HyQE: Ranking Contexts with Hypothetical Query Embeddings

In retrieval-augmented systems, context ranking techniques are commonly employed to reorder the retrieved contexts based on their relevance to a user query. A standard approach is to measure this relevance through the similarity between contexts and queries in the embedding space. However, such similarity often fails to capture the relevance. Alternatively, large language models (LLMs) have been used for ranking contexts. However, they can encounter scalability issues when the number of candidate contexts grows and the context window sizes of the LLMs remain constrained. Additionally, these approaches require fine-tuning LLMs with domain-specific data. In this work, we introduce a scalable ranking framework that combines embedding similarity and LLM capabilities without requiring LLM fine-tuning. Our framework uses a pre-trained LLM to hypothesize the user query based on the retrieved contexts and ranks the context based on the similarity between the hypothesized queries and the user query. Our framework is efficient at inference time and is compatible with many other retrieval and ranking techniques. Experimental results show that our method improves the ranking performance across multiple benchmarks. The complete code and data are available at https://github.com/zwc662/hyqe

Synthetic Knowledge Ingestion: Towards Knowledge Refinement and Injection for Enhancing Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are proficient in capturing factual knowledge across various domains. However, refining their capabilities on previously seen knowledge or integrating new knowledge from external sources remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a novel synthetic knowledge ingestion method called Ski, which leverages fine-grained synthesis, interleaved generation, and assemble augmentation strategies to construct high-quality data representations from raw knowledge sources. We then integrate Ski and its variations with three knowledge injection techniques: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT), and Continual Pre-training (CPT) to inject and refine knowledge in language models. Extensive empirical experiments are conducted on various question-answering tasks spanning finance, biomedicine, and open-generation domains to demonstrate that Ski significantly outperforms baseline methods by facilitating effective knowledge injection. We believe that our work is an important step towards enhancing the factual accuracy of LLM outputs by refining knowledge representation and injection capabilities.

Survival of the Safest: Towards Secure Prompt Optimization through Interleaved Multi-Objective Evolution

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities; however, the optimization of their prompts has historically prioritized performance metrics at the expense of crucial safety and security considerations. To overcome this shortcoming, we introduce "Survival of the Safest" (SoS), an innovative multi-objective prompt optimization framework that enhances both performance and security in LLMs simultaneously. SoS utilizes an interleaved multi-objective evolution strategy, integrating semantic, feedback, and crossover mutations to effectively traverse the prompt landscape. Differing from the computationally demanding Pareto front methods, SoS provides a scalable solution that expedites optimization in complex, high-dimensional discrete search spaces while keeping computational demands low. Our approach accommodates flexible weighting of objectives and generates a pool of optimized candidates, empowering users to select prompts that optimally meet their specific performance and security needs. Experimental evaluations across diverse benchmark datasets affirm SoS's efficacy in delivering high performance and notably enhancing safety and security compared to single-objective methods. This advancement marks a significant stride towards the deployment of LLM systems that are both high-performing and secure across varied industrial applications

SeMv-3D: Towards Semantic and Mutil-view Consistency simultaneously for General Text-to-3D Generation with Triplane Priors

Recent advancements in generic 3D content generation from text prompts have been remarkable by fine-tuning text-to-image diffusion (T2I) models or employing these T2I models as priors to learn a general text-to-3D model. While fine-tuning-based methods ensure great alignment between text and generated views, i.e., semantic consistency, their ability to achieve multi-view consistency is hampered by the absence of 3D constraints, even in limited view. In contrast, prior-based methods focus on regressing 3D shapes with any view that maintains uniformity and coherence across views, i.e., multi-view consistency, but such approaches inevitably compromise visual-textual alignment, leading to a loss of semantic details in the generated objects. To achieve semantic and multi-view consistency simultaneously, we propose SeMv-3D, a novel framework for general text-to-3d generation. Specifically, we propose a Triplane Prior Learner (TPL) that learns triplane priors with 3D spatial features to maintain consistency among different views at the 3D level, e.g., geometry and texture. Moreover, we design a Semantic-aligned View Synthesizer (SVS) that preserves the alignment between 3D spatial features and textual semantics in latent space. In SVS, we devise a simple yet effective batch sampling and rendering strategy that can generate arbitrary views in a single feed-forward inference. Extensive experiments present our SeMv-3D's superiority over state-of-the-art performances with semantic and multi-view consistency in any view. Our code and more visual results are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SeMv-3D-6425.

Do You Know What You Are Talking About? Characterizing Query-Knowledge Relevance For Reliable Retrieval Augmented Generation

Language models (LMs) are known to suffer from hallucinations and misinformation. Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) that retrieves verifiable information from an external knowledge corpus to complement the parametric knowledge in LMs provides a tangible solution to these problems. However, the generation quality of RAG is highly dependent on the relevance between a user's query and the retrieved documents. Inaccurate responses may be generated when the query is outside of the scope of knowledge represented in the external knowledge corpus or if the information in the corpus is out-of-date. In this work, we establish a statistical framework that assesses how well a query can be answered by an RAG system by capturing the relevance of knowledge. We introduce an online testing procedure that employs goodness-of-fit (GoF) tests to inspect the relevance of each user query to detect out-of-knowledge queries with low knowledge relevance. Additionally, we develop an offline testing framework that examines a collection of user queries, aiming to detect significant shifts in the query distribution which indicates the knowledge corpus is no longer sufficiently capable of supporting the interests of the users. We demonstrate the capabilities of these strategies through a systematic evaluation on eight question-answering (QA) datasets, the results of which indicate that the new testing framework is an efficient solution to enhance the reliability of existing RAG systems.

LEGO: Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Scene Text Images

In recent years, significant progress has been made in scene text recognition by data-driven methods. However, due to the scarcity of annotated real-world data, the training of these methods predominantly relies on synthetic data. The distribution gap between synthetic and real data constrains the further performance improvement of these methods in real-world applications. To tackle this problem, a highly promising approach is to utilize massive amounts of unlabeled real data for self-supervised training, which has been widely proven effective in many NLP and CV tasks. Nevertheless, generic self-supervised methods are unsuitable for scene text images due to their sequential nature. To address this issue, we propose a Local Explicit and Global Order-aware self-supervised representation learning method (LEGO) that accounts for the characteristics of scene text images. Inspired by the human cognitive process of learning words, which involves spelling, reading, and writing, we propose three novel pre-text tasks for LEGO to model sequential, semantic, and structural features, respectively. The entire pre-training process is optimized by using a consistent Text Knowledge Codebook. Extensive experiments validate that LEGO outperforms previous scene text self-supervised methods. The recognizer incorporated with our pre-trained model achieves superior or comparable performance compared to state-of-the-art scene text recognition methods on six benchmarks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that LEGO can achieve superior performance in other text-related tasks.

CAMAv2: A Vision-Centric Approach for Static Map Element Annotation

The recent development of online static map element (a.k.a. HD map) construction algorithms has raised a vast demand for data with ground truth annotations. However, available public datasets currently cannot provide high-quality training data regarding consistency and accuracy. For instance, the manual labelled (low efficiency) nuScenes still contains misalignment and inconsistency between the HD maps and images (e.g., around 8.03 pixels reprojection error on average). To this end, we present CAMAv2: a vision-centric approach for Consistent and Accurate Map Annotation. Without LiDAR inputs, our proposed framework can still generate high-quality 3D annotations of static map elements. Specifically, the annotation can achieve high reprojection accuracy across all surrounding cameras and is spatial-temporal consistent across the whole sequence. We apply our proposed framework to the popular nuScenes dataset to provide efficient and highly accurate annotations. Compared with the original nuScenes static map element, our CAMAv2 annotations achieve lower reprojection errors (e.g., 4.96 vs. 8.03 pixels). Models trained with annotations from CAMAv2 also achieve lower reprojection errors (e.g., 5.62 vs. 8.43 pixels).

Lateralization LoRA: Interleaved Instruction Tuning with Modality-Specialized Adaptations

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have led to the development of Vision-Language Generalists (VLGs) capable of understanding and generating interleaved images and text. Despite these advances, VLGs still struggle to follow user instructions for interleaved text and image generation. To address this issue, we introduce LeafInstruct, the first open-sourced interleaved instruction tuning data with over 30,000 high-quality instances across more than 10 domains. Due to the extensive size of existing VLGs, we opt for parameter-efficient tuning. However, we observe that VLGs tuned with a standard LoRA typically exhibit inferior performance in interleaved text-image generation. We attribute this problem to modality interference and the lack of modality-specialized adaptation design. Hence, we propose Lateralization LoRA, a novel modality-specialized adaptation method inspired by the concept of brain lateralization. Lateralization LoRA employs a hybrid approach, combining the traditional linear LoRA and a Convolutional LoRA for generating text and images, enabling the generation of high-quality text and images by leveraging modality-specific structures and parameter sets. We perform instruction tuning of the VLG (i.e., EMU2) using Lateralization LoRA on the LeafInstruct dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EMU2 tuned with Lateralization LoRA achieve state-of-the-art performance, significantly surpassing baseline models in complex interleaved tasks.

DocKylin: A Large Multimodal Model for Visual Document Understanding with Efficient Visual Slimming

Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face significant challenges in visual document understanding (VDU) tasks due to the high resolution, dense text, and complex layouts typical of document images. These characteristics demand a high level of detail perception ability from MLLMs. While increasing input resolution improves detail perception, it also leads to longer sequences of visual tokens, increasing computational costs and straining the models' ability to handle long contexts. To address these challenges, we introduce DocKylin, a document-centric MLLM that performs visual content slimming at both the pixel and token levels, thereby reducing token sequence length in VDU scenarios. DocKylin utilizes an Adaptive Pixel Slimming (APS) preprocessing module to perform pixel-level slimming, increasing the proportion of informative pixels. Moreover, DocKylin incorporates a novel Dynamic Token Slimming (DTS) module to conduct token-level slimming, filtering essential tokens and removing others to create a compressed, adaptive visual sequence. Experiments demonstrate DocKylin's promising performance across various VDU benchmarks. Notably, both the proposed APS and DTS are parameter-free, facilitating easy integration into existing MLLMs, and our experiments indicate their potential for broader applications.

Holistic Evaluation for Interleaved Text-and-Image Generation

Interleaved text-and-image generation has been an intriguing research direction, where the models are required to generate both images and text pieces in an arbitrary order. Despite the emerging advancements in interleaved generation, the progress in its evaluation still significantly lags behind. Existing evaluation benchmarks do not support arbitrarily interleaved images and text for both inputs and outputs, and they only cover a limited number of domains and use cases. Also, current works predominantly use similarity-based metrics which fall short in assessing the quality in open-ended scenarios. To this end, we introduce InterleavedBench, the first benchmark carefully curated for the evaluation of interleaved text-and-image generation. InterleavedBench features a rich array of tasks to cover diverse real-world use cases. In addition, we present InterleavedEval, a strong reference-free metric powered by GPT-4o to deliver accurate and explainable evaluation. We carefully define five essential evaluation aspects for InterleavedEval, including text quality, perceptual quality, image coherence, text-image coherence, and helpfulness, to ensure a comprehensive and fine-grained assessment. Through extensive experiments and rigorous human evaluation, we show that our benchmark and metric can effectively evaluate the existing models with a strong correlation with human judgments surpassing previous reference-based metrics. We also provide substantial findings and insights to foster future research in interleaved generation and its evaluation.