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Baobao Chang

Publications and source records attributed to Baobao Chang.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Towards End-to-End Embodied Decision Making via Multi-modal Large Language Model: Explorations with GPT4-Vision and Beyond

In this study, we explore the potential of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in improving embodied decision-making processes for agents. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely used due to their advanced reasoning skills and vast world knowledge, MLLMs like GPT4-Vision offer enhanced visual understanding and reasoning capabilities. We investigate whether state-of-the-art MLLMs can handle embodied decision-making in an end-to-end manner and whether collaborations between LLMs and MLLMs can enhance decision-making. To address these questions, we introduce a new benchmark called PCA-EVAL, which evaluates embodied decision-making from the perspectives of Perception, Cognition, and Action. Additionally, we propose HOLMES, a multi-agent cooperation framework that allows LLMs to leverage MLLMs and APIs to gather multimodal information for informed decision-making. We compare end-to-end embodied decision-making and HOLMES on our benchmark and find that the GPT4-Vision model demonstrates strong end-to-end embodied decision-making abilities, outperforming GPT4-HOLMES in terms of average decision accuracy (+3%). However, this performance is exclusive to the latest GPT4-Vision model, surpassing the open-source state-of-the-art MLLM by 26%. Our results indicate that powerful MLLMs like GPT4-Vision hold promise for decision-making in embodied agents, offering new avenues for MLLM research. Code and data are open at https://github.com/pkunlp-icler/PCA-EVAL/.

cs.AI↗

On the Pareto Front of Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

In this work, we study how the performance of a given direction changes with its sampling ratio in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT). By training over 200 multilingual models with various model sizes, data sizes, and language directions, we find it interesting that the performance of certain translation direction does not always improve with the increase of its weight in the multi-task optimization objective. Accordingly, scalarization method leads to a multitask trade-off front that deviates from the traditional Pareto front when there exists data imbalance in the training corpus, which poses a great challenge to improve the overall performance of all directions. Based on our observations, we propose the Double Power Law to predict the unique performance trade-off front in MNMT, which is robust across various languages, data adequacy, and the number of tasks. Finally, we formulate the sample ratio selection problem in MNMT as an optimization problem based on the Double Power Law. In our experiments, it achieves better performance than temperature searching and gradient manipulation methods with only 1/5 to 1/2 of the total training budget. We release the code at https://github.com/pkunlp-icler/ParetoMNMT for reproduction.

cs.CL↗

SCL-RAI: Span-based Contrastive Learning with Retrieval Augmented Inference for Unlabeled Entity Problem in NER

Named Entity Recognition is the task to locate and classify the entities in the text. However, Unlabeled Entity Problem in NER datasets seriously hinders the improvement of NER performance. This paper proposes SCL-RAI to cope with this problem. Firstly, we decrease the distance of span representations with the same label while increasing it for different ones via span-based contrastive learning, which relieves the ambiguity among entities and improves the robustness of the model over unlabeled entities. Then we propose retrieval augmented inference to mitigate the decision boundary shifting problem. Our method significantly outperforms the previous SOTA method by 4.21% and 8.64% F1-score on two real-world datasets.

cs.CL↗

Coarse-to-Fine Dual Encoders are Better Frame Identification Learners

Frame identification aims to find semantic frames associated with target words in a sentence. Recent researches measure the similarity or matching score between targets and candidate frames by modeling frame definitions. However, they either lack sufficient representation learning of the definitions or face challenges in efficiently selecting the most suitable frame from over 1000 candidate frames. Moreover, commonly used lexicon filtering ($lf$) to obtain candidate frames for the target may ignore out-of-vocabulary targets and cause inadequate frame modeling. In this paper, we propose CoFFTEA, a $\underline{Co}$arse-to-$\underline{F}$ine $\underline{F}$rame and $\underline{T}$arget $\underline{E}$ncoders $\underline{A}$rchitecture. With contrastive learning and dual encoders, CoFFTEA efficiently and effectively models the alignment between frames and targets. By employing a coarse-to-fine curriculum learning procedure, CoFFTEA gradually learns to differentiate frames with varying degrees of similarity. Experimental results demonstrate that CoFFTEA outperforms previous models by 0.93 overall scores and 1.53 R@1 without $lf$. Further analysis suggests that CoFFTEA can better model the relationships between frame and frame, as well as target and target. The code for our approach is available at https://github.com/pkunlp-icler/COFFTEA.

cs.CL↗

Guiding AMR Parsing with Reverse Graph Linearization

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing aims to extract an abstract semantic graph from a given sentence. The sequence-to-sequence approaches, which linearize the semantic graph into a sequence of nodes and edges and generate the linearized graph directly, have achieved good performance. However, we observed that these approaches suffer from structure loss accumulation during the decoding process, leading to a much lower F1-score for nodes and edges decoded later compared to those decoded earlier. To address this issue, we propose a novel Reverse Graph Linearization (RGL) enhanced framework. RGL defines both default and reverse linearization orders of an AMR graph, where most structures at the back part of the default order appear at the front part of the reversed order and vice versa. RGL incorporates the reversed linearization to the original AMR parser through a two-pass self-distillation mechanism, which guides the model when generating the default linearizations. Our analysis shows that our proposed method significantly mitigates the problem of structure loss accumulation, outperforming the previously best AMR parsing model by 0.8 and 0.5 Smatch scores on the AMR 2.0 and AMR 3.0 dataset, respectively. The code are available at https://github.com/pkunlp-icler/AMR_reverse_graph_linearization.

cs.CL↗

Mining Clues from Incomplete Utterance: A Query-enhanced Network for Incomplete Utterance Rewriting

Incomplete utterance rewriting has recently raised wide attention. However, previous works do not consider the semantic structural information between incomplete utterance and rewritten utterance or model the semantic structure implicitly and insufficiently. To address this problem, we propose a QUEry-Enhanced Network (QUEEN). Firstly, our proposed query template explicitly brings guided semantic structural knowledge between the incomplete utterance and the rewritten utterance making model perceive where to refer back to or recover omitted tokens. Then, we adopt a fast and effective edit operation scoring network to model the relation between two tokens. Benefiting from proposed query template and the well-designed edit operation scoring network, QUEEN achieves state-of-the-art performance on several public datasets.

cs.CL↗

Human-in-the-Loop through Chain-of-Thought

While the emergence of powerful language models along with Chain-of-thought prompting has made automation more and more omnipresent, it sometimes demonstrates its weakness in long-term or multi-step logical reasoning. For example, users don't always get desirable answers for complex mathematical problems without human involvement. Against this background, we present the Manual Correction System (MCS) -- a human-in-the-loop system enhanced by Chain-of-Thought prompting, which explores how manual correction of sub-logics in rationales can improve LLM's reasoning performance. Moving one step forward, considering a system with human-in-the-loop involves more than having humans improve performance but also controlling the cost. Therefore, we post a Cost-utility Analysis Model for Human-in-the-Loop systems (CAMLOP) based on classical economics theory to analyze, quantify and balance the utility and the corresponding cost. We conduct experiments of MCS and CAMLOP with twelve datasets. A significant advantage w.r.t cost and utility proves its superiority over strong baselines.

cs.CL↗

On the Off-Target Problem of Zero-Shot Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

While multilingual neural machine translation has achieved great success, it suffers from the off-target issue, where the translation is in the wrong language. This problem is more pronounced on zero-shot translation tasks. In this work, we find that failing in encoding discriminative target language signal will lead to off-target and a closer lexical distance (i.e., KL-divergence) between two languages' vocabularies is related with a higher off-target rate. We also find that solely isolating the vocab of different languages in the decoder can alleviate the problem. Motivated by the findings, we propose Language Aware Vocabulary Sharing (LAVS), a simple and effective algorithm to construct the multilingual vocabulary, that greatly alleviates the off-target problem of the translation model by increasing the KL-divergence between languages. We conduct experiments on a multilingual machine translation benchmark in 11 languages. Experiments show that the off-target rate for 90 translation tasks is reduced from 29\% to 8\%, while the overall BLEU score is improved by an average of 1.9 points without extra training cost or sacrificing the supervised directions' performance. We release the code at https://github.com/PKUnlp-icler/Off-Target-MNMT for reproduction.

cs.CL↗

DialogVCS: Robust Natural Language Understanding in Dialogue System Upgrade

In the constant updates of the product dialogue systems, we need to retrain the natural language understanding (NLU) model as new data from the real users would be merged into the existent data accumulated in the last updates. Within the newly added data, new intents would emerge and might have semantic entanglement with the existing intents, e.g. new intents that are semantically too specific or generic are actually subset or superset of some existing intents in the semantic space, thus impairing the robustness of the NLU model. As the first attempt to solve this problem, we setup a new benchmark consisting of 4 Dialogue Version Control dataSets (DialogVCS). We formulate the intent detection with imperfect data in the system update as a multi-label classification task with positive but unlabeled intents, which asks the models to recognize all the proper intents, including the ones with semantic entanglement, in the inference. We also propose comprehensive baseline models and conduct in-depth analyses for the benchmark, showing that the semantically entangled intents can be effectively recognized with an automatic workflow.

cs.CL↗

Can We Edit Factual Knowledge by In-Context Learning?

Previous studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) like GPTs store massive factual knowledge in their parameters. However, the stored knowledge could be false or out-dated. Traditional knowledge editing methods refine LLMs via fine-tuning on texts containing specific knowledge. However, with the increasing scales of LLMs, these gradient-based approaches bring large computation costs. The trend of model-as-a-service also makes it impossible to modify knowledge in black-box LMs. Inspired by in-context learning (ICL), a new paradigm based on demonstration contexts without parameter updating, we explore whether ICL can edit factual knowledge. To answer this question, we give a comprehensive empirical study of ICL strategies. Experiments show that in-context knowledge editing (IKE), without any gradient and parameter updating, achieves a competitive success rate compared to gradient-based methods on GPT-J (6B) but with much fewer side effects, including less over-editing on similar but unrelated facts and less knowledge forgetting on previously stored knowledge. We also apply the method to larger LMs with tens or hundreds of parameters like OPT-175B, which shows the scalability of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/Zce1112zslx/IKE.

cs.CL↗

DiffCap: Exploring Continuous Diffusion on Image Captioning

Current image captioning works usually focus on generating descriptions in an autoregressive manner. However, there are limited works that focus on generating descriptions non-autoregressively, which brings more decoding diversity. Inspired by the success of diffusion models on generating natural-looking images, we propose a novel method DiffCap to apply continuous diffusions on image captioning. Unlike image generation where the output is fixed-size and continuous, image description length varies with discrete tokens. Our method transforms discrete tokens in a natural way and applies continuous diffusion on them to successfully fuse extracted image features for diffusion caption generation. Our experiments on COCO dataset demonstrate that our method uses a much simpler structure to achieve comparable results to the previous non-autoregressive works. Apart from quality, an intriguing property of DiffCap is its high diversity during generation, which is missing from many autoregressive models. We believe our method on fusing multimodal features in diffusion language generation will inspire more researches on multimodal language generation tasks for its simplicity and decoding flexibility.

cs.CV↗

Query Your Model with Definitions in FrameNet: An Effective Method for Frame Semantic Role Labeling

Frame Semantic Role Labeling (FSRL) identifies arguments and labels them with frame semantic roles defined in FrameNet. Previous researches tend to divide FSRL into argument identification and role classification. Such methods usually model role classification as naive multi-class classification and treat arguments individually, which neglects label semantics and interactions between arguments and thus hindering performance and generalization of models. In this paper, we propose a query-based framework named ArGument Extractor with Definitions in FrameNet (AGED) to mitigate these problems. Definitions of frames and frame elements (FEs) in FrameNet can be used to query arguments in text. Encoding text-definition pairs can guide models in learning label semantics and strengthening argument interactions. Experiments show that AGED outperforms previous state-of-the-art by up to 1.3 F1-score in two FrameNet datasets and the generalization power of AGED in zero-shot and fewshot scenarios. Our code and technical appendix is available at https://github.com/PKUnlp-icler/AGED.

cs.CL↗

A Two-Stage Method for Chinese AMR Parsing

In this paper, we provide a detailed description of our system at CAMRP-2022 evaluation. We firstly propose a two-stage method to conduct Chinese AMR Parsing with alignment generation, which includes Concept-Prediction and Relation-Prediction stages. Our model achieves 0.7756 and 0.7074 Align-Smatch F1 scores on the CAMR 2.0 test set and the blind-test set of CAMRP-2022 individually. We also analyze the result and the limitation such as the error propagation and class imbalance problem we conclude in the current method. Code and the trained models are released at https://github.com/PKUnlp-icler/Two-Stage-CAMRP for reproduction.

cs.CL↗

A Double-Graph Based Framework for Frame Semantic Parsing

Frame semantic parsing is a fundamental NLP task, which consists of three subtasks: frame identification, argument identification and role classification. Most previous studies tend to neglect relations between different subtasks and arguments and pay little attention to ontological frame knowledge defined in FrameNet. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge-guided Incremental semantic parser with Double-graph (KID). We first introduce Frame Knowledge Graph (FKG), a heterogeneous graph containing both frames and FEs (Frame Elements) built on the frame knowledge so that we can derive knowledge-enhanced representations for frames and FEs. Besides, we propose Frame Semantic Graph (FSG) to represent frame semantic structures extracted from the text with graph structures. In this way, we can transform frame semantic parsing into an incremental graph construction problem to strengthen interactions between subtasks and relations between arguments. Our experiments show that KID outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method by up to 1.7 F1-score on two FrameNet datasets. Our code is availavle at https://github.com/PKUnlp-icler/KID.

cs.CL↗

An Enhanced Span-based Decomposition Method for Few-Shot Sequence Labeling

Few-Shot Sequence Labeling (FSSL) is a canonical paradigm for the tagging models, e.g., named entity recognition and slot filling, to generalize on an emerging, resource-scarce domain. Recently, the metric-based meta-learning framework has been recognized as a promising approach for FSSL. However, most prior works assign a label to each token based on the token-level similarities, which ignores the integrality of named entities or slots. To this end, in this paper, we propose ESD, an Enhanced Span-based Decomposition method for FSSL. ESD formulates FSSL as a span-level matching problem between test query and supporting instances. Specifically, ESD decomposes the span matching problem into a series of span-level procedures, mainly including enhanced span representation, class prototype aggregation and span conflicts resolution. Extensive experiments show that ESD achieves the new state-of-the-art results on two popular FSSL benchmarks, FewNERD and SNIPS, and is proven to be more robust in the nested and noisy tagging scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/Wangpeiyi9979/ESD.

cs.CL↗

Robust Fine-tuning via Perturbation and Interpolation from In-batch Instances

Fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) on downstream tasks has become common practice in natural language processing. However, most of the PLMs are vulnerable, e.g., they are brittle under adversarial attacks or imbalanced data, which hinders the application of the PLMs on some downstream tasks, especially in safe-critical scenarios. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective fine-tuning method called Match-Tuning to force the PLMs to be more robust. For each instance in a batch, we involve other instances in the same batch to interact with it. To be specific, regarding the instances with other labels as a perturbation, Match-Tuning makes the model more robust to noise at the beginning of training. While nearing the end, Match-Tuning focuses more on performing an interpolation among the instances with the same label for better generalization. Extensive experiments on various tasks in GLUE benchmark show that Match-Tuning consistently outperforms the vanilla fine-tuning by $1.64$ scores. Moreover, Match-Tuning exhibits remarkable robustness to adversarial attacks and data imbalance.

cs.CL↗

A Two-Stream AMR-enhanced Model for Document-level Event Argument Extraction

Most previous studies aim at extracting events from a single sentence, while document-level event extraction still remains under-explored. In this paper, we focus on extracting event arguments from an entire document, which mainly faces two critical problems: a) the long-distance dependency between trigger and arguments over sentences; b) the distracting context towards an event in the document. To address these issues, we propose a Two-Stream Abstract meaning Representation enhanced extraction model (TSAR). TSAR encodes the document from different perspectives by a two-stream encoding module, to utilize local and global information and lower the impact of distracting context. Besides, TSAR introduces an AMR-guided interaction module to capture both intra-sentential and inter-sentential features, based on the locally and globally constructed AMR semantic graphs. An auxiliary boundary loss is introduced to enhance the boundary information for text spans explicitly. Extensive experiments illustrate that TSAR outperforms previous state-of-the-art by a large margin, with 2.54 F1 and 5.13 F1 performance gain on the public RAMS and WikiEvents datasets respectively, showing the superiority in the cross-sentence arguments extraction. We release our code in https://github.com/ PKUnlp-icler/TSAR.

cs.CL↗

Hierarchical Curriculum Learning for AMR Parsing

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing aims to translate sentences to semantic representation with a hierarchical structure, and is recently empowered by pretrained sequence-to-sequence models. However, there exists a gap between their flat training objective (i.e., equally treats all output tokens) and the hierarchical AMR structure, which limits the model generalization. To bridge this gap, we propose a Hierarchical Curriculum Learning (HCL) framework with Structure-level (SC) and Instance-level Curricula (IC). SC switches progressively from core to detail AMR semantic elements while IC transits from structure-simple to -complex AMR instances during training. Through these two warming-up processes, HCL reduces the difficulty of learning complex structures, thus the flat model can better adapt to the AMR hierarchy. Extensive experiments on AMR2.0, AMR3.0, structure-complex and out-of-distribution situations verify the effectiveness of HCL.

cs.CL↗