Zheng Zhang

Dongyu Ru, Lin Qiu, Xiangkun Hu et al. · amazon-science

Despite Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) showing promising capability in leveraging external knowledge, a comprehensive evaluation of RAG systems is still challenging due to the modular nature of RAG, evaluation of long-form responses and reliability of measurements. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained evaluation framework, RAGChecker, that incorporates a suite of diagnostic metrics for both the retrieval and generation modules. Meta evaluation verifies that RAGChecker has significantly better correlations with human judgments than other evaluation metrics. Using RAGChecker, we evaluate 8 RAG systems and conduct an in-depth analysis of their performance, revealing insightful patterns and trade-offs in the design choices of RAG architectures. The metrics of RAGChecker can guide researchers and practitioners in developing more effective RAG systems. This work has been open sourced at https://github.com/amazon-science/RAGChecker.

Zigang Geng, Binxin Yang, Tiankai Hang et al.

We present InstructDiffusion, a unifying and generic framework for aligning computer vision tasks with human instructions. Unlike existing approaches that integrate prior knowledge and pre-define the output space (e.g., categories and coordinates) for each vision task, we cast diverse vision tasks into a human-intuitive image-manipulating process whose output space is a flexible and interactive pixel space. Concretely, the model is built upon the diffusion process and is trained to predict pixels according to user instructions, such as encircling the man's left shoulder in red or applying a blue mask to the left car. InstructDiffusion could handle a variety of vision tasks, including understanding tasks (such as segmentation and keypoint detection) and generative tasks (such as editing and enhancement). It even exhibits the ability to handle unseen tasks and outperforms prior methods on novel datasets. This represents a significant step towards a generalist modeling interface for vision tasks, advancing artificial general intelligence in the field of computer vision.

Zechen Bai, Tianjun Xiao, Tong He et al.

As online video content rapidly grows, the task of text-video retrieval (TVR) becomes increasingly important. A key challenge in TVR is the information asymmetry between video and text: videos are inherently richer in information, while their textual descriptions often capture only fragments of this complexity. This paper introduces a novel, data-centric framework to bridge this gap by enriching textual representations to better match the richness of video content. During training, videos are segmented into event-level clips and captioned to ensure comprehensive coverage. During retrieval, a large language model (LLM) generates semantically diverse queries to capture a broader range of possible matches. To enhance retrieval efficiency, we propose a query selection mechanism that identifies the most relevant and diverse queries, reducing computational cost while improving accuracy. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating the power of data-centric approaches in addressing information asymmetry in TVR. This work paves the way for new research focused on leveraging data to improve cross-modal retrieval.

Simret Araya Gebreegziabher, Kuangshi Ai, Zheng Zhang et al.

Active Learning (AL) allows models to learn interactively from user feedback. This paper introduces a counterfactual data augmentation approach to AL, particularly addressing the selection of datapoints for user querying, a pivotal concern in enhancing data efficiency. Our approach is inspired by Variation Theory, a theory of human concept learning that emphasizes the essential features of a concept by focusing on what stays the same and what changes. Instead of just querying with existing datapoints, our approach synthesizes artificial datapoints that highlight potential key similarities and differences among labels using a neuro-symbolic pipeline combining large language models (LLMs) and rule-based models. Through an experiment in the example domain of text classification, we show that our approach achieves significantly higher performance when there are fewer annotated data. As the annotated training data gets larger the impact of the generated data starts to diminish showing its capability to address the cold start problem in AL. This research sheds light on integrating theories of human learning into the optimization of AL.

Haohan Wang, Wei Feng, Yaoyu Li et al.

The state-of-the-art methods for e-commerce product background generation suffer from the inefficiency of designing product-wise prompts when scaling up the production, as well as the ineffectiveness of describing fine-grained styles when customizing personalized backgrounds for some specific brands. To address these obstacles, we integrate the category commonality and personalized style into diffusion models. Concretely, we propose a Category-Wise Generator to enable large-scale background generation with only one model for the first time. A unique identifier in the prompt is assigned to each category, whose attention is located on the background by a mask-guided cross attention layer to learn the category-wise style. Furthermore, for products with specific and fine-grained requirements in layout, elements, etc, a Personality-Wise Generator is devised to learn such personalized style directly from a reference image to resolve textual ambiguities, and is trained in a self-supervised manner for more efficient training data usage. To advance research in this field, the first large-scale e-commerce product background generation dataset BG60k is constructed, which covers more than 60k product images from over 2k categories. Experiments demonstrate that our method could generate high-quality backgrounds for different categories, and maintain the personalized background style of reference images. BG60k will be available at \url{https://github.com/Whileherham/BG60k}.

Zheng Zhang, Ying Xu, Yanhao Wang et al.

Despite its benefits for children's skill development and parent-child bonding, many parents do not often engage in interactive storytelling by having story-related dialogues with their child due to limited availability or challenges in coming up with appropriate questions. While recent advances made AI generation of questions from stories possible, the fully-automated approach excludes parent involvement, disregards educational goals, and underoptimizes for child engagement. Informed by need-finding interviews and participatory design (PD) results, we developed StoryBuddy, an AI-enabled system for parents to create interactive storytelling experiences. StoryBuddy's design highlighted the need for accommodating dynamic user needs between the desire for parent involvement and parent-child bonding and the goal of minimizing parent intervention when busy. The PD revealed varied assessment and educational goals of parents, which StoryBuddy addressed by supporting configuring question types and tracking child progress. A user study validated StoryBuddy's usability and suggested design insights for future parent-AI collaboration systems.