Zewei Wang

Jie Ma, Pinghui Wang, Dechen Kong et al.

Visual question answering requires a system to provide an accurate natural language answer given an image and a natural language question. However, it is widely recognized that previous generic VQA methods often exhibit a tendency to memorize biases present in the training data rather than learning proper behaviors, such as grounding images before predicting answers. Therefore, these methods usually achieve high in-distribution but poor out-of-distribution performance. In recent years, various datasets and debiasing methods have been proposed to evaluate and enhance the VQA robustness, respectively. This paper provides the first comprehensive survey focused on this emerging fashion. Specifically, we first provide an overview of the development process of datasets from in-distribution and out-of-distribution perspectives. Then, we examine the evaluation metrics employed by these datasets. Thirdly, we propose a typology that presents the development process, similarities and differences, robustness comparison, and technical features of existing debiasing methods. Furthermore, we analyze and discuss the robustness of representative vision-and-language pre-training models on VQA. Finally, through a thorough review of the available literature and experimental analysis, we discuss the key areas for future research from various viewpoints.

Yijie Zhong, Mengying Guo, Zewei Wang et al.

Intelligent devices have become deeply integrated into everyday life, generating vast amounts of user interactions that form valuable personal knowledge. Efficient organization of this knowledge in user memory is essential for enabling personalized applications. However, current research on memory writing, management, and reading using large language models (LLMs) faces challenges in filtering irrelevant information and in dealing with rising computational costs. Inspired by the concept of selective attention in the human brain, we introduce a memory discrimination task. To address large-scale interactions and diverse memory standards in this task, we propose a Scene-Aware Memory Discrimination method (SAMD), which comprises two key components: the Gating Unit Module (GUM) and the Cluster Prompting Module (CPM). GUM enhances processing efficiency by filtering out non-memorable interactions and focusing on the salient content most relevant to application demands. CPM establishes adaptive memory standards, guiding LLMs to discern what information should be remembered or discarded. It also analyzes the relationship between user intents and memory contexts to build effective clustering prompts. Comprehensive direct and indirect evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our approach. We independently assess the performance of memory discrimination, showing that SAMD successfully recalls the majority of memorable data and remains robust in dynamic scenarios. Furthermore, when integrated into personalized applications, SAMD significantly enhances both the efficiency and quality of memory construction, leading to better organization of personal knowledge.

Jie Ma, Pinghui Wang, Zewei Wang et al.

Question answering methods are well-known for leveraging data bias, such as the language prior in visual question answering and the position bias in machine reading comprehension (extractive question answering). Current debiasing methods often come at the cost of significant in-distribution performance to achieve favorable out-of-distribution generalizability, while non-debiasing methods sacrifice a considerable amount of out-of-distribution performance in order to obtain high in-distribution performance. Therefore, it is challenging for them to deal with the complicated changing real-world situations. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective novel loss function with adaptive loose optimization, which seeks to make the best of both worlds for question answering. Our main technical contribution is to reduce the loss adaptively according to the ratio between the previous and current optimization state on mini-batch training data. This loose optimization can be used to prevent non-debiasing methods from overlearning data bias while enabling debiasing methods to maintain slight bias learning. Experiments on the visual question answering datasets, including VQA v2, VQA-CP v1, VQA-CP v2, GQA-OOD, and the extractive question answering dataset SQuAD demonstrate that our approach enables QA methods to obtain state-of-the-art in- and out-of-distribution performance in most cases. The source code has been released publicly in \url{https://github.com/reml-group/ALO}.