Zeng YaWen

Ru Peng, Yawen Zeng, Junbo Zhao

Past works on multimodal machine translation (MMT) elevate bilingual setup by incorporating additional aligned vision information. However, an image-must requirement of the multimodal dataset largely hinders MMT's development -- namely that it demands an aligned form of [image, source text, target text]. This limitation is generally troublesome during the inference phase especially when the aligned image is not provided as in the normal NMT setup. Thus, in this work, we introduce IKD-MMT, a novel MMT framework to support the image-free inference phase via an inversion knowledge distillation scheme. In particular, a multimodal feature generator is executed with a knowledge distillation module, which directly generates the multimodal feature from (only) source texts as the input. While there have been a few prior works entertaining the possibility to support image-free inference for machine translation, their performances have yet to rival the image-must translation. In our experiments, we identify our method as the first image-free approach to comprehensively rival or even surpass (almost) all image-must frameworks, and achieved the state-of-the-art result on the often-used Multi30k benchmark. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/pengr/IKD-mmt/tree/master..

Keyu Pan, Yawen Zeng

The field of large language models (LLMs) has made significant progress, and their knowledge storage capacity is approaching that of human beings. Furthermore, advanced techniques, such as prompt learning and reinforcement learning, are being employed to address ethical concerns and hallucination problems associated with LLMs, bringing them closer to aligning with human values. This situation naturally raises the question of whether LLMs with human-like abilities possess a human-like personality? In this paper, we aim to investigate the feasibility of using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a widespread human personality assessment tool, as an evaluation metric for LLMs. Specifically, extensive experiments will be conducted to explore: 1) the personality types of different LLMs, 2) the possibility of changing the personality types by prompt engineering, and 3) How does the training dataset affect the model's personality. Although the MBTI is not a rigorous assessment, it can still reflect the similarity between LLMs and human personality. In practice, the MBTI has the potential to serve as a rough indicator. Our codes are available at https://github.com/HarderThenHarder/transformers_tasks/tree/main/LLM/llms_mbti.

Ru Peng, Yawen Zeng, Junbo Zhao

Sign language translation (SLT) systems, which are often decomposed into video-to-gloss (V2G) recognition and gloss-to-text (G2T) translation through the pivot gloss, heavily relies on the availability of large-scale parallel G2T pairs. However, the manual annotation of pivot gloss, which is a sequence of transcribed written-language words in the order in which they are signed, further exacerbates the scarcity of data for SLT. To address this issue, this paper proposes a simple and efficient rule transformation method to transcribe the large-scale target monolingual data into its pseudo glosses automatically for enhancing the SLT translation. Empirical results show that the proposed approach can significantly improve the performance of SLT, especially achieving state-of-the-art results on two SLT benchmark datasets PHEONIX-WEATHER 2014T and ASLG-PC12. Our code has been released at: https://github.com/pengr/Mono\_SLT.

Yan Wang, Yawen Zeng, Jingsheng Zheng et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are flourishing, but mainly focus on images with less attention than videos, especially in sub-fields such as prompt engineering, video chain-of-thought (CoT), and instruction tuning on videos. Therefore, we try to explore the collection of CoT datasets in videos to lead to video OpenQA and improve the reasoning ability of MLLMs. Unfortunately, making such video CoT datasets is not an easy task. Given that human annotation is too cumbersome and expensive, while machine-generated is not reliable due to the hallucination issue, we develop an automatic annotation tool that combines machine and human experts, under the active learning paradigm. Active learning is an interactive strategy between the model and human experts, in this way, the workload of human labeling can be reduced and the quality of the dataset can be guaranteed. With the help of the automatic annotation tool, we strive to contribute three datasets, namely VideoCoT, TopicQA, TopicCoT. Furthermore, we propose a simple but effective benchmark based on the collected datasets, which exploits CoT to maximize the complex reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness our solution.

Ru Peng, Heming Zou, Haobo Wang et al.

The conventional evaluation protocols on machine learning models rely heavily on a labeled, i.i.d-assumed testing dataset, which is not often present in real world applications. The Automated Model Evaluation (AutoEval) shows an alternative to this traditional workflow, by forming a proximal prediction pipeline of the testing performance without the presence of ground-truth labels. Despite its recent successes, the AutoEval frameworks still suffer from an overconfidence issue, substantial storage and computational cost. In that regard, we propose a novel measure -- Meta-Distribution Energy (MDE) -- that allows the AutoEval framework to be both more efficient and effective. The core of the MDE is to establish a meta-distribution statistic, on the information (energy) associated with individual samples, then offer a smoother representation enabled by energy-based learning. We further provide our theoretical insights by connecting the MDE with the classification loss. We provide extensive experiments across modalities, datasets and different architectural backbones to validate MDE's validity, together with its superiority compared with prior approaches. We also prove MDE's versatility by showing its seamless integration with large-scale models, and easy adaption to learning scenarios with noisy- or imbalanced- labels. Code and data are available: https://github.com/pengr/Energy_AutoEval

Leng Cai, Junxuan He, Yikai Li et al.

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) enables advertisers to place competitive bids on impression opportunities instantaneously, striving for cost-effectiveness in a highly competitive landscape. Although RTB has widely benefited from the utilization of technologies such as deep learning and reinforcement learning, the reliability of related methods often encounters challenges due to the discrepancies between online and offline environments and the rapid fluctuations of online bidding. To handle these challenges, RTBAgent is proposed as the first RTB agent system based on large language models (LLMs), which synchronizes real competitive advertising bidding environments and obtains bidding prices through an integrated decision-making process. Specifically, obtaining reasoning ability through LLMs, RTBAgent is further tailored to be more professional for RTB via involved auxiliary modules, i.e., click-through rate estimation model, expert strategy knowledge, and daily reflection. In addition, we propose a two-step decision-making process and multi-memory retrieval mechanism, which enables RTBAgent to review historical decisions and transaction records and subsequently make decisions more adaptive to market changes in real-time bidding. Empirical testing with real advertising datasets demonstrates that RTBAgent significantly enhances profitability. The RTBAgent code will be publicly accessible at: https://github.com/CaiLeng/RTBAgent.

Yajing Zhai, Yawen Zeng, Zhiyong Huang et al.

The fine-grained attribute descriptions can significantly supplement the valuable semantic information for person image, which is vital to the success of person re-identification (ReID) task. However, current ReID algorithms typically failed to effectively leverage the rich contextual information available, primarily due to their reliance on simplistic and coarse utilization of image attributes. Recent advances in artificial intelligence generated content have made it possible to automatically generate plentiful fine-grained attribute descriptions and make full use of them. Thereby, this paper explores the potential of using the generated multiple person attributes as prompts in ReID tasks with off-the-shelf (large) models for more accurate retrieval results. To this end, we present a new framework called Multi-Prompts ReID (MP-ReID), based on prompt learning and language models, to fully dip fine attributes to assist ReID task. Specifically, MP-ReID first learns to hallucinate diverse, informative, and promptable sentences for describing the query images. This procedure includes (i) explicit prompts of which attributes a person has and furthermore (ii) implicit learnable prompts for adjusting/conditioning the criteria used towards this person identity matching. Explicit prompts are obtained by ensembling generation models, such as ChatGPT and VQA models. Moreover, an alignment module is designed to fuse multi-prompts (i.e., explicit and implicit ones) progressively and mitigate the cross-modal gap. Extensive experiments on the existing attribute-involved ReID datasets, namely, Market1501 and DukeMTMC-reID, demonstrate the effectiveness and rationality of the proposed MP-ReID solution.

Ru Peng, Kexin Yang, Yawen Zeng et al.

The performance emergence of large language models (LLMs) driven by data scaling laws makes the selection of pre-training data increasingly important. However, existing methods rely on limited heuristics and human intuition, lacking comprehensive and clear guidelines. To address this, we are inspired by ``reverse thinking'' -- prompting LLMs to self-identify which criteria benefit its performance. As its pre-training capabilities are related to perplexity (PPL), we derive 14 quality criteria from the causes of text perplexity anomalies and introduce 15 common application domains to support domain mixing. In this paper, we train a Data Manager (DataMan) to learn quality ratings and domain recognition from pointwise rating, and use it to annotate a 447B token pre-training corpus with 14 quality ratings and domain type. Our experiments validate our approach, using DataMan to select 30B tokens to train a 1.3B-parameter language model, demonstrating significant improvements in in-context learning (ICL), perplexity, and instruction-following ability over the state-of-the-art baseline. The best-performing model, based on the Overall Score l=5 surpasses a model trained with 50% more data using uniform sampling. We continue pre-training with high-rated, domain-specific data annotated by DataMan to enhance domain-specific ICL performance and thus verify DataMan's domain mixing ability. Our findings emphasize the importance of quality ranking, the complementary nature of quality criteria, and their low correlation with perplexity, analyzing misalignment between PPL and ICL performance. We also thoroughly analyzed our pre-training dataset, examining its composition, the distribution of quality ratings, and the original document sources.

Ning Han, Jingjing Chen, Chuhao Shi et al.

The task of text-video retrieval aims to understand the correspondence between language and vision, has gained increasing attention in recent years. Previous studies either adopt off-the-shelf 2D/3D-CNN and then use average/max pooling to directly capture spatial features with aggregated temporal information as global video embeddings, or introduce graph-based models and expert knowledge to learn local spatial-temporal relations. However, the existing methods have two limitations: 1) The global video representations learn video temporal information in a simple average/max pooling manner and do not fully explore the temporal information between every two frames. 2) The graph-based local video representations are handcrafted, it depends heavily on expert knowledge and empirical feedback, which may not be able to effectively mine the higher-level fine-grained visual relations. These limitations result in their inability to distinguish videos with the same visual components but with different relations. To solve this problem, we propose a novel cross-modal retrieval framework, Bi-Branch Complementary Network (BiC-Net), which modifies transformer architecture to effectively bridge text-video modalities in a complementary manner via combining local spatial-temporal relation and global temporal information. Specifically, local video representations are encoded using multiple transformer blocks and additional residual blocks to learn spatio-temporal relation features, calling the module a Spatio-Temporal Residual transformer (SRT). Meanwhile, Global video representations are encoded using a multi-layer transformer block to learn global temporal features. Finally, we align the spatio-temporal relation and global temporal features with the text feature on two embedding spaces for cross-modal text-video retrieval.