriateness.
8.3CLSep 3, 2025
SinhalaMMLU: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Multitask Language Understanding in SinhalaAshmari Pramodya, Nirasha Nelki, Heshan Shalinda et al.
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive general knowledge and reasoning abilities, yet their evaluation has predominantly focused on global or anglocentric subjects, often neglecting low-resource languages and culturally specific content. While recent multilingual benchmarks attempt to bridge this gap, many rely on automatic translation, which can introduce errors and misrepresent the original cultural context. To address this, we introduce SinhalaMMLU, the first multiple-choice question answering benchmark designed specifically for Sinhala, a low-resource language. The dataset includes over 7,000 questions spanning secondary to collegiate education levels, aligned with the Sri Lankan national curriculum, and covers six domains and 30 subjects, encompassing both general academic topics and culturally grounded knowledge. We evaluate 26 LLMs on SinhalaMMLU and observe that, while Claude 3.5 sonnet and GPT-4o achieve the highest average accuracies at 67% and 62% respectively, overall model performance remains limited. In particular, models struggle in culturally rich domains such as the Humanities, revealing substantial room for improvement in adapting LLMs to low-resource and culturally specific contexts.
12.0CLAug 28, 2025
Languages Still Left Behind: Toward a Better Multilingual Machine Translation BenchmarkChihiro Taguchi, Seng Mai, Keita Kurabe et al.
Multilingual machine translation (MT) benchmarks play a central role in evaluating the capabilities of modern MT systems. Among them, the FLORES+ benchmark is widely used, offering English-to-many translation data for over 200 languages, curated with strict quality control protocols. However, we study data in four languages (Asante Twi, Japanese, Jinghpaw, and South Azerbaijani) and uncover critical shortcomings in the benchmark's suitability for truly multilingual evaluation. Human assessments reveal that many translations fall below the claimed 90% quality standard, and the annotators report that source sentences are often too domain-specific and culturally biased toward the English-speaking world. We further demonstrate that simple heuristics, such as copying named entities, can yield non-trivial BLEU scores, suggesting vulnerabilities in the evaluation protocol. Notably, we show that MT models trained on high-quality, naturalistic data perform poorly on FLORES+ while achieving significant gains on our domain-relevant evaluation set. Based on these findings, we advocate for multilingual MT benchmarks that use domain-general and culturally neutral source texts rely less on named entities, in order to better reflect real-world translation challenges.
8.3CLJun 2, 2025
Dictionaries to the Rescue: Cross-Lingual Vocabulary Transfer for Low-Resource Languages Using Bilingual DictionariesHaruki Sakajo, Yusuke Ide, Justin Vasselli et al.
Cross-lingual vocabulary transfer plays a promising role in adapting pre-trained language models to new languages, including low-resource languages. Existing approaches that utilize monolingual or parallel corpora face challenges when applied to languages with limited resources. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective vocabulary transfer method that utilizes bilingual dictionaries, which are available for many languages, thanks to descriptive linguists. Our proposed method leverages a property of BPE tokenizers where removing a subword from the vocabulary causes a fallback to shorter subwords. The embeddings of target subwords are estimated iteratively by progressively removing them from the tokenizer. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms existing methods for low-resource languages, demonstrating the effectiveness of a dictionary-based approach for cross-lingual vocabulary transfer.
20.9CLJan 5, 2025
Can Impressions of Music be Extracted from Thumbnail Images?Takashi Harada, Takehiro Motomitsu, Katsuhiko Hayashi et al.
In recent years, there has been a notable increase in research on machine learning models for music retrieval and generation systems that are capable of taking natural language sentences as inputs. However, there is a scarcity of large-scale publicly available datasets, consisting of music data and their corresponding natural language descriptions known as music captions. In particular, non-musical information such as suitable situations for listening to a track and the emotions elicited upon listening is crucial for describing music. This type of information is underrepresented in existing music caption datasets due to the challenges associated with extracting it directly from music data. To address this issue, we propose a method for generating music caption data that incorporates non-musical aspects inferred from music thumbnail images, and validated the effectiveness of our approach through human evaluations. Additionally, we created a dataset with approximately 360,000 captions containing non-musical aspects. Leveraging this dataset, we trained a music retrieval model and demonstrated its effectiveness in music retrieval tasks through evaluation.
11.5CLFeb 19, 2024
IRR: Image Review Ranking Framework for Evaluating Vision-Language ModelsKazuki Hayashi, Kazuma Onishi, Toma Suzuki et al.
Large-scale Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) process both images and text, excelling in multimodal tasks such as image captioning and description generation. However, while these models excel at generating factual content, their ability to generate and evaluate texts reflecting perspectives on the same image, depending on the context, has not been sufficiently explored. To address this, we propose IRR: Image Review Rank, a novel evaluation framework designed to assess critic review texts from multiple perspectives. IRR evaluates LVLMs by measuring how closely their judgments align with human interpretations. We validate it using a dataset of images from 15 categories, each with five critic review texts and annotated rankings in both English and Japanese, totaling over 2,000 data instances. The datasets are available at https://hf.co/datasets/naist-nlp/Wiki-ImageReview1.0. Our results indicate that, although LVLMs exhibited consistent performance across languages, their correlation with human annotations was insufficient, highlighting the need for further advancements. These findings highlight the limitations of current evaluation methods and the need for approaches that better capture human reasoning in Vision & Language tasks.
4.3GR-QCNov 19, 2021
Unsupervised Learning Architecture for Classifying the Transient Noise of Interferometric Gravitational-wave DetectorsYusuke Sakai, Yousuke Itoh, Piljong Jung et al.
In the data obtained by laser interferometric gravitational wave detectors, transient noise with non-stationary and non-Gaussian features occurs at a high rate. This often results in problems such as detector instability and the hiding and/or imitation of gravitational-wave signals. This transient noise has various characteristics in the time--frequency representation, which is considered to be associated with environmental and instrumental origins. Classification of transient noise can offer clues for exploring its origin and improving the performance of the detector. One approach for accomplishing this is supervised learning. However, in general, supervised learning requires annotation of the training data, and there are issues with ensuring objectivity in the classification and its corresponding new classes. By contrast, unsupervised learning can reduce the annotation work for the training data and ensure objectivity in the classification and its corresponding new classes. In this study, we propose an unsupervised learning architecture for the classification of transient noise that combines a variational autoencoder and invariant information clustering. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture, we used the dataset (time--frequency two-dimensional spectrogram images and labels) of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) first observation run prepared by the Gravity Spy project. The classes provided by our proposed unsupervised learning architecture were consistent with the labels annotated by the Gravity Spy project, which manifests the potential for the existence of unrevealed classes.