This paper presents VisLingInstruct, a novel approach to advancing Multi-Modal Language Models (MMLMs) in zero-shot learning. Current MMLMs show impressive zero-shot abilities in multi-modal tasks, but their performance depends heavily on the quality of instructions. VisLingInstruct tackles this by autonomously evaluating and optimizing instructional texts through In-Context Learning, improving the synergy between visual perception and linguistic expression in MMLMs. Alongside this instructional advancement, we have also optimized the visual feature extraction modules in MMLMs, further augmenting their responsiveness to textual content. Our comprehensive experiments on MMLMs, based on FlanT5 and Vicuna, show that VisLingInstruct significantly improves zero-shot performance in visual multi-modal tasks. Notably, it achieves a 13.1% and 9% increase in accuracy over the prior state-of-the-art on the TextVQA and HatefulMemes datasets. Our main code is available at https://github.com/Zhudongsheng75/VisLingInstruct

Contrastive learning has recently achieved compelling performance in unsupervised sentence representation. As an essential element, data augmentation protocols, however, have not been well explored. The pioneering work SimCSE resorting to a simple dropout mechanism (viewed as continuous augmentation) surprisingly dominates discrete augmentations such as cropping, word deletion, and synonym replacement as reported. To understand the underlying rationales, we revisit existing approaches and attempt to hypothesize the desiderata of reasonable data augmentation methods: balance of semantic consistency and expression diversity. We then develop three simple yet effective discrete sentence augmentation schemes: punctuation insertion, modal verbs, and double negation. They act as minimal noises at lexical level to produce diverse forms of sentences. Furthermore, standard negation is capitalized on to generate negative samples for alleviating feature suppression involved in contrastive learning. We experimented extensively with semantic textual similarity on diverse datasets. The results support the superiority of the proposed methods consistently. Our key code is available at https://github.com/Zhudongsheng75/SDA

Current methods for prompt learning in zero-shot scenarios widely rely on a development set with sufficient human-annotated data to select the best-performing prompt template a posteriori. This is not ideal because in a real-world zero-shot scenario of practical relevance, no labelled data is available. Thus, we propose a simple yet effective method for screening reasonable prompt templates in zero-shot text classification: Perplexity Selection (Perplection). We hypothesize that language discrepancy can be used to measure the efficacy of prompt templates, and thereby develop a substantiated perplexity-based scheme allowing for forecasting the performance of prompt templates in advance. Experiments show that our method leads to improved prediction performance in a realistic zero-shot setting, eliminating the need for any labelled examples.