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Xu Sun

Publications and source records attributed to Xu Sun.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

FETV: A Benchmark for Fine-Grained Evaluation of Open-Domain Text-to-Video Generation

Recently, open-domain text-to-video (T2V) generation models have made remarkable progress. However, the promising results are mainly shown by the qualitative cases of generated videos, while the quantitative evaluation of T2V models still faces two critical problems. Firstly, existing studies lack fine-grained evaluation of T2V models on different categories of text prompts. Although some benchmarks have categorized the prompts, their categorization either only focuses on a single aspect or fails to consider the temporal information in video generation. Secondly, it is unclear whether the automatic evaluation metrics are consistent with human standards. To address these problems, we propose FETV, a benchmark for Fine-grained Evaluation of Text-to-Video generation. FETV is multi-aspect, categorizing the prompts based on three orthogonal aspects: the major content, the attributes to control and the prompt complexity. FETV is also temporal-aware, which introduces several temporal categories tailored for video generation. Based on FETV, we conduct comprehensive manual evaluations of four representative T2V models, revealing their pros and cons on different categories of prompts from different aspects. We also extend FETV as a testbed to evaluate the reliability of automatic T2V metrics. The multi-aspect categorization of FETV enables fine-grained analysis of the metrics' reliability in different scenarios. We find that existing automatic metrics (e.g., CLIPScore and FVD) correlate poorly with human evaluation. To address this problem, we explore several solutions to improve CLIPScore and FVD, and develop two automatic metrics that exhibit significant higher correlation with humans than existing metrics. Benchmark page: https://github.com/llyx97/FETV.

cs.CV↗

Label Words are Anchors: An Information Flow Perspective for Understanding In-Context Learning

In-context learning (ICL) emerges as a promising capability of large language models (LLMs) by providing them with demonstration examples to perform diverse tasks. However, the underlying mechanism of how LLMs learn from the provided context remains under-explored. In this paper, we investigate the working mechanism of ICL through an information flow lens. Our findings reveal that label words in the demonstration examples function as anchors: (1) semantic information aggregates into label word representations during the shallow computation layers' processing; (2) the consolidated information in label words serves as a reference for LLMs' final predictions. Based on these insights, we introduce an anchor re-weighting method to improve ICL performance, a demonstration compression technique to expedite inference, and an analysis framework for diagnosing ICL errors in GPT2-XL. The promising applications of our findings again validate the uncovered ICL working mechanism and pave the way for future studies.

cs.CL↗

RECALL: A Benchmark for LLMs Robustness against External Counterfactual Knowledge

LLMs and AI chatbots have improved people's efficiency in various fields. However, the necessary knowledge for answering the question may be beyond the models' knowledge boundaries. To mitigate this issue, many researchers try to introduce external knowledge, such as knowledge graphs and Internet contents, into LLMs for up-to-date information. However, the external information from the Internet may include counterfactual information that will confuse the model and lead to an incorrect response. Thus there is a pressing need for LLMs to possess the ability to distinguish reliable information from external knowledge. Therefore, to evaluate the ability of LLMs to discern the reliability of external knowledge, we create a benchmark from existing knowledge bases. Our benchmark consists of two tasks, Question Answering and Text Generation, and for each task, we provide models with a context containing counterfactual information. Evaluation results show that existing LLMs are susceptible to interference from unreliable external knowledge with counterfactual information, and simple intervention methods make limited contributions to the alleviation of this issue.

cs.CL↗

TESTA: Temporal-Spatial Token Aggregation for Long-form Video-Language Understanding

Large-scale video-language pre-training has made remarkable strides in advancing video-language understanding tasks. However, the heavy computational burden of video encoding remains a formidable efficiency bottleneck, particularly for long-form videos. These videos contain massive visual tokens due to their inherent 3D properties and spatiotemporal redundancy, making it challenging to capture complex temporal and spatial relationships. To tackle this issue, we propose an efficient method called TEmporal-Spatial Token Aggregation (TESTA). TESTA condenses video semantics by adaptively aggregating similar frames, as well as similar patches within each frame. TESTA can reduce the number of visual tokens by 75% and thus accelerate video encoding. Building upon TESTA, we introduce a pre-trained video-language model equipped with a divided space-time token aggregation module in each video encoder block. We evaluate our model on five datasets for paragraph-to-video retrieval and long-form VideoQA tasks. Experimental results show that TESTA improves computing efficiency by 1.7 times, and achieves significant performance gains from its scalability in processing longer input frames, e.g., +13.7 R@1 on QuerYD and +6.5 R@1 on Condensed Movie.

cs.CV↗

Prompt Pre-Training with Twenty-Thousand Classes for Open-Vocabulary Visual Recognition

This work proposes POMP, a prompt pre-training method for vision-language models. Being memory and computation efficient, POMP enables the learned prompt to condense semantic information for a rich set of visual concepts with over twenty-thousand classes. Once pre-trained, the prompt with a strong transferable ability can be directly plugged into a variety of visual recognition tasks including image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection, to boost recognition performances in a zero-shot manner. Empirical evaluation shows that POMP achieves state-of-the-art performances on 21 datasets, e.g., 67.0% average accuracy on 10 classification datasets (+3.1% compared to CoOp) and 84.4 hIoU on open-vocabulary Pascal VOC segmentation (+6.9 compared to ZSSeg). Our code is available at https://github.com/amazon-science/prompt-pretraining.

cs.CV↗

Incorporating Pre-trained Model Prompting in Multimodal Stock Volume Movement Prediction

Multimodal stock trading volume movement prediction with stock-related news is one of the fundamental problems in the financial area. Existing multimodal works that train models from scratch face the problem of lacking universal knowledge when modeling financial news. In addition, the models ability may be limited by the lack of domain-related knowledge due to insufficient data in the datasets. To handle this issue, we propose the Prompt-based MUltimodal Stock volumE prediction model (ProMUSE) to process text and time series modalities. We use pre-trained language models for better comprehension of financial news and adopt prompt learning methods to leverage their capability in universal knowledge to model textual information. Besides, simply fusing two modalities can cause harm to the unimodal representations. Thus, we propose a novel cross-modality contrastive alignment while reserving the unimodal heads beside the fusion head to mitigate this problem. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed ProMUSE outperforms existing baselines. Comprehensive analyses further validate the effectiveness of our architecture compared to potential variants and learning mechanisms.

cs.CL↗

MultiCapCLIP: Auto-Encoding Prompts for Zero-Shot Multilingual Visual Captioning

Supervised visual captioning models typically require a large scale of images or videos paired with descriptions in a specific language (i.e., the vision-caption pairs) for training. However, collecting and labeling large-scale datasets is time-consuming and expensive for many scenarios and languages. Therefore, sufficient labeled pairs are usually not available. To deal with the label shortage problem, we present a simple yet effective zero-shot approach MultiCapCLIP that can generate visual captions for different scenarios and languages without any labeled vision-caption pairs of downstream datasets. In the training stage, MultiCapCLIP only requires text data for input. Then it conducts two main steps: 1) retrieving concept prompts that preserve the corresponding domain knowledge of new scenarios; 2) auto-encoding the prompts to learn writing styles to output captions in a desired language. In the testing stage, MultiCapCLIP instead takes visual data as input directly to retrieve the concept prompts to generate the final visual descriptions. The extensive experiments on image and video captioning across four benchmarks and four languages (i.e., English, Chinese, German, and French) confirm the effectiveness of our approach. Compared with state-of-the-art zero-shot and weakly-supervised methods, our method achieves 4.8% and 21.5% absolute improvements in terms of BLEU@4 and CIDEr metrics. Our code is available at https://github.com/yangbang18/MultiCapCLIP.

cs.CV↗

M$^3$IT: A Large-Scale Dataset towards Multi-Modal Multilingual Instruction Tuning

Instruction tuning has significantly advanced large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, enabling them to align with human instructions across diverse tasks. However, progress in open vision-language models (VLMs) has been limited due to the scarcity of high-quality instruction datasets. To tackle this challenge and promote research in the vision-language field, we introduce the Multi-Modal, Multilingual Instruction Tuning (M$^3$IT) dataset, designed to optimize VLM alignment with human instructions. Our M$^3$IT dataset comprises 40 carefully curated datasets, including 2.4 million instances and 400 manually written task instructions, reformatted into a vision-to-text structure. Key tasks are translated into 80 languages with an advanced translation system, ensuring broader accessibility. M$^3$IT surpasses previous datasets regarding task coverage, instruction number and instance scale. Moreover, we develop Ying-VLM, a VLM model trained on our M$^3$IT dataset, showcasing its potential to answer complex questions requiring world knowledge, generalize to unseen video tasks, and comprehend unseen instructions in Chinese. We have open-sourced the dataset to encourage further research.

cs.CV↗

Can Language Models Understand Physical Concepts?

Language models~(LMs) gradually become general-purpose interfaces in the interactive and embodied world, where the understanding of physical concepts is an essential prerequisite. However, it is not yet clear whether LMs can understand physical concepts in the human world. To investigate this, we design a benchmark VEC that covers the tasks of (i) Visual concepts, such as the shape and material of objects, and (ii) Embodied Concepts, learned from the interaction with the world such as the temperature of objects. Our zero (few)-shot prompting results show that the understanding of certain visual concepts emerges as scaling up LMs, but there are still basic concepts to which the scaling law does not apply. For example, OPT-175B performs close to humans with a zero-shot accuracy of 85\% on the material concept, yet behaves like random guessing on the mass concept. Instead, vision-augmented LMs such as CLIP and BLIP achieve a human-level understanding of embodied concepts. Analysis indicates that the rich semantics in visual representation can serve as a valuable source of embodied knowledge. Inspired by this, we propose a distillation method to transfer embodied knowledge from VLMs to LMs, achieving performance gain comparable with that by scaling up the parameters of LMs 134x. Our dataset is available at \url{https://github.com/TobiasLee/VEC}

cs.CL↗

Communication Efficient Federated Learning for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with Adapter

Federated Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (Fed-MNMT) has emerged as a promising paradigm for institutions with limited language resources. This approach allows multiple institutions to act as clients and train a unified model through model synchronization, rather than collecting sensitive data for centralized training. This significantly reduces the cost of corpus collection and preserves data privacy. However, as pre-trained language models (PLMs) continue to increase in size, the communication cost for transmitting parameters during synchronization has become a training speed bottleneck. In this paper, we propose a communication-efficient Fed-MNMT framework that addresses this issue by keeping PLMs frozen and only transferring lightweight adapter modules between clients. Since different language pairs exhibit substantial discrepancies in data distributions, adapter parameters of clients may conflict with each other. To tackle this, we explore various clustering strategies to group parameters for integration and mitigate the negative effects of conflicting parameters. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework reduces communication cost by over 98% while achieving similar or even better performance compared to competitive baselines. Further analysis reveals that clustering strategies effectively solve the problem of linguistic discrepancy and pruning adapter modules further improves communication efficiency.

cs.CL↗

PALM: Open Fundus Photograph Dataset with Pathologic Myopia Recognition and Anatomical Structure Annotation

Pathologic myopia (PM) is a common blinding retinal degeneration suffered by highly myopic population. Early screening of this condition can reduce the damage caused by the associated fundus lesions and therefore prevent vision loss. Automated diagnostic tools based on artificial intelligence methods can benefit this process by aiding clinicians to identify disease signs or to screen mass populations using color fundus photographs as inputs. This paper provides insights about PALM, our open fundus imaging dataset for pathological myopia recognition and anatomical structure annotation. Our databases comprises 1200 images with associated labels for the pathologic myopia category and manual annotations of the optic disc, the position of the fovea and delineations of lesions such as patchy retinal atrophy (including peripapillary atrophy) and retinal detachment. In addition, this paper elaborates on other details such as the labeling process used to construct the database, the quality and characteristics of the samples and provides other relevant usage notes.

eess.IV↗

Diffusion Theory as a Scalpel: Detecting and Purifying Poisonous Dimensions in Pre-trained Language Models Caused by Backdoor or Bias

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) may be poisonous with backdoors or bias injected by the suspicious attacker during the fine-tuning process. A core challenge of purifying potentially poisonous PLMs is precisely finding poisonous dimensions. To settle this issue, we propose the Fine-purifying approach, which utilizes the diffusion theory to study the dynamic process of fine-tuning for finding potentially poisonous dimensions. According to the relationship between parameter drifts and Hessians of different dimensions, we can detect poisonous dimensions with abnormal dynamics, purify them by resetting them to clean pre-trained weights, and then fine-tune the purified weights on a small clean dataset. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study the dynamics guided by the diffusion theory for safety or defense purposes. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of Fine-purifying even with a small clean dataset.

cs.CL↗

Delving into the Openness of CLIP

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) formulates image classification as an image-to-text matching task, i.e., matching images to the corresponding natural language descriptions instead of discrete category IDs. This allows for open-vocabulary visual recognition, where the model can recognize images from an open class set (also known as an open vocabulary) in a zero-shot manner. However, evaluating the openness of CLIP-like models is challenging, as the models are open to arbitrary vocabulary in theory, but their accuracy varies in practice. To address this, we resort to an incremental perspective to assess the openness through vocabulary expansions, and define extensibility to measure a model's ability to handle novel classes. Our evaluation shows that CLIP-like models are not truly open, and their performance deteriorates as the vocabulary expands. We further dissect the feature space of CLIP from the perspectives of representation alignment and uniformity. Our investigation reveals that the overestimation of openness is due to confusion among competing text features, rather than a failure to capture the similarity between image features and text features of novel classes. We hope that our investigation and analysis will facilitate future research on the CLIP openness issue.

cs.CV↗

Contrastive Attention for Automatic Chest X-ray Report Generation

Recently, chest X-ray report generation, which aims to automatically generate descriptions of given chest X-ray images, has received growing research interests. The key challenge of chest X-ray report generation is to accurately capture and describe the abnormal regions. In most cases, the normal regions dominate the entire chest X-ray image, and the corresponding descriptions of these normal regions dominate the final report. Due to such data bias, learning-based models may fail to attend to abnormal regions. In this work, to effectively capture and describe abnormal regions, we propose the Contrastive Attention (CA) model. Instead of solely focusing on the current input image, the CA model compares the current input image with normal images to distill the contrastive information. The acquired contrastive information can better represent the visual features of abnormal regions. According to the experiments on the public IU-X-ray and MIMIC-CXR datasets, incorporating our CA into several existing models can boost their performance across most metrics. In addition, according to the analysis, the CA model can help existing models better attend to the abnormal regions and provide more accurate descriptions which are crucial for an interpretable diagnosis. Specifically, we achieve the state-of-the-art results on the two public datasets.

cs.CV↗

Prophet Attention: Predicting Attention with Future Attention for Image Captioning

Recently, attention based models have been used extensively in many sequence-to-sequence learning systems. Especially for image captioning, the attention based models are expected to ground correct image regions with proper generated words. However, for each time step in the decoding process, the attention based models usually use the hidden state of the current input to attend to the image regions. Under this setting, these attention models have a "deviated focus" problem that they calculate the attention weights based on previous words instead of the one to be generated, impairing the performance of both grounding and captioning. In this paper, we propose the Prophet Attention, similar to the form of self-supervision. In the training stage, this module utilizes the future information to calculate the "ideal" attention weights towards image regions. These calculated "ideal" weights are further used to regularize the "deviated" attention. In this manner, image regions are grounded with the correct words. The proposed Prophet Attention can be easily incorporated into existing image captioning models to improve their performance of both grounding and captioning. The experiments on the Flickr30k Entities and the MSCOCO datasets show that the proposed Prophet Attention consistently outperforms baselines in both automatic metrics and human evaluations. It is worth noticing that we set new state-of-the-arts on the two benchmark datasets and achieve the 1st place on the leaderboard of the online MSCOCO benchmark in terms of the default ranking score, i.e., CIDEr-c40.

cs.CV↗

Equilibrium distribution and diffusion of mixed hydrogen-methane gas in gravity field

Repurposing existing natural gas pipelines is a promising solution for large-scale transportation of mixed hydrogen-methane gas. However, it remains debatable whether gravitational stratification can notably affect hydrogen partial pressure in the gas mixture. To address this issue, we combined molecular dynamics simulation with thermodynamic and diffusion theories. Our study systematically examined the equilibrium distribution of hydrogen-methane mixtures in gravity fields. We demonstrated that partial pressures of both gases decrease with altitude, with hydrogen showing slower decrease due to its smaller molar mass. As a result, the volume fraction of hydrogen is maximized at the top end of pipes. The stratification is more favorable at low temperature and large altitude drops, with notable gas stratification only occurring at extremely large drops in altitude, being generally negligible even at a drop of 1500 m. Furthermore, we showed that the diffusion time required to achieve the equilibrium distribution is proportional to gas pressure and the square of pipeline height. This requires approximately 300 years for a 1500 m pipeline at 1 bar. Therefore, temporary interruptions in pipeline gas transportation will not cause visible stratification. Our work clarifies the effect of gravity on hydrogen-methane gas mixtures and provides quantitative insights into assessing the stratification of gas mixtures in pipelines.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

Well-classified Examples are Underestimated in Classification with Deep Neural Networks

The conventional wisdom behind learning deep classification models is to focus on bad-classified examples and ignore well-classified examples that are far from the decision boundary. For instance, when training with cross-entropy loss, examples with higher likelihoods (i.e., well-classified examples) contribute smaller gradients in back-propagation. However, we theoretically show that this common practice hinders representation learning, energy optimization, and margin growth. To counteract this deficiency, we propose to reward well-classified examples with additive bonuses to revive their contribution to the learning process. This counterexample theoretically addresses these three issues. We empirically support this claim by directly verifying the theoretical results or significant performance improvement with our counterexample on diverse tasks, including image classification, graph classification, and machine translation. Furthermore, this paper shows that we can deal with complex scenarios, such as imbalanced classification, OOD detection, and applications under adversarial attacks because our idea can solve these three issues. Code is available at: https://github.com/lancopku/well-classified-examples-are-underestimated.

cs.LG↗

Fine-Tuning Deteriorates General Textual Out-of-Distribution Detection by Distorting Task-Agnostic Features

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs is crucial for the safe deployment of natural language processing (NLP) models. Though existing methods, especially those based on the statistics in the feature space of fine-tuned pre-trained language models (PLMs), are claimed to be effective, their effectiveness on different types of distribution shifts remains underexplored. In this work, we take the first step to comprehensively evaluate the mainstream textual OOD detection methods for detecting semantic and non-semantic shifts. We find that: (1) no existing method behaves well in both settings; (2) fine-tuning PLMs on in-distribution data benefits detecting semantic shifts but severely deteriorates detecting non-semantic shifts, which can be attributed to the distortion of task-agnostic features. To alleviate the issue, we present a simple yet effective general OOD score named GNOME that integrates the confidence scores derived from the task-agnostic and task-specific representations. Experiments show that GNOME works well in both semantic and non-semantic shift scenarios, and further brings significant improvement on two cross-task benchmarks where both kinds of shifts simultaneously take place. Our code is available at https://github.com/lancopku/GNOME.

cs.CL↗