CVOct 1, 2023Code
Reformulating Vision-Language Foundation Models and Datasets Towards Universal Multimodal AssistantsTianyu Yu, Jinyi Hu, Yuan Yao et al. · tsinghua
Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit impressive abilities to perceive images and follow open-ended instructions. The capabilities of MLLMs depend on two crucial factors: the model architecture to facilitate the feature alignment of visual modules and large language models; the multimodal instruction tuning datasets for human instruction following. (i) For the model architecture, most existing models introduce an external bridge module to connect vision encoders with language models, which needs an additional feature-alignment pre-training. In this work, we discover that compact pre-trained vision language models can inherently serve as ``out-of-the-box'' bridges between vision and language. Based on this, we propose Muffin framework, which directly employs pre-trained vision-language models to act as providers of visual signals. (ii) For the multimodal instruction tuning datasets, existing methods omit the complementary relationship between different datasets and simply mix datasets from different tasks. Instead, we propose UniMM-Chat dataset which explores the complementarities of datasets to generate 1.1M high-quality and diverse multimodal instructions. We merge information describing the same image from diverse datasets and transforms it into more knowledge-intensive conversation data. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the Muffin framework and UniMM-Chat dataset. Muffin achieves state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of vision-language tasks, significantly surpassing state-of-the-art models like LLaVA and InstructBLIP. Our model and dataset are all accessible at https://github.com/thunlp/muffin.
CLMar 14, 2022Code
Sememe Prediction for BabelNet Synsets using Multilingual and Multimodal InformationFanchao Qi, Chuancheng Lv, Zhiyuan Liu et al. · tsinghua
In linguistics, a sememe is defined as the minimum semantic unit of languages. Sememe knowledge bases (KBs), which are built by manually annotating words with sememes, have been successfully applied to various NLP tasks. However, existing sememe KBs only cover a few languages, which hinders the wide utilization of sememes. To address this issue, the task of sememe prediction for BabelNet synsets (SPBS) is presented, aiming to build a multilingual sememe KB based on BabelNet, a multilingual encyclopedia dictionary. By automatically predicting sememes for a BabelNet synset, the words in many languages in the synset would obtain sememe annotations simultaneously. However, previous SPBS methods have not taken full advantage of the abundant information in BabelNet. In this paper, we utilize the multilingual synonyms, multilingual glosses and images in BabelNet for SPBS. We design a multimodal information fusion model to encode and combine this information for sememe prediction. Experimental results show the substantial outperformance of our model over previous methods (about 10 MAP and F1 scores). All the code and data of this paper can be obtained at https://github.com/thunlp/MSGI.
IRAug 22, 2023Code
MISSRec: Pre-training and Transferring Multi-modal Interest-aware Sequence Representation for RecommendationJinpeng Wang, Ziyun Zeng, Yunxiao Wang et al.
The goal of sequential recommendation (SR) is to predict a user's potential interested items based on her/his historical interaction sequences. Most existing sequential recommenders are developed based on ID features, which, despite their widespread use, often underperform with sparse IDs and struggle with the cold-start problem. Besides, inconsistent ID mappings hinder the model's transferability, isolating similar recommendation domains that could have been co-optimized. This paper aims to address these issues by exploring the potential of multi-modal information in learning robust and generalizable sequence representations. We propose MISSRec, a multi-modal pre-training and transfer learning framework for SR. On the user side, we design a Transformer-based encoder-decoder model, where the contextual encoder learns to capture the sequence-level multi-modal user interests while a novel interest-aware decoder is developed to grasp item-modality-interest relations for better sequence representation. On the candidate item side, we adopt a dynamic fusion module to produce user-adaptive item representation, providing more precise matching between users and items. We pre-train the model with contrastive learning objectives and fine-tune it in an efficient manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of MISSRec, promising a practical solution for real-world recommendation scenarios. Data and code are available on \url{https://github.com/gimpong/MM23-MISSRec}.
CLMar 14, 2022
Delta Tuning: A Comprehensive Study of Parameter Efficient Methods for Pre-trained Language ModelsNing Ding, Yujia Qin, Guang Yang et al. · tsinghua
Despite the success, the process of fine-tuning large-scale PLMs brings prohibitive adaptation costs. In fact, fine-tuning all the parameters of a colossal model and retaining separate instances for different tasks are practically infeasible. This necessitates a new branch of research focusing on the parameter-efficient adaptation of PLMs, dubbed as delta tuning in this paper. In contrast with the standard fine-tuning, delta tuning only fine-tunes a small portion of the model parameters while keeping the rest untouched, largely reducing both the computation and storage costs. Recent studies have demonstrated that a series of delta tuning methods with distinct tuned parameter selection could achieve performance on a par with full-parameter fine-tuning, suggesting a new promising way of stimulating large-scale PLMs. In this paper, we first formally describe the problem of delta tuning and then comprehensively review recent delta tuning approaches. We also propose a unified categorization criterion that divide existing delta tuning methods into three groups: addition-based, specification-based, and reparameterization-based methods. Though initially proposed as an efficient method to steer large models, we believe that some of the fascinating evidence discovered along with delta tuning could help further reveal the mechanisms of PLMs and even deep neural networks. To this end, we discuss the theoretical principles underlying the effectiveness of delta tuning and propose frameworks to interpret delta tuning from the perspective of optimization and optimal control, respectively. Furthermore, we provide a holistic empirical study of representative methods, where results on over 100 NLP tasks demonstrate a comprehensive performance comparison of different approaches. The experimental results also cover the analysis of combinatorial, scaling and transferable properties of delta tuning.
AIApr 5, 2023Code
MoocRadar: A Fine-grained and Multi-aspect Knowledge Repository for Improving Cognitive Student Modeling in MOOCsJifan Yu, Mengying Lu, Qingyang Zhong et al. · tsinghua
Student modeling, the task of inferring a student's learning characteristics through their interactions with coursework, is a fundamental issue in intelligent education. Although the recent attempts from knowledge tracing and cognitive diagnosis propose several promising directions for improving the usability and effectiveness of current models, the existing public datasets are still insufficient to meet the need for these potential solutions due to their ignorance of complete exercising contexts, fine-grained concepts, and cognitive labels. In this paper, we present MoocRadar, a fine-grained, multi-aspect knowledge repository consisting of 2,513 exercise questions, 5,600 knowledge concepts, and over 12 million behavioral records. Specifically, we propose a framework to guarantee a high-quality and comprehensive annotation of fine-grained concepts and cognitive labels. The statistical and experimental results indicate that our dataset provides the basis for the future improvements of existing methods. Moreover, to support the convenient usage for researchers, we release a set of tools for data querying, model adaption, and even the extension of our repository, which are now available at https://github.com/THU-KEG/MOOC-Radar.
CLAug 21, 2023Code
SeqGPT: An Out-of-the-box Large Language Model for Open Domain Sequence UnderstandingTianyu Yu, Chengyue Jiang, Chao Lou et al.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive ability for open-domain NLP tasks. However, LLMs are sometimes too footloose for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks which always have restricted output and input format. Their performances on NLU tasks are highly related to prompts or demonstrations and are shown to be poor at performing several representative NLU tasks, such as event extraction and entity typing. To this end, we present SeqGPT, a bilingual (i.e., English and Chinese) open-source autoregressive model specially enhanced for open-domain natural language understanding. We express all NLU tasks with two atomic tasks, which define fixed instructions to restrict the input and output format but still ``open'' for arbitrarily varied label sets. The model is first instruction-tuned with extremely fine-grained labeled data synthesized by ChatGPT and then further fine-tuned by 233 different atomic tasks from 152 datasets across various domains. The experimental results show that SeqGPT has decent classification and extraction ability, and is capable of performing language understanding tasks on unseen domains. We also conduct empirical studies on the scaling of data and model size as well as on the transfer across tasks. Our model is accessible at https://github.com/Alibaba-NLP/SeqGPT.
CLJul 17, 2022Code
Automatic Context Pattern Generation for Entity Set ExpansionYinghui Li, Shulin Huang, Xinwei Zhang et al.
Entity Set Expansion (ESE) is a valuable task that aims to find entities of the target semantic class described by given seed entities. Various Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) downstream applications have benefited from ESE due to its ability to discover knowledge. Although existing corpus-based ESE methods have achieved great progress, they still rely on corpora with high-quality entity information annotated, because most of them need to obtain the context patterns through the position of the entity in a sentence. Therefore, the quality of the given corpora and their entity annotation has become the bottleneck that limits the performance of such methods. To overcome this dilemma and make the ESE models free from the dependence on entity annotation, our work aims to explore a new ESE paradigm, namely corpus-independent ESE. Specifically, we devise a context pattern generation module that utilizes autoregressive language models (e.g., GPT-2) to automatically generate high-quality context patterns for entities. In addition, we propose the GAPA, a novel ESE framework that leverages the aforementioned GenerAted PAtterns to expand target entities. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on three widely used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. All the codes of our experiments are available at https://github.com/geekjuruo/GAPA.
CVNov 22, 2022Code
Visually Grounded Commonsense Knowledge AcquisitionYuan Yao, Tianyu Yu, Ao Zhang et al.
Large-scale commonsense knowledge bases empower a broad range of AI applications, where the automatic extraction of commonsense knowledge (CKE) is a fundamental and challenging problem. CKE from text is known for suffering from the inherent sparsity and reporting bias of commonsense in text. Visual perception, on the other hand, contains rich commonsense knowledge about real-world entities, e.g., (person, can_hold, bottle), which can serve as promising sources for acquiring grounded commonsense knowledge. In this work, we present CLEVER, which formulates CKE as a distantly supervised multi-instance learning problem, where models learn to summarize commonsense relations from a bag of images about an entity pair without any human annotation on image instances. To address the problem, CLEVER leverages vision-language pre-training models for deep understanding of each image in the bag, and selects informative instances from the bag to summarize commonsense entity relations via a novel contrastive attention mechanism. Comprehensive experimental results in held-out and human evaluation show that CLEVER can extract commonsense knowledge in promising quality, outperforming pre-trained language model-based methods by 3.9 AUC and 6.4 mAUC points. The predicted commonsense scores show strong correlation with human judgment with a 0.78 Spearman coefficient. Moreover, the extracted commonsense can also be grounded into images with reasonable interpretability. The data and codes can be obtained at https://github.com/thunlp/CLEVER.
89.8LGMay 31Code
When Hard Negatives Hurt: Bridging the Generative-Discriminative Gap in Hard Negative Synthesis for RetrievalZhicheng Zhang, Jiwei Tang, Kuicai Dong et al.
Hard negative mining has become the dominant strategy for training retrievers, yet it faces intrinsic limitations: negatives are bounded by corpus availability, selected by retriever score rather than diagnostic value, and increasingly contaminated by false positives as the retriever improves. LLM-based synthesis offers a principled alternative, where negatives that are unconstrained, targeted, and free from false positive risk. But we show that naively incorporating generated negatives into contrastive learning often degrades retrieval performance. We identify and formalize the root cause as a generative-discriminative gap: LLM generation optimizes for fluent, plausible text, while contrastive learning demands strategic violations of relevance at the decision boundary. Our analysis reveals two compounding failure modes: discriminative-agnostic generation, where the LLM lacks an explicit model of query information needs and defaults to generic or topic-drifted text that provides no contrastive signal; and source-dependent shortcuts, where distributional artifacts enable the model to distinguish negatives by origin rather than relevance, causing gradient drift that actively corrupts optimization. To close this gap, we propose CausalNeg consisting of two main modules: (1) CoT-guided counterfactual perturbation for data construction: decomposes why a document satisfies a query into explicit information requirements, then surgically violates individual requirements to construct negatives with controlled, interpretable hardness. (2) Query-view entropy maximization during training: disperses generated negatives across the similarity spectrum, minimizing the mutual information between source identity and similarity scores to suppress shortcut exploitation. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/mzhangzhicheng/CausalNeg.
HCSep 15, 2023
Empowering Private Tutoring by Chaining Large Language ModelsYulin Chen, Ning Ding, Hai-Tao Zheng et al. · tsinghua
Artificial intelligence has been applied in various aspects of online education to facilitate teaching and learning. However, few approaches has been made toward a complete AI-powered tutoring system. In this work, we explore the development of a full-fledged intelligent tutoring system powered by state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), covering automatic course planning and adjusting, tailored instruction, and flexible quiz evaluation. To make the system robust to prolonged interaction and cater to individualized education, the system is decomposed into three inter-connected core processes-interaction, reflection, and reaction. Each process is implemented by chaining LLM-powered tools along with dynamically updated memory modules. Tools are LLMs prompted to execute one specific task at a time, while memories are data storage that gets updated during education process. Statistical results from learning logs demonstrate the effectiveness and mechanism of each tool usage. Subjective feedback from human users reveal the usability of each function, and comparison with ablation systems further testify the benefits of the designed processes in long-term interaction.
CLOct 29, 2022Code
Towards Attribute-Entangled Controllable Text Generation: A Pilot Study of Blessing GenerationShulin Huang, Shirong Ma, Yinghui Li et al.
Controllable Text Generation (CTG) has obtained great success due to its fine-grained generation ability obtained by focusing on multiple attributes. However, most existing CTG researches overlook how to utilize the attribute entanglement to enhance the diversity of the controlled generated texts. Facing this dilemma, we focus on a novel CTG scenario, i.e., blessing generation which is challenging because high-quality blessing texts require CTG models to comprehensively consider the entanglement between multiple attributes (e.g., objects and occasions). To promote the research on blessing generation, we present EBleT, a large-scale Entangled Blessing Text dataset containing 293K English sentences annotated with multiple attributes. Furthermore, we propose novel evaluation metrics to measure the quality of the blessing texts generated by the baseline models we designed. Our study opens a new research direction for controllable text generation and enables the development of attribute-entangled CTG models. Our dataset and source codes are available at \url{https://github.com/huangshulin123/Blessing-Generation}.
CVJan 23Code
TangramPuzzle: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models with Compositional Spatial ReasoningDaixian Liu, Jiayi Kuang, Yinghui Li et al.
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in visual recognition and semantic understanding. Nevertheless, their ability to perform precise compositional spatial reasoning remains largely unexplored. Existing benchmarks often involve relatively simple tasks and rely on semantic approximations or coarse relative positioning, while their evaluation metrics are typically limited and lack rigorous mathematical formulations. To bridge this gap, we introduce TangramPuzzle, a geometry-grounded benchmark designed to evaluate compositional spatial reasoning through the lens of the classic Tangram game. We propose the Tangram Construction Expression (TCE), a symbolic geometric framework that grounds tangram assemblies in exact, machine-verifiable coordinate specifications, to mitigate the ambiguity of visual approximation. We design two complementary tasks: Outline Prediction, which demands inferring global shapes from local components, and End-to-End Code Generation, which requires solving inverse geometric assembly problems. We conduct extensive evaluation experiments on advanced open-source and proprietary models, revealing an interesting insight: MLLMs tend to prioritize matching the target silhouette while neglecting geometric constraints, leading to distortions or deformations of the pieces.
CLMar 2, 2022
The Past Mistake is the Future Wisdom: Error-driven Contrastive Probability Optimization for Chinese Spell CheckingYinghui Li, Qingyu Zhou, Yangning Li et al.
Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct Chinese spelling errors, which are mainly caused by the phonological or visual similarity. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) promote the progress of CSC task. However, there exists a gap between the learned knowledge of PLMs and the goal of CSC task. PLMs focus on the semantics in text and tend to correct the erroneous characters to semantically proper or commonly used ones, but these aren't the ground-truth corrections. To address this issue, we propose an Error-driven COntrastive Probability Optimization (ECOPO) framework for CSC task. ECOPO refines the knowledge representations of PLMs, and guides the model to avoid predicting these common characters through an error-driven way. Particularly, ECOPO is model-agnostic and it can be combined with existing CSC methods to achieve better performance. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on SIGHAN datasets demonstrate that ECOPO is simple yet effective.
CLMar 16, 2023
Enhancing Text Generation with Cooperative TrainingTong Wu, Hao Wang, Zhongshen Zeng et al. · tsinghua
Recently, there has been a surge in the use of generated data to enhance the performance of downstream models, largely due to the advancements in pre-trained language models. However, most prevailing methods trained generative and discriminative models in isolation, which left them unable to adapt to changes in each other. These approaches lead to generative models that are prone to deviating from the true data distribution and providing limited benefits to discriminative models. While some works have proposed jointly training generative and discriminative language models, their methods remain challenging due to the non-differentiable nature of discrete data. To overcome these issues, we introduce a \textit{self-consistent learning} framework in the text field that involves training a discriminator and generator cooperatively in a closed-loop manner until a scoring consensus is reached. By learning directly from selected samples, our framework are able to mitigate training instabilities such as mode collapse and non-convergence. Extensive experiments on four downstream benchmarks, including AFQMC, CHIP-STS, QQP, and MRPC, demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework.
CLAug 14, 2023
EcomGPT: Instruction-tuning Large Language Models with Chain-of-Task Tasks for E-commerceYangning Li, Shirong Ma, Xiaobin Wang et al.
Recently, instruction-following Large Language Models (LLMs) , represented by ChatGPT, have exhibited exceptional performance in general Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, the unique characteristics of E-commerce data pose significant challenges to general LLMs. An LLM tailored specifically for E-commerce scenarios, possessing robust cross-dataset/task generalization capabilities, is a pressing necessity. To solve this issue, in this work, we proposed the first e-commerce instruction dataset EcomInstruct, with a total of 2.5 million instruction data. EcomInstruct scales up the data size and task diversity by constructing atomic tasks with E-commerce basic data types, such as product information, user reviews. Atomic tasks are defined as intermediate tasks implicitly involved in solving a final task, which we also call Chain-of-Task tasks. We developed EcomGPT with different parameter scales by training the backbone model BLOOMZ with the EcomInstruct. Benefiting from the fundamental semantic understanding capabilities acquired from the Chain-of-Task tasks, EcomGPT exhibits excellent zero-shot generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments and human evaluations demonstrate that EcomGPT outperforms ChatGPT in term of cross-dataset/task generalization on E-commerce tasks.
CLJul 18, 2023
On the (In)Effectiveness of Large Language Models for Chinese Text CorrectionYinghui Li, Haojing Huang, Shirong Ma et al.
Recently, the development and progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) have amazed the entire Artificial Intelligence community. Benefiting from their emergent abilities, LLMs have attracted more and more researchers to study their capabilities and performance on various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. While marveling at LLMs' incredible performance on all kinds of tasks, we notice that they also have excellent multilingual processing capabilities, such as Chinese. To explore the Chinese processing ability of LLMs, we focus on Chinese Text Correction, a fundamental and challenging Chinese NLP task. Specifically, we evaluate various representative LLMs on the Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) and Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) tasks, which are two main Chinese Text Correction scenarios. Additionally, we also fine-tune LLMs for Chinese Text Correction to better observe the potential capabilities of LLMs. From extensive analyses and comparisons with previous state-of-the-art small models, we empirically find that the LLMs currently have both amazing performance and unsatisfactory behavior for Chinese Text Correction. We believe our findings will promote the landing and application of LLMs in the Chinese NLP community.
LGNov 10, 2022
Few-shot Classification with Hypersphere Modeling of PrototypesNing Ding, Yulin Chen, Ganqu Cui et al. · tsinghua
Metric-based meta-learning is one of the de facto standards in few-shot learning. It composes of representation learning and metrics calculation designs. Previous works construct class representations in different ways, varying from mean output embedding to covariance and distributions. However, using embeddings in space lacks expressivity and cannot capture class information robustly, while statistical complex modeling poses difficulty to metric designs. In this work, we use tensor fields (``areas'') to model classes from the geometrical perspective for few-shot learning. We present a simple and effective method, dubbed hypersphere prototypes (HyperProto), where class information is represented by hyperspheres with dynamic sizes with two sets of learnable parameters: the hypersphere's center and the radius. Extending from points to areas, hyperspheres are much more expressive than embeddings. Moreover, it is more convenient to perform metric-based classification with hypersphere prototypes than statistical modeling, as we only need to calculate the distance from a data point to the surface of the hypersphere. Following this idea, we also develop two variants of prototypes under other measurements. Extensive experiments and analysis on few-shot learning tasks across NLP and CV and comparison with 20+ competitive baselines demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
CLApr 16, 2022
Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Entities for Entity Set ExpansionYinghui Li, Yangning Li, Yuxin He et al.
Entity Set Expansion (ESE) is a promising task which aims to expand entities of the target semantic class described by a small seed entity set. Various NLP and IR applications will benefit from ESE due to its ability to discover knowledge. Although previous ESE methods have achieved great progress, most of them still lack the ability to handle hard negative entities (i.e., entities that are difficult to distinguish from the target entities), since two entities may or may not belong to the same semantic class based on different granularity levels we analyze on. To address this challenge, we devise an entity-level masked language model with contrastive learning to refine the representation of entities. In addition, we propose the ProbExpan, a novel probabilistic ESE framework utilizing the entity representation obtained by the aforementioned language model to expand entities. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on three datasets show that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.
AIFeb 17, 2023
Vision, Deduction and Alignment: An Empirical Study on Multi-modal Knowledge Graph AlignmentYangning Li, Jiaoyan Chen, Yinghui Li et al.
Entity alignment (EA) for knowledge graphs (KGs) plays a critical role in knowledge engineering. Existing EA methods mostly focus on utilizing the graph structures and entity attributes (including literals), but ignore images that are common in modern multi-modal KGs. In this study we first constructed Multi-OpenEA -- eight large-scale, image-equipped EA benchmarks, and then evaluated some existing embedding-based methods for utilizing images. In view of the complementary nature of visual modal information and logical deduction, we further developed a new multi-modal EA method named LODEME using logical deduction and multi-modal KG embedding, with state-of-the-art performance achieved on Multi-OpenEA and other existing multi-modal EA benchmarks.
39.8CLJun 2
Experience-Driven Dynamic Exits for LLMs with Reinforcement LearningYanyu Zhu, Hoilam Pao, Niu Hu et al.
Large Language Models suffer from slow autoregressive inference. While self-speculative decoding accelerates this process, its efficiency is hampered by static configurations like fixed exit layers and speculation lengths. We reframe this optimization as a \textbf{Markov Decision Process} and propose \textbf{LEDE}, a framework that uses offline reinforcement learning. LEDE learns a policy to dynamically select the optimal exit layer and speculation length based on the local context of the generated sequence at each step, balancing computational cost and draft quality. Comprehensive evaluations on Llama-2 and Llama-3 models show LEDE achieves up to a $2.0\times$$\sim$$2.7\times$ speedup over autoregressive decoding and and provides an additional 17\% speedup over the static speculative baselines.
CLJul 27, 2023
MESED: A Multi-modal Entity Set Expansion Dataset with Fine-grained Semantic Classes and Hard Negative EntitiesYangning Li, Tingwei Lu, Yinghui Li et al.
The Entity Set Expansion (ESE) task aims to expand a handful of seed entities with new entities belonging to the same semantic class. Conventional ESE methods are based on mono-modality (i.e., literal modality), which struggle to deal with complex entities in the real world such as: (1) Negative entities with fine-grained semantic differences. (2) Synonymous entities. (3) Polysemous entities. (4) Long-tailed entities. These challenges prompt us to propose Multi-modal Entity Set Expansion (MESE), where models integrate information from multiple modalities to represent entities. Intuitively, the benefits of multi-modal information for ESE are threefold: (1) Different modalities can provide complementary information. (2) Multi-modal information provides a unified signal via common visual properties for the same semantic class or entity. (3) Multi-modal information offers robust alignment signal for synonymous entities. To assess the performance of model in MESE and facilitate further research, we constructed the MESED dataset which is the first multi-modal dataset for ESE with large-scale and elaborate manual calibration. A powerful multi-modal model MultiExpan is proposed which is pre-trained on four multimodal pre-training tasks. The extensive experiments and analyses on MESED demonstrate the high quality of the dataset and the effectiveness of our MultiExpan, as well as pointing the direction for future research.
CLNov 20, 2022
Embracing Ambiguity: Improving Similarity-oriented Tasks with Contextual Synonym KnowledgeYangning Li, Jiaoyan Chen, Yinghui Li et al.
Contextual synonym knowledge is crucial for those similarity-oriented tasks whose core challenge lies in capturing semantic similarity between entities in their contexts, such as entity linking and entity matching. However, most Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) lack synonym knowledge due to inherent limitations of their pre-training objectives such as masked language modeling (MLM). Existing works which inject synonym knowledge into PLMs often suffer from two severe problems: (i) Neglecting the ambiguity of synonyms, and (ii) Undermining semantic understanding of original PLMs, which is caused by inconsistency between the exact semantic similarity of the synonyms and the broad conceptual relevance learned from the original corpus. To address these issues, we propose PICSO, a flexible framework that supports the injection of contextual synonym knowledge from multiple domains into PLMs via a novel entity-aware Adapter which focuses on the semantics of the entities (synonyms) in the contexts. Meanwhile, PICSO stores the synonym knowledge in additional parameters of the Adapter structure, which prevents it from corrupting the semantic understanding of the original PLM. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PICSO can dramatically outperform the original PLMs and the other knowledge and synonym injection models on four different similarity-oriented tasks. In addition, experiments on GLUE prove that PICSO also benefits general natural language understanding tasks. Codes and data will be public.
CLOct 23, 2022
Focus Is What You Need For Chinese Grammatical Error CorrectionJingheng Ye, Yinghui Li, Shirong Ma et al.
Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) aims to automatically detect and correct grammatical errors contained in Chinese text. In the long term, researchers regard CGEC as a task with a certain degree of uncertainty, that is, an ungrammatical sentence may often have multiple references. However, we argue that even though this is a very reasonable hypothesis, it is too harsh for the intelligence of the mainstream models in this era. In this paper, we first discover that multiple references do not actually bring positive gains to model training. On the contrary, it is beneficial to the CGEC model if the model can pay attention to small but essential data during the training process. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective training strategy called OneTarget to improve the focus ability of the CGEC models and thus improve the CGEC performance. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses demonstrate the correctness of our discovery and the effectiveness of our proposed method.
CLJul 17, 2022
Contextual Similarity is More Valuable than Character Similarity: An Empirical Study for Chinese Spell CheckingDing Zhang, Yinghui Li, Qingyu Zhou et al.
Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) task aims to detect and correct Chinese spelling errors. Recently, related researches focus on introducing character similarity from confusion set to enhance the CSC models, ignoring the context of characters that contain richer information. To make better use of contextual information, we propose a simple yet effective Curriculum Learning (CL) framework for the CSC task. With the help of our model-agnostic CL framework, existing CSC models will be trained from easy to difficult as humans learn Chinese characters and achieve further performance improvements. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on widely used SIGHAN datasets show that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. More instructively, our study empirically suggests that contextual similarity is more valuable than character similarity for the CSC task.
CLNov 8, 2022
Active Relation Discovery: Towards General and Label-aware Open Relation ExtractionYangning Li, Yinghui Li, Xi Chen et al.
Open Relation Extraction (OpenRE) aims to discover novel relations from open domains. Previous OpenRE methods mainly suffer from two problems: (1) Insufficient capacity to discriminate between known and novel relations. When extending conventional test settings to a more general setting where test data might also come from seen classes, existing approaches have a significant performance decline. (2) Secondary labeling must be performed before practical application. Existing methods cannot label human-readable and meaningful types for novel relations, which is urgently required by the downstream tasks. To address these issues, we propose the Active Relation Discovery (ARD) framework, which utilizes relational outlier detection for discriminating known and novel relations and involves active learning for labeling novel relations. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that ARD significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on both conventional and our proposed general OpenRE settings. The source code and datasets will be available for reproducibility.
CLJun 30, 2023
Correct Like Humans: Progressive Learning Framework for Chinese Text Error CorrectionYinghui Li, Shirong Ma, Shaoshen Chen et al.
Chinese Text Error Correction (CTEC) aims to detect and correct errors in the input text, which benefits human daily life and various downstream tasks. Recent approaches mainly employ Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to resolve CTEC. Although PLMs have achieved remarkable success in CTEC, we argue that previous studies still overlook the importance of human thinking patterns. To enhance the development of PLMs for CTEC, inspired by humans' daily error-correcting behavior, we propose a novel model-agnostic progressive learning framework, named ProTEC, which guides PLMs-based CTEC models to learn to correct like humans. During the training process, ProTEC guides the model to learn text error correction by incorporating these sub-tasks into a progressive paradigm. During the inference process, the model completes these sub-tasks in turn to generate the correction results. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed model-agnostic ProTEC framework.
CLOct 27, 2022
A Curriculum Learning Approach for Multi-domain Text Classification Using Keyword weight RankingZilin Yuan, Yinghui Li, Yangning Li et al.
Text classification is a very classic NLP task, but it has two prominent shortcomings: On the one hand, text classification is deeply domain-dependent. That is, a classifier trained on the corpus of one domain may not perform so well in another domain. On the other hand, text classification models require a lot of annotated data for training. However, for some domains, there may not exist enough annotated data. Therefore, it is valuable to investigate how to efficiently utilize text data from different domains to improve the performance of models in various domains. Some multi-domain text classification models are trained by adversarial training to extract shared features among all domains and the specific features of each domain. We noted that the distinctness of the domain-specific features is different, so in this paper, we propose to use a curriculum learning strategy based on keyword weight ranking to improve the performance of multi-domain text classification models. The experimental results on the Amazon review and FDU-MTL datasets show that our curriculum learning strategy effectively improves the performance of multi-domain text classification models based on adversarial learning and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
CLJun 21, 2023
Bidirectional End-to-End Learning of Retriever-Reader Paradigm for Entity LinkingYinghui Li, Yong Jiang, Yangning Li et al.
Entity Linking (EL) is a fundamental task for Information Extraction and Knowledge Graphs. The general form of EL (i.e., end-to-end EL) aims to first find mentions in the given input document and then link the mentions to corresponding entities in a specific knowledge base. Recently, the paradigm of retriever-reader promotes the progress of end-to-end EL, benefiting from the advantages of dense entity retrieval and machine reading comprehension. However, the existing study only trains the retriever and the reader separately in a pipeline manner, which ignores the benefit that the interaction between the retriever and the reader can bring to the task. To advance the retriever-reader paradigm to perform more perfectly on end-to-end EL, we propose BEER$^2$, a Bidirectional End-to-End training framework for Retriever and Reader. Through our designed bidirectional end-to-end training, BEER$^2$ guides the retriever and the reader to learn from each other, make progress together, and ultimately improve EL performance. Extensive experiments on benchmarks of multiple domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed BEER$^2$.
CLApr 7, 2023
From Retrieval to Generation: Efficient and Effective Entity Set ExpansionShulin Huang, Shirong Ma, Yangning Li et al.
Entity Set Expansion (ESE) is a critical task aiming at expanding entities of the target semantic class described by seed entities. Most existing ESE methods are retrieval-based frameworks that need to extract contextual features of entities and calculate the similarity between seed entities and candidate entities. To achieve the two purposes, they iteratively traverse the corpus and the entity vocabulary, resulting in poor efficiency and scalability. Experimental results indicate that the time consumed by the retrieval-based ESE methods increases linearly with entity vocabulary and corpus size. In this paper, we firstly propose Generative Entity Set Expansion (GenExpan) framework, which utilizes a generative pre-trained auto-regressive language model to accomplish ESE task. Specifically, a prefix tree is employed to guarantee the validity of entity generation, and automatically generated class names are adopted to guide the model to generate target entities. Moreover, we propose Knowledge Calibration and Generative Ranking to further bridge the gap between generic knowledge of the language model and the goal of ESE task. For efficiency, expansion time consumed by GenExpan is independent of entity vocabulary and corpus size, and GenExpan achieves an average 600% speedup compared to strong baselines. For expansion effectiveness, our framework outperforms previous state-of-the-art ESE methods.
CVMar 9, 2023
Knowledge-augmented Few-shot Visual Relation DetectionTianyu Yu, Yangning Li, Jiaoyan Chen et al.
Visual Relation Detection (VRD) aims to detect relationships between objects for image understanding. Most existing VRD methods rely on thousands of training samples of each relationship to achieve satisfactory performance. Some recent papers tackle this problem by few-shot learning with elaborately designed pipelines and pre-trained word vectors. However, the performance of existing few-shot VRD models is severely hampered by the poor generalization capability, as they struggle to handle the vast semantic diversity of visual relationships. Nonetheless, humans have the ability to learn new relationships with just few examples based on their knowledge. Inspired by this, we devise a knowledge-augmented, few-shot VRD framework leveraging both textual knowledge and visual relation knowledge to improve the generalization ability of few-shot VRD. The textual knowledge and visual relation knowledge are acquired from a pre-trained language model and an automatically constructed visual relation knowledge graph, respectively. We extensively validate the effectiveness of our framework. Experiments conducted on three benchmarks from the commonly used Visual Genome dataset show that our performance surpasses existing state-of-the-art models with a large improvement.
CLAug 21, 2023
LatEval: An Interactive LLMs Evaluation Benchmark with Incomplete Information from Lateral Thinking PuzzlesShulin Huang, Shirong Ma, Yinghui Li et al.
With the continuous evolution and refinement of LLMs, they are endowed with impressive logical reasoning or vertical thinking capabilities. But can they think out of the box? Do they possess proficient lateral thinking abilities? Following the setup of Lateral Thinking Puzzles, we propose a novel evaluation benchmark, LatEval, which assesses the model's lateral thinking within an interactive framework. In our benchmark, we challenge LLMs with 2 aspects: the quality of questions posed by the model and the model's capability to integrate information for problem-solving. We find that nearly all LLMs struggle with employing lateral thinking during interactions. For example, even the most advanced model, GPT-4, exhibits the advantage to some extent, yet still maintain a noticeable gap when compared to human. This evaluation benchmark provides LLMs with a highly challenging and distinctive task that is crucial to an effective AI assistant.
CLJul 1, 2024Code
CLEME2.0: Towards Interpretable Evaluation by Disentangling Edits for Grammatical Error CorrectionJingheng Ye, Zishan Xu, Yinghui Li et al.
The paper focuses on the interpretability of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) evaluation metrics, which received little attention in previous studies. To bridge the gap, we introduce **CLEME2.0**, a reference-based metric describing four fundamental aspects of GEC systems: hit-correction, wrong-correction, under-correction, and over-correction. They collectively contribute to exposing critical qualities and locating drawbacks of GEC systems. Evaluating systems by combining these aspects also leads to superior human consistency over other reference-based and reference-less metrics. Extensive experiments on two human judgment datasets and six reference datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method, achieving a new state-of-the-art result. Our codes are released at https://github.com/THUKElab/CLEME.
CLSep 10, 2023
Retrieval-Augmented Meta Learning for Low-Resource Text ClassificationRongsheng Li, Yangning Li, Yinghui Li et al.
Meta learning have achieved promising performance in low-resource text classification which aims to identify target classes with knowledge transferred from source classes with sets of small tasks named episodes. However, due to the limited training data in the meta-learning scenario and the inherent properties of parameterized neural networks, poor generalization performance has become a pressing problem that needs to be addressed. To deal with this issue, we propose a meta-learning based method called Retrieval-Augmented Meta Learning(RAML). It not only uses parameterization for inference but also retrieves non-parametric knowledge from an external corpus to make inferences, which greatly alleviates the problem of poor generalization performance caused by the lack of diverse training data in meta-learning. This method differs from previous models that solely rely on parameters, as it explicitly emphasizes the importance of non-parametric knowledge, aiming to strike a balance between parameterized neural networks and non-parametric knowledge. The model is required to determine which knowledge to access and utilize during inference. Additionally, our multi-view passages fusion network module can effectively and efficiently integrate the retrieved information into low-resource classification task. The extensive experiments demonstrate that RAML significantly outperforms current SOTA low-resource text classification models.
SEJan 23
EvoConfig: Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems for Efficient Autonomous Environment ConfigurationXinshuai Guo, Jiayi Kuang, Linyue Pan et al.
A reliable executable environment is the foundation for ensuring that large language models solve software engineering tasks. Due to the complex and tedious construction process, large-scale configuration is relatively inefficient. However, most methods always overlook fine-grained analysis of the actions performed by the agent, making it difficult to handle complex errors and resulting in configuration failures. To address this bottleneck, we propose EvoConfig, an efficient environment configuration framework that optimizes multi-agent collaboration to build correct runtime environments. EvoConfig features an expert diagnosis module for fine-grained post-execution analysis, and a self-evolving mechanism that lets expert agents self-feedback and dynamically adjust error-fixing priorities in real time. Empirically, EvoConfig matches the previous state-of-the-art Repo2Run on Repo2Run's 420 repositories, while delivering clear gains on harder cases: on the more challenging Envbench, EvoConfig achieves a 78.1% success rate, outperforming Repo2Run by 7.1%. Beyond end-to-end success, EvoConfig also demonstrates stronger debugging competence, achieving higher accuracy in error identification and producing more effective repair recommendations than existing methods.
CLSep 7, 2023
An Anchor Learning Approach for Citation Field LearningZilin Yuan, Borun Chen, Yimeng Dai et al.
Citation field learning is to segment a citation string into fields of interest such as author, title, and venue. Extracting such fields from citations is crucial for citation indexing, researcher profile analysis, etc. User-generated resources like academic homepages and Curriculum Vitae, provide rich citation field information. However, extracting fields from these resources is challenging due to inconsistent citation styles, incomplete sentence syntax, and insufficient training data. To address these challenges, we propose a novel algorithm, CIFAL (citation field learning by anchor learning), to boost the citation field learning performance. CIFAL leverages the anchor learning, which is model-agnostic for any Pre-trained Language Model, to help capture citation patterns from the data of different citation styles. The experiments demonstrate that CIFAL outperforms state-of-the-art methods in citation field learning, achieving a 2.68% improvement in field-level F1-scores. Extensive analysis of the results further confirms the effectiveness of CIFAL quantitatively and qualitatively.
CLNov 19, 2023
Towards Real-World Writing Assistance: A Chinese Character Checking Benchmark with Faked and Misspelled CharactersYinghui Li, Zishan Xu, Shaoshen Chen et al.
Writing assistance is an application closely related to human life and is also a fundamental Natural Language Processing (NLP) research field. Its aim is to improve the correctness and quality of input texts, with character checking being crucial in detecting and correcting wrong characters. From the perspective of the real world where handwriting occupies the vast majority, characters that humans get wrong include faked characters (i.e., untrue characters created due to writing errors) and misspelled characters (i.e., true characters used incorrectly due to spelling errors). However, existing datasets and related studies only focus on misspelled characters mainly caused by phonological or visual confusion, thereby ignoring faked characters which are more common and difficult. To break through this dilemma, we present Visual-C$^3$, a human-annotated Visual Chinese Character Checking dataset with faked and misspelled Chinese characters. To the best of our knowledge, Visual-C$^3$ is the first real-world visual and the largest human-crafted dataset for the Chinese character checking scenario. Additionally, we also propose and evaluate novel baseline methods on Visual-C$^3$. Extensive empirical results and analyses show that Visual-C$^3$ is high-quality yet challenging. The Visual-C$^3$ dataset and the baseline methods will be publicly available to facilitate further research in the community.
CLOct 13, 2023
A Frustratingly Easy Plug-and-Play Detection-and-Reasoning Module for Chinese Spelling CheckHaojing Huang, Jingheng Ye, Qingyu Zhou et al.
In recent years, Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) has been greatly improved by designing task-specific pre-training methods or introducing auxiliary tasks, which mostly solve this task in an end-to-end fashion. In this paper, we propose to decompose the CSC workflow into detection, reasoning, and searching subtasks so that the rich external knowledge about the Chinese language can be leveraged more directly and efficiently. Specifically, we design a plug-and-play detection-and-reasoning module that is compatible with existing SOTA non-autoregressive CSC models to further boost their performance. We find that the detection-and-reasoning module trained for one model can also benefit other models. We also study the primary interpretability provided by the task decomposition. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed module.
CLSep 10, 2023
Prompt Learning With Knowledge Memorizing Prototypes For Generalized Few-Shot Intent DetectionChaiyut Luoyiching, Yangning Li, Yinghui Li et al.
Generalized Few-Shot Intent Detection (GFSID) is challenging and realistic because it needs to categorize both seen and novel intents simultaneously. Previous GFSID methods rely on the episodic learning paradigm, which makes it hard to extend to a generalized setup as they do not explicitly learn the classification of seen categories and the knowledge of seen intents. To address the dilemma, we propose to convert the GFSID task into the class incremental learning paradigm. Specifically, we propose a two-stage learning framework, which sequentially learns the knowledge of different intents in various periods via prompt learning. And then we exploit prototypes for categorizing both seen and novel intents. Furthermore, to achieve the transfer knowledge of intents in different stages, for different scenarios we design two knowledge preservation methods which close to realistic applications. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on two widely used datasets show that our framework based on the class incremental learning paradigm achieves promising performance.
IRJul 1, 2024
ProductAgent: Benchmarking Conversational Product Search Agent with Asking Clarification QuestionsJingheng Ye, Yong Jiang, Xiaobin Wang et al.
This paper introduces the task of product demand clarification within an e-commercial scenario, where the user commences the conversation with ambiguous queries and the task-oriented agent is designed to achieve more accurate and tailored product searching by asking clarification questions. To address this task, we propose ProductAgent, a conversational information seeking agent equipped with abilities of strategic clarification question generation and dynamic product retrieval. Specifically, we develop the agent with strategies for product feature summarization, query generation, and product retrieval. Furthermore, we propose the benchmark called PROCLARE to evaluate the agent's performance both automatically and qualitatively with the aid of a LLM-driven user simulator. Experiments show that ProductAgent interacts positively with the user and enhances retrieval performance with increasing dialogue turns, where user demands become gradually more explicit and detailed. All the source codes will be released after the review anonymity period.
CVDec 14, 2022
Establishing a stronger baseline for lightweight contrastive modelsWenye Lin, Yifeng Ding, Zhixiong Cao et al.
Recent research has reported a performance degradation in self-supervised contrastive learning for specially designed efficient networks, such as MobileNet and EfficientNet. A common practice to address this problem is to introduce a pretrained contrastive teacher model and train the lightweight networks with distillation signals generated by the teacher. However, it is time and resource consuming to pretrain a teacher model when it is not available. In this work, we aim to establish a stronger baseline for lightweight contrastive models without using a pretrained teacher model. Specifically, we show that the optimal recipe for efficient models is different from that of larger models, and using the same training settings as ResNet50, as previous research does, is inappropriate. Additionally, we observe a common issu e in contrastive learning where either the positive or negative views can be noisy, and propose a smoothed version of InfoNCE loss to alleviate this problem. As a result, we successfully improve the linear evaluation results from 36.3\% to 62.3\% for MobileNet-V3-Large and from 42.2\% to 65.8\% for EfficientNet-B0 on ImageNet, closing the accuracy gap to ResNet50 with $5\times$ fewer parameters. We hope our research will facilitate the usage of lightweight contrastive models.
CLAug 23, 2022
CLOWER: A Pre-trained Language Model with Contrastive Learning over Word and Character RepresentationsBorun Chen, Hongyin Tang, Jiahao Bu et al.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable performance gains across numerous downstream tasks in natural language understanding. Various Chinese PLMs have been successively proposed for learning better Chinese language representation. However, most current models use Chinese characters as inputs and are not able to encode semantic information contained in Chinese words. While recent pre-trained models incorporate both words and characters simultaneously, they usually suffer from deficient semantic interactions and fail to capture the semantic relation between words and characters. To address the above issues, we propose a simple yet effective PLM CLOWER, which adopts the Contrastive Learning Over Word and charactER representations. In particular, CLOWER implicitly encodes the coarse-grained information (i.e., words) into the fine-grained representations (i.e., characters) through contrastive learning on multi-grained information. CLOWER is of great value in realistic scenarios since it can be easily incorporated into any existing fine-grained based PLMs without modifying the production pipelines.Extensive experiments conducted on a range of downstream tasks demonstrate the superior performance of CLOWER over several state-of-the-art baselines.
LGMar 9, 2022
Efficient Sub-structured Knowledge DistillationWenye Lin, Yangming Li, Lemao Liu et al.
Structured prediction models aim at solving a type of problem where the output is a complex structure, rather than a single variable. Performing knowledge distillation for such models is not trivial due to their exponentially large output space. In this work, we propose an approach that is much simpler in its formulation and far more efficient for training than existing approaches. Specifically, we transfer the knowledge from a teacher model to its student model by locally matching their predictions on all sub-structures, instead of the whole output space. In this manner, we avoid adopting some time-consuming techniques like dynamic programming (DP) for decoding output structures, which permits parallel computation and makes the training process even faster in practice. Besides, it encourages the student model to better mimic the internal behavior of the teacher model. Experiments on two structured prediction tasks demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous methods and halves the time cost for one training epoch.
CLNov 30, 2025Code
Auxiliary-Hyperparameter-Free Sampling: Entropy Equilibrium for Text GenerationXiaodong Cai, Hai Lin, Shaoxiong Zhan et al.
Token sampling strategies critically influence text generation quality in large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods introduce additional hyperparameters, requiring extensive tuning and complicating deployment. We present Entropy Equilibrium Sampling (EES), an auxiliary hyperparameter-free approach inspired by information theory that can dynamically adjust candidate sets by balancing normalized entropy with probability mass. We evaluate EES on both reasoning and generation tasks across a range of model architectures. Our results show that EES consistently performs well across temperature settings, delivering competitive accuracy and coherence while maintaining diversity. By eliminating the need for hyperparameter tuning, EES greatly simplifies deployment while improving performance. Code is available at https://github.com/shuanncai/EES
CLNov 5, 2024Code
Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation with Dynamic VQA Dataset and Self-adaptive Planning AgentYangning Li, Yinghui Li, Xinyu Wang et al.
Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation (mRAG) plays an important role in mitigating the "hallucination" issue inherent in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Although promising, existing heuristic mRAGs typically predefined fixed retrieval processes, which causes two issues: (1) Non-adaptive Retrieval Queries. (2) Overloaded Retrieval Queries. However, these flaws cannot be adequately reflected by current knowledge-seeking visual question answering (VQA) datasets, since the most required knowledge can be readily obtained with a standard two-step retrieval. To bridge the dataset gap, we first construct Dyn-VQA dataset, consisting of three types of "dynamic" questions, which require complex knowledge retrieval strategies variable in query, tool, and time: (1) Questions with rapidly changing answers. (2) Questions requiring multi-modal knowledge. (3) Multi-hop questions. Experiments on Dyn-VQA reveal that existing heuristic mRAGs struggle to provide sufficient and precisely relevant knowledge for dynamic questions due to their rigid retrieval processes. Hence, we further propose the first self-adaptive planning agent for multimodal retrieval, OmniSearch. The underlying idea is to emulate the human behavior in question solution which dynamically decomposes complex multimodal questions into sub-question chains with retrieval action. Extensive experiments prove the effectiveness of our OmniSearch, also provide direction for advancing mRAG. The code and dataset will be open-sourced at https://github.com/Alibaba-NLP/OmniSearch.
CLJul 1, 2024
EXCGEC: A Benchmark for Edit-Wise Explainable Chinese Grammatical Error CorrectionJingheng Ye, Shang Qin, Yinghui Li et al.
Existing studies explore the explainability of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) in a limited scenario, where they ignore the interaction between corrections and explanations and have not established a corresponding comprehensive benchmark. To bridge the gap, this paper first introduces the task of EXplainable GEC (EXGEC), which focuses on the integral role of correction and explanation tasks. To facilitate the task, we propose EXCGEC, a tailored benchmark for Chinese EXGEC consisting of 8,216 explanation-augmented samples featuring the design of hybrid edit-wise explanations. We then benchmark several series of LLMs in multi-task learning settings, including post-explaining and pre-explaining. To promote the development of the task, we also build a comprehensive evaluation suite by leveraging existing automatic metrics and conducting human evaluation experiments to demonstrate the human consistency of the automatic metrics for free-text explanations. Our experiments reveal the effectiveness of evaluating free-text explanations using traditional metrics like METEOR and ROUGE, and the inferior performance of multi-task models compared to the pipeline solution, indicating its challenges to establish positive effects in learning both tasks.
CLOct 18, 2023
MixEdit: Revisiting Data Augmentation and Beyond for Grammatical Error CorrectionJingheng Ye, Yinghui Li, Yangning Li et al.
Data Augmentation through generating pseudo data has been proven effective in mitigating the challenge of data scarcity in the field of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC). Various augmentation strategies have been widely explored, most of which are motivated by two heuristics, i.e., increasing the distribution similarity and diversity of pseudo data. However, the underlying mechanism responsible for the effectiveness of these strategies remains poorly understood. In this paper, we aim to clarify how data augmentation improves GEC models. To this end, we introduce two interpretable and computationally efficient measures: Affinity and Diversity. Our findings indicate that an excellent GEC data augmentation strategy characterized by high Affinity and appropriate Diversity can better improve the performance of GEC models. Based on this observation, we propose MixEdit, a data augmentation approach that strategically and dynamically augments realistic data, without requiring extra monolingual corpora. To verify the correctness of our findings and the effectiveness of the proposed MixEdit, we conduct experiments on mainstream English and Chinese GEC datasets. The results show that MixEdit substantially improves GEC models and is complementary to traditional data augmentation methods.
CLFeb 2
Read As Human: Compressing Context via Parallelizable Close Reading and SkimmingJiwei Tang, Shilei Liu, Zhicheng Zhang et al.
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capability across diverse tasks. However, their deployment in long-context scenarios is hindered by two challenges: computational inefficiency and redundant information. We propose RAM (Read As HuMan), a context compression framework that adopts an adaptive hybrid reading strategy, to address these challenges. Inspired by human reading behavior (i.e., close reading important content while skimming less relevant content), RAM partitions the context into segments and encodes them with the input query in parallel. High-relevance segments are fully retained (close reading), while low-relevance ones are query-guided compressed into compact summary vectors (skimming). Both explicit textual segments and implicit summary vectors are concatenated and fed into decoder to achieve both superior performance and natural language format interpretability. To refine the decision boundary between close reading and skimming, we further introduce a contrastive learning objective based on positive and negative query-segment pairs. Experiments demonstrate that RAM outperforms existing baselines on multiple question answering and summarization benchmarks across two backbones, while delivering up to a 12x end-to-end speedup on long inputs (average length 16K; maximum length 32K).
CLFeb 16, 2024Code
When LLMs Meet Cunning Texts: A Fallacy Understanding Benchmark for Large Language ModelsYinghui Li, Qingyu Zhou, Yuanzhen Luo et al.
Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) make remarkable evolutions in language understanding and generation. Following this, various benchmarks for measuring all kinds of capabilities of LLMs have sprung up. In this paper, we challenge the reasoning and understanding abilities of LLMs by proposing a FaLlacy Understanding Benchmark (FLUB) containing cunning texts that are easy for humans to understand but difficult for models to grasp. Specifically, the cunning texts that FLUB focuses on mainly consist of the tricky, humorous, and misleading texts collected from the real internet environment. And we design three tasks with increasing difficulty in the FLUB benchmark to evaluate the fallacy understanding ability of LLMs. Based on FLUB, we investigate the performance of multiple representative and advanced LLMs, reflecting our FLUB is challenging and worthy of more future study. Interesting discoveries and valuable insights are achieved in our extensive experiments and detailed analyses. We hope that our benchmark can encourage the community to improve LLMs' ability to understand fallacies. Our data and codes are available at https://github.com/THUKElab/FLUB.
CLSep 28, 2024
Perception Compressor: A Training-Free Prompt Compression Framework in Long Context ScenariosJiwei Tang, Jin Xu, Tingwei Lu et al.
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in various scenarios. However, they suffer from much redundant information and are sensitive to the position of key information in long context scenarios. To address these challenges, we present Perception Compressor, a training-free prompt compression framework. It includes a perception retriever that leverages guiding questions and instruction to retrieve the most relevant demonstrations, a dual-slope ratio allocator to dynamically allocate compression ratios and open-book ratios, and a semi-guided iterative compression that retains key information at the token level while removing tokens that distract the LLM. We conduct extensive experiments on long context benchmarks, i.e., NaturalQuestions, LongBench, and MuSiQue. Experiment results show that Perception Compressor outperforms existing methods by a large margin, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
CLDec 4, 2025
AdmTree: Compressing Lengthy Context with Adaptive Semantic TreesYangning Li, Shaoshen Chen, Yinghui Li et al.
The quadratic complexity of self-attention constrains Large Language Models (LLMs) in processing long contexts, a capability essential for many advanced applications. Context compression aims to alleviate this computational bottleneck while retaining critical semantic information. However, existing approaches often fall short: explicit methods may compromise local detail, whereas implicit methods can suffer from positional biases, information degradation, or an inability to capture long-range semantic dependencies. We propose AdmTree, a novel framework for adaptive, hierarchical context compression with a central focus on preserving high semantic fidelity while maintaining efficiency. AdmTree dynamically segments input based on information density, utilizing gist tokens to summarize variable-length segments as the leaves of a semantic binary tree. This structure, together with a lightweight aggregation mechanism and a frozen backbone LLM (thereby minimizing new trainable parameters), enables efficient hierarchical abstraction of the context. By preserving fine-grained details alongside global semantic coherence, mitigating positional bias, and dynamically adapting to content, AdmTree robustly retains the semantic information of long contexts.