Despite recent advances in the general visual instruction-following ability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), they still struggle with critical problems when required to provide a precise and detailed response to a visual instruction: (1) failure to identify novel objects or entities, (2) mention of non-existent objects, and (3) neglect of object’s attributed details. Intuitive solutions include improving the size and quality of data or using larger foundation models. They show effectiveness in mitigating these issues, but at an expensive cost of collecting a vast amount of new data and introducing a significantly larger model. Standing at the intersection of these approaches, we examine the three object-oriented problems from the perspective of the image-to-text mapping process by the multimodal connector. In this paper, we first identify the limitations of multimodal connectors stemming from insufficient training data. Driven by this, we propose to enhance the mapping with retrieval-augmented tag tokens, which contain rich object-aware information such as object names and attributes. With our Tag-grounded visual instruction tuning with retrieval Augmentation (TUNA), we outperform baselines that share the same language model and training data on 12 benchmarks. Furthermore, we show the zero-shot capability of TUNA when provided with specific datastores.

Contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) models have demonstrated considerable success across various vision-language tasks, such as text-to-image retrieval, where the model is required to effectively process natural language input to produce an accurate visual output. However, current models still face limitations in dealing with linguistic variations in input queries, such as paraphrases, making it challenging to handle a broad range of user queries in real-world applications. In this study, we introduce a straightforward fine-tuning approach to enhance the representations of CLIP models for paraphrases. Our approach involves a two-step paraphrase generation process, where we automatically create two categories of paraphrases from web-scale image captions by leveraging large language models. Subsequently, we fine-tune the CLIP text encoder using these generated paraphrases while freezing the image encoder. Our resulting model, which we call ParaCLIP, exhibits significant improvements over baseline CLIP models across various tasks, including paraphrased retrieval (with rank similarity scores improved by up to 7.6% and 9.6%), Visual Genome Relation and Attribution, as well as seven semantic textual similarity tasks.

In this paper, we study personalized federated learning for text classification with Pretrained Language Models (PLMs). We identify two challenges in efficiently leveraging PLMs for personalized federated learning: 1) Communication. PLMs are usually large in size, e.g., with hundreds of millions of parameters, inducing huge communication cost in a federated setting. 2) Local Training. Training with PLMs generally requires back-propagation, during which memory consumption can be several times that of the forward-propagation. This may not be affordable when the PLMs are trained locally on the clients that are resource constrained, e.g., mobile devices with limited access to memory resources. Additionally, the proprietary PLMs can be provided as concealed APIs, for which the back-propagation operations may not be available. In solving these, we propose a training framework that includes an approach of discrete local search for gradient-free local training, along with a compression mechanism inspired from the linear word analogy that allows communicating with discretely indexed tokens, thus significantly reducing the communication cost. Experiments show that our gradient-free framework achieves superior performance compared with baselines.

CLIP revolutes vision-language pretraining by using contrastive learning on paired web data. However, the sheer size of these pretrained models makes full-model finetuning exceedingly costly. One common solution is the “adapter”, which finetunes a few additional parameters while freezing the backbone. It harnesses the heavy-duty backbone while offering a light finetuning for small downstream tasks. This synergy prompts us to explore the potential of augmenting large-scale backbones with traditional machine learning techniques. Often employed in traditional fields and overlooked in the large-scale era, these techniques could provide valuable enhancements. Herein, we delve into the “adapter ensembles” in the realm of large-scale pretrained vision-language models. We begin with a proof-of-concept study to establish the efficacy of combining multiple adapters. We then present extensive evidence showing these ensembles excel in a variety of settings, particularly when employing a Multi-Scale Attention (MSA) approach thoughtfully integrated into the ensemble framework. We further incorporate the LoRA to mitigate the additional parameter burden. We focus on vision-language retrieval, using different backbones under constraints of minimal data, parameters, and finetuning budgets. This research paves the way for a synergistic blend of traditional, yet effective, strategies with modern large-scale networks.

Large language models (LLMs) often generate biased outputs containing offensive, toxic, or stereotypical text. Existing LLM alignment methods such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) alleviate biases primarily based on reward signals from current model outputs without considering the source of biases. In this work, to explore how biases are formed, we revisit LLMs’ text generation from a causal perspective. We identify pretraining data and input prompts, which contain semantic correlations of textual phrases, as two confounders between LLMs and model outputs causing biases. Inspired by our causal view, we leverage the reward model in RL alignment as an instrumental variable to perform causal intervention on LLMs. Utilizing the reward difference between an initial LLM and intervened LLM as interventional feedback to guide RL finetuning, we propose Causality-Aware Alignment (CAA) for LLM debiasing. Experiments on two text generation tasks with three different alignment objectives demonstrate the advantages of our method in aligning LLMs to generate less biased and safer outputs.

In real-world scenarios, labeled samples for dialogue summarization are usually limited (i.e., few-shot) due to high annotation costs for high-quality dialogue summaries. To efficiently learn from few-shot samples, previous works have utilized massive annotated data from other downstream tasks and then performed prompt transfer in prompt tuning so as to enable cross-task knowledge transfer. However, existing general-purpose prompt transfer techniques lack consideration for dialogue-specific information. In this paper, we focus on improving the prompt transfer from dialogue state tracking to dialogue summarization and propose Skeleton-Assisted Prompt Transfer (SAPT), which leverages skeleton generation as extra supervision that functions as a medium connecting the distinct source and target task and resulting in the model’s better consumption of dialogue state information. To automatically extract dialogue skeletons as supervised training data for skeleton generation, we design a novel approach with perturbation-based probes requiring neither annotation effort nor domain knowledge. Training the model on such skeletons can also help preserve model capability during prompt transfer. Our method significantly outperforms existing baselines. In-depth analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in facilitating cross-task knowledge transfer in few-shot dialogue summarization.

Federated learning involves collaborative training with private data from multiple platforms, while not violating data privacy. We study the problem of federated domain adaptation for Named Entity Recognition (NER), where we seek to transfer knowledge across different platforms with data of multiple domains. In addition, we consider a practical and challenging scenario, where NER datasets of different platforms of federated learning are annotated with heterogeneous tag sets, i.e., different sets of entity types. The goal is to train a global model with federated learning, such that it can predict with a complete tag set, i.e., with all the occurring entity types for data across all platforms. To cope with the heterogeneous tag sets in a multi-domain setting, we propose a distillation approach along with a mechanism of instance weighting to facilitate knowledge transfer across platforms. Besides, we release two re-annotated clinic NER datasets, for testing the proposed method in the clinic domain. Our method shows superior empirical performance for NER with federated learning.

Large-scale pre-training is widely used in recent document understanding tasks. During deployment, one may expect that models should trigger a conservative fallback policy when encountering out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, which highlights the importance of OOD detection. However, most existing OOD detection methods focus on single-modal inputs such as images or texts. While documents are multi-modal in nature, it is underexplored if and how multi-modal information in documents can be exploited for OOD detection. In this work, we first provide a systematic and in-depth analysis on OOD detection for document understanding models. We study the effects of model modality, pre-training, and fine-tuning across various types of OOD inputs. In particular, we find that spatial information is critical for document OOD detection. To better exploit spatial information, we propose a spatial-aware adapter, which serves as a parameter-efficient add-on module to adapt transformer-based language models to the document domain. Extensive experiments show that adding the spatial-aware adapter significantly improves the OOD detection performance compared to directly using the language model and achieves superior performance compared to competitive baselines.

Previous work of class-incremental learning for Named Entity Recognition (NER) relies on the assumption that there exists abundance of labeled data for the training of new classes. In this work, we study a more challenging but practical problem, i.e., few-shot class-incremental learning for NER, where an NER model is trained with only few labeled samples of the new classes, without forgetting knowledge of the old ones. To alleviate the problem of catastrophic forgetting in few-shot class-incremental learning, we reconstruct synthetic training data of the old classes using the trained NER model, augmenting the training of new classes. We further develop a framework that distills from the existing model with both synthetic data, and real data from the current training set. Experimental results show that our approach achieves significant improvements over existing baselines.

Large pretrained multilingual language models (ML-LMs) have shown remarkable capabilities of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, without direct cross-lingual supervision. While these results are promising, follow-up works found that, within the multilingual embedding spaces, there exists strong language identity information which hinders the expression of linguistic factors shared across languages. For semantic tasks like cross-lingual sentence retrieval, it is desired to remove such language identity signals to fully leverage semantic information. In this work, we provide a novel view of projecting away language-specific factors from a multilingual embedding space. Specifically, we discover that there exists a low-rank subspace that primarily encodes information irrelevant to semantics (e.g., syntactic information). To identify this subspace, we present a simple but effective unsupervised method based on singular value decomposition with multiple monolingual corpora as input. Once the subspace is found, we can directly project the original embeddings into the null space to boost language agnosticism without finetuning. We systematically evaluate our method on various tasks including the challenging language-agnostic QA retrieval task. Empirical results show that applying our method consistently leads to improvements over commonly used ML-LMs.

We present a comprehensive study of sparse attention patterns in Transformer models. We first question the need for pre-training with sparse attention and present experiments showing that an efficient fine-tuning only approach yields a slightly worse but still competitive model. Then we compare the widely used local attention pattern and the less-well-studied global attention pattern, demonstrating that global patterns have several unique advantages. We also demonstrate that a flexible approach to attention, with different patterns across different layers of the model, is beneficial for some tasks. Drawing on this insight, we propose a novel Adaptive Axis Attention method, which learns—during fine-tuning—different attention patterns for each Transformer layer depending on the downstream task. Rather than choosing a fixed attention pattern, the adaptive axis attention method identifies important tokens—for each task and model layer—and focuses attention on those. It does not require pre-training to accommodate the sparse patterns and demonstrates competitive and sometimes better performance against fixed sparse attention patterns that require resource-intensive pre-training.

Supervised training of existing deep learning models for sequence labeling relies on large scale labeled datasets. Such datasets are generally created with crowd-source labeling. However, crowd-source labeling for tasks of sequence labeling can be expensive and time-consuming. Further, crowd-source labeling by external annotators may not be appropriate for data that contains user private information. Considering the above limitations of crowd-source labeling, we study interactive sequence labeling that allows training directly with the user feedback, which alleviates the annotation cost and maintains the user privacy. We identify two bias, namely, context bias and feedback bias, by formulating interactive sequence labeling via a Structural Causal Model (SCM). To alleviate the context and feedback bias based on the SCM, we identify the frequent context tokens as confounders in the backdoor adjustment and further propose an entropy-based modulation that is inspired by information theory. entities more sample-efficiently. With extensive experiments, we validate that our approach can effectively alleviate the biases and our models can be efficiently learnt with the user feedback.

Knowledge graphs suffer from sparsity which degrades the quality of representations generated by various methods. While there is an abundance of textual information throughout the web and many existing knowledge bases, aligning information across these diverse data sources remains a challenge in the literature. Previous work has partially addressed this issue by enriching knowledge graph entities based on “hard” co-occurrence of words present in the entities of the knowledge graphs and external text, while we achieve “soft” augmentation by proposing a knowledge graph enrichment and embedding framework named Edge. Given an original knowledge graph, we first generate a rich but noisy augmented graph using external texts in semantic and structural level. To distill the relevant knowledge and suppress the introduced noise, we design a graph alignment term in a shared embedding space between the original graph and augmented graph. To enhance the embedding learning on the augmented graph, we further regularize the locality relationship of target entity based on negative sampling. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of Edge in link prediction and node classification.