Tao Wu

Tao Wu, Mengze Li, Jingyuan Chen et al.

Research on Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) towards the multi-image cross-modal instruction has received increasing attention and made significant progress, particularly in scenarios involving closely resembling images (e.g., change captioning). Existing MLLMs typically follow a two-step process in their pipelines: first, extracting visual tokens independently for each input image, and then aligning these visual tokens from different images with the Large Language Model (LLM) in its textual feature space. However, the independent extraction of visual tokens for each image may result in different semantics being prioritized for different images in the first step, leading to a lack of preservation of linking information among images for subsequent LLM analysis. This issue becomes more serious in scenarios where significant variations exist among the images (e.g., visual storytelling). To address this challenge, we introduce Semantic Alignment for Multi-modal large language models (SAM). By involving the bidirectional semantic guidance between different images in the visual-token extraction process, SAM aims to enhance the preservation of linking information for coherent analysis and align the semantics of different images before feeding them into LLM. As the test bed, we propose a large-scale dataset named MmLINK consisting of 69K samples. Different from most existing datasets for MLLMs fine-tuning, our MmLINK dataset comprises multi-modal instructions with significantly diverse images. Extensive experiments on the group captioning task and the storytelling task prove the effectiveness of our SAM model, surpassing the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin (+37% for group captioning and +22% for storytelling on CIDEr score). Project page: https://mccartney01.github.io/SAM.

Tao Wu, Shuqiu Ge, Jie Qin et al.

Spatio-temporal action detection (STAD) is an important fine-grained video understanding task. Current methods require box and label supervision for all action classes in advance. However, in real-world applications, it is very likely to come across new action classes not seen in training because the action category space is large and hard to enumerate. Also, the cost of data annotation and model training for new classes is extremely high for traditional methods, as we need to perform detailed box annotations and re-train the whole network from scratch. In this paper, we propose a new challenging setting by performing open-vocabulary STAD to better mimic the situation of action detection in an open world. Open-vocabulary spatio-temporal action detection (OV-STAD) requires training a model on a limited set of base classes with box and label supervision, which is expected to yield good generalization performance on novel action classes. For OV-STAD, we build two benchmarks based on the existing STAD datasets and propose a simple but effective method based on pretrained video-language models (VLM). To better adapt the holistic VLM for the fine-grained action detection task, we carefully fine-tune it on the localized video region-text pairs. This customized fine-tuning endows the VLM with better motion understanding, thus contributing to a more accurate alignment between video regions and texts. Local region feature and global video feature fusion before alignment is adopted to further improve the action detection performance by providing global context. Our method achieves a promising performance on novel classes.

Jingyuan Chen, Tao Wu, Wei Ji et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools in natural language processing (NLP), showing a promising future of artificial generated intelligence (AGI). Despite their notable performance in the general domain, LLMs have remained suboptimal in the field of education, owing to the unique challenges presented by this domain, such as the need for more specialized knowledge, the requirement for personalized learning experiences, and the necessity for concise explanations of complex concepts. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel LLM for education named WisdomBot, which combines the power of LLMs with educational theories, enabling their seamless integration into educational contexts. To be specific, we harness self-instructed knowledge concepts and instructions under the guidance of Bloom's Taxonomy as training data. To further enhance the accuracy and professionalism of model's response on factual questions, we introduce two key enhancements during inference, i.e., local knowledge base retrieval augmentation and search engine retrieval augmentation during inference. We substantiate the effectiveness of our approach by applying it to several Chinese LLMs, thereby showcasing that the fine-tuned models can generate more reliable and professional responses.

Tao Wu, Xinwen Cao, Chao Wang et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated significant application potential in various fields. However, GNNs are still vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Numerous adversarial defense methods on GNNs are proposed to address the problem of adversarial attacks. However, these methods can only serve as a defense before poisoning, but cannot repair poisoned GNN. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a method to repair poisoned GNN. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing the novel concept of model repair for GNNs. We propose a repair framework, Repairing Robustness of Graph Neural Networks via Machine Unlearning (GraphMU), which aims to fine-tune poisoned GNN to forget adversarial samples without the need for complete retraining. We also introduce a unlearning validation method to ensure that our approach effectively forget specified poisoned data. To evaluate the effectiveness of GraphMU, we explore three fine-tuned subgraph construction scenarios based on the available perturbation information: (i) Known Perturbation Ratios, (ii) Known Complete Knowledge of Perturbations, and (iii) Unknown any Knowledge of Perturbations. Our extensive experiments, conducted across four citation datasets and four adversarial attack scenarios, demonstrate that GraphMU can effectively restore the performance of poisoned GNN.