Takashi Wada

Takashi Wada, Timothy Baldwin, Yuji Matsumoto et al.

We propose a new unsupervised method for lexical substitution using pre-trained language models. Compared to previous approaches that use the generative capability of language models to predict substitutes, our method retrieves substitutes based on the similarity of contextualised and decontextualised word embeddings, i.e. the average contextual representation of a word in multiple contexts. We conduct experiments in English and Italian, and show that our method substantially outperforms strong baselines and establishes a new state-of-the-art without any explicit supervision or fine-tuning. We further show that our method performs particularly well at predicting low-frequency substitutes, and also generates a diverse list of substitute candidates, reducing morphophonetic or morphosyntactic biases induced by article-noun agreement.

Takashi Wada, Yuji Matsumoto, Timothy Baldwin et al.

We propose an unsupervised approach to paraphrasing multiword expressions (MWEs) in context. Our model employs only monolingual corpus data and pre-trained language models (without fine-tuning), and does not make use of any external resources such as dictionaries. We evaluate our method on the SemEval 2022 idiomatic semantic text similarity task, and show that it outperforms all unsupervised systems and rivals supervised systems.

Takashi Wada, Timothy Baldwin, Jey Han Lau

We propose a new unsupervised lexical simplification method that uses only monolingual data and pre-trained language models. Given a target word and its context, our method generates substitutes based on the target context and also additional contexts sampled from monolingual data. We conduct experiments in English, Portuguese, and Spanish on the TSAR-2022 shared task, and show that our model substantially outperforms other unsupervised systems across all languages. We also establish a new state-of-the-art by ensembling our model with GPT-3.5. Lastly, we evaluate our model on the SWORDS lexical substitution data set, achieving a state-of-the-art result.

Ryotaro Shimizu, Yu Wang, Masanari Kimura et al.

In this work, we propose a fashion item recommendation model that incorporates hyperbolic geometry into user and item representations. Using hyperbolic space, our model aims to capture implicit hierarchies among items based on their visual data and users' purchase history. During training, we apply a multi-task learning framework that considers both hyperbolic and Euclidean distances in the loss function. Our experiments on three data sets show that our model performs better than previous models trained in Euclidean space only, confirming the effectiveness of our model. Our ablation studies show that multi-task learning plays a key role, and removing the Euclidean loss substantially deteriorates the model performance.

Ryotaro Shimizu, Takashi Wada, Yu Wang et al.

Recent research on explainable recommendation generally frames the task as a standard text generation problem, and evaluates models simply based on the textual similarity between the predicted and ground-truth explanations. However, this approach fails to consider one crucial aspect of the systems: whether their outputs accurately reflect the users' (post-purchase) sentiments, i.e., whether and why they would like and/or dislike the recommended items. To shed light on this issue, we introduce new datasets and evaluation methods that focus on the users' sentiments. Specifically, we construct the datasets by explicitly extracting users' positive and negative opinions from their post-purchase reviews using an LLM, and propose to evaluate systems based on whether the generated explanations 1) align well with the users' sentiments, and 2) accurately identify both positive and negative opinions of users on the target items. We benchmark several recent models on our datasets and demonstrate that achieving strong performance on existing metrics does not ensure that the generated explanations align well with the users' sentiments. Lastly, we find that existing models can provide more sentiment-aware explanations when the users' (predicted) ratings for the target items are directly fed into the models as input. The datasets and benchmark implementation are available at: https://github.com/jchanxtarov/sent_xrec.

Yuki Hirakawa, Takashi Wada, Kazuya Morishita et al.

Fashion aesthetic evaluation is the task of estimating how well the outfits worn by individuals in images suit them. In this work, we examine the zero-shot performance of GPT-4V on this task for the first time. We show that its predictions align fairly well with human judgments on our datasets, and also find that it struggles with ranking outfits in similar colors. The code is available at https://github.com/st-tech/gpt4v-fashion-aesthetic-evaluation.

Yuki Hirakawa, Takashi Wada, Ryotaro Shimizu et al.

Given a person image and a garment image, image-based Virtual Try-ON (VTON) synthesizes a try-on image of the person wearing the target garment. As VTON systems become increasingly important in practical applications such as fashion e-commerce, reliable evaluation of their outputs has emerged as a critical challenge. In real-world scenarios, ground-truth images of the same person wearing the target garment are typically unavailable, making reference-based evaluation impractical. Moreover, widely used distribution-level metrics such as Fréchet Inception Distance and Kernel Inception Distance measure dataset-level similarity and fail to reflect the perceptual quality of individual generated images. To address these limitations, we propose Image Quality Assessment for Virtual Try-On (VTON-IQA), a reference-free framework for human-aligned, image-level quality assessment without requiring ground-truth images. To model human perceptual judgments, we construct VTON-QBench, a large-scale human-annotated benchmark comprising 62,688 try-on images generated by 14 representative VTON models and 431,800 quality annotations collected from 13,838 qualified annotators. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest dataset to date for human subjective evaluation in virtual try-on. Evaluating virtual try-on quality requires verifying both garment fidelity and the preservation of person-specific details. To explicitly model such interactions, we introduce an Interleaved Cross-Attention module that extends standard transformer blocks by inserting a cross-attention layer between self-attention and MLP in the latter blocks. Extensive experiments show that VTON-IQA achieves reliable human-aligned image-level quality prediction. Moreover, we conduct a comprehensive benchmark evaluation of 14 representative VTON models using VTON-IQA.

Tianwei Chen, Takuya Furusawa, Yuki Hirakawa et al.

This paper introduces a multi-label visual emotion analysis benchmark dataset for comprehensively evaluating the ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to predict the emotions evoked by images. Recent user studies report an unintuitive finding: humans may prefer the predictions of MLLMs over the labels in existing datasets. We argue that this phenomenon stems from the suboptimal annotation scheme used in existing datasets, where each annotator is shown a single candidate emotion for each image and judges whether it is evoked or not. This approach is clearly limited because a single image can evoke multiple emotions with varying intensities. As a result, evaluations based on these datasets may underestimate the capabilities of MLLMs, yet an appropriate benchmark for evaluating such models remains lacking. To address this issue, we introduce a new multi-label benchmark dataset for visual emotion analysis toward MLLMs evaluation. We hire $20$ annotators per image and ask them to select all emotions they feel from an image. Then, we aggregate the votes across all annotators, providing a more reliable and representative dataset labeled with a distribution of emotions. The resulting dataset contains $10,344$ images with $236,998$ valid votes across eight emotions. Based on this benchmark dataset, we evaluate several recent models, including Qwen3-VL, OpenAI's GPT, Gemini, and Claude. We assess model performance on both dominant emotion prediction and emotion distribution prediction. Our results demonstrate the progress achieved by recent MLLMs while also indicating that substantial room for improvement remains. Furthermore, our experiments with LLM-as-a-judge show that the method does not consistently improve MLLMs' performance, indicating its limitations for the subjective task of visual emotion analysis.

Takashi Wada, Yuki Hirakawa, Ryotaro Shimizu et al.

We propose new static word embeddings optimised for sentence semantic representation. We first extract word embeddings from a pre-trained Sentence Transformer, and improve them with sentence-level principal component analysis, followed by either knowledge distillation or contrastive learning. During inference, we represent sentences by simply averaging word embeddings, which requires little computational cost. We evaluate models on both monolingual and cross-lingual tasks and show that our model substantially outperforms existing static models on sentence semantic tasks, and even surpasses a basic Sentence Transformer model (SimCSE) on a text embedding benchmark. Lastly, we perform a variety of analyses and show that our method successfully removes word embedding components that are not highly relevant to sentence semantics, and adjusts the vector norms based on the influence of words on sentence semantics.

Takashi Wada, Tomoharu Iwata, Yuji Matsumoto et al.

We propose a new approach for learning contextualised cross-lingual word embeddings based on a small parallel corpus (e.g. a few hundred sentence pairs). Our method obtains word embeddings via an LSTM encoder-decoder model that simultaneously translates and reconstructs an input sentence. Through sharing model parameters among different languages, our model jointly trains the word embeddings in a common cross-lingual space. We also propose to combine word and subword embeddings to make use of orthographic similarities across different languages. We base our experiments on real-world data from endangered languages, namely Yongning Na, Shipibo-Konibo, and Griko. Our experiments on bilingual lexicon induction and word alignment tasks show that our model outperforms existing methods by a large margin for most language pairs. These results demonstrate that, contrary to common belief, an encoder-decoder translation model is beneficial for learning cross-lingual representations even in extremely low-resource conditions. Furthermore, our model also works well on high-resource conditions, achieving state-of-the-art performance on a German-English word-alignment task.

Takashi Wada, Hideitsu Hino

Bayesian optimization is an effective method to efficiently optimize unknown objective functions with high evaluation costs. Traditional Bayesian optimization algorithms select one point per iteration for single objective function, whereas in recent years, Bayesian optimization for multi-objective optimization or multi-point search per iteration have been proposed. However, Bayesian optimization that can deal with them at the same time in non-heuristic way is not known at present. We propose a Bayesian optimization algorithm that can deal with multi-objective optimization and multi-point search at the same time. First, we define an acquisition function that considers both multi-objective and multi-point search problems. It is difficult to analytically maximize the acquisition function as the computational cost is prohibitive even when approximate calculations such as sampling approximation are performed; therefore, we propose an accurate and computationally efficient method for estimating gradient of the acquisition function, and develop an algorithm for Bayesian optimization with multi-objective and multi-point search. It is shown via numerical experiments that the performance of the proposed method is comparable or superior to those of heuristic methods.

Takashi Wada, Tomoharu Iwata

We propose an unsupervised method to obtain cross-lingual embeddings without any parallel data or pre-trained word embeddings. The proposed model, which we call multilingual neural language models, takes sentences of multiple languages as an input. The proposed model contains bidirectional LSTMs that perform as forward and backward language models, and these networks are shared among all the languages. The other parameters, i.e. word embeddings and linear transformation between hidden states and outputs, are specific to each language. The shared LSTMs can capture the common sentence structure among all languages. Accordingly, word embeddings of each language are mapped into a common latent space, making it possible to measure the similarity of words across multiple languages. We evaluate the quality of the cross-lingual word embeddings on a word alignment task. Our experiments demonstrate that our model can obtain cross-lingual embeddings of much higher quality than existing unsupervised models when only a small amount of monolingual data (i.e. 50k sentences) are available, or the domains of monolingual data are different across languages.