Yujie Lin

Yujie Lin, Ante Wang, Moye Chen et al.

Recently, inference-time scaling of chain-of-thought (CoT) has been demonstrated as a promising approach for addressing multi-modal reasoning tasks. While existing studies have predominantly centered on text-based thinking, the integration of both visual and textual modalities within the reasoning process remains unexplored. In this study, we pioneer the exploration of inference-time scaling with multi-modal thought, aiming to bridge this gap. To provide a comprehensive analysis, we systematically investigate popular sampling-based and tree search-based inference-time scaling methods on 10 challenging tasks spanning various domains. Besides, we uniformly adopt a consistency-enhanced verifier to ensure effective guidance for both methods across different thought paradigms. Results show that multi-modal thought promotes better performance against conventional text-only thought, and blending the two types of thought fosters more diverse thinking. Despite these advantages, multi-modal thoughts necessitate higher token consumption for processing richer visual inputs, which raises concerns in practical applications. We hope that our findings on the merits and drawbacks of this research line will inspire future works in the field.

Yujie Lin, Dong Li, Minglai Shao et al.

Fairness-aware domain generalization (FairDG) has emerged as a critical challenge for deploying trustworthy AI systems, particularly in scenarios involving distribution shifts. Traditional methods for addressing fairness have failed in domain generalization due to their lack of consideration for distribution shifts. Although disentanglement has been used to tackle FairDG, it is limited by its strong assumptions. To overcome these limitations, we propose Fairness-aware Classifier-Guided Score-based Diffusion Models (FADE) as a novel approach to effectively address the FairDG issue. Specifically, we first pre-train a score-based diffusion model (SDM) and two classifiers to equip the model with strong generalization capabilities across different domains. Then, we guide the SDM using these pre-trained classifiers to effectively eliminate sensitive information from the generated data. Finally, the generated fair data is used to train downstream classifiers, ensuring robust performance under new data distributions. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that FADE not only enhances fairness but also improves accuracy in the presence of distribution shifts. Additionally, FADE outperforms existing methods in achieving the best accuracy-fairness trade-offs.