Hyunjong Ok

Hyunjong Ok

We present FinTree, Financial Dataset Pretrain Transformer Encoder for Relation Extraction. Utilizing an encoder language model, we further pretrain FinTree on the financial dataset, adapting the model in financial domain tasks. FinTree stands out with its novel structure that predicts a masked token instead of the conventional [CLS] token, inspired by the Pattern Exploiting Training methodology. This structure allows for more accurate relation predictions between two given entities. The model is trained with a unique input pattern to provide contextual and positional information about the entities of interest, and a post-processing step ensures accurate predictions in line with the entity types. Our experiments demonstrate that FinTree outperforms on the REFinD, a large-scale financial relation extraction dataset. The code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/HJ-Ok/FinTree.

Hyunjong Ok, Suho Yoo, Jaeho Lee

Recent studies have identified that language models, pretrained on text-only datasets, often lack elementary visual knowledge, \textit{e.g.,} colors of everyday objects. Motivated by this observation, we ask whether a similar shortcoming exists in terms of the \textit{auditory} knowledge. To answer this question, we construct a new dataset called AuditoryBench, which consists of two novel tasks for evaluating auditory knowledge. Based on our analysis using the benchmark, we find that language models also suffer from a severe lack of auditory knowledge. To address this limitation, we propose AudioBERT, a novel method to augment the auditory knowledge of BERT through a retrieval-based approach. First, we detect auditory knowledge spans in prompts to query our retrieval model efficiently. Then, we inject audio knowledge into BERT and switch on low-rank adaptation for effective adaptation when audio knowledge is required. Our experiments demonstrate that AudioBERT is quite effective, achieving superior performance on the AuditoryBench. The dataset and code are available at \bulurl{https://github.com/HJ-Ok/AudioBERT}.

Hyunjong Ok, Jaeho Lee

Large language models exhibit surprising sensitivity to the structure of the prompt, but the mechanisms underlying this sensitivity remain poorly understood. In this work, we conduct an in-depth investigation on a striking case: in multiple-choice question answering, placing context before the questions and options (CQO) outperforms the reverse order (QOC) by over 14%p, consistently over a wide range of models and datasets. Through systematic architectural analysis, we identify causal attention as the core mechanism: in QOC prompts, the causal mask prevents option tokens from attending to context, creating an information bottleneck where context becomes invisible to options.

Jiyun Bae, Hyunjong Ok, Sangwoo Mo et al.

How does irrelevant information (i.e., distractors) affect test-time scaling in vision-language models (VLMs)? Prior studies on language models have reported an inverse scaling effect, where textual distractors lead to longer but less effective reasoning. To investigate whether similar phenomena occur in multimodal settings, we introduce Idis (Images with distractors), a visual question-answering dataset that systematically varies distractors along semantic, numerical, and spatial dimensions. Our analyses reveal that visual distractors differ fundamentally from textual ones: although inverse scaling persists, adding visual distractors reduces accuracy without increasing reasoning length. We further show that tracking attribute counts within reasoning traces provides key insights into how distractors, reasoning length, and accuracy interact. Finally, we demonstrate that these trends extend to established visual bias benchmarks such as Waterbirds, and we propose a simple prompting strategy to mitigate bias-driven predictions in reasoning models.

Hyunjong Ok, Taeho Kil, Sukmin Seo et al.

Recent advances in named entity recognition (NER) have pushed the boundary of the task to incorporate visual signals, leading to many variants, including multi-modal NER (MNER) or grounded MNER (GMNER). A key challenge to these tasks is that the model should be able to generalize to the entities unseen during the training, and should be able to handle the training samples with noisy annotations. To address this obstacle, we propose SCANNER (Span CANdidate detection and recognition for NER), a model capable of effectively handling all three NER variants. SCANNER is a two-stage structure; we extract entity candidates in the first stage and use it as a query to get knowledge, effectively pulling knowledge from various sources. We can boost our performance by utilizing this entity-centric extracted knowledge to address unseen entities. Furthermore, to tackle the challenges arising from noisy annotations in NER datasets, we introduce a novel self-distillation method, enhancing the robustness and accuracy of our model in processing training data with inherent uncertainties. Our approach demonstrates competitive performance on the NER benchmark and surpasses existing methods on both MNER and GMNER benchmarks. Further analysis shows that the proposed distillation and knowledge utilization methods improve the performance of our model on various benchmarks.

Hyunjong Ok, Suho Yoo, Jaeho Lee

Spoken dialogue systems powered by large language models have demonstrated remarkable abilities in understanding human speech and generating appropriate spoken responses. However, these systems struggle with end-turn detection (ETD) -- the ability to distinguish between user turn completion and hesitation. This limitation often leads to premature or delayed responses, disrupting the flow of spoken conversations. In this paper, we introduce the ETD Dataset, the first public dataset for end-turn detection. The ETD dataset consists of both synthetic speech data generated with text-to-speech models and real-world speech data collected from web sources. We also propose SpeculativeETD, a novel collaborative inference framework that balances efficiency and accuracy to improve real-time ETD in resource-constrained environments. Our approach jointly employs a lightweight GRU-based model, which rapidly detects the non-speaking units in real-time on local devices, and a high-performance Wav2vec-based model running on the server to make a more challenging classification of distinguishing turn ends from mere pauses. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed SpeculativeETD significantly improves ETD accuracy while keeping the required computations low. Datasets and code will be available after the review.

Suho Yoo, Hyunjong Ok, Jaeho Lee

Language models pretrained on text-only corpora often struggle with tasks that require auditory commonsense knowledge. Previous work addresses this problem by augmenting the language model to retrieve knowledge from external audio databases. This approach has several limitations, such as the potential lack of relevant audio in databases and the high costs associated with constructing the databases. To address these issues, we propose Imagine to Hear, a novel approach that dynamically generates auditory knowledge using generative models. Our framework detects multiple audio-related textual spans from the given prompt and generates corresponding auditory knowledge. We develop several mechanisms to efficiently process multiple auditory knowledge, including a CLAP-based rejection sampler and a language-audio fusion module. Our experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on AuditoryBench without relying on external databases, highlighting the effectiveness of our generation-based approach.

Hyunjong Ok, Jaeho Lee

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have led to much progress in video understanding tasks. To avoid the heavy computational cost of processing all frames, these models typically rely on keyframe sampling methods guided by vision-language encoders (\textit{e.g.,} SigLIP). However, it remains unclear whether such encoders can truly identify the most informative frames. In this work, we provide several empirical pieces of evidence revealing that popular vision encoders critically suffer from their limited capability to identify where the MLLM should look inside the video to handle the given textual query appropriately. Our findings suggest that the development of better keyframe identification techniques may be necessary for efficient video MLLMs.