Compositional Image Retrieval via Instruction-Aware Contrastive Learning

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) involves retrieving a target image based on a composed query of an image paired with text that specifies modifications or changes to the visual reference. CIR is inherently an instruction-following task, as the model needs to interpret and apply modifications to the image. In practice, due to the scarcity of annotated data in downstream tasks, Zero-Shot CIR (ZS-CIR) is desirable. While existing ZS-CIR models based on CLIP have shown promising results, their capability in interpreting and following modification instructions remains limited. Some research attempts to address this by incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these approaches still face challenges in effectively integrating multimodal information and instruction understanding. To tackle above challenges, we propose a novel embedding method utilizing an instruction-tuned Multimodal LLM (MLLM) to generate composed representation, which significantly enhance the instruction following capability for a comprehensive integration between images and instructions. Nevertheless, directly applying MLLMs introduces a new challenge since MLLMs are primarily designed for text generation rather than embedding extraction as required in CIR. To address this, we introduce a two-stage training strategy to efficiently learn a joint multimodal embedding space and further refining the ability to follow modification instructions by tuning the model in a triplet dataset similar to the CIR format. Extensive experiments on four public datasets: FashionIQ, CIRR, GeneCIS, and CIRCO demonstrates the superior performance of our model, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by a significant margin. Codes are available at the GitHub repository.

AD-DINO: Attention-Dynamic DINO for Distance-Aware Embodied Reference Understanding

Embodied reference understanding is crucial for intelligent agents to predict referents based on human intention through gesture signals and language descriptions. This paper introduces the Attention-Dynamic DINO, a novel framework designed to mitigate misinterpretations of pointing gestures across various interaction contexts. Our approach integrates visual and textual features to simultaneously predict the target object's bounding box and the attention source in pointing gestures. Leveraging the distance-aware nature of nonverbal communication in visual perspective taking, we extend the virtual touch line mechanism and propose an attention-dynamic touch line to represent referring gesture based on interactive distances. The combination of this distance-aware approach and independent prediction of the attention source, enhances the alignment between objects and the gesture represented line. Extensive experiments on the YouRefIt dataset demonstrate the efficacy of our gesture information understanding method in significantly improving task performance. Our model achieves 76.4% accuracy at the 0.25 IoU threshold and, notably, surpasses human performance at the 0.75 IoU threshold, marking a first in this domain. Comparative experiments with distance-unaware understanding methods from previous research further validate the superiority of the Attention-Dynamic Touch Line across diverse contexts.

Beyond Binary: Towards Fine-Grained LLM-Generated Text Detection via Role Recognition and Involvement Measurement

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, has resulted in the widespread presence of LLM-generated content on social media platforms, raising concerns about misinformation, data biases, and privacy violations, which can undermine trust in online discourse. While detecting LLM-generated content is crucial for mitigating these risks, current methods often focus on binary classification, failing to address the complexities of real-world scenarios like human-AI collaboration. To move beyond binary classification and address these challenges, we propose a new paradigm for detecting LLM-generated content. This approach introduces two novel tasks: LLM Role Recognition (LLM-RR), a multi-class classification task that identifies specific roles of LLM in content generation, and LLM Influence Measurement (LLM-IM), a regression task that quantifies the extent of LLM involvement in content creation. To support these tasks, we propose LLMDetect, a benchmark designed to evaluate detectors' performance on these new tasks. LLMDetect includes the Hybrid News Detection Corpus (HNDC) for training detectors, as well as DetectEval, a comprehensive evaluation suite that considers five distinct cross-context variations and multi-intensity variations within the same LLM role. This allows for a thorough assessment of detectors' generalization and robustness across diverse contexts. Our empirical validation of 10 baseline detection methods demonstrates that fine-tuned PLM-based models consistently outperform others on both tasks, while advanced LLMs face challenges in accurately detecting their own generated content. Our experimental results and analysis offer insights for developing more effective detection models for LLM-generated content. This research enhances the understanding of LLM-generated content and establishes a foundation for more nuanced detection methodologies.

Aligning Language Models Using Follow-up Likelihood as Reward Signal

In natural human-to-human conversations, participants often receive feedback signals from one another based on their follow-up reactions. These reactions can include verbal responses, facial expressions, changes in emotional state, and other non-verbal cues. Similarly, in human-machine interactions, the machine can leverage the user's follow-up utterances as feedback signals to assess whether it has appropriately addressed the user's request. Therefore, we propose using the likelihood of follow-up utterances as rewards to differentiate preferred responses from less favored ones, without relying on human or commercial LLM-based preference annotations. Our proposed reward mechanism, ``Follow-up Likelihood as Reward" (FLR), matches the performance of strong reward models trained on large-scale human or GPT-4 annotated data on 8 pairwise-preference and 4 rating-based benchmarks. Building upon the FLR mechanism, we propose to automatically mine preference data from the online generations of a base policy model. The preference data are subsequently used to boost the helpfulness of the base model through direct alignment from preference (DAP) methods, such as direct preference optimization (DPO). Lastly, we demonstrate that fine-tuning the language model that provides follow-up likelihood with natural language feedback significantly enhances FLR's performance on reward modeling benchmarks and effectiveness in aligning the base policy model's helpfulness.

LLMs for Doctors: Leveraging Medical LLMs to Assist Doctors, Not Replace Them

The recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) has had a significant impact on the healthcare field, providing patients with medical advice, diagnostic information, and more. However, due to a lack of professional medical knowledge, patients are easily misled by generated erroneous information from LLMs, which may result in serious medical problems. To address this issue, we focus on tuning the LLMs to be medical assistants who collaborate with more experienced doctors. We first conduct a two-stage survey by inspiration-feedback to gain a broad understanding of the real needs of doctors for medical assistants. Based on this, we construct a Chinese medical dataset called DoctorFLAN to support the entire workflow of doctors, which includes 92K Q\&A samples from 22 tasks and 27 specialists. Moreover, we evaluate LLMs in doctor-oriented scenarios by constructing the DoctorFLAN-\textit{test} containing 550 single-turn Q\&A and DotaBench containing 74 multi-turn conversations. The evaluation results indicate that being a medical assistant still poses challenges for existing open-source models, but DoctorFLAN can help them significantly. It demonstrates that the doctor-oriented dataset and benchmarks we construct can complement existing patient-oriented work and better promote medical LLMs research.

Take the essence and discard the dross: A Rethinking on Data Selection for Fine-Tuning Large Language Models

Data selection for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) aims to select a high-quality subset from a given candidate dataset to train a Pending Fine-tune Model (PFM) into a Selective-Enhanced Model (SEM). It can improve the model performance and accelerate the training process. Although a few surveys have investigated related works of data selection, there is a lack of comprehensive comparison between existing methods due to their various experimental settings. To address this issue, we first propose a three-stage scheme for data selection and comprehensively review existing works according to this scheme. Then, we design a unified comparing method with ratio-based efficiency indicators and ranking-based feasibility indicators to overcome the difficulty of comparing various models with diverse experimental settings. After an in-depth comparative analysis, we find that the more targeted method with data-specific and model-specific quality labels has higher efficiency, but the introduction of additional noise information should be avoided when designing selection algorithms. Finally, we summarize the trends in data selection and highlight the short-term and long-term challenges to guide future research.

Unsupervised Mutual Learning of Dialogue Discourse Parsing and Topic Segmentation

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has propelled the development of dialogue systems. Unlike the popular ChatGPT-like assistant model, which only satisfies the user's preferences, task-oriented dialogue systems have also faced new requirements and challenges in the broader business field. They are expected to provide correct responses at each dialogue turn, at the same time, achieve the overall goal defined by the task. By understanding rhetorical structures and topic structures via topic segmentation and discourse parsing, a dialogue system may do a better planning to achieve both objectives. However, while both structures belong to discourse structure in linguistics, rhetorical structure and topic structure are mostly modeled separately or with one assisting the other in the prior work. The interaction between these two structures has not been considered for joint modeling and mutual learning. Furthermore, unsupervised learning techniques to achieve the above are not well explored. To fill this gap, we propose an unsupervised mutual learning framework of two structures leveraging the global and local connections between them. We extend the topic modeling between non-adjacent discourse units to ensure global structural relevance with rhetorical structures. We also incorporate rhetorical structures into the topic structure through a graph neural network model to ensure local coherence consistency. Finally, we utilize the similarity between the two fused structures for mutual learning. The experimental results demonstrate that our methods outperform all strong baselines on two dialogue rhetorical datasets (STAC and Molweni), as well as dialogue topic datasets (Doc2Dial and TIAGE). We provide our code at https://github.com/Jeff-Sue/URT.

TS-Align: A Teacher-Student Collaborative Framework for Scalable Iterative Finetuning of Large Language Models

Mainstream approaches to aligning large language models (LLMs) heavily rely on human preference data, particularly when models require periodic updates. The standard process for iterative alignment of LLMs involves collecting new human feedback for each update. However, the data collection process is costly and challenging to scale. To address this issue, we introduce the "TS-Align" framework, which fine-tunes a policy model using pairwise feedback data automatically mined from its outputs. This automatic mining process is efficiently accomplished through the collaboration between a large-scale teacher model and a small-scale student model. The policy fine-tuning process can be iteratively repeated using on-policy generations within our proposed teacher-student collaborative framework. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our final aligned policy outperforms the base policy model with an average win rate of 69.7% across seven conversational or instruction-following datasets. Furthermore, we show that the ranking capability of the teacher is effectively distilled into the student through our pipeline, resulting in a small-scale yet effective reward model for policy model alignment.

S-IQA Image Quality Assessment With Compressive Sampling

No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (IQA) aims at estimating image quality in accordance with subjective human perception. However, most existing NR-IQA methods focus on exploring increasingly complex networks or components to improve the final performance. Such practice imposes great limitations and complexity on IQA methods, especially when they are applied to high-resolution (HR) images in the real world. Actually, most images own high spatial redundancy, especially for those HR data. To further exploit the characteristic and alleviate the issue above, we propose a new framework for Image Quality Assessment with compressive Sampling (dubbed S-IQA), which consists of three components: (1) The Flexible Sampling Module (FSM) samples the image to obtain measurements at an arbitrary ratio. (2) Vision Transformer with the Adaptive Embedding Module (AEM) makes measurements of uniform size and extracts deep features (3) Dual Branch (DB) allocates weight for every patch and predicts the final quality score. Experiments show that our proposed S-IQA achieves state-of-the-art result on various datasets with less data usage.

SC-HVPPNet: Spatial and Channel Hybrid-Attention Video Post-Processing Network with CNN and Transformer

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Transformer have attracted much attention recently for video post-processing (VPP). However, the interaction between CNN and Transformer in existing VPP methods is not fully explored, leading to inefficient communication between the local and global extracted features. In this paper, we explore the interaction between CNN and Transformer in the task of VPP, and propose a novel Spatial and Channel Hybrid-Attention Video Post-Processing Network (SC-HVPPNet), which can cooperatively exploit the image priors in both spatial and channel domains. Specifically, in the spatial domain, a novel spatial attention fusion module is designed, in which two attention weights are generated to fuse the local and global representations collaboratively. In the channel domain, a novel channel attention fusion module is developed, which can blend the deep representations at the channel dimension dynamically. Extensive experiments show that SC-HVPPNet notably boosts video restoration quality, with average bitrate savings of 5.29%, 12.42%, and 13.09% for Y, U, and V components in the VTM-11.0-NNVC RA configuration.