Lifu Huang

Barry Menglong Yao, Aditya Shah, Lichao Sun et al.

We propose end-to-end multimodal fact-checking and explanation generation, where the input is a claim and a large collection of web sources, including articles, images, videos, and tweets, and the goal is to assess the truthfulness of the claim by retrieving relevant evidence and predicting a truthfulness label (e.g., support, refute or not enough information), and to generate a statement to summarize and explain the reasoning and ruling process. To support this research, we construct Mocheg, a large-scale dataset consisting of 15,601 claims where each claim is annotated with a truthfulness label and a ruling statement, and 33,880 textual paragraphs and 12,112 images in total as evidence. To establish baseline performances on Mocheg, we experiment with several state-of-the-art neural architectures on the three pipelined subtasks: multimodal evidence retrieval, claim verification, and explanation generation, and demonstrate that the performance of the state-of-the-art end-to-end multimodal fact-checking does not provide satisfactory outcomes. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to build the benchmark dataset and solutions for end-to-end multimodal fact-checking and explanation generation. The dataset, source code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/VT-NLP/Mocheg.

Zhiyang Xu, Ying Shen, Lifu Huang

Instruction tuning, a new learning paradigm that fine-tunes pre-trained language models on tasks specified through instructions, has shown promising zero-shot performance on various natural language processing tasks. However, it has yet to be explored for vision and multimodal tasks. In this work, we introduce MUL-TIINSTRUCT, the first multimodal instruction tuning benchmark dataset that consists of 62 diverse multimodal tasks in a unified seq-to-seq format covering 10 broad categories. The tasks are derived from 21 existing open-source datasets and each task is equipped with 5 expert-written instructions. We take OFA as the base pre-trained model for multimodal instruction tuning, and to further improve its zero-shot performance, we explore multiple transfer learning strategies to leverage the large-scale NATURAL INSTRUCTIONS dataset. Experimental results demonstrate strong zero-shot performance on various unseen multimodal tasks and the benefit of transfer learning from a text-only instruction dataset. We also design a new evaluation metric - Sensitivity, to evaluate how sensitive the model is to the variety of instructions. Our results indicate that fine-tuning the model on a diverse set of tasks and instructions leads to a reduced sensitivity to variations in instructions for each task.

Zihao Lin, Yan Sun, Yifan Shi et al.

With the blowout development of pre-trained models (PTMs), the efficient tuning of these models for diverse downstream applications has emerged as a pivotal research concern. Although recent investigations into prompt tuning have provided promising avenues, three salient challenges persist: (1) memory constraint: the continuous growth in the size of open-source PTMs renders fine-tuning, even a fraction of their parameters, challenging for many practitioners. (2) model privacy: existing PTMs often function as public API services, with their parameters inaccessible for effective or tailored fine-tuning. (3) data privacy: the fine-tuning of PTMs necessitates high-quality datasets, which are typically localized and not shared to public. To optimally harness each local dataset while navigating memory constraints and preserving privacy, we propose Federated Black-Box Prompt Tuning (Fed-BBPT). This innovative approach eschews reliance on parameter architectures and private dataset access, instead capitalizing on a central server that aids local users in collaboratively training a prompt generator through regular aggregation. Local users leverage API-driven learning via a zero-order optimizer, obviating the need for PTM deployment. Relative to extensive fine-tuning, Fed-BBPT proficiently sidesteps memory challenges tied to PTM storage and fine-tuning on local machines, tapping into comprehensive, high-quality, yet private training datasets. A thorough evaluation across 40 datasets spanning CV and NLP tasks underscores the robustness of our proposed model.

Haibo Wang, Lifu Huang

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at 2D semantic understanding but lack intrinsic 3D awareness, resulting in representations that fail to maintain geometric and spatial consistency across video frames. Given the scarcity of large-scale 3D data, we present GeoVR, a novel framework that learns geometric representations using purely 2D video sequences. This approach effectively restructures the semantic latent space within MLLMs to unlock spatial intelligence. Rather than employing superficial feature mixing, GeoVR reshapes the internal representations of the MLLM by distilling geometry knowledge from pre-trained 3D foundation models. This is accomplished through a multi-objective learning strategy driven by four complementary geometric targets: (1) estimating inter-frame camera poses to embed varying viewpoint dynamics, (2) regressing dense depth maps to anchor physical distances, (3) predicting a metric scale factor for real-world calibration, and (4) distilling multi-scale 3D features to align the intermediate feature space. Guided by these explicit physical and geometric constraints, the model's internal representations naturally develop strong 3D awareness. Extensive experiments on spatial reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that GeoVR achieves state-of-the-art performance, establishing a new paradigm for endowing foundation models with spatial intelligence.

Minqian Liu, Shiyu Chang, Lifu Huang

Lifelong event detection aims to incrementally update a model with new event types and data while retaining the capability on previously learned old types. One critical challenge is that the model would catastrophically forget old types when continually trained on new data. In this paper, we introduce Episodic Memory Prompts (EMP) to explicitly preserve the learned task-specific knowledge. Our method adopts continuous prompt for each task and they are optimized to instruct the model prediction and learn event-specific representation. The EMPs learned in previous tasks are carried along with the model in subsequent tasks, and can serve as a memory module that keeps the old knowledge and transferring to new tasks. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Furthermore, we also conduct a comprehensive analysis of the new and old event types in lifelong learning.

Zhiyang Xu, Minqian Liu, Ying Shen et al.

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have led to the emergence of Vision-Language Generalists (VLGs) capable of understanding and generating both text and images. However, seamlessly generating an arbitrary sequence of text and images remains a challenging task for the current VLGs. One primary limitation lies in applying a unified architecture and the same set of parameters to simultaneously model discrete text tokens and continuous image features. Recent works attempt to tackle this fundamental problem by introducing modality-aware expert models. However, they employ identical architectures to process both text and images, disregarding the intrinsic inductive biases in these two modalities. In this work, we introduce MODALITY-SPECIALIZED SYNERGIZERS (MOSS), a novel design that efficiently optimizes existing unified architectures of VLGs with modality-specialized adaptation layers, i.e., a Convolutional LoRA for modeling the local priors of image patches and a Linear LoRA for processing sequential text. This design enables more effective modeling of modality-specific features while maintaining the strong cross-modal integration gained from pretraining. In addition, to improve the instruction-following capability on interleaved text-and-image generation, we introduce LEAFINSTRUCT, the first open-sourced interleaved instruction tuning dataset comprising 184,982 high-quality instances on more than 10 diverse domains. Extensive experiments show that VLGs integrated with M OSS achieve state-of-the-art performance, significantly surpassing baseline VLGs in complex interleaved generation tasks. Furthermore, our method exhibits strong generalizability on different VLGs.

Kai Zhang, Yu Wang, Hongyi Wang et al.

Federated learning (FL) can be essential in knowledge representation, reasoning, and data mining applications over multi-source knowledge graphs (KGs). A recent study FedE first proposes an FL framework that shares entity embeddings of KGs across all clients. However, entity embedding sharing from FedE would incur a severe privacy leakage. Specifically, the known entity embedding can be used to infer whether a specific relation between two entities exists in a private client. In this paper, we introduce a novel attack method that aims to recover the original data based on the embedding information, which is further used to evaluate the vulnerabilities of FedE. Furthermore, we propose a Federated learning paradigm with privacy-preserving Relation embedding aggregation (FedR) to tackle the privacy issue in FedE. Besides, relation embedding sharing can significantly reduce the communication cost due to its smaller size of queries. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate FedR with five different KG embedding models and three datasets. Compared to FedE, FedR achieves similar utility and significant improvements regarding privacy-preserving effect and communication efficiency on the link prediction task.

Hossein Naderi, Alireza Shojaei, Lifu Huang et al.

Robots are expected to play a major role in the future construction industry but face challenges due to high costs and difficulty adapting to dynamic tasks. This study explores the potential of foundation models to enhance the adaptability and generalizability of task planning in construction robots. Four models are proposed and implemented using lightweight, open-source large language models (LLMs) and vision language models (VLMs). These models include one single agent and three multi-agent teams that collaborate to create robot action plans. The models are evaluated across three construction roles: Painter, Safety Inspector, and Floor Tiling. Results show that the four-agent team outperforms the state-of-the-art GPT-4o in most metrics while being ten times more cost-effective. Additionally, teams with three and four agents demonstrate the improved generalizability. By discussing how agent behaviors influence outputs, this study enhances the understanding of AI teams and supports future research in diverse unstructured environments beyond construction.

Qingyun Wang, Manling Li, Hou Pong Chan et al.

Goal-oriented generative script learning aims to generate subsequent steps to reach a particular goal, which is an essential task to assist robots or humans in performing stereotypical activities. An important aspect of this process is the ability to capture historical states visually, which provides detailed information that is not covered by text and will guide subsequent steps. Therefore, we propose a new task, Multimedia Generative Script Learning, to generate subsequent steps by tracking historical states in both text and vision modalities, as well as presenting the first benchmark containing 5,652 tasks and 79,089 multimedia steps. This task is challenging in three aspects: the multimedia challenge of capturing the visual states in images, the induction challenge of performing unseen tasks, and the diversity challenge of covering different information in individual steps. We propose to encode visual state changes through a selective multimedia encoder to address the multimedia challenge, transfer knowledge from previously observed tasks using a retrieval-augmented decoder to overcome the induction challenge, and further present distinct information at each step by optimizing a diversity-oriented contrastive learning objective. We define metrics to evaluate both generation and inductive quality. Experiment results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms strong baselines.

Xiangyang Mou, Mo Yu, Bingsheng Yao et al. · ibm-research

Pre-trained Transformer models have achieved successes in a wide range of NLP tasks, but are inefficient when dealing with long input sequences. Existing studies try to overcome this challenge via segmenting the long sequence followed by hierarchical encoding or post-hoc aggregation. We propose a synchronization mechanism for hierarchical encoding. Our approach first identifies anchor tokens across segments and groups them by their roles in the original input sequence. Then inside Transformer layer, anchor embeddings are synchronized within their group via a self-attention module. Our approach is a general framework with sufficient flexibility -- when adapted to a new task, it is easy to be enhanced with the task-specific anchor definitions. Experiments on two representative tasks with different types of long input texts, NarrativeQA summary setting and wild multi-hop reasoning from HotpotQA, demonstrate that our approach is able to improve the global information exchange among segments while maintaining efficiency.

Zhe Hu, Hou Pong Chan, Jiachen Liu et al.

Despite recent progress of pre-trained language models on generating fluent text, existing methods still suffer from incoherence problems in long-form text generation tasks that require proper content control and planning to form a coherent high-level logical flow. In this work, we propose PLANET, a novel generation framework leveraging autoregressive self-attention mechanism to conduct content planning and surface realization dynamically. To guide the generation of output sentences, our framework enriches the Transformer decoder with latent representations to maintain sentence-level semantic plans grounded by bag-of-words. Moreover, we introduce a new coherence-based contrastive learning objective to further improve the coherence of output. Extensive experiments are conducted on two challenging long-form text generation tasks including counterargument generation and opinion article generation. Both automatic and human evaluations show that our method significantly outperforms strong baselines and generates more coherent texts with richer contents.

Zihao Lin, Haibo Wang, Zhiyang Xu et al.

Music-grounded mashup video creation is a challenging form of video non-linear editing, where a system must compose a coherent timeline from large collections of source videos while aligning with music rhythm, user intent, story completeness, and long-range structural constraints. Existing approaches typically rely on fixed pipelines or simplified retrieval-and-concatenation paradigms, limiting their ability to adapt to diverse prompts and heterogeneous source materials. In this paper, we present GLANCE, a global-local coordination multi-agent framework for music-grounded nonlinear video editing. GLANCE adopts a bi-loop architecture for better editing practice: an outer loop performs long-horizon planning and task-graph construction, and an inner loop adopts the "Observe-Think-Act-Verify" flow for segment-wise editing tasks and their refinements. To address the cross-segment and global conflict emerging after subtimelines composition, we introduce a dedicated global-local coordination mechanism with both preventive and corrective components, which includes a novelly designed context controller, conflict region decomposition module, and a bottom-up dynamic negotiation mechanism. To support rigorous evaluation, we construct MVEBench, a new benchmark that factorizes editing difficulty along task type, prompt specificity, and music length, and propose an agent-as-a-judge evaluation framework for scalable multi-dimensional assessment. Experimental results show that GLANCE consistently outperforms prior research baselines and open-source product baselines under the same backbone models. With GPT-4o-mini as the backbone, GLANCE improves over the strongest baseline by 33.2% and 15.6% on two task settings, respectively. Human evaluation further confirms the quality of the generated videos and validates the effectiveness of the proposed evaluation framework.

Sai Gurrapu, Ajay Kulkarni, Lifu Huang et al.

Recent advances in deep learning have improved the performance of many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as translation, question-answering, and text classification. However, this improvement comes at the expense of model explainability. Black-box models make it difficult to understand the internals of a system and the process it takes to arrive at an output. Numerical (LIME, Shapley) and visualization (saliency heatmap) explainability techniques are helpful; however, they are insufficient because they require specialized knowledge. These factors led rationalization to emerge as a more accessible explainable technique in NLP. Rationalization justifies a model's output by providing a natural language explanation (rationale). Recent improvements in natural language generation have made rationalization an attractive technique because it is intuitive, human-comprehensible, and accessible to non-technical users. Since rationalization is a relatively new field, it is disorganized. As the first survey, rationalization literature in NLP from 2007-2022 is analyzed. This survey presents available methods, explainable evaluations, code, and datasets used across various NLP tasks that use rationalization. Further, a new subfield in Explainable AI (XAI), namely, Rational AI (RAI), is introduced to advance the current state of rationalization. A discussion on observed insights, challenges, and future directions is provided to point to promising research opportunities.

Taowen Wang, Yiyang Liu, James Chenhao Liang et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across a wide range of domains, with increasing emphasis on enhancing their zero-shot generalization capabilities for unseen tasks across various modalities. Instruction tuning has emerged as an effective strategy for achieving zero-shot generalization by finetuning pretrained models on diverse multimodal tasks. As the scale of MLLMs continues to grow, parameter-efficient finetuning becomes increasingly critical. However, most existing parameter-efficient approaches focus only on single modalities and often overlook the multimodal characteristics during finetuning. In this work, we introduce a novel Multimodal Prompt Tuning (M$^2$PT) approach for efficient instruction tuning of MLLMs. M$^2$PT effectively integrates visual and textual prompts into the vision encoder and language processor respectively during finetuning, facilitating the extraction and alignment of features across modalities. Empirical results on various multimodal evaluation datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to several state-of-the-art baselines. A comprehensive set of ablation studies validates the effectiveness of our prompt design and the efficiency of our approach.

Zihao Lin, Wanrong Zhu, Jiuxiang Gu et al.

Real-world design documents (e.g., posters) are inherently multi-layered, combining decoration, text, and images. Editing them from natural-language instructions requires fine-grained, layer-aware reasoning to identify relevant layers and coordinate modifications. Prior work largely overlooks multi-layer design document editing, focusing instead on single-layer image editing or multi-layer generation, which assume a flat canvas and lack the reasoning needed to determine what and where to modify. To address this gap, we introduce the Multi-Layer Document Editing Agent (MiLDEAgent), a reasoning-based framework that combines an RL-trained multimodal reasoner for layer-wise understanding with an image editor for targeted modifications. To systematically benchmark this setting, we introduce the MiLDEBench, a human-in-the-loop corpus of over 20K design documents paired with diverse editing instructions. The benchmark is complemented by a task-specific evaluation protocol, MiLDEEval, which spans four dimensions including instruction following, layout consistency, aesthetics, and text rendering. Extensive experiments on 14 open-source and 2 closed-source models reveal that existing approaches fail to generalize: open-source models often cannot complete multi-layer document editing tasks, while closed-source models suffer from format violations. In contrast, MiLDEAgent achieves strong layer-aware reasoning and precise editing, significantly outperforming all open-source baselines and attaining performance comparable to closed-source models, thereby establishing the first strong baseline for multi-layer document editing.

Minqian Liu, Ying Shen, Zhiyang Xu et al.

Natural Language Generation (NLG) typically involves evaluating the generated text in various aspects (e.g., consistency and naturalness) to obtain a comprehensive assessment. However, multi-aspect evaluation remains challenging as it may require the evaluator to generalize to any given evaluation aspect even if it's absent during training. In this paper, we introduce X-Eval, a two-stage instruction tuning framework to evaluate the text in both seen and unseen aspects customized by end users. X-Eval consists of two learning stages: the vanilla instruction tuning stage that improves the model's ability to follow evaluation instructions, and an enhanced instruction tuning stage that exploits the connections between fine-grained evaluation aspects to better assess text quality. To support the training of X-Eval, we collect AspectInstruct, the first instruction tuning dataset tailored for multi-aspect NLG evaluation spanning 27 diverse evaluation aspects with 65 tasks. To enhance task diversity, we devise an augmentation strategy that converts human rating annotations into diverse forms of NLG evaluation tasks, including scoring, comparison, ranking, and Boolean question answering. Extensive experiments across three essential categories of NLG tasks: dialogue generation, summarization, and data-to-text coupled with 21 aspects in meta-evaluation, demonstrate that our X-Eval enables even a lightweight language model to achieve a comparable if not higher correlation with human judgments compared to the state-of-the-art NLG evaluators, such as GPT-4.

Yue Huang, Lichao Sun, Haoran Wang et al.

Large language models (LLMs), exemplified by ChatGPT, have gained considerable attention for their excellent natural language processing capabilities. Nonetheless, these LLMs present many challenges, particularly in the realm of trustworthiness. Therefore, ensuring the trustworthiness of LLMs emerges as an important topic. This paper introduces TrustLLM, a comprehensive study of trustworthiness in LLMs, including principles for different dimensions of trustworthiness, established benchmark, evaluation, and analysis of trustworthiness for mainstream LLMs, and discussion of open challenges and future directions. Specifically, we first propose a set of principles for trustworthy LLMs that span eight different dimensions. Based on these principles, we further establish a benchmark across six dimensions including truthfulness, safety, fairness, robustness, privacy, and machine ethics. We then present a study evaluating 16 mainstream LLMs in TrustLLM, consisting of over 30 datasets. Our findings firstly show that in general trustworthiness and utility (i.e., functional effectiveness) are positively related. Secondly, our observations reveal that proprietary LLMs generally outperform most open-source counterparts in terms of trustworthiness, raising concerns about the potential risks of widely accessible open-source LLMs. However, a few open-source LLMs come very close to proprietary ones. Thirdly, it is important to note that some LLMs may be overly calibrated towards exhibiting trustworthiness, to the extent that they compromise their utility by mistakenly treating benign prompts as harmful and consequently not responding. Finally, we emphasize the importance of ensuring transparency not only in the models themselves but also in the technologies that underpin trustworthiness. Knowing the specific trustworthy technologies that have been employed is crucial for analyzing their effectiveness.

Cheng Han, Qifan Wang, Sohail A. Dianat et al.

Transformer-based architectures have become the de-facto standard models for diverse vision tasks owing to their superior performance. As the size of the models continues to scale up, model distillation becomes extremely important in various real applications, particularly on devices limited by computational resources. However, prevailing knowledge distillation methods exhibit diminished efficacy when confronted with a large capacity gap between the teacher and the student, e.g, 10x compression rate. In this paper, we present a novel approach named Automatic Multi-step Distillation (AMD) for large-scale vision model compression. In particular, our distillation process unfolds across multiple steps. Initially, the teacher undergoes distillation to form an intermediate teacher-assistant model, which is subsequently distilled further to the student. An efficient and effective optimization framework is introduced to automatically identify the optimal teacher-assistant that leads to the maximal student performance. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple image classification datasets, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet. The findings consistently reveal that our approach outperforms several established baselines, paving a path for future knowledge distillation methods on large-scale vision models.

Sai Gurrapu, Lifu Huang, Feras A. Batarseh

With the advent of deep learning, text generation language models have improved dramatically, with text at a similar level as human-written text. This can lead to rampant misinformation because content can now be created cheaply and distributed quickly. Automated claim verification methods exist to validate claims, but they lack foundational data and often use mainstream news as evidence sources that are strongly biased towards a specific agenda. Current claim verification methods use deep neural network models and complex algorithms for a high classification accuracy but it is at the expense of model explainability. The models are black-boxes and their decision-making process and the steps it took to arrive at a final prediction are obfuscated from the user. We introduce a novel claim verification approach, namely: ExClaim, that attempts to provide an explainable claim verification system with foundational evidence. Inspired by the legal system, ExClaim leverages rationalization to provide a verdict for the claim and justifies the verdict through a natural language explanation (rationale) to describe the model's decision-making process. ExClaim treats the verdict classification task as a question-answer problem and achieves a performance of 0.93 F1 score. It provides subtasks explanations to also justify the intermediate outcomes. Statistical and Explainable AI (XAI) evaluations are conducted to ensure valid and trustworthy outcomes. Ensuring claim verification systems are assured, rational, and explainable is an essential step toward improving Human-AI trust and the accessibility of black-box systems.

Mingchen Li, Lifu Huang

Open domain entity state tracking aims to predict reasonable state changes of entities (i.e., [attribute] of [entity] was [before_state] and [after_state] afterwards) given the action descriptions. It's important to many reasoning tasks to support human everyday activities. However, it's challenging as the model needs to predict an arbitrary number of entity state changes caused by the action while most of the entities are implicitly relevant to the actions and their attributes as well as states are from open vocabularies. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end Knowledge Informed framework for open domain Entity State Tracking, namely KIEST, which explicitly retrieves the relevant entities and attributes from external knowledge graph (i.e., ConceptNet) and incorporates them to autoregressively generate all the entity state changes with a novel dynamic knowledge grained encoder-decoder framework. To enforce the logical coherence among the predicted entities, attributes, and states, we design a new constraint decoding strategy and employ a coherence reward to improve the decoding process. Experimental results show that our proposed KIEST framework significantly outperforms the strong baselines on the public benchmark dataset OpenPI.

Zhiyang Xu, Jay-Yoon Lee, Lifu Huang

Data scarcity has been the main factor that hinders the progress of event extraction. To overcome this issue, we propose a Self-Training with Feedback (STF) framework that leverages the large-scale unlabeled data and acquires feedback for each new event prediction from the unlabeled data by comparing it to the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graph of the same sentence. Specifically, STF consists of (1) a base event extraction model trained on existing event annotations and then applied to large-scale unlabeled corpora to predict new event mentions as pseudo training samples, and (2) a novel scoring model that takes in each new predicted event trigger, an argument, its argument role, as well as their paths in the AMR graph to estimate a compatibility score indicating the correctness of the pseudo label. The compatibility scores further act as feedback to encourage or discourage the model learning on the pseudo labels during self-training. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets, including ACE05-E, ACE05-E+, and ERE, demonstrate the effectiveness of the STF framework on event extraction, especially event argument extraction, with significant performance gain over the base event extraction models and strong baselines. Our experimental analysis further shows that STF is a generic framework as it can be applied to improve most, if not all, event extraction models by leveraging large-scale unlabeled data, even when high-quality AMR graph annotations are not available.

Jiuhai Chen, Zhiyang Xu, Xichen Pan et al.

Unifying image understanding and generation has gained growing attention in recent research on multimodal models. Although design choices for image understanding have been extensively studied, the optimal model architecture and training recipe for a unified framework with image generation remain underexplored. Motivated by the strong potential of autoregressive and diffusion models for high-quality generation and scalability, we conduct a comprehensive study of their use in unified multimodal settings, with emphasis on image representations, modeling objectives, and training strategies. Grounded in these investigations, we introduce a novel approach that employs a diffusion transformer to generate semantically rich CLIP image features, in contrast to conventional VAE-based representations. This design yields both higher training efficiency and improved generative quality. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a sequential pretraining strategy for unified models-first training on image understanding and subsequently on image generation-offers practical advantages by preserving image understanding capability while developing strong image generation ability. Finally, we carefully curate a high-quality instruction-tuning dataset BLIP3o-60k for image generation by prompting GPT-4o with a diverse set of captions covering various scenes, objects, human gestures, and more. Building on our innovative model design, training recipe, and datasets, we develop BLIP3-o, a suite of state-of-the-art unified multimodal models. BLIP3-o achieves superior performance across most of the popular benchmarks spanning both image understanding and generation tasks. To facilitate future research, we fully open-source our models, including code, model weights, training scripts, and pretraining and instruction tuning datasets.

Zhe Hu, Hou Pong Chan, Lifu Huang

Teaching neural models to generate narrative coherent texts is a critical problem. Recent pre-trained language models have achieved promising results, but there is still a gap between human written texts and machine-generated outputs. In this work, we propose a novel multi-task training strategy for coherent text generation grounded on the cognitive theory of writing, which empowers the model to learn essential subskills needed for writing including planning and reviewing besides end-to-end generation. We extensively evaluate our model on three open-ended generation tasks including story generation, news article writing and argument generation. Experiments show that our model achieves better results on both few-shot and fully-supervised settings than strong baselines, and human evaluations confirm that our model can generate more coherent outputs.

Apoorv Garg, Deval Srivastava, Zhiyang Xu et al.

Due to the superior performance, large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been widely adopted in many aspects of human society. However, we still lack effective tools to understand the potential bias embedded in the black-box models. Recent advances in prompt tuning show the possibility to explore the internal mechanism of the PLMs. In this work, we propose two token-level sentiment tests: Sentiment Association Test (SAT) and Sentiment Shift Test (SST) which utilize the prompt as a probe to detect the latent bias in the PLMs. Our experiments on the collection of sentiment datasets show that both SAT and SST can identify sentiment bias in PLMs and SST is able to quantify the bias. The results also suggest that fine-tuning can possibly augment the existing bias in PLMs.

Jingyuan Qi, Minqian Liu, Ying Shen et al.

Automatically generating scripts (i.e. sequences of key steps described in text) from video demonstrations and reasoning about the subsequent steps are crucial to the modern AI virtual assistants to guide humans to complete everyday tasks, especially unfamiliar ones. However, current methods for generative script learning rely heavily on well-structured preceding steps described in text and/or images or are limited to a certain domain, resulting in a disparity with real-world user scenarios. To address these limitations, we present a new benchmark challenge -- MultiScript, with two new tasks on task-oriented multimodal script learning: (1) multimodal script generation, and (2) subsequent step prediction. For both tasks, the input consists of a target task name and a video illustrating what has been done to complete the target task, and the expected output is (1) a sequence of structured step descriptions in text based on the demonstration video, and (2) a single text description for the subsequent step, respectively. Built from WikiHow, MultiScript covers multimodal scripts in videos and text descriptions for over 6,655 human everyday tasks across 19 diverse domains. To establish baseline performance on MultiScript, we propose two knowledge-guided multimodal generative frameworks that incorporate the task-related knowledge prompted from large language models such as Vicuna. Experimental results show that our proposed approaches significantly improve over the competitive baselines.

Sijia Wang, Mo Yu, Lifu Huang

We compare various forms of prompts to represent event types and develop a unified framework to incorporate the event type specific prompts for supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot event detection. The experimental results demonstrate that a well-defined and comprehensive event type prompt can significantly improve the performance of event detection, especially when the annotated data is scarce (few-shot event detection) or not available (zero-shot event detection). By leveraging the semantics of event types, our unified framework shows up to 24.3\% F-score gain over the previous state-of-the-art baselines.

Runjia Zeng, Cheng Han, Qifan Wang et al.

With the scale of vision Transformer-based models continuing to grow, finetuning these large-scale pretrained models for new tasks has become increasingly parameter-intensive. Visual prompt tuning is introduced as a parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) method to this trend. Despite its successes, a notable research challenge persists within almost all PEFT approaches: significant performance degradation is observed when there is a substantial disparity between the datasets applied in pretraining and finetuning phases. To address this challenge, we draw inspiration from human visual cognition, and propose the Visual Fourier Prompt Tuning (VFPT) method as a general and effective solution for adapting large-scale transformer-based models. Our approach innovatively incorporates the Fast Fourier Transform into prompt embeddings and harmoniously considers both spatial and frequency domain information. Apart from its inherent simplicity and intuitiveness, VFPT exhibits superior performance across all datasets, offering a general solution to dataset challenges, irrespective of data disparities. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art baselines on two benchmarks, with low parameter usage (e.g., 0.57% of model parameters on VTAB-1k) and notable performance enhancements (e.g., 73.20% of mean accuracy on VTAB-1k). Our code is avaliable at https://github.com/runtsang/VFPT.

Runjia Zeng, Qifan Wang, Qiang Guan et al.

Fine tuning has been regarded as a de facto approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, but the high training memory consumption inherited from LLMs makes this process inefficient. Among existing memory efficient approaches, activation-related optimization has proven particularly effective, as activations consistently dominate overall memory consumption. Although prior arts offer various activation optimization strategies, their data-agnostic nature ultimately results in ineffective and unstable fine tuning. In this paper, we propose TokenSeek, a universal plugin solution for various transformer-based models through instance-aware token seeking and ditching, achieving significant fine-tuning memory savings (e.g., requiring only 14.8% of the memory on Llama3.2 1B) with on-par or even better performance. Furthermore, our interpretable token seeking process reveals the underlying reasons for its effectiveness, offering valuable insights for future research on token efficiency. Homepage: https://runjia.tech/iclr_tokenseek/

Jiaxin Zhang, Wendi Cui, Zhuohang Li et al.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable capabilities, their unreliability remains a critical barrier to deployment in high-stakes domains. This survey charts a functional evolution in addressing this challenge: the evolution of uncertainty from a passive diagnostic metric to an active control signal guiding real-time model behavior. We demonstrate how uncertainty is leveraged as an active control signal across three frontiers: in \textbf{advanced reasoning} to optimize computation and trigger self-correction; in \textbf{autonomous agents} to govern metacognitive decisions about tool use and information seeking; and in \textbf{reinforcement learning} to mitigate reward hacking and enable self-improvement via intrinsic rewards. By grounding these advancements in emerging theoretical frameworks like Bayesian methods and Conformal Prediction, we provide a unified perspective on this transformative trend. This survey provides a comprehensive overview, critical analysis, and practical design patterns, arguing that mastering the new trend of uncertainty is essential for building the next generation of scalable, reliable, and trustworthy AI.

Renze Lou, Hanzi Xu, Sijia Wang et al.

Numerous studies have assessed the proficiency of AI systems, particularly large language models (LLMs), in facilitating everyday tasks such as email writing, question answering, and creative content generation. However, researchers face unique challenges and opportunities in leveraging LLMs for their own work, such as brainstorming research ideas, designing experiments, and writing or reviewing papers. In this study, we introduce AAAR-1.0, a benchmark dataset designed to evaluate LLM performance in three fundamental, expertise-intensive research tasks: (i) EquationInference, assessing the correctness of equations based on the contextual information in paper submissions; (ii) ExperimentDesign, designing experiments to validate research ideas and solutions; (iii) PaperWeakness, identifying weaknesses in paper submissions; and (iv) REVIEWCRITIQUE, identifying each segment in human reviews is deficient or not. AAAR-1.0 differs from prior benchmarks in two key ways: first, it is explicitly research-oriented, with tasks requiring deep domain expertise; second, it is researcher-oriented, mirroring the primary activities that researchers engage in on a daily basis. An evaluation of both open-source and proprietary LLMs reveals their potential as well as limitations in conducting sophisticated research tasks. We will keep iterating AAAR-1.0 to new versions.

Hossein Naderi, Alireza Shojaei, Lifu Huang

Automating activities through robots in unstructured environments, such as construction sites, has been a long-standing desire. However, the high degree of unpredictable events in these settings has resulted in far less adoption compared to more structured settings, such as manufacturing, where robots can be hard-coded or trained on narrowly defined datasets. Recently, pretrained foundation models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), have demonstrated superior generalization capabilities by providing zero-shot solutions for problems do not present in the training data, proposing them as a potential solution for introducing robots to unstructured environments. To this end, this study investigates potential opportunities and challenges of pretrained foundation models from a multi-dimensional perspective. The study systematically reviews application of foundation models in two field of robotic and unstructured environment and then synthesized them with deliberative acting theory. Findings showed that linguistic capabilities of LLMs have been utilized more than other features for improving perception in human-robot interactions. On the other hand, findings showed that the use of LLMs demonstrated more applications in project management and safety in construction, and natural hazard detection in disaster management. Synthesizing these findings, we located the current state-of-the-art in this field on a five-level scale of automation, placing them at conditional automation. This assessment was then used to envision future scenarios, challenges, and solutions toward autonomous safe unstructured environments. Our study can be seen as a benchmark to track our progress toward that future.

Mohammad Beigi, Ming Jin, Junshan Zhang et al.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) remains vulnerable to reward hacking, where models exploit spurious correlations in learned reward models to achieve high scores while violating human intent. Existing mitigations rely on static defenses that cannot adapt to novel exploitation strategies. We propose Adversarial Reward Auditing (ARA), a framework that reconceptualizes reward hacking as a dynamic, competitive game. ARA operates in two stages: first, a Hacker policy discovers reward model vulnerabilities while an Auditor learns to detect exploitation from latent representations; second, Auditor-Guided RLHF (AG-RLHF) gates reward signals to penalize detected hacking, transforming reward hacking from an unobservable failure into a measurable, controllable signal. Experiments across three hacking scenarios demonstrate that ARA achieves the best alignment-utility tradeoff among all baselines: reducing sycophancy to near-SFT levels while improving helpfulness, decreasing verbosity while achieving the highest ROUGE-L, and suppressing code gaming while improving Pass@1. Beyond single-domain evaluation, we show that reward hacking, detection, and mitigation all generalize across domains -- a Hacker trained on code gaming exhibits increased sycophancy despite no reward for this behavior, and an Auditor trained on one domain effectively suppresses exploitation in others, enabling efficient multi-domain defense with a single model.

Shiping Gao, Hongzhan Chen, Xiaojun Quan et al.

Process reward models (PRMs) provide fine-grained reward signals along the reasoning process, but training reliable PRMs often requires step annotations or heavy verification pipelines, making them expensive to scale and refresh during online RL. Implicit PRMs mitigate this cost by learning decomposable token- or step-level rewards from trajectory-level outcome labels. However, they suffer from a train-inference mismatch: training only constrains a sequence-level aggregate, whereas inference requires token-level scores to reflect local step quality. As a result, token-level credits are weakly identified and may fail to faithfully reflect which reasoning steps are actually correct. This unreliability undermines a key promise of implicit PRMs: scoring many candidate tokens. In practice, noisy per-token advantages may systematically reinforce incorrect continuations. We address this problem with a novel Implicit Prefix-Value Reward Model (IPVRM), which directly learns a prefix-conditioned value function estimating the probability of eventual correctness, and derives step signals via temporal-difference (TD) differences. IPVRM substantially improves step-verification F1 on ProcessBench. Building on these calibrated prefix values, we further propose Distribution-Level RL (DistRL), which computes TD advantages for both sampled tokens and high-probability candidate tokens, enabling dense counterfactual updates without additional rollouts. While DistRL offers limited gains when powered by miscalibrated implicit rewards, it consistently improves downstream reasoning once paired with IPVRM.

Zhiyang Xu, Tian Qin, Bowen Jin et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently shown strong performance in visual understanding, yet they often lack temporal awareness, particularly in egocentric settings where reasoning depends on the correct ordering and evolution of events. This deficiency stems in part from training objectives that fail to explicitly reward temporal reasoning and instead rely on frame-level spatial shortcuts. To address this limitation, we propose Temporal Global Policy Optimization (TGPO), a reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) algorithm designed to incentivize temporal awareness in MLLMs. TGPO contrasts model outputs generated from temporally ordered versus shuffled video frames to derive calibrated, globally normalized reward signals that explicitly favor temporally coherent reasoning. Integrated with GRPO and GSPO, TGPO supports cold-start RL training and effectively suppresses spatial shortcut behaviors learned by existing MLLMs. Experiments across five egocentric video benchmarks demonstrate that TGPO consistently improves temporal grounding and causal coherence, outperforming prior RL-based video reasoning approaches. Our results suggest that TGPO offers a simple and scalable pathway toward temporally robust MLLMs for egocentric video understanding.

Zijian Jin, Xingyu Zhang, Mo Yu et al.

Script knowledge is critical for humans to understand the broad daily tasks and routine activities in the world. Recently researchers have explored the large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) to perform various script related tasks, such as story generation, temporal ordering of event, future event prediction and so on. However, it's still not well studied in terms of how well the PLMs capture the script knowledge. To answer this question, we design three probing tasks: inclusive sub-event selection, starting sub-event selection and temporal ordering to investigate the capabilities of PLMs with and without fine-tuning. The three probing tasks can be further used to automatically induce a script for each main event given all the possible sub-events. Taking BERT as a case study, by analyzing its performance on script induction as well as each individual probing task, we conclude that the stereotypical temporal knowledge among the sub-events is well captured in BERT, however the inclusive or starting sub-event knowledge is barely encoded.

Hoang Anh Just, Mahavir Dabas, Lifu Huang et al.

Existing work on improving language model reasoning typically explores a single solution path, which can be prone to errors. Inspired by perspective-taking in social studies, this paper introduces DiPT, a novel approach that complements current reasoning methods by explicitly incorporating diversified viewpoints. This approach allows the model to gain a deeper understanding of the problem's context and identify the most effective solution path during the inference stage. Additionally, it provides a general data-centric AI recipe for augmenting existing data to improve their quality for fine-tuning. Our empirical results demonstrate that DiPT can be flexibly integrated into existing methods that focus on a single reasoning approach, enhancing their reasoning performance and stability when presented with paraphrased problems. Furthermore, we illustrate improved context understanding by maintaining the model's safe outputs against "jailbreaking" prompts intentionally designed to bypass safeguards built into deployed models. Lastly, we show that fine-tuning with data enriched with diverse perspectives can boost the reasoning capabilities of the model compared to fine-tuning with raw data alone.

Hanwen Zheng, Sijia Wang, Lifu Huang

Document-level information extraction (IE) is a crucial task in natural language processing (NLP). This paper conducts a systematic review of recent document-level IE literature. In addition, we conduct a thorough error analysis with current state-of-the-art algorithms and identify their limitations as well as the remaining challenges for the task of document-level IE. According to our findings, labeling noises, entity coreference resolution, and lack of reasoning, severely affect the performance of document-level IE. The objective of this survey paper is to provide more insights and help NLP researchers to further enhance document-level IE performance.

Jianpeng Chen, Wangzhi Zhan, Haohui Wang et al.

Metamaterials, engineered materials with architected structures across multiple length scales, offer unprecedented and tunable mechanical properties that surpass those of conventional materials. However, leveraging advanced machine learning (ML) for metamaterial discovery is hindered by three fundamental challenges: (C1) Data Heterogeneity Challenge arises from heterogeneous data sources, heterogeneous composition scales, and heterogeneous structure categories; (C2) Model Complexity Challenge stems from the intricate geometric constraints of ML models, which complicate their adaptation to metamaterial structures; and (C3) Human-AI Collaboration Challenge comes from the "dual black-box'' nature of sophisticated ML models and the need for intuitive user interfaces. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a unified framework, named MetamatBench, that operates on three levels. (1) At the data level, we integrate and standardize 5 heterogeneous, multi-modal metamaterial datasets. (2) The ML level provides a comprehensive toolkit that adapts 17 state-of-the-art ML methods for metamaterial discovery. It also includes a comprehensive evaluation suite with 12 novel performance metrics with finite element-based assessments to ensure accurate and reliable model validation. (3) The user level features a visual-interactive interface that bridges the gap between complex ML techniques and non-ML researchers, advancing property prediction and inverse design of metamaterials for research and applications. MetamatBench offers a unified platform deployed at http://zhoulab-1.cs.vt.edu:5550 that enables machine learning researchers and practitioners to develop and evaluate new methodologies in metamaterial discovery. For accessibility and reproducibility, we open-source our benchmark and the codebase at https://github.com/cjpcool/Metamaterial-Benchmark.

Runjia Zeng, Guangyan Sun, Qifan Wang et al.

Considering deep neural networks as manifold mappers, the pretrain-then-fine-tune paradigm can be interpreted as a two-stage process: pretrain establishes a broad knowledge base, and fine-tune adjusts the model parameters to activate specific neural pathways to align with the target manifold. Although prior fine-tuning approaches demonstrate success, their rigid parameter space limits their ability to dynamically activate appropriate neural pathways, rendering them ill-equipped to adapt flexibly to the diverse and evolving data distributions. In light of this view, we propose a novel approach, Mixture of Expert Prompt Tuning (MEPT), as an effective and efficient manifold-mapping framework. MEPT leverages the Mixture of Experts architecture by integrating multiple prompt experts to adaptively learn diverse and non-stationary data distributions. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that MEPT outperforms several state-of-the-art parameter efficient baselines on SuperGLUE, achieving notable improvements in mean accuracy (e.g., 1.94%) while significantly reducing activated prompts by 79.25%. The effectiveness of MEPT is further supported by theoretical insights from manifold learning and validated through neural activation pathway visualization results. Our code is avaliable at https://runjia.tech/emnlp_mept/.

Barry Menglong Yao, Sha Li, Yunzhi Yao et al.

Human beings primarily understand the world through concepts (e.g., dog), abstract mental representations that structure perception, reasoning, and learning. However, how large language models (LLMs) acquire, retain, and forget such concepts during continual pretraining remains poorly understood. In this work, we study how individual concepts are acquired and forgotten, as well as how multiple concepts interact through interference and synergy. We link these behavioral dynamics to LLMs' internal Concept Circuits, computational subgraphs associated with specific concepts, and incorporate Graph Metrics to characterize circuit structure. Our analysis reveals: (1) LLMs concept circuits provide a non-trivial, statistically significant signal of concept learning and forgetting; (2) Concept circuits exhibit a stage-wise temporal pattern during continual pretraining, with an early increase followed by gradual decrease and stabilization; (3) concepts with larger learning gains tend to exhibit greater forgetting under subsequent training; (4) semantically similar concepts induce stronger interference than weakly related ones; (5) conceptual knowledge differs in their transferability, with some significantly facilitating the learning of others. Together, our findings offer a circuit-level view of concept learning dynamics and inform the design of more interpretable and robust concept-aware training strategies for LLMs.

Mohammad Beigi, Ming Jin, Junshan Zhang et al.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) enables powerful LLM alignment but can introduce reward hacking - models exploit spurious correlations in proxy rewards without genuine alignment. Compounding this, the objectives internalized during RLHF remain opaque, making hacking behaviors difficult to detect or correct. We introduce IR3 (Interpretable Reward Reconstruction and Rectification), a framework that reverse-engineers, interprets, and surgically repairs the implicit objectives driving RLHF-tuned models. We propose Contrastive Inverse Reinforcement Learning (C-IRL), which reconstructs the implicit reward function by contrasting paired responses from post-alignment and baseline policies to explain behavioral shifts during RLHF. We then decompose the reconstructed reward via sparse autoencoders into interpretable features, enabling identification of hacking signatures through contribution analysis. Finally, we propose mitigation strategies - clean reward optimization, adversarial shaping, constrained optimization, and feature-guided distillation - that target problematic features while preserving beneficial alignment. Experiments across multiple reward model configurations show that IR3 achieves 0.89 correlation with ground-truth rewards, identifies hacking features with over 90% precision, and significantly reduces hacking behaviors while maintaining capabilities within 3% of the original model.

Hanwen Zheng, Sijia Wang, Chris Thomas et al.

Chart comprehension presents significant challenges for machine learning models due to the diverse and intricate shapes of charts. Existing multimodal methods often overlook these visual features or fail to integrate them effectively for chart question answering (ChartQA). To address this, we introduce Chartformer, a unified framework that enhances chart component recognition by accurately identifying and classifying components such as bars, lines, pies, titles, legends, and axes. Additionally, we propose a novel Question-guided Deformable Co-Attention (QDCAt) mechanism, which fuses chart features encoded by Chartformer with the given question, leveraging the question's guidance to ground the correct answer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approaches significantly outperform baseline models in chart component recognition and ChartQA tasks, achieving improvements of 3.2% in mAP and 15.4% in accuracy, respectively. These results underscore the robustness of our solution for detailed visual data interpretation across various applications.

Jiuhai Chen, Le Xue, Zhiyang Xu et al.

We present BLIP3o-NEXT, a fully open-source foundation model in the BLIP3 series that advances the next frontier of native image generation. BLIP3o-NEXT unifies text-to-image generation and image editing within a single architecture, demonstrating strong image generation and image editing capabilities. In developing the state-of-the-art native image generation model, we identify four key insights: (1) Most architectural choices yield comparable performance; an architecture can be deemed effective provided it scales efficiently and supports fast inference; (2) The successful application of reinforcement learning can further push the frontier of native image generation; (3) Image editing still remains a challenging task, yet instruction following and the consistency between generated and reference images can be significantly enhanced through post-training and data engine; (4) Data quality and scale continue to be decisive factors that determine the upper bound of model performance. Building upon these insights, BLIP3o-NEXT leverages an Autoregressive + Diffusion architecture in which an autoregressive model first generates discrete image tokens conditioned on multimodal inputs, whose hidden states are then used as conditioning signals for a diffusion model to generate high-fidelity images. This architecture integrates the reasoning strength and instruction following of autoregressive models with the fine-detail rendering ability of diffusion models, achieving a new level of coherence and realism. Extensive evaluations of various text-to-image and image-editing benchmarks show that BLIP3o-NEXT achieves superior performance over existing models.

Runjia Zeng, James Chenhao Liang, Cheng Han et al.

Training large language models (LLMs) from scratch can yield models with unique functionalities and strengths, but it is costly and often leads to redundant capabilities. A more cost-effective alternative is to fuse existing pre-trained LLMs with different architectures into a more powerful model. However, a key challenge in existing model fusion is their dependence on manually predefined vocabulary alignment, which may not generalize well across diverse contexts, leading to performance degradation in several evaluation. To solve this, we draw inspiration from distribution learning and propose the probabilistic token alignment method as a general and soft mapping for alignment, named as PTA-LLM. Our approach innovatively reformulates token alignment into a classic mathematical problem: optimal transport, seamlessly leveraging distribution-aware learning to facilitate more coherent model fusion. Apart from its inherent generality, PTA-LLM exhibits interpretability from a distributional perspective, offering insights into the essence of the token alignment. Empirical results demonstrate that probabilistic token alignment enhances the target model's performance across multiple capabilities. Our code is avaliable at https://runjia.tech/neurips_pta-llm/.

Haibo Wang, Zihao Lin, Zhiyang Xu et al.

3D Visual Grounding (3D-VG) aims to localize objects in 3D scenes via natural language descriptions. While recent advancements leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have explored zero-shot possibilities, they typically suffer from a static workflow relying on preprocessed 3D point clouds, essentially degrading grounding into proposal matching. To bypass this reliance, our core motivation is to decouple the task: leveraging 2D VLMs to resolve complex spatial semantics, while relying on deterministic multi-view geometry to instantiate the 3D structure. Driven by this insight, we propose "Think, Act, Build (TAB)", a dynamic agentic framework that reformulates 3D-VG tasks as a generative 2D-to-3D reconstruction paradigm operating directly on raw RGB-D streams. Specifically, guided by a specialized 3D-VG skill, our VLM agent dynamically invokes visual tools to track and reconstruct the target across 2D frames. Crucially, to overcome the multi-view coverage deficit caused by strict VLM semantic tracking, we introduce the Semantic-Anchored Geometric Expansion, a mechanism that first anchors the target in a reference video clip and then leverages multi-view geometry to propagate its spatial location across unobserved frames. This enables the agent to "Build" the target's 3D representation by aggregating these multi-view features via camera parameters, directly mapping 2D visual cues to 3D coordinates. Furthermore, to ensure rigorous assessment, we identify flaws such as reference ambiguity and category errors in existing benchmarks and manually refine the incorrect queries. Extensive experiments on ScanRefer and Nr3D demonstrate that our framework, relying entirely on open-source models, significantly outperforms previous zero-shot methods and even surpasses fully supervised baselines.

Li Yang, Qifan Wang, Jianfeng Chi et al.

Product attribute value extraction involves identifying the specific values associated with various attributes from a product profile. While existing methods often prioritize the development of effective models to improve extraction performance, there has been limited emphasis on extraction efficiency. However, in real-world scenarios, products are typically associated with multiple attributes, necessitating multiple extractions to obtain all corresponding values. In this work, we propose an Efficient product Attribute Value Extraction (EAVE) approach via lightweight sparse-layer interaction. Specifically, we employ a heavy encoder to separately encode the product context and attribute. The resulting non-interacting heavy representations of the context can be cached and reused for all attributes. Additionally, we introduce a light encoder to jointly encode the context and the attribute, facilitating lightweight interactions between them. To enrich the interaction within the lightweight encoder, we design a sparse-layer interaction module to fuse the non-interacting heavy representation into the lightweight encoder. Comprehensive evaluation on two benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves significant efficiency gains with neutral or marginal loss in performance when the context is long and number of attributes is large. Our code is available \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EAVE-EA18}{here}.

Barry Menglong Yao, Sijia Wang, Yu Chen et al.

We propose attribute-aware multimodal entity linking, where the input consists of a mention described with a text paragraph and images, and the goal is to predict the corresponding target entity from a multimodal knowledge base (KB) where each entity is also accompanied by a text description, visual images, and a collection of attributes that present the meta-information of the entity in a structured format. To facilitate this research endeavor, we construct AMELI, encompassing a new multimodal entity linking benchmark dataset that contains 16,735 mentions described in text and associated with 30,472 images, and a multimodal knowledge base that covers 34,690 entities along with 177,873 entity images and 798,216 attributes. To establish baseline performance on AMELI, we experiment with several state-of-the-art architectures for multimodal entity linking and further propose a new approach that incorporates attributes of entities into disambiguation. Experimental results and extensive qualitative analysis demonstrate that extracting and understanding the attributes of mentions from their text descriptions and visual images play a vital role in multimodal entity linking. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to integrate attributes in the multimodal entity linking task. The programs, model checkpoints, and the dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/VT-NLP/Ameli.

Zikun Hu, Yixin Cao, Lifu Huang et al.

Knowledge Graph (KG) and attention mechanism have been demonstrated effective in introducing and selecting useful information for weakly supervised methods. However, only qualitative analysis and ablation study are provided as evidence. In this paper, we contribute a dataset and propose a paradigm to quantitatively evaluate the effect of attention and KG on bag-level relation extraction (RE). We find that (1) higher attention accuracy may lead to worse performance as it may harm the model's ability to extract entity mention features; (2) the performance of attention is largely influenced by various noise distribution patterns, which is closely related to real-world datasets; (3) KG-enhanced attention indeed improves RE performance, while not through enhanced attention but by incorporating entity prior; and (4) attention mechanism may exacerbate the issue of insufficient training data. Based on these findings, we show that a straightforward variant of RE model can achieve significant improvements (6% AUC on average) on two real-world datasets as compared with three state-of-the-art baselines. Our codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/zig-kwin-hu/how-KG-ATT-help.

Shuaicheng Zhang, Lifu Huang, Qiang Ning

Extracting temporal relations (e.g., before, after, and simultaneous) among events is crucial to natural language understanding. One of the key challenges of this problem is that when the events of interest are far away in text, the context in-between often becomes complicated, making it challenging to resolve the temporal relationship between them. This paper thus proposes a new Syntax-guided Graph Transformer network (SGT) to mitigate this issue, by (1) explicitly exploiting the connection between two events based on their dependency parsing trees, and (2) automatically locating temporal cues between two events via a novel syntax-guided attention mechanism. Experiments on two benchmark datasets, MATRES and TB-Dense, show that our approach significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on both end-to-end temporal relation extraction and temporal relation classification; This improvement also proves to be robust on the contrast set of MATRES. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/VT-NLP/Syntax-Guided-Graph-Transformer.

Zhiyang Xu, Chao Feng, Rulin Shao et al.

Despite vision-language models' (VLMs) remarkable capabilities as versatile visual assistants, two substantial challenges persist within the existing VLM frameworks: (1) lacking task diversity in pretraining and visual instruction tuning, and (2) annotation error and bias in GPT-4 synthesized instruction tuning data. Both challenges lead to issues such as poor generalizability, hallucination, and catastrophic forgetting. To address these challenges, we construct Vision-Flan, the most diverse publicly available visual instruction tuning dataset to date, comprising 187 diverse tasks and 1,664,261 instances sourced from academic datasets, and each task is accompanied by an expert-written instruction. In addition, we propose a two-stage instruction tuning framework, in which VLMs are firstly finetuned on Vision-Flan and further tuned on GPT-4 synthesized data. We find this two-stage tuning framework significantly outperforms the traditional single-stage visual instruction tuning framework and achieves the state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of multi-modal evaluation benchmarks. Finally, we conduct in-depth analyses to understand visual instruction tuning and our findings reveal that: (1) GPT-4 synthesized data does not substantially enhance VLMs' capabilities but rather modulates the model's responses to human-preferred formats; (2) A minimal quantity (e.g., 1,000) of GPT-4 synthesized data can effectively align VLM responses with human-preference; (3) Visual instruction tuning mainly helps large-language models (LLMs) to understand visual features.