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Ming Yan

Publications and source records attributed to Ming Yan.

At least 181 records · Page 10Linked to original sources

Ladder-of-Thought: Using Knowledge as Steps to Elevate Stance Detection

Stance detection aims to identify the attitude expressed in a document towards a given target. Techniques such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting have advanced this task, enhancing a model's reasoning capabilities through the derivation of intermediate rationales. However, CoT relies primarily on a model's pre-trained internal knowledge during reasoning, thereby neglecting the valuable external information that is previously unknown to the model. This omission, especially within the unsupervised reasoning process, can affect the model's overall performance. Moreover, while CoT enhances Large Language Models (LLMs), smaller LMs, though efficient operationally, face challenges in delivering nuanced reasoning. In response to these identified gaps, we introduce the Ladder-of-Thought (LoT) for the stance detection task. Constructed through a dual-phase Progressive Optimization Framework, LoT directs the small LMs to assimilate high-quality external knowledge, refining the intermediate rationales produced. These bolstered rationales subsequently serve as the foundation for more precise predictions - akin to how a ladder facilitates reaching elevated goals. LoT achieves a balance between efficiency and performance. Our empirical evaluations underscore LoT's efficacy, marking a 16% improvement over GPT-3.5 and a 10% enhancement compared to GPT-3.5 with CoT on stance detection task.

cs.CL↗

ModelScope-Agent: Building Your Customizable Agent System with Open-source Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities to comprehend human intentions, engage in reasoning, and design planning-like behavior. To further unleash the power of LLMs to accomplish complex tasks, there is a growing trend to build agent framework that equips LLMs, such as ChatGPT, with tool-use abilities to connect with massive external APIs. In this work, we introduce ModelScope-Agent, a general and customizable agent framework for real-world applications, based on open-source LLMs as controllers. It provides a user-friendly system library, with customizable engine design to support model training on multiple open-source LLMs, while also enabling seamless integration with both model APIs and common APIs in a unified way. To equip the LLMs with tool-use abilities, a comprehensive framework has been proposed spanning over tool-use data collection, tool retrieval, tool registration, memory control, customized model training, and evaluation for practical real-world applications. Finally, we showcase ModelScopeGPT, a real-world intelligent assistant of ModelScope Community based on the ModelScope-Agent framework, which is able to connect open-source LLMs with more than 1000 public AI models and localized community knowledge in ModelScope. The ModelScope-Agent library\footnote{https://github.com/modelscope/modelscope-agent} and online demo\footnote{https://modelscope.cn/studios/damo/ModelScopeGPT/summary} are now publicly available.

cs.CL↗

COCO: Testing Code Generation Systems via Concretized Instructions

Code generation systems have been extensively developed in recent years to generate source code based on natural language instructions. However, despite their advancements, these systems still face robustness issues where even slightly different instructions can result in significantly different code semantics. Robustness is critical for code generation systems, as it can have significant impacts on software development, software quality, and trust in the generated code. Although existing testing techniques for general text-to-text software can detect some robustness issues, they are limited in effectiveness due to ignoring the characteristics of code generation systems. In this work, we propose a novel technique COCO to test the robustness of code generation systems. It exploits the usage scenario of code generation systems to make the original programming instruction more concrete by incorporating features known to be contained in the original code. A robust system should maintain code semantics for the concretized instruction, and COCO detects robustness inconsistencies when it does not. We evaluated COCO on eight advanced code generation systems, including commercial tools such as Copilot and ChatGPT, using two widely-used datasets. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of COCO in testing the robustness of code generation systems, outperforming two techniques adopted from general text-to-text software testing by 466.66% and 104.02%, respectively. Furthermore, concretized instructions generated by COCO can help reduce robustness inconsistencies by 18.35% to 53.91% through fine-tuning.

cs.SE↗

Improved Visual Fine-tuning with Natural Language Supervision

Fine-tuning a visual pre-trained model can leverage the semantic information from large-scale pre-training data and mitigate the over-fitting problem on downstream vision tasks with limited training examples. While the problem of catastrophic forgetting in pre-trained backbone has been extensively studied for fine-tuning, its potential bias from the corresponding pre-training task and data, attracts less attention. In this work, we investigate this problem by demonstrating that the obtained classifier after fine-tuning will be close to that induced by the pre-trained model. To reduce the bias in the classifier effectively, we introduce a reference distribution obtained from a fixed text classifier, which can help regularize the learned vision classifier. The proposed method, Text Supervised fine-tuning (TeS), is evaluated with diverse pre-trained vision models including ResNet and ViT, and text encoders including BERT and CLIP, on 11 downstream tasks. The consistent improvement with a clear margin over distinct scenarios confirms the effectiveness of our proposal. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/idstcv/TeS}.

cs.CV↗

Sorted L1/L2 Minimization for Sparse Signal Recovery

This paper introduces a novel approach for recovering sparse signals using sorted L1/L2 minimization. The proposed method assigns higher weights to indices with smaller absolute values and lower weights to larger values, effectively preserving the most significant contributions to the signal while promoting sparsity. We present models for both noise-free and noisy scenarios, and rigorously prove the existence of solutions for each case. To solve these models, we adopt a linearization approach inspired by the difference of convex functions algorithm. Our experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art approaches in sparse signal recovery across various circumstances, particularly in support detection.

math.NA↗

Structural, electronic, magnetic properties of Cu-doped lead-apatite Pb$_{10-x}$Cu$_x$(PO$_4$)$_6$O

The recent report of superconductivity in the Cu-doped PbPO compound stimulates the extensive researches on its physical properties. Herein, the detailed atomic and electronic structures of this compound are investigated, which are the necessary information to explain the physical properties, including possible superconductivity. By the first-principles electronic structure calculations, we find that the partial replacement of Pb at $4f$ site by Cu atom, instead of Pb at $6h$ site, plays a crucial role in dominating the electronic state at Fermi energy. The $3d$ electronic orbitals of Cu atom emerge near the Fermi energy and exhibit strong spin-polarization, resulting in the local moment around the doped Cu atom. Particularly, the ground state of Pb$_{10-x}$Cu$_x$(PO$_4$)$_6$O (x = 1) is determined to be a semiconducting phase, in good agreement with the experimental measurements.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

CValues: Measuring the Values of Chinese Large Language Models from Safety to Responsibility

With the rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs), there is a growing concern that they may pose risks or have negative social impacts. Therefore, evaluation of human values alignment is becoming increasingly important. Previous work mainly focuses on assessing the performance of LLMs on certain knowledge and reasoning abilities, while neglecting the alignment to human values, especially in a Chinese context. In this paper, we present CValues, the first Chinese human values evaluation benchmark to measure the alignment ability of LLMs in terms of both safety and responsibility criteria. As a result, we have manually collected adversarial safety prompts across 10 scenarios and induced responsibility prompts from 8 domains by professional experts. To provide a comprehensive values evaluation of Chinese LLMs, we not only conduct human evaluation for reliable comparison, but also construct multi-choice prompts for automatic evaluation. Our findings suggest that while most Chinese LLMs perform well in terms of safety, there is considerable room for improvement in terms of responsibility. Moreover, both the automatic and human evaluation are important for assessing the human values alignment in different aspects. The benchmark and code is available on ModelScope and Github.

cs.CL↗

mPLUG-DocOwl: Modularized Multimodal Large Language Model for Document Understanding

Document understanding refers to automatically extract, analyze and comprehend information from various types of digital documents, such as a web page. Existing Multi-model Large Language Models (MLLMs), including mPLUG-Owl, have demonstrated promising zero-shot capabilities in shallow OCR-free text recognition, indicating their potential for OCR-free document understanding. Nevertheless, without in-domain training, these models tend to ignore fine-grained OCR features, such as sophisticated tables or large blocks of text, which are essential for OCR-free document understanding. In this paper, we propose mPLUG-DocOwl based on mPLUG-Owl for OCR-free document understanding. Specifically, we first construct a instruction tuning dataset featuring a wide range of visual-text understanding tasks. Then, we strengthen the OCR-free document understanding ability by jointly train the model on language-only, general vision-and-language, and document instruction tuning dataset with our unified instruction tuning strategy. We also build an OCR-free document instruction understanding evaluation set LLMDoc to better compare models' capabilities on instruct compliance and document understanding. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing multi-modal models, demonstrating its strong ability of document understanding. Besides, without specific fine-tuning, mPLUG-DocOwl generalizes well on various downstream tasks. Our code, models, training data and evaluation set are available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/mPLUG-DocOwl.

cs.CL↗

Revisiting Deep Neural Network Test Coverage from the Test Effectiveness Perspective

Many test coverage metrics have been proposed to measure the Deep Neural Network (DNN) testing effectiveness, including structural coverage and non-structural coverage. These test coverage metrics are proposed based on the fundamental assumption: they are correlated with test effectiveness. However, the fundamental assumption is still not validated sufficiently and reasonably, which brings question on the usefulness of DNN test coverage. This paper conducted a revisiting study on the existing DNN test coverage from the test effectiveness perspective, to effectively validate the fundamental assumption. Here, we carefully considered the diversity of subjects, three test effectiveness criteria, and both typical and state-of-the-art test coverage metrics. Different from all the existing studies that deliver negative conclusions on the usefulness of existing DNN test coverage, we identified some positive conclusions on their usefulness from the test effectiveness perspective. In particular, we found the complementary relationship between structural and non-structural coverage and identified the practical usage scenarios and promising research directions for these existing test coverage metrics.

cs.SE↗

Youku-mPLUG: A 10 Million Large-scale Chinese Video-Language Dataset for Pre-training and Benchmarks

To promote the development of Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) and multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) in the Chinese community, we firstly release the largest public Chinese high-quality video-language dataset named Youku-mPLUG, which is collected from Youku, a well-known Chinese video-sharing website, with strict criteria of safety, diversity, and quality. Youku-mPLUG contains 10 million Chinese video-text pairs filtered from 400 million raw videos across a wide range of 45 diverse categories for large-scale pre-training. In addition, to facilitate a comprehensive evaluation of video-language models, we carefully build the largest human-annotated Chinese benchmarks covering three popular video-language tasks of cross-modal retrieval, video captioning, and video category classification. Youku-mPLUG can enable researchers to conduct more in-depth multimodal research and develop better applications in the future. Furthermore, we release popular video-language pre-training models, ALPRO and mPLUG-2, and our proposed modularized decoder-only model mPLUG-video pre-trained on Youku-mPLUG. Experiments show that models pre-trained on Youku-mPLUG gain up to 23.1% improvement in video category classification. Besides, mPLUG-video achieves a new state-of-the-art result on these benchmarks with 80.5% top-1 accuracy in video category classification and 68.9 CIDEr score in video captioning, respectively. Finally, we scale up mPLUG-video based on the frozen Bloomz with only 1.7% trainable parameters as Chinese multimodal LLM, and demonstrate impressive instruction and video understanding ability. The zero-shot instruction understanding experiment indicates that pretraining with Youku-mPLUG can enhance the ability to comprehend overall and detailed visual semantics, recognize scene text, and leverage open-domain knowledge.

cs.CV↗

Distinguish Before Answer: Generating Contrastive Explanation as Knowledge for Commonsense Question Answering

Existing knowledge-enhanced methods have achieved remarkable results in certain QA tasks via obtaining diverse knowledge from different knowledge bases. However, limited by the properties of retrieved knowledge, they still have trouble benefiting from both the knowledge relevance and distinguishment simultaneously. To address the challenge, we propose CPACE, a Concept-centric Prompt-bAsed Contrastive Explanation Generation model, which aims to convert obtained symbolic knowledge into a contrastive explanation for better distinguishing the differences among given candidates. Firstly, following previous works, we retrieve different types of symbolic knowledge with a concept-centric knowledge extraction module. After that, we generate corresponding contrastive explanations using acquired symbolic knowledge and explanation prompts as guidance for better modeling the knowledge distinguishment and interpretability. Finally, we regard the generated contrastive explanation as external knowledge for downstream task enhancement. We conduct a series of experiments on three widely-used question-answering datasets: CSQA, QASC, and OBQA. Experimental results demonstrate that with the help of generated contrastive explanation, our CPACE model achieves new SOTA on CSQA (89.8% on the testing set, 0.9% higher than human performance), and gains impressive improvement on QASC and OBQA (4.2% and 3.5%, respectively).

cs.CL↗

ChatPLUG: Open-Domain Generative Dialogue System with Internet-Augmented Instruction Tuning for Digital Human

In this paper, we present ChatPLUG, a Chinese open-domain dialogue system for digital human applications that instruction finetunes on a wide range of dialogue tasks in a unified internet-augmented format. Different from other open-domain dialogue models that focus on large-scale pre-training and scaling up model size or dialogue corpus, we aim to build a powerful and practical dialogue system for digital human with diverse skills and good multi-task generalization by internet-augmented instruction tuning. To this end, we first conduct large-scale pre-training on both common document corpus and dialogue data with curriculum learning, so as to inject various world knowledge and dialogue abilities into ChatPLUG. Then, we collect a wide range of dialogue tasks spanning diverse features of knowledge, personality, multi-turn memory, and empathy, on which we further instruction tune \modelname via unified natural language instruction templates. External knowledge from an internet search is also used during instruction finetuning for alleviating the problem of knowledge hallucinations. We show that \modelname outperforms state-of-the-art Chinese dialogue systems on both automatic and human evaluation, and demonstrates strong multi-task generalization on a variety of text understanding and generation tasks. In addition, we deploy \modelname to real-world applications such as Smart Speaker and Instant Message applications with fast inference. Our models and code will be made publicly available on ModelScope: https://modelscope.cn/models/damo/ChatPLUG-3.7B and Github: https://github.com/X-PLUG/ChatPLUG .

cs.CL↗

AMTSS: An Adaptive Multi-Teacher Single-Student Knowledge Distillation Framework For Multilingual Language Inference

Knowledge distillation is of key importance to launching multilingual pre-trained language models for real applications. To support cost-effective language inference in multilingual settings, we propose AMTSS, an adaptive multi-teacher single-student distillation framework, which allows distilling knowledge from multiple teachers to a single student. We first introduce an adaptive learning strategy and teacher importance weight, which enables a student to effectively learn from max-margin teachers and easily adapt to new languages. Moreover, we present a shared student encoder with different projection layers in support of multiple languages, which contributes to largely reducing development and machine cost. Experimental results show that AMTSS gains competitive results on the public XNLI dataset and the realistic industrial dataset AliExpress (AE) in the E-commerce scenario.

cs.CL↗

From Association to Generation: Text-only Captioning by Unsupervised Cross-modal Mapping

With the development of Vision-Language Pre-training Models (VLPMs) represented by CLIP and ALIGN, significant breakthroughs have been achieved for association-based visual tasks such as image classification and image-text retrieval by the zero-shot capability of CLIP without fine-tuning. However, CLIP is hard to apply to generation-based tasks. This is due to the lack of decoder architecture and pre-training tasks for generation. Although previous works have created generation capacity for CLIP through additional language models, a modality gap between the CLIP representations of different modalities and the inability of CLIP to model the offset of this gap, which fails the concept to transfer across modalities. To solve the problem, we try to map images/videos to the language modality and generate captions from the language modality. In this paper, we propose the K-nearest-neighbor Cross-modality Mapping (Knight), a zero-shot method from association to generation. With text-only unsupervised training, Knight achieves State-of-the-Art performance in zero-shot methods for image captioning and video captioning. Our code is available at https://github.com/junyangwang0410/Knight.

cs.CV↗

Accelerated Sparse Recovery via Gradient Descent with Nonlinear Conjugate Gradient Momentum

This paper applies an idea of adaptive momentum for the nonlinear conjugate gradient to accelerate optimization problems in sparse recovery. Specifically, we consider two types of minimization problems: a (single) differentiable function and the sum of a non-smooth function and a differentiable function. In the first case, we adopt a fixed step size to avoid the traditional line search and establish the convergence analysis of the proposed algorithm for a quadratic problem. This acceleration is further incorporated with an operator splitting technique to deal with the non-smooth function in the second case. We use the convex $\ell_1$ and the nonconvex $\ell_1-\ell_2$ functionals as two case studies to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approaches over traditional methods.

math.OC↗

CIMI4D: A Large Multimodal Climbing Motion Dataset under Human-scene Interactions

Motion capture is a long-standing research problem. Although it has been studied for decades, the majority of research focus on ground-based movements such as walking, sitting, dancing, etc. Off-grounded actions such as climbing are largely overlooked. As an important type of action in sports and firefighting field, the climbing movements is challenging to capture because of its complex back poses, intricate human-scene interactions, and difficult global localization. The research community does not have an in-depth understanding of the climbing action due to the lack of specific datasets. To address this limitation, we collect CIMI4D, a large rock \textbf{C}l\textbf{I}mbing \textbf{M}ot\textbf{I}on dataset from 12 persons climbing 13 different climbing walls. The dataset consists of around 180,000 frames of pose inertial measurements, LiDAR point clouds, RGB videos, high-precision static point cloud scenes, and reconstructed scene meshes. Moreover, we frame-wise annotate touch rock holds to facilitate a detailed exploration of human-scene interaction. The core of this dataset is a blending optimization process, which corrects for the pose as it drifts and is affected by the magnetic conditions. To evaluate the merit of CIMI4D, we perform four tasks which include human pose estimations (with/without scene constraints), pose prediction, and pose generation. The experimental results demonstrate that CIMI4D presents great challenges to existing methods and enables extensive research opportunities. We share the dataset with the research community in http://www.lidarhumanmotion.net/cimi4d/.

cs.CV↗

Correspondence-Free Domain Alignment for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Retrieval

Cross-domain image retrieval aims at retrieving images across different domains to excavate cross-domain classificatory or correspondence relationships. This paper studies a less-touched problem of cross-domain image retrieval, i.e., unsupervised cross-domain image retrieval, considering the following practical assumptions: (i) no correspondence relationship, and (ii) no category annotations. It is challenging to align and bridge distinct domains without cross-domain correspondence. To tackle the challenge, we present a novel Correspondence-free Domain Alignment (CoDA) method to effectively eliminate the cross-domain gap through In-domain Self-matching Supervision (ISS) and Cross-domain Classifier Alignment (CCA). To be specific, ISS is presented to encapsulate discriminative information into the latent common space by elaborating a novel self-matching supervision mechanism. To alleviate the cross-domain discrepancy, CCA is proposed to align distinct domain-specific classifiers. Thanks to the ISS and CCA, our method could encode the discrimination into the domain-invariant embedding space for unsupervised cross-domain image retrieval. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on four benchmark datasets compared with six state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

Construction and Applications of Billion-Scale Pre-Trained Multimodal Business Knowledge Graph

Business Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are important to many enterprises today, providing factual knowledge and structured data that steer many products and make them more intelligent. Despite their promising benefits, building business KG necessitates solving prohibitive issues of deficient structure and multiple modalities. In this paper, we advance the understanding of the practical challenges related to building KG in non-trivial real-world systems. We introduce the process of building an open business knowledge graph (OpenBG) derived from a well-known enterprise, Alibaba Group. Specifically, we define a core ontology to cover various abstract products and consumption demands, with fine-grained taxonomy and multimodal facts in deployed applications. OpenBG is an open business KG of unprecedented scale: 2.6 billion triples with more than 88 million entities covering over 1 million core classes/concepts and 2,681 types of relations. We release all the open resources (OpenBG benchmarks) derived from it for the community and report experimental results of KG-centric tasks. We also run up an online competition based on OpenBG benchmarks, and has attracted thousands of teams. We further pre-train OpenBG and apply it to many KG- enhanced downstream tasks in business scenarios, demonstrating the effectiveness of billion-scale multimodal knowledge for e-commerce. All the resources with codes have been released at \url{https://github.com/OpenBGBenchmark/OpenBG}.

cs.AI↗