Xinyu Liu

Junhao Ruan, Abudukeyumu Abudula, Xinyu Liu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) trained on next-token prediction (NTP) paradigm have demonstrated powerful capabilities. However, the existing NTP paradigm contains several limitations, particularly related to planned task complications and error propagation during inference. In our work, we extend the critique of NTP, highlighting its limitation also due to training with a narrow objective: the prediction of a sub-optimal one-hot distribution. To support this critique, we conducted a pre-experiment treating the output distribution from powerful LLMs as efficient world data compression. By evaluating the similarity between the $n$-gram distribution and the one-hot distribution with LLMs, we observed that the $n$-gram distributions align more closely with the output distribution of LLMs. Based on this insight, we introduce Next Distribution Prediction (NDP), which uses $n$-gram distributions to replace the one-hot targets, enhancing learning without extra online training time. We conducted experiments across translation, general task, language transfer, and medical domain adaptation. Compared to NTP, NDP can achieve up to +2.97 COMET improvement in translation tasks, +0.61 average improvement in general tasks, and incredible +10.75 average improvement in the medical domain. This demonstrates the concrete benefits of addressing the target narrowing problem, pointing to a new direction for future work on improving NTP.

Xiaomeng Zhu, Changwei Wang, Haozhe Wang et al.

A scene graph is a structured represention of objects and their relationships in a scene. Scene Graph Anticipation (SGA) involves predicting future scene graphs from video clips, enabling applications as intelligent surveillance and human-machine collaboration. Existing SGA approaches primarily leverage visual cues, often struggling to integrate valuable commonsense knowledge, thereby limiting long-term prediction robustness. To explicitly leverage such commonsense knowledge, we propose a new approach to better understand the objects, concepts, and relationships in a scene graph. Our approach decouples the SGA task in two steps: first a scene graph capturing model is used to convert a video clip into a sequence of scene graphs, then a pure text-based model is used to predict scene graphs in future frames. Our focus in this work is on the second step, and we call it Linguistic Scene Graph Anticipation (LSGA) and believes it should have independent interest beyond the use in SGA discussed here. For LSGA, we introduce an Object-Oriented Two-Staged Method (OOTSM) where an Large Language Model (LLM) first forecasts object appearances and disappearances before generating detailed human-object relations. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate OOTSM in two settings. For LSGA, we evaluate our fine-tuned open-sourced LLMs against zero-shot APIs (i.e., GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, and DeepSeek-V3) on a benchmark constructed from Action Genome annotations. For SGA, we combine our OOTSM with STTran++ from, and our experiments demonstrate effective state-of-the-art performance: short-term mean-Recall (@10) increases by 3.4% while long-term mean-Recall (@50) improves dramatically by 21.9%. Code is available at https://github.com/ZhuXMMM/OOTSM.