Transformer-based models excel in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, attracting countless efforts to explain their inner workings. Prior methods explain Transformers by focusing on the raw gradient and attention as token attribution scores, where non-relevant information is often considered during explanation computation, resulting in confusing results. In this work, we propose highlighting the important information and eliminating irrelevant information by a refined information flow on top of the layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) method. Specifically, we consider identifying syntactic and positional heads as important attention heads and focus on the relevance obtained from these important heads. Experimental results demonstrate that irrelevant information does distort output attribution scores and then should be masked during explanation computation. Compared to eight baselines on both classification and question-answering datasets, our method consistently outperforms with over 3% to 33% improvement on explanation metrics, providing superior explanation performance. Our anonymous code repository is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MLRP-E676/

In this paper, we introduce Cross-View Language Modeling, a simple and effective pre-training framework that unifies cross-lingual and cross-modal pre-training with shared architectures and objectives. Our approach is motivated by a key observation that cross-lingual and cross-modal pre-training share the same goal of aligning two different views of the same object into a common semantic space. To this end, the cross-view language modeling framework considers both multi-modal data (i.e., image-caption pairs) and multi-lingual data (i.e., parallel sentence pairs) as two different views of the same object, and trains the model to align the two views by maximizing the mutual information between them with conditional masked language modeling and contrastive learning. We pre-train CCLM, a Cross-lingual Cross-modal Language Model, with the cross-view language modeling framework. Empirical results on IGLUE, a multi-lingual multi-modal benchmark, and two multi-lingual image-text retrieval datasets show that while conceptually simpler, CCLM significantly outperforms the prior state-of-the-art with an average absolute improvement of over 10%. Moreover, CCLM is the first multi-lingual multi-modal pre-trained model that surpasses the translate-test performance of representative English vision-language models by zero-shot cross-lingual transfer.

Web search is an essential way for humans to obtain information, but it’s still a great challenge for machines to understand the contents of web pages. In this paper, we introduce the task of web-based structural reading comprehension. Given a web page and a question about it, the task is to find an answer from the web page. This task requires a system not only to understand the semantics of texts but also the structure of the web page. Moreover, we proposed WebSRC, a novel Web-based Structural Reading Comprehension dataset. WebSRC consists of 400K question-answer pairs, which are collected from 6.4K web pages with corresponding HTML source code, screenshots, and metadata. Each question in WebSRC requires a certain structural understanding of a web page to answer, and the answer is either a text span on the web page or yes/no. We evaluate various strong baselines on our dataset to show the difficulty of our task. We also investigate the usefulness of structural information and visual features. Our dataset and baselines have been publicly available.