Aishwarya Reganti

S Suryavardan, Shreyash Mishra, Parth Patwa et al. · apple-ml, stanford

The internet gives the world an open platform to express their views and share their stories. While this is very valuable, it makes fake news one of our society's most pressing problems. Manual fact checking process is time consuming, which makes it challenging to disprove misleading assertions before they cause significant harm. This is he driving interest in automatic fact or claim verification. Some of the existing datasets aim to support development of automating fact-checking techniques, however, most of them are text based. Multi-modal fact verification has received relatively scant attention. In this paper, we provide a multi-modal fact-checking dataset called FACTIFY 2, improving Factify 1 by using new data sources and adding satire articles. Factify 2 has 50,000 new data instances. Similar to FACTIFY 1.0, we have three broad categories - support, no-evidence, and refute, with sub-categories based on the entailment of visual and textual data. We also provide a BERT and Vison Transformer based baseline, which achieves 65% F1 score in the test set. The baseline codes and the dataset will be made available at https://github.com/surya1701/Factify-2.0.

Shreyash Mishra, S Suryavardan, Parth Patwa et al. · apple-ml, stanford

Memes are the new-age conveyance mechanism for humor on social media sites. Memes often include an image and some text. Memes can be used to promote disinformation or hatred, thus it is crucial to investigate in details. We introduce Memotion 3, a new dataset with 10,000 annotated memes. Unlike other prevalent datasets in the domain, including prior iterations of Memotion, Memotion 3 introduces Hindi-English Codemixed memes while prior works in the area were limited to only the English memes. We describe the Memotion task, the data collection and the dataset creation methodologies. We also provide a baseline for the task. The baseline code and dataset will be made available at https://github.com/Shreyashm16/Memotion-3.0

Shreyash Mishra, S Suryavardan, Megha Chakraborty et al. · apple-ml, stanford

Analyzing memes on the internet has emerged as a crucial endeavor due to the impact this multi-modal form of content wields in shaping online discourse. Memes have become a powerful tool for expressing emotions and sentiments, possibly even spreading hate and misinformation, through humor and sarcasm. In this paper, we present the overview of the Memotion 3 shared task, as part of the DeFactify 2 workshop at AAAI-23. The task released an annotated dataset of Hindi-English code-mixed memes based on their Sentiment (Task A), Emotion (Task B), and Emotion intensity (Task C). Each of these is defined as an individual task and the participants are ranked separately for each task. Over 50 teams registered for the shared task and 5 made final submissions to the test set of the Memotion 3 dataset. CLIP, BERT modifications, ViT etc. were the most popular models among the participants along with approaches such as Student-Teacher model, Fusion, and Ensembling. The best final F1 score for Task A is 34.41, Task B is 79.77 and Task C is 59.82.

S Suryavardan, Shreyash Mishra, Megha Chakraborty et al.

With social media usage growing exponentially in the past few years, fake news has also become extremely prevalent. The detrimental impact of fake news emphasizes the need for research focused on automating the detection of false information and verifying its accuracy. In this work, we present the outcome of the Factify 2 shared task, which provides a multi-modal fact verification and satire news dataset, as part of the DeFactify 2 workshop at AAAI'23. The data calls for a comparison based approach to the task by pairing social media claims with supporting documents, with both text and image, divided into 5 classes based on multi-modal relations. In the second iteration of this task we had over 60 participants and 9 final test-set submissions. The best performances came from the use of DeBERTa for text and Swinv2 and CLIP for image. The highest F1 score averaged for all five classes was 81.82%.

Thilini Wijesiriwardene, Ruwan Wickramarachchi, Aishwarya Naresh Reganti et al. · apple-ml, stanford

The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to encode syntactic and semantic structures of language is well examined in NLP. Additionally, analogy identification, in the form of word analogies are extensively studied in the last decade of language modeling literature. In this work we specifically look at how LLMs' abilities to capture sentence analogies (sentences that convey analogous meaning to each other) vary with LLMs' abilities to encode syntactic and semantic structures of sentences. Through our analysis, we find that LLMs' ability to identify sentence analogies is positively correlated with their ability to encode syntactic and semantic structures of sentences. Specifically, we find that the LLMs which capture syntactic structures better, also have higher abilities in identifying sentence analogies.

Rajarshi Roy, Nasrin Imanpour, Ashhar Aziz et al.

Multimodal generative AI systems like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and MidJourney have fundamentally changed how synthetic images are created. These tools drive innovation but also enable the spread of misleading content, false information, and manipulated media. As generated images become harder to distinguish from photographs, detecting them has become an urgent priority. To combat this challenge, We release MS COCOAI, a novel dataset for AI generated image detection consisting of 96000 real and synthetic datapoints, built using the MS COCO dataset. To generate synthetic images, we use five generators: Stable Diffusion 3, Stable Diffusion 2.1, SDXL, DALL-E 3, and MidJourney v6. Based on the dataset, we propose two tasks: (1) classifying images as real or generated, and (2) identifying which model produced a given synthetic image. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Rajarshi-Roy-research/Defactify_Image_Dataset.

Rajarshi Roy, Gurpreet Singh, Ashhar Aziz et al.

The rapid proliferation of AI-generated text has introduced significant challenges in maintaining the integrity of digital content. Advanced generative models such as GPT-4, Claude 3.5, and Llama can produce highly coherent and human-like text, making it increasingly difficult to differentiate between human-written and AI-generated content. While these models have transformative applications, their misuse has raised concerns about misinformation, biased narratives, and security threats. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art AI-generated text detection techniques and evaluates their effectiveness through the Counter Turing Test (CT2) shared tasks. Task A (Binary Classification) required participants to distinguish between human-written and AI-generated text, while Task B (Model Attribution) focused on identifying the specific language model responsible for generating a given text. The results demonstrated high performance in binary classification, with the top system achieving an F1 score of 1.0000, but significantly lower scores in model attribution, where the best system achieved 0.9531, highlighting the increased complexity of this task. The top-performing teams leveraged fine-tuned transformer models, ensemble learning, and hybrid detection approaches, with DeBERTa-based and BART-based methods demonstrating strong results. However, the lower scores in Task B underscore the challenges of distinguishing outputs from different LLMs, necessitating further research into adversarial robustness, feature extraction, and cross-domain generalization.

Rajarshi Roy, Nasrin Imanpour, Ashhar Aziz et al.

The rapid advancements in generative AI technologies, such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney, have significantly transformed the creation of synthetic visual content. While these models enable innovation across industries, they also pose serious challenges, including misinformation, disinformation, and biased content generation. The increasing realism of AI-generated images makes their detection a pressing concern for researchers, policymakers, and industry stakeholders. In this paper, we present the findings of the Defactify 4.0 workshop, which introduced the Counter Turing Test (CT2) for AI-Generated Image Detection. The competition consisted of two key tasks: (1) binary classification of images as either AI-generated or real and (2) identification of the specific generative model responsible for an AI-generated image. To facilitate this, we developed the MS COCOAI dataset, consisting of 50,000 synthetic images from multiple generative models alongside real-world images from the MS COCO dataset. Participants employed diverse detection strategies, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs), Vision Transformers (ViTs), frequency-based analysis, contrastive learning, and multimodal techniques. The results demonstrated that while AI-generated images can be detected with high accuracy (F1-score > 0.83), identifying the exact model used remains significantly more challenging (highest F1-score: 0.4986). These findings highlight the need for improved model fingerprinting, adversarial robustness, and real-time detection mechanisms.

Vipula Rawte, Sarthak Jain, Aarush Sinha et al.

Recent advances in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have expanded their capabilities to video understanding, with Text-to-Video (T2V) models excelling in generating videos from textual prompts. However, they still frequently produce hallucinated content, revealing AI-generated inconsistencies. We introduce ViBe (https://vibe-t2v-bench.github.io/): a large-scale dataset of hallucinated videos from open-source T2V models. We identify five major hallucination types: Vanishing Subject, Omission Error, Numeric Variability, Subject Dysmorphia, and Visual Incongruity. Using ten T2V models, we generated and manually annotated 3,782 videos from 837 diverse MS COCO captions. Our proposed benchmark includes a dataset of hallucinated videos and a classification framework using video embeddings. ViBe serves as a critical resource for evaluating T2V reliability and advancing hallucination detection. We establish classification as a baseline, with the TimeSFormer + CNN ensemble achieving the best performance (0.345 accuracy, 0.342 F1 score). While initial baselines proposed achieve modest accuracy, this highlights the difficulty of automated hallucination detection and the need for improved methods. Our research aims to drive the development of more robust T2V models and evaluate their outputs based on user preferences.

Charles Dickens, Eddie Huang, Aishwarya Reganti et al.

Graph summarization as a preprocessing step is an effective and complementary technique for scalable graph neural network (GNN) training. In this work, we propose the Coarsening Via Convolution Matching (CONVMATCH) algorithm and a highly scalable variant, A-CONVMATCH, for creating summarized graphs that preserve the output of graph convolution. We evaluate CONVMATCH on six real-world link prediction and node classification graph datasets, and show it is efficient and preserves prediction performance while significantly reducing the graph size. Notably, CONVMATCH achieves up to 95% of the prediction performance of GNNs on node classification while trained on graphs summarized down to 1% the size of the original graph. Furthermore, on link prediction tasks, CONVMATCH consistently outperforms all baselines, achieving up to a 2x improvement.

Amitava Das, Suranjana Trivedy, Danush Khanna et al.

The rapid rise of large language models (LLMs) has unlocked many applications but also underscores the challenge of aligning them with diverse values and preferences. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is central to alignment but constrained by fixed divergences and limited feature transformations. We propose DPO-Kernels, which integrates kernel methods to address these issues through four key contributions: (i) Kernelized Representations with polynomial, RBF, Mahalanobis, and spectral kernels for richer transformations, plus a hybrid loss combining embedding-based and probability-based objectives; (ii) Divergence Alternatives (Jensen-Shannon, Hellinger, Renyi, Bhattacharyya, Wasserstein, and f-divergences) for greater stability; (iii) Data-Driven Selection metrics that automatically choose the best kernel-divergence pair; and (iv) a Hierarchical Mixture of Kernels for both local precision and global modeling. Evaluations on 12 datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in factuality, safety, reasoning, and instruction following. Grounded in Heavy-Tailed Self-Regularization, DPO-Kernels maintains robust generalization for LLMs, offering a comprehensive resource for further alignment research.

Jiong Zhu, Aishwarya Reganti, Edward Huang et al.

Distributed training of GNNs enables learning on massive graphs (e.g., social and e-commerce networks) that exceed the storage and computational capacity of a single machine. To reach performance comparable to centralized training, distributed frameworks focus on maximally recovering cross-instance node dependencies with either communication across instances or periodic fallback to centralized training, which create overhead and limit the framework scalability. In this work, we present a simplified framework for distributed GNN training that does not rely on the aforementioned costly operations, and has improved scalability, convergence speed and performance over the state-of-the-art approaches. Specifically, our framework (1) assembles independent trainers, each of which asynchronously learns a local model on locally-available parts of the training graph, and (2) only conducts periodic (time-based) model aggregation to synchronize the local models. Backed by our theoretical analysis, instead of maximizing the recovery of cross-instance node dependencies -- which has been considered the key behind closing the performance gap between model aggregation and centralized training -- , our framework leverages randomized assignment of nodes or super-nodes (i.e., collections of original nodes) to partition the training graph such that it improves data uniformity and minimizes the discrepancy of gradient and loss function across instances. In our experiments on social and e-commerce networks with up to 1.3 billion edges, our proposed RandomTMA and SuperTMA approaches -- despite using less training data -- achieve state-of-the-art performance and 2.31x speedup compared to the fastest baseline, and show better robustness to trainer failures.

Thilini Wijesiriwardene, Ruwan Wickramarachchi, Bimal G. Gajera et al.

Over the past decade, analogies, in the form of word-level analogies, have played a significant role as an intrinsic measure of evaluating the quality of word embedding methods such as word2vec. Modern large language models (LLMs), however, are primarily evaluated on extrinsic measures based on benchmarks such as GLUE and SuperGLUE, and there are only a few investigations on whether LLMs can draw analogies between long texts. In this paper, we present ANALOGICAL, a new benchmark to intrinsically evaluate LLMs across a taxonomy of analogies of long text with six levels of complexity -- (i) word, (ii) word vs. sentence, (iii) syntactic, (iv) negation, (v) entailment, and (vi) metaphor. Using thirteen datasets and three different distance measures, we evaluate the abilities of eight LLMs in identifying analogical pairs in the semantic vector space. Our evaluation finds that it is increasingly challenging for LLMs to identify analogies when going up the analogy taxonomy.

Feng Gao, Qing Ping, Govind Thattai et al.

Outside-knowledge visual question answering (OK-VQA) requires the agent to comprehend the image, make use of relevant knowledge from the entire web, and digest all the information to answer the question. Most previous works address the problem by first fusing the image and question in the multi-modal space, which is inflexible for further fusion with a vast amount of external knowledge. In this paper, we call for a paradigm shift for the OK-VQA task, which transforms the image into plain text, so that we can enable knowledge passage retrieval, and generative question-answering in the natural language space. This paradigm takes advantage of the sheer volume of gigantic knowledge bases and the richness of pre-trained language models. A Transform-Retrieve-Generate framework (TRiG) framework is proposed, which can be plug-and-played with alternative image-to-text models and textual knowledge bases. Experimental results show that our TRiG framework outperforms all state-of-the-art supervised methods by at least 11.1% absolute margin.

Shane Storks, Qiaozi Gao, Aishwarya Reganti et al.

Language-enabled AI systems can answer complex, multi-hop questions to high accuracy, but supporting answers with evidence is a more challenging task which is important for the transparency and trustworthiness to users. Prior work in this area typically makes a trade-off between efficiency and accuracy; state-of-the-art deep neural network systems are too cumbersome to be useful in large-scale applications, while the fastest systems lack reliability. In this work, we integrate fast syntactic methods with powerful semantic methods for multi-hop explanation generation based on declarative facts. Our best system, which learns a lightweight operation to simulate multi-hop reasoning over pieces of evidence and fine-tunes language models to re-rank generated explanation chains, outperforms a purely syntactic baseline from prior work by up to 7% in gold explanation retrieval rate.

Qing Ping, Feiyang Niu, Govind Thattai et al.

Current conversational AI systems aim to understand a set of pre-designed requests and execute related actions, which limits them to evolve naturally and adapt based on human interactions. Motivated by how children learn their first language interacting with adults, this paper describes a new Teachable AI system that is capable of learning new language nuggets called concepts, directly from end users using live interactive teaching sessions. The proposed setup uses three models to: a) Identify gaps in understanding automatically during live conversational interactions, b) Learn the respective interpretations of such unknown concepts from live interactions with users, and c) Manage a classroom sub-dialogue specifically tailored for interactive teaching sessions. We propose state-of-the-art transformer based neural architectures of models, fine-tuned on top of pre-trained models, and show accuracy improvements on the respective components. We demonstrate that this method is very promising in leading way to build more adaptive and personalized language understanding models.

Weixin Liang, Feiyang Niu, Aishwarya Reganti et al.

The predominant approach to visual question answering (VQA) relies on encoding the image and question with a "black-box" neural encoder and decoding a single token as the answer like "yes" or "no". Despite this approach's strong quantitative results, it struggles to come up with intuitive, human-readable forms of justification for the prediction process. To address this insufficiency, we reformulate VQA as a full answer generation task, which requires the model to justify its predictions in natural language. We propose LRTA [Look, Read, Think, Answer], a transparent neural-symbolic reasoning framework for visual question answering that solves the problem step-by-step like humans and provides human-readable form of justification at each step. Specifically, LRTA learns to first convert an image into a scene graph and parse a question into multiple reasoning instructions. It then executes the reasoning instructions one at a time by traversing the scene graph using a recurrent neural-symbolic execution module. Finally, it generates a full answer to the given question with natural language justifications. Our experiments on GQA dataset show that LRTA outperforms the state-of-the-art model by a large margin (43.1% v.s. 28.0%) on the full answer generation task. We also create a perturbed GQA test set by removing linguistic cues (attributes and relations) in the questions for analyzing whether a model is having a smart guess with superficial data correlations. We show that LRTA makes a step towards truly understanding the question while the state-of-the-art model tends to learn superficial correlations from the training data.

Ritesh Kumar, Aishwarya N. Reganti, Akshit Bhatia et al.

As the interaction over the web has increased, incidents of aggression and related events like trolling, cyberbullying, flaming, hate speech, etc. too have increased manifold across the globe. While most of these behaviour like bullying or hate speech have predated the Internet, the reach and extent of the Internet has given these an unprecedented power and influence to affect the lives of billions of people. So it is of utmost significance and importance that some preventive measures be taken to provide safeguard to the people using the web such that the web remains a viable medium of communication and connection, in general. In this paper, we discuss the development of an aggression tagset and an annotated corpus of Hindi-English code-mixed data from two of the most popular social networking and social media platforms in India, Twitter and Facebook. The corpus is annotated using a hierarchical tagset of 3 top-level tags and 10 level 2 tags. The final dataset contains approximately 18k tweets and 21k facebook comments and is being released for further research in the field.