Crowdsource, Crawl, or Generate? Creating SEA-VL, a Multicultural Vision-Language Dataset for Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region of extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity, yet it remains significantly underrepresented in vision-language (VL) research. This often results in artificial intelligence (AI) models that fail to capture SEA cultural nuances. To fill this gap, we present SEA-VL, an open-source initiative dedicated to developing high-quality, culturally relevant data for SEA languages. By involving contributors from SEA countries, SEA-VL aims to ensure better cultural relevance and diversity, fostering greater inclusivity of underrepresented languages in VL research. Beyond crowdsourcing, our initiative goes one step further in the exploration of the automatic collection of culturally relevant images through crawling and image generation. First, we find that image crawling achieves approximately ~85% cultural relevance while being more cost- and time-efficient than crowdsourcing. Second, despite the substantial progress in generative vision models, synthetic images remain unreliable in accurately reflecting SEA cultures. The generated images often fail to reflect the nuanced traditions and cultural contexts of the region. Collectively, we gather 1.28M SEA culturally-relevant images, more than 50 times larger than other existing datasets. Through SEA-VL, we aim to bridge the representation gap in SEA, fostering the development of more inclusive AI systems that authentically represent diverse cultures across SEA.

Shifting Long-Context LLMs Research from Input to Output

Recent advancements in long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) have primarily concentrated on processing extended input contexts, resulting in significant strides in long-context comprehension. However, the equally critical aspect of generating long-form outputs has received comparatively less attention. This paper advocates for a paradigm shift in NLP research toward addressing the challenges of long-output generation. Tasks such as novel writing, long-term planning, and complex reasoning require models to understand extensive contexts and produce coherent, contextually rich, and logically consistent extended text. These demands highlight a critical gap in current LLM capabilities. We underscore the importance of this under-explored domain and call for focused efforts to develop foundational LLMs tailored for generating high-quality, long-form outputs, which hold immense potential for real-world applications.

Bridging Modalities: Enhancing Cross-Modality Hate Speech Detection with Few-Shot In-Context Learning

The widespread presence of hate speech on the internet, including formats such as text-based tweets and vision-language memes, poses a significant challenge to digital platform safety. Recent research has developed detection models tailored to specific modalities; however, there is a notable gap in transferring detection capabilities across different formats. This study conducts extensive experiments using few-shot in-context learning with large language models to explore the transferability of hate speech detection between modalities. Our findings demonstrate that text-based hate speech examples can significantly enhance the classification accuracy of vision-language hate speech. Moreover, text-based demonstrations outperform vision-language demonstrations in few-shot learning settings. These results highlight the effectiveness of cross-modality knowledge transfer and offer valuable insights for improving hate speech detection systems.

LongGenbench: Benchmarking Long-Form Generation in Long Context LLMs

The abilities of long-context language models (LMs) are often evaluated using the "Needle-in-a-Haystack" (NIAH) test, which comprises tasks designed to assess a model's ability to identify specific information ("needle") within large text sequences ("haystack"). While these benchmarks measure how well models understand long-context input sequences, they do not effectively gauge the quality of long-form text generation--a critical aspect for applications such as design proposals and creative writing. To address this gap, we have introduced a new long-form text evaluation benchmark, LongGenbench, which tests models' ability to identify specific events within generated long text sequences. In this benchmark, we prompt long-context LMs to create long-form text that must include particular events or constraints and evaluate their ability to incorporate these elements. We evaluated ten long-context LMs across four distinct scenarios, three types of prompt instructions, and two different generation-length settings (16K and 32K). Although these models perform well on NIAH benchmarks, none demonstrated satisfactory performance on the LongGenbench, raising concerns about their ability to generate coherent long-form text that follows instructions. Additionally, as the length of the generated text increases, all models exhibit a significant drop in performance.

Spinning the Golden Thread: Benchmarking Long-Form Generation in Language Models

The abilities of long-context language models (LMs) are often evaluated using the "Needle-in-a-Haystack" (NIAH) test, which comprises tasks designed to assess a model's ability to identify specific information ("needle") within large text sequences ("haystack"). While these benchmarks measure how well models understand long-context input sequences, they do not effectively gauge the quality of long-form text generation--a critical aspect for applications such as design proposals and creative writing. To address this gap, we have introduced a new long-form text evaluation benchmark, Spinning the Golden Thread (SGT), which tests models' ability to identify specific events within generated long text sequences. In this benchmark, we prompt long-context LMs to create long-form text that must include particular events or constraints and evaluate their ability to incorporate these elements. We evaluated ten long-context LMs across four distinct scenarios, three types of prompt instructions, and two different generation-length settings (16K and 32K). Although these models perform well on NIAH benchmarks, none demonstrated satisfactory performance on the Spinning the Golden Thread, raising concerns about their ability to generate coherent long-form text that follows instructions. Additionally, as the length of the generated text increases, all models exhibit a significant drop in performance.

SGHateCheck: Functional Tests for Detecting Hate Speech in Low-Resource Languages of Singapore

To address the limitations of current hate speech detection models, we introduce \textsf{SGHateCheck}, a novel framework designed for the linguistic and cultural context of Singapore and Southeast Asia. It extends the functional testing approach of HateCheck and MHC, employing large language models for translation and paraphrasing into Singapore's main languages, and refining these with native annotators. \textsf{SGHateCheck} reveals critical flaws in state-of-the-art models, highlighting their inadequacy in sensitive content moderation. This work aims to foster the development of more effective hate speech detection tools for diverse linguistic environments, particularly for Singapore and Southeast Asia contexts.

Recent Advances in Hate Speech Moderation: Multimodality and the Role of Large Models

In the evolving landscape of online communication, moderating hate speech (HS) presents an intricate challenge, compounded by the multimodal nature of digital content. This comprehensive survey delves into the recent strides in HS moderation, spotlighting the burgeoning role of large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs). Our exploration begins with a thorough analysis of current literature, revealing the nuanced interplay between textual, visual, and auditory elements in propagating HS. We uncover a notable trend towards integrating these modalities, primarily due to the complexity and subtlety with which HS is disseminated. A significant emphasis is placed on the advances facilitated by LLMs and LMMs, which have begun to redefine the boundaries of detection and moderation capabilities. We identify existing gaps in research, particularly in the context of underrepresented languages and cultures, and the need for solutions to handle low-resource settings. The survey concludes with a forward-looking perspective, outlining potential avenues for future research, including the exploration of novel AI methodologies, the ethical governance of AI in moderation, and the development of more nuanced, context-aware systems. This comprehensive overview aims to catalyze further research and foster a collaborative effort towards more sophisticated, responsible, and human-centric approaches to HS moderation in the digital era. WARNING: This paper contains offensive examples.

Prompting Large Language Models for Topic Modeling

Topic modeling is a widely used technique for revealing underlying thematic structures within textual data. However, existing models have certain limitations, particularly when dealing with short text datasets that lack co-occurring words. Moreover, these models often neglect sentence-level semantics, focusing primarily on token-level semantics. In this paper, we propose PromptTopic, a novel topic modeling approach that harnesses the advanced language understanding of large language models (LLMs) to address these challenges. It involves extracting topics at the sentence level from individual documents, then aggregating and condensing these topics into a predefined quantity, ultimately providing coherent topics for texts of varying lengths. This approach eliminates the need for manual parameter tuning and improves the quality of extracted topics. We benchmark PromptTopic against the state-of-the-art baselines on three vastly diverse datasets, establishing its proficiency in discovering meaningful topics. Furthermore, qualitative analysis showcases PromptTopic's ability to uncover relevant topics in multiple datasets.

PromptMTopic: Unsupervised Multimodal Topic Modeling of Memes using Large Language Models

The proliferation of social media has given rise to a new form of communication: memes. Memes are multimodal and often contain a combination of text and visual elements that convey meaning, humor, and cultural significance. While meme analysis has been an active area of research, little work has been done on unsupervised multimodal topic modeling of memes, which is important for content moderation, social media analysis, and cultural studies. We propose \textsf{PromptMTopic}, a novel multimodal prompt-based model designed to learn topics from both text and visual modalities by leveraging the language modeling capabilities of large language models. Our model effectively extracts and clusters topics learned from memes, considering the semantic interaction between the text and visual modalities. We evaluate our proposed model through extensive experiments on three real-world meme datasets, which demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art topic modeling baselines in learning descriptive topics in memes. Additionally, our qualitative analysis shows that \textsf{PromptMTopic} can identify meaningful and culturally relevant topics from memes. Our work contributes to the understanding of the topics and themes of memes, a crucial form of communication in today's society.\\ \red{\textbf{Disclaimer: This paper contains sensitive content that may be disturbing to some readers.}}

MATK: The Meme Analytical Tool Kit

The rise of social media platforms has brought about a new digital culture called memes. Memes, which combine visuals and text, can strongly influence public opinions on social and cultural issues. As a result, people have become interested in categorizing memes, leading to the development of various datasets and multimodal models that show promising results in this field. However, there is currently a lack of a single library that allows for the reproduction, evaluation, and comparison of these models using fair benchmarks and settings. To fill this gap, we introduce the Meme Analytical Tool Kit (MATK), an open-source toolkit specifically designed to support existing memes datasets and cutting-edge multimodal models. MATK aims to assist researchers and engineers in training and reproducing these multimodal models for meme classification tasks, while also providing analysis techniques to gain insights into their strengths and weaknesses. To access MATK, please visit \url{https://github.com/Social-AI-Studio/MATK}.