Hai Wang

Shiyang Li, Jun Yan, Hai Wang et al.

While instruction-tuned models have shown remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks, accurately evaluating their ability to follow instructions remains challenging. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on common instructions that align well with what the model learned during training. However, proficiency in responding to these instructions does not necessarily imply strong ability in instruction following. In this paper, we propose a novel instruction-following evaluation protocol called verbalizer manipulation. It instructs the model to verbalize the task label with words aligning with model priors to different extents, adopting verbalizers from highly aligned (e.g., outputting ``postive'' for positive sentiment), to minimally aligned (e.g., outputting ``negative'' for positive sentiment). Verbalizer manipulation can be seamlessly integrated with any classification benchmark to examine the model's reliance on priors and its ability to override them to accurately follow the instructions. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of four major model families across nine datasets, employing twelve sets of verbalizers for each of them. We observe that the instruction-following abilities of models, across different families and scales, are significantly distinguished by their performance on less natural verbalizers. Even the strongest GPT-4 model struggles to perform better than random guessing on the most challenging verbalizer, emphasizing the need for continued advancements to improve their instruction-following abilities.

Taicheng Guo, Hai Wang, ChaoChun Liu et al.

Multi-turn Text-to-SQL aims to translate a user's conversational utterances into executable SQL while preserving dialogue coherence and grounding to the target schema. However, most existing systems only regard this task as a simple text translation task and follow a short-horizon paradigm, generating a query per turn without execution, explicit verification, and refinement, which leads to non-executable or incoherent outputs. We present MTSQL-R1, an agentic training framework for long-horizon multi-turn Text-to-SQL. We cast the task as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) in which an agent interacts with (i) a database for execution feedback and (ii) a persistent dialogue memory for coherence verification, performing an iterative propose to execute -> verify -> refine cycle until all checks pass. Experiments on COSQL and SPARC demonstrate that MTSQL-R1 consistently outperforms strong baselines, highlighting the importance of environment-driven verification and memory-guided refinement for conversational semantic parsing. Full recipes (including code, trained models, logs, reasoning trajectories, etc.) will be released after the internal review to contribute to community research.

Yihao Wang, Ling Gao, Jie Ren et al.

Object Detection on the mobile system is a challenge in terms of everything. Nowadays, many object detection models have been designed, and most of them concentrate on precision. However, the computation burden of those models on mobile systems is unacceptable. Researchers have designed some lightweight networks for mobiles by sacrificing precision. We present a novel edge-based task scheduling framework for object detection (termed as ESOD). In detail, we train a DNN model (termed as pre-model) to predict which object detection model to use for the coming task and offloads to which edge servers by physical characteristics of the image task (e.g., brightness, saturation). The results show that ESOD can reduce latency and energy consumption by an average of 22.13% and 29.60% and improve the mAP to 45.8(with 0.9 mAP better), respectively, compared with the SOTA DETR model.

Jinjin Gu, Haoming Cai, Chao Dong et al.

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2021 challenge on perceptual image quality assessment (IQA), held in conjunction with the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement workshop (NTIRE) workshop at CVPR 2021. As a new type of image processing technology, perceptual image processing algorithms based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have produced images with more realistic textures. These output images have completely different characteristics from traditional distortions, thus pose a new challenge for IQA methods to evaluate their visual quality. In comparison with previous IQA challenges, the training and testing datasets in this challenge include the outputs of perceptual image processing algorithms and the corresponding subjective scores. Thus they can be used to develop and evaluate IQA methods on GAN-based distortions. The challenge has 270 registered participants in total. In the final testing stage, 13 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets. Almost all of them have achieved much better results than existing IQA methods, while the winning method can demonstrate state-of-the-art performance.

Hai Wang, Wei-Shi Zheng, Ling Yingbiao

Human-object interaction(HOI) detection is an important task for understanding human activity. Graph structure is appropriate to denote the HOIs in the scene. Since there is an subordination between human and object---human play subjective role and object play objective role in HOI, the relations between homogeneous entities and heterogeneous entities in the scene should also not be equally the same. However, previous graph models regard human and object as the same kind of nodes and do not consider that the messages are not equally the same between different entities. In this work, we address such a problem for HOI task by proposing a heterogeneous graph network that models humans and objects as different kinds of nodes and incorporates intra-class messages between homogeneous nodes and inter-class messages between heterogeneous nodes. In addition, a graph attention mechanism based on the intra-class context and inter-class context is exploited to improve the learning. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets V-COCO and HICO-DET demonstrate that the intra-class and inter-class messages are very important in HOI detection and verify the effectiveness of our method.

Hai Wang, Hoifung Poon

Deep learning has emerged as a versatile tool for a wide range of NLP tasks, due to its superior capacity in representation learning. But its applicability is limited by the reliance on annotated examples, which are difficult to produce at scale. Indirect supervision has emerged as a promising direction to address this bottleneck, either by introducing labeling functions to automatically generate noisy examples from unlabeled text, or by imposing constraints over interdependent label decisions. A plethora of methods have been proposed, each with respective strengths and limitations. Probabilistic logic offers a unifying language to represent indirect supervision, but end-to-end modeling with probabilistic logic is often infeasible due to intractable inference and learning. In this paper, we propose deep probabilistic logic (DPL) as a general framework for indirect supervision, by composing probabilistic logic with deep learning. DPL models label decisions as latent variables, represents prior knowledge on their relations using weighted first-order logical formulas, and alternates between learning a deep neural network for the end task and refining uncertain formula weights for indirect supervision, using variational EM. This framework subsumes prior indirect supervision methods as special cases, and enables novel combination via infusion of rich domain and linguistic knowledge. Experiments on biomedical machine reading demonstrate the promise of this approach.

Jialei Wang, Hai Wang, Nathan Srebro

Contrary to the situation with stochastic gradient descent, we argue that when using stochastic methods with variance reduction, such as SDCA, SAG or SVRG, as well as their variants, it could be beneficial to reuse previously used samples instead of fresh samples, even when fresh samples are available. We demonstrate this empirically for SDCA, SAG and SVRG, studying the optimal sample size one should use, and also uncover be-havior that suggests running SDCA for an integer number of epochs could be wasteful.