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Jieping Ye

Publications and source records attributed to Jieping Ye.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

Category-Extensible Out-of-Distribution Detection via Hierarchical Context Descriptions

The key to OOD detection has two aspects: generalized feature representation and precise category description. Recently, vision-language models such as CLIP provide significant advances in both two issues, but constructing precise category descriptions is still in its infancy due to the absence of unseen categories. This work introduces two hierarchical contexts, namely perceptual context and spurious context, to carefully describe the precise category boundary through automatic prompt tuning. Specifically, perceptual contexts perceive the inter-category difference (e.g., cats vs apples) for current classification tasks, while spurious contexts further identify spurious (similar but exactly not) OOD samples for every single category (e.g., cats vs panthers, apples vs peaches). The two contexts hierarchically construct the precise description for a certain category, which is, first roughly classifying a sample to the predicted category and then delicately identifying whether it is truly an ID sample or actually OOD. Moreover, the precise descriptions for those categories within the vision-language framework present a novel application: CATegory-EXtensible OOD detection (CATEX). One can efficiently extend the set of recognizable categories by simply merging the hierarchical contexts learned under different sub-task settings. And extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate CATEX's effectiveness, robustness, and category-extensibility. For instance, CATEX consistently surpasses the rivals by a large margin with several protocols on the challenging ImageNet-1K dataset. In addition, we offer new insights on how to efficiently scale up the prompt engineering in vision-language models to recognize thousands of object categories, as well as how to incorporate large language models (like GPT-3) to boost zero-shot applications. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/alibaba/catex.

cs.CV↗

Tree-of-Table: Unleashing the Power of LLMs for Enhanced Large-Scale Table Understanding

The ubiquity and value of tables as semi-structured data across various domains necessitate advanced methods for understanding their complexity and vast amounts of information. Despite the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in advancing the natural language understanding frontier, their application to large-scale tabular data presents significant challenges, specifically regarding table size and complex intricate relationships. Existing works have shown promise with small-scale tables but often flounder when tasked with the complex reasoning required by larger, interconnected tables found in real-world scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce "Tree-of-Table", a novel approach designed to enhance LLMs' reasoning capabilities over large and complex tables. Our method employs Table Condensation and Decomposition to distill and reorganize relevant data into a manageable format, followed by the construction of a hierarchical Table-Tree that facilitates tree-structured reasoning. Through a meticulous Table-Tree Execution process, we systematically unravel the tree-structured reasoning chain to derive the solutions. Experiments across diverse datasets, including WikiTQ, TableFact, FeTaQA, and BIRD, demonstrate that Tree-of-Table sets a new benchmark with superior performance, showcasing remarkable efficiency and generalization capabilities in large-scale table reasoning.

cs.CL↗

Bridge-IF: Learning Inverse Protein Folding with Markov Bridges

Inverse protein folding is a fundamental task in computational protein design, which aims to design protein sequences that fold into the desired backbone structures. While the development of machine learning algorithms for this task has seen significant success, the prevailing approaches, which predominantly employ a discriminative formulation, frequently encounter the error accumulation issue and often fail to capture the extensive variety of plausible sequences. To fill these gaps, we propose Bridge-IF, a generative diffusion bridge model for inverse folding, which is designed to learn the probabilistic dependency between the distributions of backbone structures and protein sequences. Specifically, we harness an expressive structure encoder to propose a discrete, informative prior derived from structures, and establish a Markov bridge to connect this prior with native sequences. During the inference stage, Bridge-IF progressively refines the prior sequence, culminating in a more plausible design. Moreover, we introduce a reparameterization perspective on Markov bridge models, from which we derive a simplified loss function that facilitates more effective training. We also modulate protein language models (PLMs) with structural conditions to precisely approximate the Markov bridge process, thereby significantly enhancing generation performance while maintaining parameter-efficient training. Extensive experiments on well-established benchmarks demonstrate that Bridge-IF predominantly surpasses existing baselines in sequence recovery and excels in the design of plausible proteins with high foldability. The code is available at https://github.com/violet-sto/Bridge-IF.

cs.LG↗

Enhancing Multiple Dimensions of Trustworthiness in LLMs via Sparse Activation Control

As the development and application of Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance rapidly, enhancing their trustworthiness and aligning them with human preferences has become a critical area of research. Traditional methods rely heavily on extensive data for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), but representation engineering offers a new, training-free approach. This technique leverages semantic features to control the representation of LLM's intermediate hidden states, enabling the model to meet specific requirements such as increased honesty or heightened safety awareness. However, a significant challenge arises when attempting to fulfill multiple requirements simultaneously. It proves difficult to encode various semantic contents, like honesty and safety, into a singular semantic feature, restricting its practicality. In this work, we address this issue through ``Sparse Activation Control''. By delving into the intrinsic mechanisms of LLMs, we manage to identify and pinpoint components that are closely related to specific tasks within the model, i.e., attention heads. These heads display sparse characteristics that allow for near-independent control over different tasks. Our experiments, conducted on the open-source Llama series models, have yielded encouraging results. The models were able to align with human preferences on issues of safety, factuality, and bias concurrently.

cs.CL↗

Rethinking Out-of-Distribution Detection on Imbalanced Data Distribution

Detecting and rejecting unknown out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is critical for deployed neural networks to void unreliable predictions. In real-world scenarios, however, the efficacy of existing OOD detection methods is often impeded by the inherent imbalance of in-distribution (ID) data, which causes significant performance decline. Through statistical observations, we have identified two common challenges faced by different OOD detectors: misidentifying tail class ID samples as OOD, while erroneously predicting OOD samples as head class from ID. To explain this phenomenon, we introduce a generalized statistical framework, termed ImOOD, to formulate the OOD detection problem on imbalanced data distribution. Consequently, the theoretical analysis reveals that there exists a class-aware bias item between balanced and imbalanced OOD detection, which contributes to the performance gap. Building upon this finding, we present a unified training-time regularization technique to mitigate the bias and boost imbalanced OOD detectors across architecture designs. Our theoretically grounded method translates into consistent improvements on the representative CIFAR10-LT, CIFAR100-LT, and ImageNet-LT benchmarks against several state-of-the-art OOD detection approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/alibaba/imood.

cs.CV↗

Enhancing LLM's Cognition via Structurization

When reading long-form text, human cognition is complex and structurized. While large language models (LLMs) process input contexts through a causal and sequential perspective, this approach can potentially limit their ability to handle intricate and complex inputs effectively. To enhance LLM's cognition capability, this paper presents a novel concept of context structurization. Specifically, we transform the plain, unordered contextual sentences into well-ordered and hierarchically structurized elements. By doing so, LLMs can better grasp intricate and extended contexts through precise attention and information-seeking along the organized structures. Extensive evaluations are conducted across various model architectures and sizes (including a series of auto-regressive LLMs as well as BERT-like masking models) on a diverse set of NLP tasks (e.g., context-based question-answering, exhaustive hallucination evaluation, and passage-level dense retrieval). Empirical results show consistent and significant performance gains afforded by a single-round structurization. In particular, we boost the open-sourced LLaMA2-70B model to achieve comparable performance against GPT-3.5-Turbo as the hallucination evaluator. Besides, we show the feasibility of distilling advanced LLMs' language processing abilities to a smaller yet effective StruXGPT-7B to execute structurization, addressing the practicality of our approach. Code is available at https://github.com/alibaba/struxgpt.

cs.CL↗

Instance-adaptive Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting emerges as a simple and effective strategy for enhancing the performance of large language models (LLMs) in real-world reasoning tasks. Nonetheless, the efficacy of a singular, task-level prompt uniformly applied across the whole of instances is inherently limited since one prompt cannot be a good partner for all, a more appropriate approach should consider the interaction between the prompt and each instance meticulously. This work introduces an instance-adaptive prompting algorithm as an alternative zero-shot CoT reasoning scheme by adaptively differentiating good and bad prompts. Concretely, we first employ analysis on LLMs through the lens of information flow to detect the mechanism under zero-shot CoT reasoning, in which we discover that information flows from question to prompt and question to rationale jointly influence the reasoning results most. We notice that a better zero-shot CoT reasoning needs the prompt to obtain semantic information from the question then the rationale aggregates sufficient information from the question directly and via the prompt indirectly. On the contrary, lacking any of those would probably lead to a bad one. Stem from that, we further propose an instance-adaptive prompting strategy (IAP) for zero-shot CoT reasoning. Experiments conducted with LLaMA-2, LLaMA-3, and Qwen on math, logic, and commonsense reasoning tasks (e.g., GSM8K, MMLU, Causal Judgement) obtain consistent improvement, demonstrating that the instance-adaptive zero-shot CoT prompting performs better than other task-level methods with some curated prompts or sophisticated procedures, showing the significance of our findings in the zero-shot CoT reasoning mechanism.

cs.CL↗

Plan-on-Graph: Self-Correcting Adaptive Planning of Large Language Model on Knowledge Graphs

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities on complex tasks, but they still suffer from out-of-date knowledge, hallucinations, and opaque decision-making. In contrast, Knowledge Graphs (KGs) can provide explicit and editable knowledge for LLMs to alleviate these issues. Existing paradigm of KG-augmented LLM manually predefines the breadth of exploration space and requires flawless navigation in KGs. However, this paradigm cannot adaptively explore reasoning paths in KGs based on the question semantics and self-correct erroneous reasoning paths, resulting in a bottleneck in efficiency and effect. To address these limitations, we propose a novel self-correcting adaptive planning paradigm for KG-augmented LLM named Plan-on-Graph (PoG), which first decomposes the question into several sub-objectives and then repeats the process of adaptively exploring reasoning paths, updating memory, and reflecting on the need to self-correct erroneous reasoning paths until arriving at the answer. Specifically, three important mechanisms of Guidance, Memory, and Reflection are designed to work together, to guarantee the adaptive breadth of self-correcting planning for graph reasoning. Finally, extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of PoG.

cs.AI↗

INSIDE: LLMs' Internal States Retain the Power of Hallucination Detection

Knowledge hallucination have raised widespread concerns for the security and reliability of deployed LLMs. Previous efforts in detecting hallucinations have been employed at logit-level uncertainty estimation or language-level self-consistency evaluation, where the semantic information is inevitably lost during the token-decoding procedure. Thus, we propose to explore the dense semantic information retained within LLMs' \textbf{IN}ternal \textbf{S}tates for halluc\textbf{I}nation \textbf{DE}tection (\textbf{INSIDE}). In particular, a simple yet effective \textbf{EigenScore} metric is proposed to better evaluate responses' self-consistency, which exploits the eigenvalues of responses' covariance matrix to measure the semantic consistency/diversity in the dense embedding space. Furthermore, from the perspective of self-consistent hallucination detection, a test time feature clipping approach is explored to truncate extreme activations in the internal states, which reduces overconfident generations and potentially benefits the detection of overconfident hallucinations. Extensive experiments and ablation studies are performed on several popular LLMs and question-answering (QA) benchmarks, showing the effectiveness of our proposal.

cs.CL↗

From Redundancy to Relevance: Information Flow in LVLMs Across Reasoning Tasks

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) achieve great performance on visual-language reasoning tasks, however, the black-box nature of LVLMs hinders in-depth research on the reasoning mechanism. As all images need to be converted into image tokens to fit the input format of large language models (LLMs) along with natural language prompts, sequential visual representation is essential to the performance of LVLMs, and the information flow analysis approach can be an effective tool for determining interactions between these representations. In this paper, we propose integrating attention analysis with LLaVA-CAM, concretely, attention scores highlight relevant regions during forward propagation, while LLaVA-CAM captures gradient changes through backward propagation, revealing key image features. By exploring the information flow from the perspective of visual representation contribution, we observe that it tends to converge in shallow layers but diversify in deeper layers. To validate our analysis, we conduct comprehensive experiments with truncation strategies across various LVLMs for visual question answering and image captioning tasks, and experimental results not only verify our hypothesis but also reveal a consistent pattern of information flow convergence in the corresponding layers, and the information flow cliff layer will be different due to different contexts. The paper's source code can be accessed from \url{https://github.com/zhangbaijin/From-Redundancy-to-Relevance}

cs.CL↗

Llama SLayer 8B: Shallow Layers Hold the Key to Knowledge Injection

As a manner to augment pre-trained large language models (LLM), knowledge injection is critical to develop vertical domain large models and has been widely studied. Although most current approaches, including parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and block expansion methods, uniformly apply knowledge across all LLM layers, it raises the question: are all layers equally crucial for knowledge injection? We begin by evaluating the importance of each layer in finding the optimal layer range for knowledge injection. Intuitively, the more important layers should play a more critical role in knowledge injection and deserve a denser injection. We observe performance dips in question-answering benchmarks after the removal or expansion of the shallow layers, and the degradation shrinks as the layer gets deeper, indicating that the shallow layers hold the key to knowledge injection. This insight leads us to propose the S strategy, a post-pretraining strategy of selectively enhancing shallow layers while pruning the less effective deep ones. Based on this strategy, we introduce Llama Slayer-8B and Llama Slayer-8B-Instruct. We experimented on the corpus of code $\&$ math and demonstrated the effectiveness of our strategy. Further experiments across different LLM, Mistral-7B, and a legal corpus confirmed the general applicability of the approach, underscoring its wide-ranging efficacy. Our code is available at: \https://github.com/txchen-USTC/Llama-Slayer

cs.CL↗

SAC-KG: Exploiting Large Language Models as Skilled Automatic Constructors for Domain Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge graphs (KGs) play a pivotal role in knowledge-intensive tasks across specialized domains, where the acquisition of precise and dependable knowledge is crucial. However, existing KG construction methods heavily rely on human intervention to attain qualified KGs, which severely hinders the practical applicability in real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a general KG construction framework, named SAC-KG, to exploit large language models (LLMs) as Skilled Automatic Constructors for domain Knowledge Graph. SAC-KG effectively involves LLMs as domain experts to generate specialized and precise multi-level KGs. Specifically, SAC-KG consists of three components: Generator, Verifier, and Pruner. For a given entity, Generator produces its relations and tails from raw domain corpora, to construct a specialized single-level KG. Verifier and Pruner then work together to ensure precision by correcting generation errors and determining whether newly produced tails require further iteration for the next-level KG.Experiments demonstrate that SAC-KG automatically constructs a domain KG at the scale of over one million nodes and achieves a precision of 89.32%, leading to a superior performance with over 20% increase in precision rate compared to existing state-of-the-art methods for the KG construction task.

cs.AI↗

Interpreting and Improving Large Language Models in Arithmetic Calculation

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential across numerous applications and have shown an emergent ability to tackle complex reasoning tasks, such as mathematical computations. However, even for the simplest arithmetic calculations, the intrinsic mechanisms behind LLMs remain mysterious, making it challenging to ensure reliability. In this work, we delve into uncovering a specific mechanism by which LLMs execute calculations. Through comprehensive experiments, we find that LLMs frequently involve a small fraction (< 5%) of attention heads, which play a pivotal role in focusing on operands and operators during calculation processes. Subsequently, the information from these operands is processed through multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), progressively leading to the final solution. These pivotal heads/MLPs, though identified on a specific dataset, exhibit transferability across different datasets and even distinct tasks. This insight prompted us to investigate the potential benefits of selectively fine-tuning these essential heads/MLPs to boost the LLMs' computational performance. We empirically find that such precise tuning can yield notable enhancements on mathematical prowess, without compromising the performance on non-mathematical tasks. Our work serves as a preliminary exploration into the arithmetic calculation abilities inherent in LLMs, laying a solid foundation to reveal more intricate mathematical tasks.

cs.CL↗

Self-Learning Symmetric Multi-view Probabilistic Clustering

Multi-view Clustering (MVC) has achieved significant progress, with many efforts dedicated to learn knowledge from multiple views. However, most existing methods are either not applicable or require additional steps for incomplete MVC. Such a limitation results in poor-quality clustering performance and poor missing view adaptation. Besides, noise or outliers might significantly degrade the overall clustering performance, which are not handled well by most existing methods. In this paper, we propose a novel unified framework for incomplete and complete MVC named self-learning symmetric multi-view probabilistic clustering (SLS-MPC). SLS-MPC proposes a novel symmetric multi-view probability estimation and equivalently transforms multi-view pairwise posterior matching probability into composition of each view's individual distribution, which tolerates data missing and might extend to any number of views. Then, SLS-MPC proposes a novel self-learning probability function without any prior knowledge and hyper-parameters to learn each view's individual distribution. Next, graph-context-aware refinement with path propagation and co-neighbor propagation is used to refine pairwise probability, which alleviates the impact of noise and outliers. Finally, SLS-MPC proposes a probabilistic clustering algorithm to adjust clustering assignments by maximizing the joint probability iteratively without category information. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that SLS-MPC outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

A3S: A General Active Clustering Method with Pairwise Constraints

Active clustering aims to boost the clustering performance by integrating human-annotated pairwise constraints through strategic querying. Conventional approaches with semi-supervised clustering schemes encounter high query costs when applied to large datasets with numerous classes. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Adaptive Active Aggregation and Splitting (A3S) framework, falling within the cluster-adjustment scheme in active clustering. A3S features strategic active clustering adjustment on the initial cluster result, which is obtained by an adaptive clustering algorithm. In particular, our cluster adjustment is inspired by the quantitative analysis of Normalized mutual information gain under the information theory framework and can provably improve the clustering quality. The proposed A3S framework significantly elevates the performance and scalability of active clustering. In extensive experiments across diverse real-world datasets, A3S achieves desired results with significantly fewer human queries compared with existing methods.

cs.LG↗

Learning Neural Volumetric Pose Features for Camera Localization

We introduce a novel neural volumetric pose feature, termed PoseMap, designed to enhance camera localization by encapsulating the information between images and the associated camera poses. Our framework leverages an Absolute Pose Regression (APR) architecture, together with an augmented NeRF module. This integration not only facilitates the generation of novel views to enrich the training dataset but also enables the learning of effective pose features. Additionally, we extend our architecture for self-supervised online alignment, allowing our method to be used and fine-tuned for unlabelled images within a unified framework. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves 14.28% and 20.51% performance gain on average in indoor and outdoor benchmark scenes, outperforming existing APR methods with state-of-the-art accuracy.

cs.CV↗

URRL-IMVC: Unified and Robust Representation Learning for Incomplete Multi-View Clustering

Incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC) aims to cluster multi-view data that are only partially available. This poses two main challenges: effectively leveraging multi-view information and mitigating the impact of missing views. Prevailing solutions employ cross-view contrastive learning and missing view recovery techniques. However, they either neglect valuable complementary information by focusing only on consensus between views or provide unreliable recovered views due to the absence of supervision. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Unified and Robust Representation Learning for Incomplete Multi-View Clustering (URRL-IMVC). URRL-IMVC directly learns a unified embedding that is robust to view missing conditions by integrating information from multiple views and neighboring samples. Firstly, to overcome the limitations of cross-view contrastive learning, URRL-IMVC incorporates an attention-based auto-encoder framework to fuse multi-view information and generate unified embeddings. Secondly, URRL-IMVC directly enhances the robustness of the unified embedding against view-missing conditions through KNN imputation and data augmentation techniques, eliminating the need for explicit missing view recovery. Finally, incremental improvements are introduced to further enhance the overall performance, such as the Clustering Module and the customization of the Encoder. We extensively evaluate the proposed URRL-IMVC framework on various benchmark datasets, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, comprehensive ablation studies are performed to validate the effectiveness of our design.

cs.LG↗

AddressCLIP: Empowering Vision-Language Models for City-wide Image Address Localization

In this study, we introduce a new problem raised by social media and photojournalism, named Image Address Localization (IAL), which aims to predict the readable textual address where an image was taken. Existing two-stage approaches involve predicting geographical coordinates and converting them into human-readable addresses, which can lead to ambiguity and be resource-intensive. In contrast, we propose an end-to-end framework named AddressCLIP to solve the problem with more semantics, consisting of two key ingredients: i) image-text alignment to align images with addresses and scene captions by contrastive learning, and ii) image-geography matching to constrain image features with the spatial distance in terms of manifold learning. Additionally, we have built three datasets from Pittsburgh and San Francisco on different scales specifically for the IAL problem. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves compelling performance on the proposed datasets and outperforms representative transfer learning methods for vision-language models. Furthermore, extensive ablations and visualizations exhibit the effectiveness of the proposed method. The datasets and source code are available at https://github.com/xsx1001/AddressCLIP.

cs.CV↗