PQPP: A Joint Benchmark for Text-to-Image Prompt and Query Performance Prediction

Text-to-image generation has recently emerged as a viable alternative to text-to-image retrieval, due to the visually impressive results of generative diffusion models. Although query performance prediction is an active research topic in information retrieval, to the best of our knowledge, there is no prior study that analyzes the difficulty of queries (prompts) in text-to-image generation, based on human judgments. To this end, we introduce the first dataset of prompts which are manually annotated in terms of image generation performance. In order to determine the difficulty of the same prompts in image retrieval, we also collect manual annotations that represent retrieval performance. We thus propose the first benchmark for joint text-to-image prompt and query performance prediction, comprising 10K queries. Our benchmark enables: (i) the comparative assessment of the difficulty of prompts/queries in image generation and image retrieval, and (ii) the evaluation of prompt/query performance predictors addressing both generation and retrieval. We present results with several pre-generation/retrieval and post-generation/retrieval performance predictors, thus providing competitive baselines for future research. Our benchmark and code is publicly available under the CC BY 4.0 license at https://github.com/Eduard6421/PQPP.

A Novel Cartography-Based Curriculum Learning Method Applied on RoNLI: The First Romanian Natural Language Inference Corpus

Natural language inference (NLI), the task of recognizing the entailment relationship in sentence pairs, is an actively studied topic serving as a proxy for natural language understanding. Despite the relevance of the task in building conversational agents and improving text classification, machine translation and other NLP tasks, to the best of our knowledge, there is no publicly available NLI corpus for the Romanian language. To this end, we introduce the first Romanian NLI corpus (RoNLI) comprising 58K training sentence pairs, which are obtained via distant supervision, and 6K validation and test sentence pairs, which are manually annotated with the correct labels. We conduct experiments with multiple machine learning methods based on distant learning, ranging from shallow models based on word embeddings to transformer-based neural networks, to establish a set of competitive baselines. Furthermore, we improve on the best model by employing a new curriculum learning strategy based on data cartography. Our dataset and code to reproduce the baselines are available at https://github.com/Eduard6421/RONLI.

iQPP: A Benchmark for Image Query Performance Prediction

To date, query performance prediction (QPP) in the context of content-based image retrieval remains a largely unexplored task, especially in the query-by-example scenario, where the query is an image. To boost the exploration of the QPP task in image retrieval, we propose the first benchmark for image query performance prediction (iQPP). First, we establish a set of four data sets (PASCAL VOC 2012, Caltech-101, ROxford5k and RParis6k) and estimate the ground-truth difficulty of each query as the average precision or the precision@k, using two state-of-the-art image retrieval models. Next, we propose and evaluate novel pre-retrieval and post-retrieval query performance predictors, comparing them with existing or adapted (from text to image) predictors. The empirical results show that most predictors do not generalize across evaluation scenarios. Our comprehensive experiments indicate that iQPP is a challenging benchmark, revealing an important research gap that needs to be addressed in future work. We release our code and data as open source at https://github.com/Eduard6421/iQPP, to foster future research.