Yash Butala

Tapas Nayak, Soumya Sharma, Yash Butala et al.

Causality represents the foremost relation between events in financial documents such as financial news articles, financial reports. Each financial causality contains a cause span and an effect span. Previous works proposed sequence labeling approaches to solve this task. But sequence labeling models find it difficult to extract multiple causalities and overlapping causalities from the text segments. In this paper, we explore a generative approach for causality extraction using the encoder-decoder framework and pointer networks. We use a causality dataset from the financial domain, \textit{FinCausal}, for our experiments and our proposed framework achieves very competitive performance on this dataset.

Abhilash Nandy, Manav Nitin Kapadnis, Sohan Patnaik et al.

In this paper, we propose $FastDoc$ (Fast Continual Pre-training Technique using Document Level Metadata and Taxonomy), a novel, compute-efficient framework that utilizes Document metadata and Domain-Specific Taxonomy as supervision signals to continually pre-train transformer encoder on a domain-specific corpus. The main innovation is that during domain-specific pretraining, an open-domain encoder is continually pre-trained using sentence-level embeddings as inputs (to accommodate long documents), however, fine-tuning is done with token-level embeddings as inputs to this encoder. We perform such domain-specific pre-training on three different domains namely customer support, scientific, and legal domains, and compare performance on 6 different downstream tasks and 9 different datasets. The novel use of document-level supervision along with sentence-level embedding input for pre-training reduces pre-training compute by around $1,000$, $4,500$, and $500$ times compared to MLM and/or NSP in Customer Support, Scientific, and Legal Domains, respectively. The reduced training time does not lead to a deterioration in performance. In fact we show that $FastDoc$ either outperforms or performs on par with several competitive transformer-based baselines in terms of character-level F1 scores and other automated metrics in the Customer Support, Scientific, and Legal Domains. Moreover, reduced training aids in mitigating the risk of catastrophic forgetting. Thus, unlike baselines, $FastDoc$ shows a negligible drop in performance on open domain.

Raghav Kapoor, Yash Parag Butala, Melisa Russak et al. · cmu

For decades, human-computer interaction has fundamentally been manual. Even today, almost all productive work done on the computer necessitates human input at every step. Autonomous virtual agents represent an exciting step in automating many of these menial tasks. Virtual agents would empower users with limited technical proficiency to harness the full possibilities of computer systems. They could also enable the efficient streamlining of numerous computer tasks, ranging from calendar management to complex travel bookings, with minimal human intervention. In this paper, we introduce OmniACT, the first-of-a-kind dataset and benchmark for assessing an agent's capability to generate executable programs to accomplish computer tasks. Our scope extends beyond traditional web automation, covering a diverse range of desktop applications. The dataset consists of fundamental tasks such as "Play the next song", as well as longer horizon tasks such as "Send an email to John Doe mentioning the time and place to meet". Specifically, given a pair of screen image and a visually-grounded natural language task, the goal is to generate a script capable of fully executing the task. We run several strong baseline language model agents on our benchmark. The strongest baseline, GPT-4, performs the best on our benchmark However, its performance level still reaches only 15% of the human proficiency in generating executable scripts capable of completing the task, demonstrating the challenge of our task for conventional web agents. Our benchmark provides a platform to measure and evaluate the progress of language model agents in automating computer tasks and motivates future work towards building multimodal models that bridge large language models and the visual grounding of computer screens.

Ipsita Praharaj, Yukta Butala, Badrikanath Praharaj et al.

The rapid advancement of generative models has intensified the challenge of detecting and interpreting visual forgeries, necessitating robust frameworks for image forgery detection while providing reasoning as well as localization. While existing works approach this problem using supervised training for specific manipulation or anomaly detection in the embedding space, generalization across domains remains a challenge. We frame this problem of forgery detection as a prompt-driven visual reasoning task, leveraging the semantic alignment capabilities of large vision-language models. We propose a framework, `REVEAL` (Reasoning and Evaluation of Visual Evidence through Aligned Language), that incorporates generalized guidelines. We propose two tangential approaches - (1) Holistic Scene-level Evaluation that relies on the physics, semantics, perspective, and realism of the image as a whole and (2) Region-wise anomaly detection that splits the image into multiple regions and analyzes each of them. We conduct experiments over datasets from different domains (Photoshop, DeepFake and AIGC editing). We compare the Vision Language Models against competitive baselines and analyze the reasoning provided by them.

Rajdeep Mukherjee, Tapas Nayak, Yash Butala et al.

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) deals with extracting opinion triplets, consisting of an opinion target or aspect, its associated sentiment, and the corresponding opinion term/span explaining the rationale behind the sentiment. Existing research efforts are majorly tagging-based. Among the methods taking a sequence tagging approach, some fail to capture the strong interdependence between the three opinion factors, whereas others fall short of identifying triplets with overlapping aspect/opinion spans. A recent grid tagging approach on the other hand fails to capture the span-level semantics while predicting the sentiment between an aspect-opinion pair. Different from these, we present a tagging-free solution for the task, while addressing the limitations of the existing works. We adapt an encoder-decoder architecture with a Pointer Network-based decoding framework that generates an entire opinion triplet at each time step thereby making our solution end-to-end. Interactions between the aspects and opinions are effectively captured by the decoder by considering their entire detected spans while predicting their connecting sentiment. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets establish the better efficacy of our proposed approach, especially in the recall, and in predicting multiple and aspect/opinion-overlapped triplets from the same review sentence. We report our results both with and without BERT and also demonstrate the utility of domain-specific BERT post-training for the task.

Yash Butala, Kanishk Singh, Adarsh Kumar et al.

Emotion is fundamental to humanity. The ability to perceive, understand and respond to social interactions in a human-like manner is one of the most desired capabilities in artificial agents, particularly in social-media bots. Over the past few years, computational understanding and detection of emotional aspects in language have been vital in advancing human-computer interaction. The WASSA Shared Task 2021 released a dataset of news-stories across two tracks, Track-1 for Empathy and Distress Prediction and Track-2 for Multi-Dimension Emotion prediction at the essay-level. We describe our system entry for the WASSA 2021 Shared Task (for both Track-1 and Track-2), where we leveraged the information from Pre-trained language models for Track-specific Tasks. Our proposed models achieved an Average Pearson Score of 0.417 and a Macro-F1 Score of 0.502 in Track 1 and Track 2, respectively. In the Shared Task leaderboard, we secured 4th rank in Track 1 and 2nd rank in Track 2.