Xianghua Fu

Bowen Zhang, Xianghua Fu, Daijun Ding et al.

Stance detection predicts attitudes towards targets in texts and has gained attention with the rise of social media. Traditional approaches include conventional machine learning, early deep neural networks, and pre-trained fine-tuning models. However, with the evolution of very large pre-trained language models (VLPLMs) like ChatGPT (GPT-3.5), traditional methods face deployment challenges. The parameter-free Chain-of-Thought (CoT) approach, not requiring backpropagation training, has emerged as a promising alternative. This paper examines CoT's effectiveness in stance detection tasks, demonstrating its superior accuracy and discussing associated challenges.

ZhenHao Tang, XiaoBing Zhang, Zi Long et al.

Recently, numbers of works shows that the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) can be improved to a certain extent with using visual information. However, most of these conclusions are drawn from the analysis of experimental results based on a limited set of bilingual sentence-image pairs, such as Multi30K. In these kinds of datasets, the content of one bilingual parallel sentence pair must be well represented by a manually annotated image, which is different with the actual translation situation. Some previous works are proposed to addressed the problem by retrieving images from exiting sentence-image pairs with topic model. However, because of the limited collection of sentence-image pairs they used, their image retrieval method is difficult to deal with the out-of-vocabulary words, and can hardly prove that visual information enhance NMT rather than the co-occurrence of images and sentences. In this paper, we propose an open-vocabulary image retrieval methods to collect descriptive images for bilingual parallel corpus using image search engine. Next, we propose text-aware attentive visual encoder to filter incorrectly collected noise images. Experiment results on Multi30K and other two translation datasets show that our proposed method achieves significant improvements over strong baselines.

Fuqiang Niu, Zebang Cheng, Xianghua Fu et al.

Stance detection, which aims to identify public opinion towards specific targets using social media data, is an important yet challenging task. With the proliferation of diverse multimodal social media content including text, and images multimodal stance detection (MSD) has become a crucial research area. However, existing MSD studies have focused on modeling stance within individual text-image pairs, overlooking the multi-party conversational contexts that naturally occur on social media. This limitation stems from a lack of datasets that authentically capture such conversational scenarios, hindering progress in conversational MSD. To address this, we introduce a new multimodal multi-turn conversational stance detection dataset (called MmMtCSD). To derive stances from this challenging dataset, we propose a novel multimodal large language model stance detection framework (MLLM-SD), that learns joint stance representations from textual and visual modalities. Experiments on MmMtCSD show state-of-the-art performance of our proposed MLLM-SD approach for multimodal stance detection. We believe that MmMtCSD will contribute to advancing real-world applications of stance detection research.

Shilong Hou, Ruilin Shang, Zi Long et al.

An increasing number of companies have begun providing services that leverage cloud-based large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT. However, this development raises substantial privacy concerns, as users' prompts are transmitted to and processed by the model providers. Among the various privacy protection methods for LLMs, those implemented during the pre-training and fine-tuning phrases fail to mitigate the privacy risks associated with the remote use of cloud-based LLMs by users. On the other hand, methods applied during the inference phrase are primarily effective in scenarios where the LLM's inference does not rely on privacy-sensitive information. In this paper, we outline the process of remote user interaction with LLMs and, for the first time, propose a detailed definition of a general pseudonymization framework applicable to cloud-based LLMs. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework strikes an optimal balance between privacy protection and utility. The code for our method is available to the public at https://github.com/Mebymeby/Pseudonymization-Framework.

Jinze Lv, Jian Chen, Zi Long et al.

Most existing multimodal machine translation (MMT) datasets are predominantly composed of static images or short video clips, lacking extensive video data across diverse domains and topics. As a result, they fail to meet the demands of real-world MMT tasks, such as documentary translation. In this study, we developed TopicVD, a topic-based dataset for video-supported multimodal machine translation of documentaries, aiming to advance research in this field. We collected video-subtitle pairs from documentaries and categorized them into eight topics, such as economy and nature, to facilitate research on domain adaptation in video-guided MMT. Additionally, we preserved their contextual information to support research on leveraging the global context of documentaries in video-guided MMT. To better capture the shared semantics between text and video, we propose an MMT model based on a cross-modal bidirectional attention module. Extensive experiments on the TopicVD dataset demonstrate that visual information consistently improves the performance of the NMT model in documentary translation. However, the MMT model's performance significantly declines in out-of-domain scenarios, highlighting the need for effective domain adaptation methods. Additionally, experiments demonstrate that global context can effectively improve translation performance. % Dataset and our implementations are available at https://github.com/JinzeLv/TopicVD

Yongcheng Li, Lingcong Cai, Ying Lu et al.

Blood cell identification is critical for hematological analysis as it aids physicians in diagnosing various blood-related diseases. In real-world scenarios, blood cell image datasets often present the issues of domain shift and data imbalance, posing challenges for accurate blood cell identification. To address these issues, we propose a novel blood cell classification method termed SADA via stain-aware domain alignment. The primary objective of this work is to mine domain-invariant features in the presence of domain shifts and data imbalances. To accomplish this objective, we propose a stain-based augmentation approach and a local alignment constraint to learn domain-invariant features. Furthermore, we propose a domain-invariant supervised contrastive learning strategy to capture discriminative features. We decouple the training process into two stages of domain-invariant feature learning and classification training, alleviating the problem of data imbalance. Experiment results on four public blood cell datasets and a private real dataset collected from the Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University demonstrate that SADA can achieve a new state-of-the-art baseline, which is superior to the existing cutting-edge methods with a big margin. The source code can be available at the URL (\url{https://github.com/AnoK3111/SADA}).

Junshu Huang, Zi Long, Xianghua Fu et al.

Intent is a significant latent factor influencing user-item interaction sequences. Prevalent sequence recommendation models that utilize contrastive learning predominantly rely on single-intent representations to direct the training process. However, this paradigm oversimplifies real-world recommendation scenarios, attempting to encapsulate the diversity of intents within the single-intent level representation. SR models considering multi-intent information in their framework are more likely to reflect real-life recommendation scenarios accurately.

Jian Chen, JinZe Lv, Zi Long et al.

Video-guided Multimodal Translation (VMT) has advanced significantly in recent years. However, most existing methods rely on locally aligned video segments paired one-to-one with subtitles, limiting their ability to capture global narrative context across multiple segments in long videos. To overcome this limitation, we propose a globally video-guided multimodal translation framework that leverages a pretrained semantic encoder and vector database-based subtitle retrieval to construct a context set of video segments closely related to the target subtitle semantics. An attention mechanism is employed to focus on highly relevant visual content, while preserving the remaining video features to retain broader contextual information. Furthermore, we design a region-aware cross-modal attention mechanism to enhance semantic alignment during translation. Experiments on a large-scale documentary translation dataset demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms baseline models, highlighting its effectiveness in long-video scenarios.

Zi Long, Zhenhao Tang, Xianghua Fu et al.

Recent research in the field of multimodal machine translation (MMT) has indicated that the visual modality is either dispensable or offers only marginal advantages. However, most of these conclusions are drawn from the analysis of experimental results based on a limited set of bilingual sentence-image pairs, such as Multi30k. In these kinds of datasets, the content of one bilingual parallel sentence pair must be well represented by a manually annotated image, which is different from the real-world translation scenario. In this work, we adhere to the universal multimodal machine translation framework proposed by Tang et al. (2022). This approach allows us to delve into the impact of the visual modality on translation efficacy by leveraging real-world translation datasets. Through a comprehensive exploration via probing tasks, we find that the visual modality proves advantageous for the majority of authentic translation datasets. Notably, the translation performance primarily hinges on the alignment and coherence between textual and visual contents. Furthermore, our results suggest that visual information serves a supplementary role in multimodal translation and can be substituted.

Fuqiang Niu, Yi Yang, Xianghua Fu et al.

Stance detection has become an essential tool for analyzing public discussions on social media. Current methods face significant challenges, particularly in Chinese language processing and multi-turn conversational analysis. To address these limitations, we introduce C-MTCSD, the largest Chinese multi-turn conversational stance detection dataset, comprising 24,264 carefully annotated instances from Sina Weibo, which is 4.2 times larger than the only prior Chinese conversational stance detection dataset. Our comprehensive evaluation using both traditional approaches and large language models reveals the complexity of C-MTCSD: even state-of-the-art models achieve only 64.07% F1 score in the challenging zero-shot setting, while performance consistently degrades with increasing conversation depth. Traditional models particularly struggle with implicit stance detection, achieving below 50% F1 score. This work establishes a challenging new benchmark for Chinese stance detection research, highlighting significant opportunities for future improvements.

Xiao Chen, Jiazhen Huang, Qinting Jiang et al.

Test-time adaptation (TTA) has emerged as a critical technique for enhancing the generalization capability of vision-language models (VLMs) during inference. However, existing approaches often incur substantial computational costs and exhibit poor scalability, primarily due to sample-wise adaptation granularity and reliance on costly auxiliary designs such as data augmentation. To address these limitations, we introduce SAIL (Small Aid, Big Leap), a novel adapter-based TTA framework that leverages a lightweight, learnable AdaptNet to enable efficient and scalable model adaptation. As SAIL's core, a frozen pre-trained VLM collaborates with AdaptNet through a confidence-based interpolation weight, generating robust predictions during inference. These predictions serve as self-supervised targets to align AdaptNet's outputs through efficient batch-wise processing, dramatically reducing computational costs without modifying the VLM or requiring memory caches. To mitigate catastrophic forgetting during continual adaptation, we propose a gradient-aware reset strategy driven by a gradient drift indicator (GDI), which dynamically detects domain transitions and strategically resets AdaptNet for stable adaptation. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks on two scenarios demonstrate that SAIL achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining low computational costs. These results highlight SAIL's effectiveness, efficiency and scalability for real-world deployment. The code will be released upon acceptance.