Yi Liu

Yi Liu, Lianzhe Huang, Shicheng Li et al.

LLMs and AI chatbots have improved people's efficiency in various fields. However, the necessary knowledge for answering the question may be beyond the models' knowledge boundaries. To mitigate this issue, many researchers try to introduce external knowledge, such as knowledge graphs and Internet contents, into LLMs for up-to-date information. However, the external information from the Internet may include counterfactual information that will confuse the model and lead to an incorrect response. Thus there is a pressing need for LLMs to possess the ability to distinguish reliable information from external knowledge. Therefore, to evaluate the ability of LLMs to discern the reliability of external knowledge, we create a benchmark from existing knowledge bases. Our benchmark consists of two tasks, Question Answering and Text Generation, and for each task, we provide models with a context containing counterfactual information. Evaluation results show that existing LLMs are susceptible to interference from unreliable external knowledge with counterfactual information, and simple intervention methods make limited contributions to the alleviation of this issue.

Jia Zhang, Chen-Xi Zhang, Yao Liu et al.

Recent advancements in instruction tuning for large language models (LLMs) suggest that a small, high-quality dataset can significantly equip LLMs with instruction-following capabilities, outperforming large datasets often burdened by quality and redundancy issues. However, the challenge lies in automatically identifying valuable subsets from large datasets to boost both the effectiveness and efficiency of instruction tuning. In this paper, we first establish data selection criteria based on three distinct aspects of data value: diversity, difficulty, and dependability, and then propose the D3 method comprising two key steps of scoring and selection. Specifically, in the scoring step, we define the diversity function to measure sample distinctiveness and introduce the uncertainty-based prediction difficulty to evaluate sample difficulty by mitigating the interference of context-oriented generation diversity. Additionally, we integrate an external LLM for dependability assessment. In the selection step, we formulate the D3 weighted coreset objective, which jointly optimizes three aspects of data value to solve for the most valuable subset. The two steps of D3 can iterate multiple rounds, incorporating feedback to refine the selection focus adaptively. Experiments on both public datasets and the real-world Taobao Live application demonstrate the effectiveness of D3 in endowing LLMs with competitive or even superior instruction-following capabilities using less than 10\% of the entire dataset.

Zeyu Xu, Junkang Zhang, Qiang Wang et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled substantial progress in video understanding by leveraging cross-modal reasoning capabilities. However, their effectiveness is limited by the restricted context window and the high computational cost required to process long videos with thousands of frames. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) addresses this challenge by selecting only the most relevant frames as input, thereby reducing the computational burden. Nevertheless, existing video RAG methods struggle to balance retrieval efficiency and accuracy, particularly when handling diverse and complex video content. To address these limitations, we propose E-VRAG, a novel and efficient video RAG framework for video understanding. We first apply a frame pre-filtering method based on hierarchical query decomposition to eliminate irrelevant frames, reducing computational costs at the data level. We then employ a lightweight VLM for frame scoring, further reducing computational costs at the model level. Additionally, we propose a frame retrieval strategy that leverages the global statistical distribution of inter-frame scores to mitigate the potential performance degradation from using a lightweight VLM. Finally, we introduce a multi-view question answering scheme for the retrieved frames, enhancing the VLM's capability to extract and comprehend information from long video contexts. Experiments on four public benchmarks show that E-VRAG achieves about 70% reduction in computational cost and higher accuracy compared to baseline methods, all without additional training. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of E-VRAG in improving both efficiency and accuracy for video RAG tasks.