Avoid Wasted Annotation Costs in Open-set Active Learning with Pre-trained Vision-Language Model

Active learning (AL) aims to enhance model performance by selectively collecting highly informative data, thereby minimizing annotation costs. However, in practical scenarios, unlabeled data may contain out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, leading to wasted annotation costs if data is incorrectly selected. Recent research has explored methods to apply AL to open-set data, but these methods often require or incur unavoidable cost losses to minimize them. To address these challenges, we propose a novel selection strategy, CLIPN for AL (CLIPNAL), which minimizes cost losses without requiring OOD samples. CLIPNAL sequentially evaluates the purity and informativeness of data. First, it utilizes a pre-trained vision-language model to detect and exclude OOD data by leveraging linguistic and visual information of in-distribution (ID) data without additional training. Second, it selects highly informative data from the remaining ID data, and then the selected samples are annotated by human experts. Experimental results on datasets with various open-set conditions demonstrate that CLIPNAL achieves the lowest cost loss and highest performance across all scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/DSBA-Lab/OpenAL.

A Gradient Accumulation Method for Dense Retriever under Memory Constraint

InfoNCE loss is commonly used to train dense retriever in information retrieval tasks. It is well known that a large batch is essential to stable and effective training with InfoNCE loss, which requires significant hardware resources. Due to the dependency of large batch, dense retriever has bottleneck of application and research. Recently, memory reduction methods have been broadly adopted to resolve the hardware bottleneck by decomposing forward and backward or using a memory bank. However, current methods still suffer from slow and unstable training. To address these issues, we propose \longmodelname\ (\modelname), a stable and efficient memory reduction method for dense retriever trains that uses a dual memory bank structure to leverage previously generated query and passage representations. Experiments on widely used five information retrieval datasets indicate that \modelname\ can surpass not only existing memory reduction methods but also high-resource scenario. Moreover, theoretical analysis and experimental results confirm that \modelname\ provides more stable dual-encoder training than current memory bank utilization methods.

Technical Report of NICE Challenge at CVPR 2024: Caption Re-ranking Evaluation Using Ensembled CLIP and Consensus Scores

This report presents the ECO (Ensembled Clip score and cOnsensus score) pipeline from team DSBA LAB, which is a new framework used to evaluate and rank captions for a given image. ECO selects the most accurate caption describing image. It is made possible by combining an Ensembled CLIP score, which considers the semantic alignment between the image and captions, with a Consensus score that accounts for the essentialness of the captions. Using this framework, we achieved notable success in the CVPR 2024 Workshop Challenge on Caption Re-ranking Evaluation at the New Frontiers for Zero-Shot Image Captioning Evaluation (NICE). Specifically, we secured third place based on the CIDEr metric, second in both the SPICE and METEOR metrics, and first in the ROUGE-L and all BLEU Score metrics. The code and configuration for the ECO framework are available at https://github.com/ DSBA-Lab/ECO .

Navigating the Path of Writing: Outline-guided Text Generation with Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly impacted the writing process, enabling collaborative content creation and enhancing productivity. However, generating high-quality, user-aligned text remains challenging. In this paper, we propose Writing Path, a framework that uses explicit outlines to guide LLMs in generating goal-oriented, high-quality pieces of writing. Our approach draws inspiration from structured writing planning and reasoning paths, focusing on capturing and reflecting user intentions throughout the writing process. We construct a diverse dataset from unstructured blog posts to benchmark writing performance and introduce a comprehensive evaluation framework assessing the quality of outlines and generated texts. Our evaluations with GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4, and HyperCLOVA X demonstrate that the Writing Path approach significantly enhances text quality according to both LLMs and human evaluations. This study highlights the potential of integrating writing-specific techniques into LLMs to enhance their ability to meet the diverse writing needs of users.

CheckEval: Robust Evaluation Framework using Large Language Model via Checklist

We introduce CheckEval, a novel evaluation framework using Large Language Models, addressing the challenges of ambiguity and inconsistency in current evaluation methods. CheckEval addresses these challenges by dividing evaluation criteria into detailed sub-aspects and constructing a checklist of Boolean questions for each, simplifying the evaluation. This approach not only renders the process more interpretable but also significantly enhances the robustness and reliability of results by focusing on specific evaluation dimensions. Validated through a focused case study using the SummEval benchmark, CheckEval indicates a strong correlation with human judgments. Furthermore, it demonstrates a highly consistent Inter-Annotator Agreement. These findings highlight the effectiveness of CheckEval for objective, flexible, and precise evaluations. By offering a customizable and interactive framework, CheckEval sets a new standard for the use of LLMs in evaluation, responding to the evolving needs of the field and establishing a clear method for future LLM-based evaluation.

Boosting Prompt-Based Self-Training With Mapping-Free Automatic Verbalizer for Multi-Class Classification

Recently, prompt-based fine-tuning has garnered considerable interest as a core technique for few-shot text classification task. This approach reformulates the fine-tuning objective to align with the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) objective. Leveraging unlabeled data, prompt-based self-training has shown greater effectiveness in binary and three-class classification. However, prompt-based self-training for multi-class classification has not been adequately investigated, despite its significant applicability to real-world scenarios. Moreover, extending current methods to multi-class classification suffers from the verbalizer that extracts the predicted value of manually pre-defined single label word for each class from MLM predictions. Consequently, we introduce a novel, efficient verbalizer structure, named Mapping-free Automatic Verbalizer (MAV). Comprising two fully connected layers, MAV serves as a trainable verbalizer that automatically extracts the requisite word features for classification by capitalizing on all available information from MLM predictions. Experimental results on five multi-class classification datasets indicate MAV's superior self-training efficacy.

RAPID: Training-free Retrieval-based Log Anomaly Detection with PLM considering Token-level information

As the IT industry advances, system log data becomes increasingly crucial. Many computer systems rely on log texts for management due to restricted access to source code. The need for log anomaly detection is growing, especially in real-world applications, but identifying anomalies in rapidly accumulating logs remains a challenging task. Traditional deep learning-based anomaly detection models require dataset-specific training, leading to corresponding delays. Notably, most methods only focus on sequence-level log information, which makes the detection of subtle anomalies harder, and often involve inference processes that are difficult to utilize in real-time. We introduce RAPID, a model that capitalizes on the inherent features of log data to enable anomaly detection without training delays, ensuring real-time capability. RAPID treats logs as natural language, extracting representations using pre-trained language models. Given that logs can be categorized based on system context, we implement a retrieval-based technique to contrast test logs with the most similar normal logs. This strategy not only obviates the need for log-specific training but also adeptly incorporates token-level information, ensuring refined and robust detection, particularly for unseen logs. We also propose the core set technique, which can reduce the computational cost needed for comparison. Experimental results show that even without training on log data, RAPID demonstrates competitive performance compared to prior models and achieves the best performance on certain datasets. Through various research questions, we verified its capability for real-time detection without delay.

Which is better? Exploring Prompting Strategy For LLM-based Metrics

This paper describes the DSBA submissions to the Prompting Large Language Models as Explainable Metrics shared task, where systems were submitted to two tracks: small and large summarization tracks. With advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, evaluating the quality of Natural Language Generation (NLG) has become increasingly paramount. Traditional similarity-based metrics such as BLEU and ROUGE have shown to misalign with human evaluation and are ill-suited for open-ended generation tasks. To address this issue, we explore the potential capability of LLM-based metrics, especially leveraging open-source LLMs. In this study, wide range of prompts and prompting techniques are systematically analyzed with three approaches: prompting strategy, score aggregation, and explainability. Our research focuses on formulating effective prompt templates, determining the granularity of NLG quality scores and assessing the impact of in-context examples on LLM-based evaluation. Furthermore, three aggregation strategies are compared to identify the most reliable method for aggregating NLG quality scores. To examine explainability, we devise a strategy that generates rationales for the scores and analyzes the characteristics of the explanation produced by the open-source LLMs. Extensive experiments provide insights regarding evaluation capabilities of open-source LLMs and suggest effective prompting strategies.

Painsight: An Extendable Opinion Mining Framework for Detecting Pain Points Based on Online Customer Reviews

As the e-commerce market continues to expand and online transactions proliferate, customer reviews have emerged as a critical element in shaping the purchasing decisions of prospective buyers. Previous studies have endeavored to identify key aspects of customer reviews through the development of sentiment analysis models and topic models. However, extracting specific dissatisfaction factors remains a challenging task. In this study, we delineate the pain point detection problem and propose Painsight, an unsupervised framework for automatically extracting distinct dissatisfaction factors from customer reviews without relying on ground truth labels. Painsight employs pre-trained language models to construct sentiment analysis and topic models, leveraging attribution scores derived from model gradients to extract dissatisfaction factors. Upon application of the proposed methodology to customer review data spanning five product categories, we successfully identified and categorized dissatisfaction factors within each group, as well as isolated factors for each type. Notably, Painsight outperformed benchmark methods, achieving substantial performance enhancements and exceptional results in human evaluations.

Multi-Task Self-Supervised Time-Series Representation Learning

Time-series representation learning can extract representations from data with temporal dynamics and sparse labels. When labeled data are sparse but unlabeled data are abundant, contrastive learning, i.e., a framework to learn a latent space where similar samples are close to each other while dissimilar ones are far from each other, has shown outstanding performance. This strategy can encourage varied consistency of time-series representations depending on the positive pair selection and contrastive loss. We propose a new time-series representation learning method by combining the advantages of self-supervised tasks related to contextual, temporal, and transformation consistency. It allows the network to learn general representations for various downstream tasks and domains. Specifically, we first adopt data preprocessing to generate positive and negative pairs for each self-supervised task. The model then performs contextual, temporal, and transformation contrastive learning and is optimized jointly using their contrastive losses. We further investigate an uncertainty weighting approach to enable effective multi-task learning by considering the contribution of each consistency. We evaluate the proposed framework on three downstream tasks: time-series classification, forecasting, and anomaly detection. Experimental results show that our method not only outperforms the benchmark models on these downstream tasks, but also shows efficiency in cross-domain transfer learning.