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Hai-Tao Zheng

Publications and source records attributed to Hai-Tao Zheng.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

Reformulating Vision-Language Foundation Models and Datasets Towards Universal Multimodal Assistants

Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit impressive abilities to perceive images and follow open-ended instructions. The capabilities of MLLMs depend on two crucial factors: the model architecture to facilitate the feature alignment of visual modules and large language models; the multimodal instruction tuning datasets for human instruction following. (i) For the model architecture, most existing models introduce an external bridge module to connect vision encoders with language models, which needs an additional feature-alignment pre-training. In this work, we discover that compact pre-trained vision language models can inherently serve as ``out-of-the-box'' bridges between vision and language. Based on this, we propose Muffin framework, which directly employs pre-trained vision-language models to act as providers of visual signals. (ii) For the multimodal instruction tuning datasets, existing methods omit the complementary relationship between different datasets and simply mix datasets from different tasks. Instead, we propose UniMM-Chat dataset which explores the complementarities of datasets to generate 1.1M high-quality and diverse multimodal instructions. We merge information describing the same image from diverse datasets and transforms it into more knowledge-intensive conversation data. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the Muffin framework and UniMM-Chat dataset. Muffin achieves state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of vision-language tasks, significantly surpassing state-of-the-art models like LLaVA and InstructBLIP. Our model and dataset are all accessible at https://github.com/thunlp/muffin.

cs.CV↗

Enhancing Text Generation with Cooperative Training

Recently, there has been a surge in the use of generated data to enhance the performance of downstream models, largely due to the advancements in pre-trained language models. However, most prevailing methods trained generative and discriminative models in isolation, which left them unable to adapt to changes in each other. These approaches lead to generative models that are prone to deviating from the true data distribution and providing limited benefits to discriminative models. While some works have proposed jointly training generative and discriminative language models, their methods remain challenging due to the non-differentiable nature of discrete data. To overcome these issues, we introduce a \textit{self-consistent learning} framework in the text field that involves training a discriminator and generator cooperatively in a closed-loop manner until a scoring consensus is reached. By learning directly from selected samples, our framework are able to mitigate training instabilities such as mode collapse and non-convergence. Extensive experiments on four downstream benchmarks, including AFQMC, CHIP-STS, QQP, and MRPC, demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework.

cs.CL↗

Click-aware Structure Transfer with Sample Weight Assignment for Post-Click Conversion Rate Estimation

Post-click Conversion Rate (CVR) prediction task plays an essential role in industrial applications, such as recommendation and advertising. Conventional CVR methods typically suffer from the data sparsity problem as they rely only on samples where the user has clicked. To address this problem, researchers have introduced the method of multi-task learning, which utilizes non-clicked samples and shares feature representations of the Click-Through Rate (CTR) task with the CVR task. However, it should be noted that the CVR and CTR tasks are fundamentally different and may even be contradictory. Therefore, introducing a large amount of CTR information without distinction may drown out valuable information related to CVR. This phenomenon is called the curse of knowledge problem in this paper. To tackle this issue, we argue that a trade-off should be achieved between the introduction of large amounts of auxiliary information and the protection of valuable information related to CVR. Hence, we propose a Click-aware Structure Transfer model with sample Weight Assignment, abbreviated as CSTWA. It pays more attention to the latent structure information, which can filter the input information that is related to CVR, instead of directly sharing feature representations. Meanwhile, to capture the representation conflict between CTR and CVR, we calibrate the representation layer and reweight the discriminant layer to excavate the click bias information from the CTR tower. Moreover, it incorporates a sample weight assignment algorithm biased towards CVR modeling, to make the knowledge from CTR would not mislead the CVR. Extensive experiments on industrial and public datasets have demonstrated that CSTWA significantly outperforms widely used and competitive models.

cs.IR↗

Prompt Learning With Knowledge Memorizing Prototypes For Generalized Few-Shot Intent Detection

Generalized Few-Shot Intent Detection (GFSID) is challenging and realistic because it needs to categorize both seen and novel intents simultaneously. Previous GFSID methods rely on the episodic learning paradigm, which makes it hard to extend to a generalized setup as they do not explicitly learn the classification of seen categories and the knowledge of seen intents. To address the dilemma, we propose to convert the GFSID task into the class incremental learning paradigm. Specifically, we propose a two-stage learning framework, which sequentially learns the knowledge of different intents in various periods via prompt learning. And then we exploit prototypes for categorizing both seen and novel intents. Furthermore, to achieve the transfer knowledge of intents in different stages, for different scenarios we design two knowledge preservation methods which close to realistic applications. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on two widely used datasets show that our framework based on the class incremental learning paradigm achieves promising performance.

cs.CL↗

Retrieval-Augmented Meta Learning for Low-Resource Text Classification

Meta learning have achieved promising performance in low-resource text classification which aims to identify target classes with knowledge transferred from source classes with sets of small tasks named episodes. However, due to the limited training data in the meta-learning scenario and the inherent properties of parameterized neural networks, poor generalization performance has become a pressing problem that needs to be addressed. To deal with this issue, we propose a meta-learning based method called Retrieval-Augmented Meta Learning(RAML). It not only uses parameterization for inference but also retrieves non-parametric knowledge from an external corpus to make inferences, which greatly alleviates the problem of poor generalization performance caused by the lack of diverse training data in meta-learning. This method differs from previous models that solely rely on parameters, as it explicitly emphasizes the importance of non-parametric knowledge, aiming to strike a balance between parameterized neural networks and non-parametric knowledge. The model is required to determine which knowledge to access and utilize during inference. Additionally, our multi-view passages fusion network module can effectively and efficiently integrate the retrieved information into low-resource classification task. The extensive experiments demonstrate that RAML significantly outperforms current SOTA low-resource text classification models.

cs.CL↗

EcomGPT: Instruction-tuning Large Language Models with Chain-of-Task Tasks for E-commerce

Recently, instruction-following Large Language Models (LLMs) , represented by ChatGPT, have exhibited exceptional performance in general Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, the unique characteristics of E-commerce data pose significant challenges to general LLMs. An LLM tailored specifically for E-commerce scenarios, possessing robust cross-dataset/task generalization capabilities, is a pressing necessity. To solve this issue, in this work, we proposed the first e-commerce instruction dataset EcomInstruct, with a total of 2.5 million instruction data. EcomInstruct scales up the data size and task diversity by constructing atomic tasks with E-commerce basic data types, such as product information, user reviews. Atomic tasks are defined as intermediate tasks implicitly involved in solving a final task, which we also call Chain-of-Task tasks. We developed EcomGPT with different parameter scales by training the backbone model BLOOMZ with the EcomInstruct. Benefiting from the fundamental semantic understanding capabilities acquired from the Chain-of-Task tasks, EcomGPT exhibits excellent zero-shot generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments and human evaluations demonstrate that EcomGPT outperforms ChatGPT in term of cross-dataset/task generalization on E-commerce tasks.

cs.CL↗

SeqGPT: An Out-of-the-box Large Language Model for Open Domain Sequence Understanding

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive ability for open-domain NLP tasks. However, LLMs are sometimes too footloose for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks which always have restricted output and input format. Their performances on NLU tasks are highly related to prompts or demonstrations and are shown to be poor at performing several representative NLU tasks, such as event extraction and entity typing. To this end, we present SeqGPT, a bilingual (i.e., English and Chinese) open-source autoregressive model specially enhanced for open-domain natural language understanding. We express all NLU tasks with two atomic tasks, which define fixed instructions to restrict the input and output format but still ``open'' for arbitrarily varied label sets. The model is first instruction-tuned with extremely fine-grained labeled data synthesized by ChatGPT and then further fine-tuned by 233 different atomic tasks from 152 datasets across various domains. The experimental results show that SeqGPT has decent classification and extraction ability, and is capable of performing language understanding tasks on unseen domains. We also conduct empirical studies on the scaling of data and model size as well as on the transfer across tasks. Our model is accessible at https://github.com/Alibaba-NLP/SeqGPT.

cs.CL↗

MESED: A Multi-modal Entity Set Expansion Dataset with Fine-grained Semantic Classes and Hard Negative Entities

The Entity Set Expansion (ESE) task aims to expand a handful of seed entities with new entities belonging to the same semantic class. Conventional ESE methods are based on mono-modality (i.e., literal modality), which struggle to deal with complex entities in the real world such as: (1) Negative entities with fine-grained semantic differences. (2) Synonymous entities. (3) Polysemous entities. (4) Long-tailed entities. These challenges prompt us to propose Multi-modal Entity Set Expansion (MESE), where models integrate information from multiple modalities to represent entities. Intuitively, the benefits of multi-modal information for ESE are threefold: (1) Different modalities can provide complementary information. (2) Multi-modal information provides a unified signal via common visual properties for the same semantic class or entity. (3) Multi-modal information offers robust alignment signal for synonymous entities. To assess the performance of model in MESE and facilitate further research, we constructed the MESED dataset which is the first multi-modal dataset for ESE with large-scale and elaborate manual calibration. A powerful multi-modal model MultiExpan is proposed which is pre-trained on four multimodal pre-training tasks. The extensive experiments and analyses on MESED demonstrate the high quality of the dataset and the effectiveness of our MultiExpan, as well as pointing the direction for future research.

cs.CL↗

Mining Interest Trends and Adaptively Assigning SampleWeight for Session-based Recommendation

Session-based Recommendation (SR) aims to predict users' next click based on their behavior within a short period, which is crucial for online platforms. However, most existing SR methods somewhat ignore the fact that user preference is not necessarily strongly related to the order of interactions. Moreover, they ignore the differences in importance between different samples, which limits the model-fitting performance. To tackle these issues, we put forward the method, Mining Interest Trends and Adaptively Assigning Sample Weight, abbreviated as MTAW. Specifically, we model users' instant interest based on their present behavior and all their previous behaviors. Meanwhile, we discriminatively integrate instant interests to capture the changing trend of user interest to make more personalized recommendations. Furthermore, we devise a novel loss function that dynamically weights the samples according to their prediction difficulty in the current epoch. Extensive experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method.

cs.IR↗

Exploring Lottery Prompts for Pre-trained Language Models

Consistently scaling pre-trained language models (PLMs) imposes substantial burdens on model adaptation, necessitating more efficient alternatives to conventional fine-tuning. Given the advantage of prompting in the zero-shot setting and the observed performance fluctuation among different prompts, we explore the instance-level prompt and their generalizability. By searching through the prompt space, we first validate the assumption that for every instance, there is almost always a lottery prompt that induces the correct prediction from the PLM, and such prompt can be obtained at a low cost thanks to the inherent ability of PLMs. Meanwhile, we find that some strong lottery prompts have high performance over the whole training set, and they are equipped with distinguishable linguistic features. Lastly, we attempt to generalize the searched strong lottery prompts to unseen data with prompt ensembling method without any parameter tuning. Experiments are conducted on various types of NLP classification tasks and demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve comparable results with other gradient-free and optimization-free baselines.

cs.CL↗

MoocRadar: A Fine-grained and Multi-aspect Knowledge Repository for Improving Cognitive Student Modeling in MOOCs

Student modeling, the task of inferring a student's learning characteristics through their interactions with coursework, is a fundamental issue in intelligent education. Although the recent attempts from knowledge tracing and cognitive diagnosis propose several promising directions for improving the usability and effectiveness of current models, the existing public datasets are still insufficient to meet the need for these potential solutions due to their ignorance of complete exercising contexts, fine-grained concepts, and cognitive labels. In this paper, we present MoocRadar, a fine-grained, multi-aspect knowledge repository consisting of 2,513 exercise questions, 5,600 knowledge concepts, and over 12 million behavioral records. Specifically, we propose a framework to guarantee a high-quality and comprehensive annotation of fine-grained concepts and cognitive labels. The statistical and experimental results indicate that our dataset provides the basis for the future improvements of existing methods. Moreover, to support the convenient usage for researchers, we release a set of tools for data querying, model adaption, and even the extension of our repository, which are now available at https://github.com/THU-KEG/MOOC-Radar.

cs.AI↗

Visually Grounded Commonsense Knowledge Acquisition

Large-scale commonsense knowledge bases empower a broad range of AI applications, where the automatic extraction of commonsense knowledge (CKE) is a fundamental and challenging problem. CKE from text is known for suffering from the inherent sparsity and reporting bias of commonsense in text. Visual perception, on the other hand, contains rich commonsense knowledge about real-world entities, e.g., (person, can_hold, bottle), which can serve as promising sources for acquiring grounded commonsense knowledge. In this work, we present CLEVER, which formulates CKE as a distantly supervised multi-instance learning problem, where models learn to summarize commonsense relations from a bag of images about an entity pair without any human annotation on image instances. To address the problem, CLEVER leverages vision-language pre-training models for deep understanding of each image in the bag, and selects informative instances from the bag to summarize commonsense entity relations via a novel contrastive attention mechanism. Comprehensive experimental results in held-out and human evaluation show that CLEVER can extract commonsense knowledge in promising quality, outperforming pre-trained language model-based methods by 3.9 AUC and 6.4 mAUC points. The predicted commonsense scores show strong correlation with human judgment with a 0.78 Spearman coefficient. Moreover, the extracted commonsense can also be grounded into images with reasonable interpretability. The data and codes can be obtained at https://github.com/thunlp/CLEVER.

cs.CV↗

Active Relation Discovery: Towards General and Label-aware Open Relation Extraction

Open Relation Extraction (OpenRE) aims to discover novel relations from open domains. Previous OpenRE methods mainly suffer from two problems: (1) Insufficient capacity to discriminate between known and novel relations. When extending conventional test settings to a more general setting where test data might also come from seen classes, existing approaches have a significant performance decline. (2) Secondary labeling must be performed before practical application. Existing methods cannot label human-readable and meaningful types for novel relations, which is urgently required by the downstream tasks. To address these issues, we propose the Active Relation Discovery (ARD) framework, which utilizes relational outlier detection for discriminating known and novel relations and involves active learning for labeling novel relations. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that ARD significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on both conventional and our proposed general OpenRE settings. The source code and datasets will be available for reproducibility.

cs.CL↗

Vision, Deduction and Alignment: An Empirical Study on Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Alignment

Entity alignment (EA) for knowledge graphs (KGs) plays a critical role in knowledge engineering. Existing EA methods mostly focus on utilizing the graph structures and entity attributes (including literals), but ignore images that are common in modern multi-modal KGs. In this study we first constructed Multi-OpenEA -- eight large-scale, image-equipped EA benchmarks, and then evaluated some existing embedding-based methods for utilizing images. In view of the complementary nature of visual modal information and logical deduction, we further developed a new multi-modal EA method named LODEME using logical deduction and multi-modal KG embedding, with state-of-the-art performance achieved on Multi-OpenEA and other existing multi-modal EA benchmarks.

cs.AI↗

Knowledge-augmented Few-shot Visual Relation Detection

Visual Relation Detection (VRD) aims to detect relationships between objects for image understanding. Most existing VRD methods rely on thousands of training samples of each relationship to achieve satisfactory performance. Some recent papers tackle this problem by few-shot learning with elaborately designed pipelines and pre-trained word vectors. However, the performance of existing few-shot VRD models is severely hampered by the poor generalization capability, as they struggle to handle the vast semantic diversity of visual relationships. Nonetheless, humans have the ability to learn new relationships with just few examples based on their knowledge. Inspired by this, we devise a knowledge-augmented, few-shot VRD framework leveraging both textual knowledge and visual relation knowledge to improve the generalization ability of few-shot VRD. The textual knowledge and visual relation knowledge are acquired from a pre-trained language model and an automatically constructed visual relation knowledge graph, respectively. We extensively validate the effectiveness of our framework. Experiments conducted on three benchmarks from the commonly used Visual Genome dataset show that our performance surpasses existing state-of-the-art models with a large improvement.

cs.CV↗

Automatic Context Pattern Generation for Entity Set Expansion

Entity Set Expansion (ESE) is a valuable task that aims to find entities of the target semantic class described by given seed entities. Various Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) downstream applications have benefited from ESE due to its ability to discover knowledge. Although existing corpus-based ESE methods have achieved great progress, they still rely on corpora with high-quality entity information annotated, because most of them need to obtain the context patterns through the position of the entity in a sentence. Therefore, the quality of the given corpora and their entity annotation has become the bottleneck that limits the performance of such methods. To overcome this dilemma and make the ESE models free from the dependence on entity annotation, our work aims to explore a new ESE paradigm, namely corpus-independent ESE. Specifically, we devise a context pattern generation module that utilizes autoregressive language models (e.g., GPT-2) to automatically generate high-quality context patterns for entities. In addition, we propose the GAPA, a novel ESE framework that leverages the aforementioned GenerAted PAtterns to expand target entities. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on three widely used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. All the codes of our experiments are available at https://github.com/geekjuruo/GAPA.

cs.CL↗

Contextual Similarity is More Valuable than Character Similarity: An Empirical Study for Chinese Spell Checking

Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) task aims to detect and correct Chinese spelling errors. Recently, related researches focus on introducing character similarity from confusion set to enhance the CSC models, ignoring the context of characters that contain richer information. To make better use of contextual information, we propose a simple yet effective Curriculum Learning (CL) framework for the CSC task. With the help of our model-agnostic CL framework, existing CSC models will be trained from easy to difficult as humans learn Chinese characters and achieve further performance improvements. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on widely used SIGHAN datasets show that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. More instructively, our study empirically suggests that contextual similarity is more valuable than character similarity for the CSC task.

cs.CL↗

Embracing Ambiguity: Improving Similarity-oriented Tasks with Contextual Synonym Knowledge

Contextual synonym knowledge is crucial for those similarity-oriented tasks whose core challenge lies in capturing semantic similarity between entities in their contexts, such as entity linking and entity matching. However, most Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) lack synonym knowledge due to inherent limitations of their pre-training objectives such as masked language modeling (MLM). Existing works which inject synonym knowledge into PLMs often suffer from two severe problems: (i) Neglecting the ambiguity of synonyms, and (ii) Undermining semantic understanding of original PLMs, which is caused by inconsistency between the exact semantic similarity of the synonyms and the broad conceptual relevance learned from the original corpus. To address these issues, we propose PICSO, a flexible framework that supports the injection of contextual synonym knowledge from multiple domains into PLMs via a novel entity-aware Adapter which focuses on the semantics of the entities (synonyms) in the contexts. Meanwhile, PICSO stores the synonym knowledge in additional parameters of the Adapter structure, which prevents it from corrupting the semantic understanding of the original PLM. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PICSO can dramatically outperform the original PLMs and the other knowledge and synonym injection models on four different similarity-oriented tasks. In addition, experiments on GLUE prove that PICSO also benefits general natural language understanding tasks. Codes and data will be public.

cs.CL↗