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 (M²PT) approach for efficient instruction tuning of MLLMs. M²PT 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.

Span-based models are one of the most straightforward methods for named entity recognition (NER). Existing span-based NER systems shallowly aggregate the token representations to span representations. However, this typically results in significant ineffectiveness for long entities, a coupling between the representations of overlapping spans, and ultimately a performance degradation. In this study, we propose DSpERT (Deep Span Encoder Representations from Transformers), which comprises a standard Transformer and a span Transformer. The latter uses low-layered span representations as queries, and aggregates the token representations as keys and values, layer by layer from bottom to top. Thus, DSpERT produces span representations of deep semantics. With weight initialization from pretrained language models, DSpERT achieves performance higher than or competitive with recent state-of-the-art systems on six NER benchmarks. Experimental results verify the importance of the depth for span representations, and show that DSpERT performs particularly well on long-span entities and nested structures. Further, the deep span representations are well structured and easily separable in the feature space.

The de-identification task aims to detect and remove the protected health information from electronic medical records (EMRs). Previous studies generally focus on the within-hospital setting and achieve great successes, while the cross-hospital setting has been overlooked. This study introduces a new de-identification dataset comprising EMRs from three hospitals in China, creating a benchmark for evaluating both within- and cross-hospital generalization. We find significant domain discrepancy between hospitals. A model with almost perfect within-hospital performance struggles when transferred across hospitals. Further experiments show that pretrained language models and some domain generalization methods can alleviate this problem. We believe that our data and findings will encourage investigations on the generalization of medical NLP models.