Mingliang Zhang

Ming-Liang Zhang, Fei Yin, Yi-Han Hao et al.

Geometry diagram parsing plays a key role in geometry problem solving, wherein the primitive extraction and relation parsing remain challenging due to the complex layout and between-primitive relationship. In this paper, we propose a powerful diagram parser based on deep learning and graph reasoning. Specifically, a modified instance segmentation method is proposed to extract geometric primitives, and the graph neural network (GNN) is leveraged to realize relation parsing and primitive classification incorporating geometric features and prior knowledge. All the modules are integrated into an end-to-end model called PGDPNet to perform all the sub-tasks simultaneously. In addition, we build a new large-scale geometry diagram dataset named PGDP5K with primitive level annotations. Experiments on PGDP5K and an existing dataset IMP-Geometry3K show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in four sub-tasks remarkably. Our code, dataset and appendix material are available at https://github.com/mingliangzhang2018/PGDP.

Yujing Wang, Yaming Yang, Zhuo Li et al.

Attention-based neural networks, such as Transformers, have become ubiquitous in numerous applications, including computer vision, natural language processing, and time-series analysis. In all kinds of attention networks, the attention maps are crucial as they encode semantic dependencies between input tokens. However, most existing attention networks perform modeling or reasoning based on representations , wherein the attention maps of different layers are learned separately without explicit interactions. In this paper, we propose a novel and generic evolving attention mechanism, which directly models the evolution of inter-token relationships through a chain of residual convolutional modules. The major motivations are twofold. On the one hand, the attention maps in different layers share transferable knowledge, thus adding a residual connection can facilitate the information flow of inter-token relationships across layers. On the other hand, there is naturally an evolutionary trend among attention maps at different abstraction levels, so it is beneficial to exploit a dedicated convolution-based module to capture this process. Equipped with the proposed mechanism, the convolution-enhanced evolving attention networks achieve superior performance in various applications, including time-series representation, natural language understanding, machine translation, and image classification. Especially on time-series representation tasks, Evolving Attention-enhanced Dilated Convolutional (EA-DC-) Transformer outperforms state-of-the-art models significantly, achieving an average of 17% improvement compared to the best SOTA. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that explicitly models the layer-wise evolution of attention maps. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/pkuyym/EvolvingAttention.

Zhong-Zhi Li, Ming-Liang Zhang, Fei Yin et al.

Geometry problem solving (GPS) is a challenging mathematical reasoning task requiring multi-modal understanding, fusion, and reasoning. Existing neural solvers take GPS as a vision-language task but are short in the representation of geometry diagrams that carry rich and complex layout information. In this paper, we propose a layout-aware neural solver named LANS, integrated with two new modules: multimodal layout-aware pre-trained language module (MLA-PLM) and layout-aware fusion attention (LA-FA). MLA-PLM adopts structural-semantic pre-training (SSP) to implement global relationship modeling, and point-match pre-training (PMP) to achieve alignment between visual points and textual points. LA-FA employs a layout-aware attention mask to realize point-guided cross-modal fusion for further boosting layout awareness of LANS. Extensive experiments on datasets Geometry3K and PGPS9K validate the effectiveness of the layout-aware modules and superior problem-solving performance of our LANS solver, over existing symbolic and neural solvers. The code will be made public available soon.

Ming-Liang Zhang, Zhong-Zhi Li, Fei Yin et al.

Geometry problem solving (GPS) requires capacities of multi-modal understanding, multi-hop reasoning and theorem knowledge application. In this paper, we propose a neural-symbolic model for plane geometry problem solving (PGPS), named PGPSNet-v2, with three key steps: modal fusion, reasoning process and knowledge verification. In modal fusion, we leverage textual clauses to express fine-grained structural and semantic content of geometry diagram, and fuse diagram with textual problem efficiently through structural-semantic pre-training. For reasoning, we design an explicable solution program to describe the geometric reasoning process, and employ a self-limited decoder to generate solution program autoregressively. To reduce solution errors, a multi-level theorem verifier is proposed to eliminate solutions that do not match geometric principles, alleviating the hallucination of the neural model. We also construct a large-scale geometry problem dataset called PGPS9K, containing fine-grained annotations of textual clauses, solution program and involved knowledge tuples. Extensive experiments on datasets Geometry3K and PGPS9K show that our PGPSNet solver outperforms existing symbolic and neural solvers in GPS performance, while maintaining good explainability and reliability, and the solver components (fusion, reasoning, verification) are all justified effective.

Yihan Hao, Mingliang Zhang, Fei Yin et al.

Diagram parsing is an important foundation for geometry problem solving, attracting increasing attention in the field of intelligent education and document image understanding. Due to the complex layout and between-primitive relationship, plane geometry diagram parsing (PGDP) is still a challenging task deserving further research and exploration. An appropriate dataset is critical for the research of PGDP. Although some datasets with rough annotations have been proposed to solve geometric problems, they are either small in scale or not publicly available. The rough annotations also make them not very useful. Thus, we propose a new large-scale geometry diagram dataset named PGDP5K and a novel annotation method. Our dataset consists of 5000 diagram samples composed of 16 shapes, covering 5 positional relations, 22 symbol types and 6 text types. Different from previous datasets, our PGDP5K dataset is labeled with more fine-grained annotations at primitive level, including primitive classes, locations and relationships. What is more, combined with above annotations and geometric prior knowledge, it can generate intelligible geometric propositions automatically and uniquely. We performed experiments on PGDP5K and IMP-Geometry3K datasets reveal that the state-of-the-art (SOTA) method achieves only 66.07% F1 value. This shows that PGDP5K presents a challenge for future research. Our dataset is available at http://www.nlpr.ia.ac.cn/databases/CASIA-PGDP5K/.

Jihao Gu, Qihang Ai, Yingyao Wang et al.

Vision-language model-based mobile agents have gained the ability to not only understand complex instructions and mobile screenshots, but also optimize their action outputs via thinking and reasoning, benefiting from reinforcement learning, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). However, existing research centers on offline reinforcement learning training or online optimization using action-level rewards, which limits the agent's dynamic interaction with the environment. This often results in agents settling into local optima, thereby weakening their ability for exploration and error action correction. To address these challenges, we introduce an approach called Mobile-R1, which employs interactive multi-turn reinforcement learning with task-level rewards for mobile agents. Our training framework consists of three stages: initial format finetuning, single-step online training via action-level reward, followed by online training via task-level reward based on multi-turn trajectories. This strategy is designed to enhance the exploration and error correction capabilities of Mobile-R1, leading to significant performance improvements. Moreover, we have collected a dataset covering 28 Chinese applications with 24,521 high-quality manual annotations and established a new benchmark with 500 trajectories. We will open source all resources, including the dataset, benchmark, model weight, and codes: https://mobile-r1.github.io/Mobile-R1/.

Mingliang Zhang, Zhen Cao, Juntao Liu et al.

In this paper, we introduce WeLayout, a novel system for segmenting the layout of corporate documents, which stands for WeChat Layout Analysis System. Our approach utilizes a sophisticated ensemble of DINO and YOLO models, specifically developed for the ICDAR 2023 Competition on Robust Layout Segmentation. Our method significantly surpasses the baseline, securing a top position on the leaderboard with a mAP of 70.0. To achieve this performance, we concentrated on enhancing various aspects of the task, such as dataset augmentation, model architecture, bounding box refinement, and model ensemble techniques. Additionally, we trained the data separately for each document category to ensure a higher mean submission score. We also developed an algorithm for cell matching to further improve our performance. To identify the optimal weights and IoU thresholds for our model ensemble, we employed a Bayesian optimization algorithm called the Tree-Structured Parzen Estimator. Our approach effectively demonstrates the benefits of combining query-based and anchor-free models for achieving robust layout segmentation in corporate documents.

Mingliang Zhang, Fandong Meng, Yunhai Tong et al.

Currently, multilingual machine translation is receiving more and more attention since it brings better performance for low resource languages (LRLs) and saves more space. However, existing multilingual machine translation models face a severe challenge: imbalance. As a result, the translation performance of different languages in multilingual translation models are quite different. We argue that this imbalance problem stems from the different learning competencies of different languages. Therefore, we focus on balancing the learning competencies of different languages and propose Competence-based Curriculum Learning for Multilingual Machine Translation, named CCL-M. Specifically, we firstly define two competencies to help schedule the high resource languages (HRLs) and the low resource languages: 1) Self-evaluated Competence, evaluating how well the language itself has been learned; and 2) HRLs-evaluated Competence, evaluating whether an LRL is ready to be learned according to HRLs' Self-evaluated Competence. Based on the above competencies, we utilize the proposed CCL-M algorithm to gradually add new languages into the training set in a curriculum learning manner. Furthermore, we propose a novel competenceaware dynamic balancing sampling strategy for better selecting training samples in multilingual training. Experimental results show that our approach has achieved a steady and significant performance gain compared to the previous state-of-the-art approach on the TED talks dataset.