Synth-Empathy: Towards High-Quality Synthetic Empathy Data

In recent years, with the rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs), achieving excellent empathetic response capabilities has become a crucial prerequisite. Consequently, managing and understanding empathetic datasets have gained increasing significance. However, empathetic data are typically human-labeled, leading to insufficient datasets and wasted human labor. In this work, we present Synth-Empathy, an LLM-based data generation and quality and diversity selection pipeline that automatically generates high-quality empathetic data while discarding low-quality data. With the data generated from a low empathetic model, we are able to further improve empathetic response performance and achieve state-of-the-art (SoTA) results across multiple benchmarks. Moreover, our model achieves SoTA performance on various human evaluation benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness in real-world applications. Furthermore, we show the trade-off between data quantity and quality, providing insights into empathetic data generation and selection.

Efficient-Empathy: Towards Efficient and Effective Selection of Empathy Data

In recent years, with the rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs), achieving excellent empathetic response capability has become a crucial prerequisite. Consequently, managing and understanding large-scale video datasets has gained increasing importance. However, empathetic data are typically trained without any quality selection, leading to inefficient data usage and wasted computational resources. Additionally, using raw data can result in low performance in empathetic dialogues. In this work, we present Efficient-Empathy, a sensibility and rationality score-based data selection algorithm that automatically selects sensibility and rationality data while discarding low-quality data. With only the sensibility data (59% of the full dataset), our trained sensibility model efficiently achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance. Furthermore, with multiple data selection hyperparameters, the sensibility model demonstrates SoTA performance, showcasing the robustness of our method. By integrating sensibility and rationality data with a MoE structure, we achieve even higher performance, demonstrating the effectiveness of our Efficient-Empathy algorithm.

Retrieval Meets Reasoning: Even High-school Textbook Knowledge Benefits Multimodal Reasoning

Large language models equipped with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) represent a burgeoning field aimed at enhancing answering capabilities by leveraging external knowledge bases. Although the application of RAG with language-only models has been extensively explored, its adaptation into multimodal vision-language models remains nascent. Going beyond mere answer generation, the primary goal of multimodal RAG is to cultivate the models' ability to reason in response to relevant queries. To this end, we introduce a novel multimodal RAG framework named RMR (Retrieval Meets Reasoning). The RMR framework employs a bi-modal retrieval module to identify the most relevant question-answer pairs, which then serve as scaffolds for the multimodal reasoning process. This training-free approach not only encourages the model to engage deeply with the reasoning processes inherent in the retrieved content but also facilitates the generation of answers that are precise and richly interpretable. Surprisingly, utilizing solely the ScienceQA dataset, collected from elementary and high school science curricula, RMR significantly boosts the performance of various vision-language models across a spectrum of benchmark datasets, including A-OKVQA, MMBench, and SEED. These outcomes highlight the substantial potential of our multimodal retrieval and reasoning mechanism to improve the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models.

Sentence-Level or Token-Level? A Comprehensive Study on Knowledge Distillation

Knowledge distillation, transferring knowledge from a teacher model to a student model, has emerged as a powerful technique in neural machine translation for compressing models or simplifying training targets. Knowledge distillation encompasses two primary methods: sentence-level distillation and token-level distillation. In sentence-level distillation, the student model is trained to align with the output of the teacher model, which can alleviate the training difficulty and give student model a comprehensive understanding of global structure. Differently, token-level distillation requires the student model to learn the output distribution of the teacher model, facilitating a more fine-grained transfer of knowledge. Studies have revealed divergent performances between sentence-level and token-level distillation across different scenarios, leading to the confusion on the empirical selection of knowledge distillation methods. In this study, we argue that token-level distillation, with its more complex objective (i.e., distribution), is better suited for ``simple'' scenarios, while sentence-level distillation excels in ``complex'' scenarios. To substantiate our hypothesis, we systematically analyze the performance of distillation methods by varying the model size of student models, the complexity of text, and the difficulty of decoding procedure. While our experimental results validate our hypothesis, defining the complexity level of a given scenario remains a challenging task. So we further introduce a novel hybrid method that combines token-level and sentence-level distillation through a gating mechanism, aiming to leverage the advantages of both individual methods. Experiments demonstrate that the hybrid method surpasses the performance of token-level or sentence-level distillation methods and the previous works by a margin, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid method.

Rational Sensibility: LLM Enhanced Empathetic Response Generation Guided by Self-presentation Theory

Having the ability to empathize is crucial for accurately representing human behavior during conversations. Despite numerous research aim to improve the cognitive capability of models by incorporating external knowledge, there has been limited attention on the sensible and rational expression of the conversation itself, which are crucial components of the cognitive empathy. Guided by self-presentation theory in sociology, we have designed an innovative categorical approach that segregates historical dialogues into sensible and rational sentences and subsequently elucidate the context through the designed attention mechanism. However, the rational information within the conversation is restricted and the external knowledge used in previous methods have limitations of semantic contradiction and narrow vision field. Considering the impressive performance of LLM in the domain of intelligent agent. We employ LLaMA2-70b as a rational brain to analyze the profound logical information maintained in conversations, which assists the model assessing the balance of sensibility and rationality to produce quality empathetic responses. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms other comparable methods on both automatic and human evaluations.

Unraveling Key Factors of Knowledge Distillation

Knowledge distillation, a technique for model compression and performance enhancement, has gained significant traction in Neural Machine Translation (NMT). However, existing research primarily focuses on empirical applications, and there is a lack of comprehensive understanding of how student model capacity, data complexity, and decoding strategies collectively influence distillation effectiveness. Addressing this gap, our study conducts an in-depth investigation into these factors, particularly focusing on their interplay in word-level and sequence-level distillation within NMT. Through extensive experimentation across datasets like IWSLT13 En$\rightarrow$Fr, IWSLT14 En$\rightarrow$De, and others, we empirically validate hypotheses related to the impact of these factors on knowledge distillation. Our research not only elucidates the significant influence of model capacity, data complexity, and decoding strategies on distillation effectiveness but also introduces a novel, optimized distillation approach. This approach, when applied to the IWSLT14 de$\rightarrow$en translation task, achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating its practical efficacy in advancing the field of NMT.

Brain-inspired Computing Based on Machine Learning And Deep Learning:A Review

The continuous development of artificial intelligence has a profound impact on biomedical research and other fields.Brain-inspired computing is an important intersection of multimodal technology and biomedical field. This paper provides a comprehensive review of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models in brain-inspired computing, tracking their evolution, application value, challenges, and potential research trajectories. First, the basic concepts and development history are reviewed, and their evolution is divided into two stages: recent machine learning and current deep learning, emphasizing the importance of each stage in the research state of brain-inspired computing. In addition, the latest progress and key techniques of deep learning in different tasks of brain-inspired computing are introduced from six perspectives. Despite significant progress, challenges remain in making full use of its capabilities. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of brain-inspired computing models based on machine learning and deep learning, highlighting their potential in various applications and providing a valuable reference for future academic research. It can be accessed through the following url: https://github.com/ultracoolHub/brain-inspired-computing

A Survey on Image-text Multimodal Models

Amidst the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, the convergence of visual and textual information has surfaced as a crucial frontier, leading to the advent of image-text multimodal models. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the evolution and current state of image-text multimodal models, exploring their application value, challenges, and potential research trajectories. Initially, we revisit the basic concepts and developmental milestones of these models, introducing a novel classification that segments their evolution into three distinct phases, based on their time of introduction and subsequent impact on the discipline. Furthermore, based on the tasks' significance and prevalence in the academic landscape, we propose a categorization of the tasks associated with image-text multimodal models into five major types, elucidating the recent progress and key technologies within each category. Despite the remarkable accomplishments of these models, numerous challenges and issues persist. This paper delves into the inherent challenges and limitations of image-text multimodal models, fostering the exploration of prospective research directions. Our objective is to offer an exhaustive overview of the present research landscape of image-text multimodal models and to serve as a valuable reference for future scholarly endeavors. We extend an invitation to the broader community to collaborate in enhancing the image-text multimodal model community, accessible at: \href{https://github.com/i2vec/A-survey-on-image-text-multimodal-models}{https://github.com/i2vec/A-survey-on-image-text-multimodal-models}.

Enhancing Human-like Multi-Modal Reasoning: A New Challenging Dataset and Comprehensive Framework

Multimodal reasoning is a critical component in the pursuit of artificial intelligence systems that exhibit human-like intelligence, especially when tackling complex tasks. While the chain-of-thought (CoT) technique has gained considerable attention, the existing ScienceQA dataset, which focuses on multimodal scientific questions and explanations from elementary and high school textbooks, lacks a comprehensive evaluation of diverse approaches. To address this gap, we present COCO Multi-Modal Reasoning Dataset(COCO-MMRD), a novel dataset that encompasses an extensive collection of open-ended questions, rationales, and answers derived from the large object dataset COCO. Unlike previous datasets that rely on multiple-choice questions, our dataset pioneers the use of open-ended questions in the context of multimodal CoT, introducing a more challenging problem that effectively assesses the reasoning capability of CoT models. Through comprehensive evaluations and detailed analyses, we provide valuable insights and propose innovative techniques, including multi-hop cross-modal attention and sentence-level contrastive learning, to enhance the image and text encoders. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed dataset and techniques, offering novel perspectives for advancing multimodal reasoning.