Mingyang Zhou

Mingyang Zhou, Licheng Yu, Amanpreet Singh et al. · meta-ai

Vision-and-Language (V+L) pre-training models have achieved tremendous success in recent years on various multi-modal benchmarks. However, the majority of existing models require pre-training on a large set of parallel image-text data, which is costly to collect, compared to image-only or text-only data. In this paper, we explore unsupervised Vision-and-Language pre-training (UVLP) to learn the cross-modal representation from non-parallel image and text datasets. We found two key factors that lead to good unsupervised V+L pre-training without parallel data: (i) joint image-and-text input (ii) overall image-text alignment (even for non-parallel data). Accordingly, we propose a novel unsupervised V+L pre-training curriculum for non-parallel texts and images. We first construct a weakly aligned image-text corpus via a retrieval-based approach, then apply a set of multi-granular alignment pre-training tasks, including region-to-tag, region-to-phrase, and image-to-sentence alignment, to bridge the gap between the two modalities. A comprehensive ablation study shows each granularity is helpful to learn a stronger pre-trained model. We adapt our pre-trained model to a set of V+L downstream tasks, including VQA, NLVR2, Visual Entailment, and RefCOCO+. Our model achieves the state-of-art performance in all these tasks under the unsupervised setting.

Mingyang Zhou, Grace Luo, Anna Rohrbach et al.

News Image Captioning requires describing an image by leveraging additional context from a news article. Previous works only coarsely leverage the article to extract the necessary context, which makes it challenging for models to identify relevant events and named entities. In our paper, we first demonstrate that by combining more fine-grained context that captures the key named entities (obtained via an oracle) and the global context that summarizes the news, we can dramatically improve the model's ability to generate accurate news captions. This begs the question, how to automatically extract such key entities from an image? We propose to use the pre-trained vision and language retrieval model CLIP to localize the visually grounded entities in the news article and then capture the non-visual entities via an open relation extraction model. Our experiments demonstrate that by simply selecting a better context from the article, we can significantly improve the performance of existing models and achieve new state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks.

Kung-Hsiang Huang, Mingyang Zhou, Hou Pong Chan et al.

Recent advancements in large vision-language models (LVLMs) have led to significant progress in generating natural language descriptions for visual content and thus enhancing various applications. One issue with these powerful models is that they sometimes produce texts that are factually inconsistent with the visual input. While there has been some effort to mitigate such inconsistencies in natural image captioning, the factuality of generated captions for structured document images, such as charts, has not received as much scrutiny, posing a potential threat to information reliability in critical applications. This work delves into the factuality aspect by introducing a comprehensive typology of factual errors in generated chart captions. A large-scale human annotation effort provides insight into the error patterns and frequencies in captions crafted by various chart captioning models, ultimately forming the foundation of a novel dataset, CHOCOLATE. Our analysis reveals that even state-of-the-art models, including GPT-4V, frequently produce captions laced with factual inaccuracies. In response to this challenge, we establish the new task of Chart Caption Factual Error Correction and introduce CHARTVE, a model for visual entailment that outperforms proprietary and open-source LVLMs in evaluating factual consistency. Furthermore, we propose C2TFEC, an interpretable two-stage framework that excels at correcting factual errors. This work inaugurates a new domain in factual error correction for chart captions, presenting a novel evaluation mechanism, and demonstrating an effective approach to ensuring the factuality of generated chart captions. The code and data as well as the continuously updated benchmark can be found at: https://khuangaf.github.io/CHOCOLATE/.

Hao Liao, Wensheng Lu, Jianxun Lian et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for generative recommender systems due to their transformative capabilities in user interaction. However, ensuring they do not recommend out-of-domain (OOD) items remains a challenge. We study two distinct methods to address this issue: RecLM-ret, a retrieval-based method, and RecLM-cgen, a constrained generation method. Both methods integrate seamlessly with existing LLMs to ensure in-domain recommendations. Comprehensive experiments on three recommendation datasets demonstrate that RecLM-cgen consistently outperforms RecLM-ret and existing LLM-based recommender models in accuracy while eliminating OOD recommendations, making it the preferred method for adoption. Additionally, RecLM-cgen maintains strong generalist capabilities and is a lightweight plug-and-play module for easy integration into LLMs, offering valuable practical benefits for the community. Source code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/RecAI

Mingyang Zhou, Yi R. Fung, Long Chen et al.

Building cross-model intelligence that can understand charts and communicate the salient information hidden behind them is an appealing challenge in the vision and language(V+L) community. The capability to uncover the underlined table data of chart figures is a critical key to automatic chart understanding. We introduce ChartT5, a V+L model that learns how to interpret table information from chart images via cross-modal pre-training on plot table pairs. Specifically, we propose two novel pre-training objectives: Masked Header Prediction (MHP) and Masked Value Prediction (MVP) to facilitate the model with different skills to interpret the table information. We have conducted extensive experiments on chart question answering and chart summarization to verify the effectiveness of the proposed pre-training strategies. In particular, on the ChartQA benchmark, our ChartT5 outperforms the state-of-the-art non-pretraining methods by over 8% performance gains.

Mingyang Zhou, Josh Arnold, Zhou Yu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach to learn an optimal dialog policy for task-oriented visual dialog systems. A common practice is to apply RL on a neural sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) framework with the action space being the output vocabulary in the decoder. However, it is difficult to design a reward function that can achieve a balance between learning an effective policy and generating a natural dialog response. This paper proposes a novel framework that alternatively trains a RL policy for image guessing and a supervised seq2seq model to improve dialog generation quality. We evaluate our framework on the GuessWhich task and the framework achieves the state-of-the-art performance in both task completion and dialog quality.