arXiv subjects

Qingyang Wu

Publications and source records attributed to Qingyang Wu.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Surveying Attitudinal Alignment Between Large Language Models Vs. Humans Towards 17 Sustainable Development Goals

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as potent tools for advancing the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, the attitudinal disparities between LLMs and humans towards these goals can pose significant challenges. This study conducts a comprehensive review and analysis of the existing literature on the attitudes of LLMs towards the 17 SDGs, emphasizing the comparison between their attitudes and support for each goal and those of humans. We examine the potential disparities, primarily focusing on aspects such as understanding and emotions, cultural and regional differences, task objective variations, and factors considered in the decision-making process. These disparities arise from the underrepresentation and imbalance in LLM training data, historical biases, quality issues, lack of contextual understanding, and skewed ethical values reflected. The study also investigates the risks and harms that may arise from neglecting the attitudes of LLMs towards the SDGs, including the exacerbation of social inequalities, racial discrimination, environmental destruction, and resource wastage. To address these challenges, we propose strategies and recommendations to guide and regulate the application of LLMs, ensuring their alignment with the principles and goals of the SDGs, and therefore creating a more just, inclusive, and sustainable future.

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arXiv2024

DECOR: Improving Coherence in L2 English Writing with a Novel Benchmark for Incoherence Detection, Reasoning, and Rewriting

Coherence in writing, an aspect that second-language (L2) English learners often struggle with, is crucial in assessing L2 English writing. Existing automated writing evaluation systems primarily use basic surface linguistic features to detect coherence in writing. However, little effort has been made to correct the detected incoherence, which could significantly benefit L2 language learners seeking to improve their writing. To bridge this gap, we introduce DECOR, a novel benchmark that includes expert annotations for detecting incoherence in L2 English writing, identifying the underlying reasons, and rewriting the incoherent sentences. To our knowledge, DECOR is the first coherence assessment dataset specifically designed for improving L2 English writing, featuring pairs of original incoherent sentences alongside their expert-rewritten counterparts. Additionally, we fine-tuned models to automatically detect and rewrite incoherence in student essays. We find that incorporating specific reasons for incoherence during fine-tuning consistently improves the quality of the rewrites, achieving a result that is favored in both automatic and human evaluations.

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arXiv2024

LIONs: An Empirically Optimized Approach to Align Language Models

Alignment is a crucial step to enhance the instruction-following and conversational abilities of language models. Despite many recent work proposing new algorithms, datasets, and training pipelines, there is a lack of comprehensive studies measuring the impact of various design choices throughout the whole training process. We first conduct a rigorous analysis over a three-stage training pipeline consisting of supervised fine-tuning, offline preference learning, and online preference learning. We have found that using techniques like sequence packing, loss masking in SFT, increasing the preference dataset size in DPO, and online DPO training can significantly improve the performance of language models. We then train from Gemma-2b-base and LLama-3-8b-base, and find that our best models exceed the performance of the official instruct models tuned with closed-source data and algorithms. Our code and models can be found at \url{https://github.com/Columbia-NLP-Lab/LionAlignment}.

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arXiv2024

Mamba-Enhanced Text-Audio-Video Alignment Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversations

Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERCs) is a vital area within multimodal interaction research, dedicated to accurately identifying and classifying the emotions expressed by speakers throughout a conversation. Traditional ERC approaches predominantly rely on unimodal cues\-such as text, audio, or visual data\-leading to limitations in their effectiveness. These methods encounter two significant challenges: 1) Consistency in multimodal information. Before integrating various modalities, it is crucial to ensure that the data from different sources is aligned and coherent. 2) Contextual information capture. Successfully fusing multimodal features requires a keen understanding of the evolving emotional tone, especially in lengthy dialogues where emotions may shift and develop over time. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Mamba-enhanced Text-Audio-Video alignment network (MaTAV) for the ERC task. MaTAV is with the advantages of aligning unimodal features to ensure consistency across different modalities and handling long input sequences to better capture contextual multimodal information. The extensive experiments on the MELD and IEMOCAP datasets demonstrate that MaTAV significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on the ERC task with a big margin.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

kNN-ICL: Compositional Task-Oriented Parsing Generalization with Nearest Neighbor In-Context Learning

Task-Oriented Parsing (TOP) enables conversational assistants to interpret user commands expressed in natural language, transforming them into structured outputs that combine elements of both natural language and intent/slot tags. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in synthesizing computer programs based on a natural language prompt, mitigating the gap between natural language and structured programs. Our paper focuses on harnessing the capabilities of LLMs for semantic parsing tasks, addressing the following three key research questions: 1) How can LLMs be effectively utilized for semantic parsing tasks? 2) What defines an effective prompt? and 3) How can LLM overcome the length constraint and streamline prompt design by including all examples as prompts? We introduce k Nearest Neighbor In-Context Learning(kNN-ICL), which simplifies prompt engineering by allowing it to be built on top of any design strategy while providing access to all demo examples. Extensive experiments show that: 1)Simple ICL without kNN search can achieve a comparable performance with strong supervised models on the TOP tasks, and 2) kNN-ICL significantly improves the comprehension of complex requests by seamlessly integrating ICL with a nearest-neighbor approach. Notably, this enhancement is achieved without the need for additional data or specialized prompts.

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arXiv2023

Visual Instruction Tuning

Instruction tuning large language models (LLMs) using machine-generated instruction-following data has improved zero-shot capabilities on new tasks, but the idea is less explored in the multimodal field. In this paper, we present the first attempt to use language-only GPT-4 to generate multimodal language-image instruction-following data. By instruction tuning on such generated data, we introduce LLaVA: Large Language and Vision Assistant, an end-to-end trained large multimodal model that connects a vision encoder and LLM for general-purpose visual and language understanding.Our early experiments show that LLaVA demonstrates impressive multimodel chat abilities, sometimes exhibiting the behaviors of multimodal GPT-4 on unseen images/instructions, and yields a 85.1% relative score compared with GPT-4 on a synthetic multimodal instruction-following dataset. When fine-tuned on Science QA, the synergy of LLaVA and GPT-4 achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 92.53%. We make GPT-4 generated visual instruction tuning data, our model and code base publicly available.

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arXiv2023

KRLS: Improving End-to-End Response Generation in Task Oriented Dialog with Reinforced Keywords Learning

In task-oriented dialogs (TOD), reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms train a model to directly optimize response for task-related metrics. However, RL needs to perform exploration, which can be time-consuming due to the slow auto-regressive sequence generation process. We investigate an approach to create a more efficient RL-based algorithm to improve TOD performance in an offline setting. First, we use a faster generation procedure that samples from independent next-word distributions after training the language model (LM) with supervised learning. We then introduce a fine-grained reward function to help the model focus on learning key information in a dialog, by measuring the importance and semantic closeness of each generated token. Experiments on the MultiWoZ dataset show our new training algorithm, Keywords Reinforcement Learning with Next-word Sampling (KRLS), achieves state-of-the-art performance on the end-to-end response generation task, with a 15% training time reduction compared to a standard RL algorithm using auto-regressive generation.

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arXiv2023

ARNOLD: A Benchmark for Language-Grounded Task Learning With Continuous States in Realistic 3D Scenes

Understanding the continuous states of objects is essential for task learning and planning in the real world. However, most existing task learning benchmarks assume discrete (e.g., binary) object goal states, which poses challenges for the learning of complex tasks and transferring learned policy from simulated environments to the real world. Furthermore, state discretization limits a robot's ability to follow human instructions based on the grounding of actions and states. To tackle these challenges, we present ARNOLD, a benchmark that evaluates language-grounded task learning with continuous states in realistic 3D scenes. ARNOLD is comprised of 8 language-conditioned tasks that involve understanding object states and learning policies for continuous goals. To promote language-instructed learning, we provide expert demonstrations with template-generated language descriptions. We assess task performance by utilizing the latest language-conditioned policy learning models. Our results indicate that current models for language-conditioned manipulations continue to experience significant challenges in novel goal-state generalizations, scene generalizations, and object generalizations. These findings highlight the need to develop new algorithms that address this gap and underscore the potential for further research in this area. Project website: https://arnold-benchmark.github.io.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

DiactTOD: Learning Generalizable Latent Dialogue Acts for Controllable Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Dialogue act annotations are important to improve response generation quality in task-oriented dialogue systems. However, it can be challenging to use dialogue acts to control response generation in a generalizable way because different datasets and tasks may have incompatible annotations. While alternative methods that utilize latent action spaces or reinforcement learning do not require explicit annotations, they may lack interpretability or face difficulties defining task-specific rewards. In this work, we present a novel end-to-end latent dialogue act model (DiactTOD) that represents dialogue acts in a latent space. DiactTOD, when pre-trained on a large corpus, is able to predict and control dialogue acts to generate controllable responses using these latent representations in a zero-shot fashion. Our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of experimental settings on the MultiWOZ dataset, including zero-shot, few-shot, and full data fine-tuning with both end-to-end and policy optimization configurations.

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arXiv2023

Stateful Memory-Augmented Transformers for Efficient Dialogue Modeling

Transformer encoder-decoder models have achieved great performance in dialogue generation tasks, however, their inability to process long dialogue history often leads to truncation of the context To address this problem, we propose a novel memory-augmented transformer that is compatible with existing pre-trained encoder-decoder models and enables efficient preservation of the dialogue history information. By incorporating a separate memory module alongside the pre-trained transformer, the model can effectively interchange information between the memory states and the current input context. We evaluate our model on three dialogue datasets and two language modeling datasets. Experimental results show that our method has achieved superior efficiency and performance compared to other pre-trained Transformer baselines.

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arXiv2023

Using Textual Interface to Align External Knowledge for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Traditional end-to-end task-oriented dialogue systems have been built with a modularized design. However, such design often causes misalignment between the agent response and external knowledge, due to inadequate representation of information. Furthermore, its evaluation metrics emphasize assessing the agent's pre-lexicalization response, neglecting the quality of the completed response. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm that uses a textual interface to align external knowledge and eliminate redundant processes. We demonstrate our paradigm in practice through MultiWOZ-Remake, including an interactive textual interface built for the MultiWOZ database and a correspondingly re-processed dataset. We train an end-to-end dialogue system to evaluate this new dataset. The experimental results show that our approach generates more natural final responses and achieves a greater task success rate compared to the previous models.

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arXiv2023

GLIGEN: Open-Set Grounded Text-to-Image Generation

Large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have made amazing advances. However, the status quo is to use text input alone, which can impede controllability. In this work, we propose GLIGEN, Grounded-Language-to-Image Generation, a novel approach that builds upon and extends the functionality of existing pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models by enabling them to also be conditioned on grounding inputs. To preserve the vast concept knowledge of the pre-trained model, we freeze all of its weights and inject the grounding information into new trainable layers via a gated mechanism. Our model achieves open-world grounded text2img generation with caption and bounding box condition inputs, and the grounding ability generalizes well to novel spatial configurations and concepts. GLIGEN's zero-shot performance on COCO and LVIS outperforms that of existing supervised layout-to-image baselines by a large margin.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

FaceChat: An Emotion-Aware Face-to-face Dialogue Framework

While current dialogue systems like ChatGPT have made significant advancements in text-based interactions, they often overlook the potential of other modalities in enhancing the overall user experience. We present FaceChat, a web-based dialogue framework that enables emotionally-sensitive and face-to-face conversations. By seamlessly integrating cutting-edge technologies in natural language processing, computer vision, and speech processing, FaceChat delivers a highly immersive and engaging user experience. FaceChat framework has a wide range of potential applications, including counseling, emotional support, and personalized customer service. The system is designed to be simple and flexible as a platform for future researchers to advance the field of multimodal dialogue systems. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/qywu/FaceChat.

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arXiv2022

AU-Aware Vision Transformers for Biased Facial Expression Recognition

Studies have proven that domain bias and label bias exist in different Facial Expression Recognition (FER) datasets, making it hard to improve the performance of a specific dataset by adding other datasets. For the FER bias issue, recent researches mainly focus on the cross-domain issue with advanced domain adaption algorithms. This paper addresses another problem: how to boost FER performance by leveraging cross-domain datasets. Unlike the coarse and biased expression label, the facial Action Unit (AU) is fine-grained and objective suggested by psychological studies. Motivated by this, we resort to the AU information of different FER datasets for performance boosting and make contributions as follows. First, we experimentally show that the naive joint training of multiple FER datasets is harmful to the FER performance of individual datasets. We further introduce expression-specific mean images and AU cosine distances to measure FER dataset bias. This novel measurement shows consistent conclusions with experimental degradation of joint training. Second, we propose a simple yet conceptually-new framework, AU-aware Vision Transformer (AU-ViT). It improves the performance of individual datasets by jointly training auxiliary datasets with AU or pseudo-AU labels. We also find that the AU-ViT is robust to real-world occlusions. Moreover, for the first time, we prove that a carefully-initialized ViT achieves comparable performance to advanced deep convolutional networks. Our AU-ViT achieves state-of-the-art performance on three popular datasets, namely 91.10% on RAF-DB, 65.59% on AffectNet, and 90.15% on FERPlus. The code and models will be released soon.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Video-based Smoky Vehicle Detection with A Coarse-to-Fine Framework

Automatic smoky vehicle detection in videos is a superior solution to the traditional expensive remote sensing one with ultraviolet-infrared light devices for environmental protection agencies. However, it is challenging to distinguish vehicle smoke from shadow and wet regions coming from rear vehicle or clutter roads, and could be worse due to limited annotated data. In this paper, we first introduce a real-world large-scale smoky vehicle dataset with 75,000 annotated smoky vehicle images, facilitating the effective training of advanced deep learning models. To enable fair algorithm comparison, we also build a smoky vehicle video dataset including 163 long videos with segment-level annotations. Moreover, we present a new Coarse-to-fine Deep Smoky vehicle detection (CoDeS) framework for efficient smoky vehicle detection. The CoDeS first leverages a light-weight YOLO detector for fast smoke detection with high recall rate, and then applies a smoke-vehicle matching strategy to eliminate non-vehicle smoke, and finally uses a elaborately-designed 3D model to further refine the results in spatial temporal space. Extensive experiments in four metrics demonstrate that our framework is significantly superior to those hand-crafted feature based methods and recent advanced methods. The code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/pengxj/smokyvehicle.

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arXiv2022

Memformer: A Memory-Augmented Transformer for Sequence Modeling

Transformers have reached remarkable success in sequence modeling. However, these models have efficiency issues as they need to store all the history token-level representations as memory. We present Memformer, an efficient neural network for sequence modeling, that utilizes an external dynamic memory to encode and retrieve past information. Our model achieves linear time complexity and constant memory space complexity when processing long sequences. We also propose a new optimization scheme, memory replay back-propagation (MRBP), which promotes long-range back-propagation through time with a significantly reduced memory requirement. Experimental results show that Memformer has achieved comparable performance compared to the baselines by using 8.1x less memory space and 3.2x faster on inference. Analysis of the attention pattern shows that our external memory slots can encode and retain important information through timesteps.

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arXiv2021

DG2: Data Augmentation Through Document Grounded Dialogue Generation

Collecting data for training dialog systems can be extremely expensive due to the involvement of human participants and need for extensive annotation. Especially in document-grounded dialog systems, human experts need to carefully read the unstructured documents to answer the users' questions. As a result, existing document-grounded dialog datasets are relatively small-scale and obstruct the effective training of dialogue systems. In this paper, we propose an automatic data augmentation technique grounded on documents through a generative dialogue model. The dialogue model consists of a user bot and agent bot that can synthesize diverse dialogues given an input document, which are then used to train a downstream model. When supplementing the original dataset, our method achieves significant improvement over traditional data augmentation methods. We also achieve great performance in the low-resource setting.

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arXiv2021

Alternating Recurrent Dialog Model with Large-scale Pre-trained Language Models

Existing dialog system models require extensive human annotations and are difficult to generalize to different tasks. The recent success of large pre-trained language models such as BERT and GPT-2 (Devlin et al., 2019; Radford et al., 2019) have suggested the effectiveness of incorporating language priors in down-stream NLP tasks. However, how much pre-trained language models can help dialog response generation is still under exploration. In this paper, we propose a simple, general, and effective framework: Alternating Roles Dialog Model (ARDM). ARDM models each speaker separately and takes advantage of the large pre-trained language model. It requires no supervision from human annotations such as belief states or dialog acts to achieve effective conversations. ARDM outperforms or is on par with state-of-the-art methods on two popular task-oriented dialog datasets: CamRest676 and MultiWOZ. Moreover, we can generalize ARDM to more challenging, non-collaborative tasks such as persuasion. In persuasion tasks, ARDM is capable of generating human-like responses to persuade people to donate to a charity.

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