Ning Liu

Lei Wang, Yi Hu, Jiabang He et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated exceptional performance in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. They have also shown the ability to perform chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex problems. Recent studies have explored CoT reasoning in complex multimodal scenarios, such as the science question answering task, by fine-tuning multimodal models with high-quality human-annotated CoT rationales. However, collecting high-quality COT rationales is usually time-consuming and costly. Besides, the annotated rationales are hardly accurate due to the external essential information missed. To address these issues, we propose a novel method termed T-SciQ that aims at teaching science question answering with LLM signals. The T-SciQ approach generates high-quality CoT rationales as teaching signals and is advanced to train much smaller models to perform CoT reasoning in complex modalities. Additionally, we introduce a novel data mixing strategy to produce more effective teaching data samples for simple and complex science question answer problems. Extensive experimental results show that our T-SciQ method achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on the ScienceQA benchmark, with an accuracy of 96.18%. Moreover, our approach outperforms the most powerful fine-tuned baseline by 4.5%. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/T-SciQ/T-SciQ.

Zhuo Wang, Wei Zhang, Ning Liu et al.

Rule-based models, e.g., decision trees, are widely used in scenarios demanding high model interpretability for their transparent inner structures and good model expressivity. However, rule-based models are hard to optimize, especially on large data sets, due to their discrete parameters and structures. Ensemble methods and fuzzy/soft rules are commonly used to improve performance, but they sacrifice the model interpretability. To obtain both good scalability and interpretability, we propose a new classifier, named Rule-based Representation Learner (RRL), that automatically learns interpretable non-fuzzy rules for data representation and classification. To train the non-differentiable RRL effectively, we project it to a continuous space and propose a novel training method, called Gradient Grafting, that can directly optimize the discrete model using gradient descent. An improved design of logical activation functions is also devised to increase the scalability of RRL and enable it to discretize the continuous features end-to-end. Exhaustive experiments on nine small and four large data sets show that RRL outperforms the competitive interpretable approaches and can be easily adjusted to obtain a trade-off between classification accuracy and model complexity for different scenarios. Our code is available at: https://github.com/12wang3/rrl.

Zhuo Wang, Wei Zhang, Ning Liu et al.

Models with transparent inner structure and high classification performance are required to reduce potential risk and provide trust for users in domains like health care, finance, security, etc. However, existing models are hard to simultaneously satisfy the above two properties. In this paper, we propose a new hierarchical rule-based model for classification tasks, named Concept Rule Sets (CRS), which has both a strong expressive ability and a transparent inner structure. To address the challenge of efficiently learning the non-differentiable CRS model, we propose a novel neural network architecture, Multilayer Logical Perceptron (MLLP), which is a continuous version of CRS. Using MLLP and the Random Binarization (RB) method we proposed, we can search the discrete solution of CRS in continuous space using gradient descent and ensure the discrete CRS acts almost the same as the corresponding continuous MLLP. Experiments on 12 public data sets show that CRS outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and the complexity of the learned CRS is close to the simple decision tree. Source code is available at https://github.com/12wang3/mllp.

Ning Liu, Yongchao Long, Changqing Zou et al.

We propose an attention-injective deformable convolutional network called ADCrowdNet for crowd understanding that can address the accuracy degradation problem of highly congested noisy scenes. ADCrowdNet contains two concatenated networks. An attention-aware network called Attention Map Generator (AMG) first detects crowd regions in images and computes the congestion degree of these regions. Based on detected crowd regions and congestion priors, a multi-scale deformable network called Density Map Estimator (DME) then generates high-quality density maps. With the attention-aware training scheme and multi-scale deformable convolutional scheme, the proposed ADCrowdNet achieves the capability of being more effective to capture the crowd features and more resistant to various noises. We have evaluated our method on four popular crowd counting datasets (ShanghaiTech, UCF_CC_50, WorldEXPO'10, and UCSD) and an extra vehicle counting dataset TRANCOS, and our approach beats existing state-of-the-art approaches on all of these datasets.