From the Least to the Most: Building a Plug-and-Play Visual Reasoner via Data Synthesis

We explore multi-step reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs). The problem is challenging, as reasoning data consisting of multiple steps of visual and language processing are barely available. To overcome the challenge, we first introduce a least-to-most visual reasoning paradigm, which interleaves steps of decomposing a question into sub-questions and invoking external tools for resolving sub-questions. Based on the paradigm, we further propose a novel data synthesis approach that can automatically create questions and multi-step reasoning paths for an image in a bottom-up manner. Our approach divides the complex synthesis task into a few simple sub-tasks, and (almost entirely) relies on open-sourced models to accomplish the sub-tasks. Therefore, the entire synthesis process is reproducible and cost-efficient, and the synthesized data is quality guaranteed. With the approach, we construct $50$k visual reasoning examples. Then, we develop a visual reasoner through supervised fine-tuning, which is capable of generally enhancing the reasoning abilities of a wide range of existing VLMs in a plug-and-play fashion. Extensive experiments indicate that the visual reasoner can consistently and significantly improve four VLMs on four VQA benchmarks. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/steven-ccq/VisualReasoner.

"In Dialogues We Learn": Towards Personalized Dialogue Without Pre-defined Profiles through In-Dialogue Learning

Personalized dialogue systems have gained significant attention in recent years for their ability to generate responses in alignment with different personas. However, most existing approaches rely on pre-defined personal profiles, which are not only time-consuming and labor-intensive to create but also lack flexibility. We propose In-Dialogue Learning (IDL), a fine-tuning framework that enhances the ability of pre-trained large language models to leverage dialogue history to characterize persona for completing personalized dialogue generation tasks without pre-defined profiles. Our experiments on three datasets demonstrate that IDL brings substantial improvements, with BLEU and ROUGE scores increasing by up to 200% and 247%, respectively. Additionally, the results of human evaluations further validate the efficacy of our proposed method.

Scalable Motif Counting for Large-scale Temporal Graphs

One fundamental problem in temporal graph analysis is to count the occurrences of small connected subgraph patterns (i.e., motifs), which benefits a broad range of real-world applications, such as anomaly detection, structure prediction, and network representation learning. However, existing works focused on exacting temporal motif are not scalable to large-scale temporal graph data, due to their heavy computational costs or inherent inadequacy of parallelism. In this work, we propose a scalable parallel framework for exactly counting temporal motifs in large-scale temporal graphs. We first categorize the temporal motifs based on their distinct properties, and then design customized algorithms that offer efficient strategies to exactly count the motif instances of each category. Moreover, our compact data structures, namely triple and quadruple counters, enable our algorithms to directly identify the temporal motif instances of each category, according to edge information and the relationship between edges, therefore significantly improving the counting efficiency. Based on the proposed counting algorithms, we design a hierarchical parallel framework that features both inter- and intra-node parallel strategies, and fully leverages the multi-threading capacity of modern CPU to concurrently count all temporal motifs. Extensive experiments on sixteen real-world temporal graph datasets demonstrate the superiority and capability of our proposed framework for temporal motif counting, achieving up to 538* speedup compared to the state-of-the-art methods. The source code of our method is available at: https://github.com/steven-ccq/FAST-temporal-motif.