DMRA: An Adaptive Line Spectrum Estimation Method through Dynamical Multi-Resolution of Atoms

We proposed a novel dense line spectrum super-resolution algorithm, the DMRA, that leverages dynamical multi-resolution of atoms technique to address the limitation of traditional compressed sensing methods when handling dense point-source signals. The algorithm utilizes a smooth $\tanh$ relaxation function to replace the $\ell_0$ norm, promoting sparsity and jointly estimating the frequency atoms and complex gains. To reduce computational complexity and improve frequency estimation accuracy, a two-stage strategy was further introduced to dynamically adjust the number of the optimized degrees of freedom. The strategy first increases candidate frequencies through local refinement, then applies a sparse selector to eliminate insignificant frequencies, thereby adaptively adjusting the degrees of freedom to improve estimation accuracy. Theoretical analysis were provided to validate the proposed method for multi-parameter estimations. Computational results demonstrated that this algorithm achieves good super-resolution performance in various practical scenarios and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of frequency estimation accuracy and computational efficiency.

DePrompt: Desensitization and Evaluation of Personal Identifiable Information in Large Language Model Prompts

Prompt serves as a crucial link in interacting with large language models (LLMs), widely impacting the accuracy and interpretability of model outputs. However, acquiring accurate and high-quality responses necessitates precise prompts, which inevitably pose significant risks of personal identifiable information (PII) leakage. Therefore, this paper proposes DePrompt, a desensitization protection and effectiveness evaluation framework for prompt, enabling users to safely and transparently utilize LLMs. Specifically, by leveraging large model fine-tuning techniques as the underlying privacy protection method, we integrate contextual attributes to define privacy types, achieving high-precision PII entity identification. Additionally, through the analysis of key features in prompt desensitization scenarios, we devise adversarial generative desensitization methods that retain important semantic content while disrupting the link between identifiers and privacy attributes. Furthermore, we present utility evaluation metrics for prompt to better gauge and balance privacy and usability. Our framework is adaptable to prompts and can be extended to text usability-dependent scenarios. Through comparison with benchmarks and other model methods, experimental evaluations demonstrate that our desensitized prompt exhibit superior privacy protection utility and model inference results.

Leveraging Adaptive Implicit Representation Mapping for Ultra High-Resolution Image Segmentation

Implicit representation mapping (IRM) can translate image features to any continuous resolution, showcasing its potent capability for ultra-high-resolution image segmentation refinement. Current IRM-based methods for refining ultra-high-resolution image segmentation often rely on CNN-based encoders to extract image features and apply a Shared Implicit Representation Mapping Function (SIRMF) to convert pixel-wise features into segmented results. Hence, these methods exhibit two crucial limitations. Firstly, the CNN-based encoder may not effectively capture long-distance information, resulting in a lack of global semantic information in the pixel-wise features. Secondly, SIRMF is shared across all samples, which limits its ability to generalize and handle diverse inputs. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach that leverages the newly proposed Adaptive Implicit Representation Mapping (AIRM) for ultra-high-resolution Image Segmentation. Specifically, the proposed method comprises two components: (1) the Affinity Empowered Encoder (AEE), a robust feature extractor that leverages the benefits of the transformer architecture and semantic affinity to model long-distance features effectively, and (2) the Adaptive Implicit Representation Mapping Function (AIRMF), which adaptively translates pixel-wise features without neglecting the global semantic information, allowing for flexible and precise feature translation. We evaluated our method on the commonly used ultra-high-resolution segmentation refinement datasets, i.e., BIG and PASCAL VOC 2012. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms competitors by a large margin. The code is provided in supplementary material.

CLII: Visual-Text Inpainting via Cross-Modal Predictive Interaction

Image inpainting aims to fill missing pixels in damaged images and has achieved significant progress with cut-edging learning techniques. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art inpainting methods are mainly designed for nature images and cannot correctly recover text within scene text images, and training existing models on the scene text images cannot fix the issues. In this work, we identify the visual-text inpainting task to achieve high-quality scene text image restoration and text completion: Given a scene text image with unknown missing regions and the corresponding text with unknown missing characters, we aim to complete the missing information in both images and text by leveraging their complementary information. Intuitively, the input text, even if damaged, contains language priors of the contents within the images and can guide the image inpainting. Meanwhile, the scene text image includes the appearance cues of the characters that could benefit text recovery. To this end, we design the cross-modal predictive interaction (CLII) model containing two branches, i.e., ImgBranch and TxtBranch, for scene text inpainting and text completion, respectively while leveraging their complementary effectively. Moreover, we propose to embed our model into the SOTA scene text spotting method and significantly enhance its robustness against missing pixels, which demonstrates the practicality of the newly developed task. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we construct three real datasets based on existing text-related datasets, containing 1838 images and covering three scenarios with curved, incidental, and styled texts, and conduct extensive experiments to show that our method outperforms baselines significantly.

EWEK-QA: Enhanced Web and Efficient Knowledge Graph Retrieval for Citation-based Question Answering Systems

The emerging citation-based QA systems are gaining more attention especially in generative AI search applications. The importance of extracted knowledge provided to these systems is vital from both accuracy (completeness of information) and efficiency (extracting the information in a timely manner). In this regard, citation-based QA systems are suffering from two shortcomings. First, they usually rely only on web as a source of extracted knowledge and adding other external knowledge sources can hamper the efficiency of the system. Second, web-retrieved contents are usually obtained by some simple heuristics such as fixed length or breakpoints which might lead to splitting information into pieces. To mitigate these issues, we propose our enhanced web and efficient knowledge graph (KG) retrieval solution (EWEK-QA) to enrich the content of the extracted knowledge fed to the system. This has been done through designing an adaptive web retriever and incorporating KGs triples in an efficient manner. We demonstrate the effectiveness of EWEK-QA over the open-source state-of-the-art (SoTA) web-based and KG baseline models using a comprehensive set of quantitative and human evaluation experiments. Our model is able to: first, improve the web-retriever baseline in terms of extracting more relevant passages (>20\%), the coverage of answer span (>25\%) and self containment (>35\%); second, obtain and integrate KG triples into its pipeline very efficiently (by avoiding any LLM calls) to outperform the web-only and KG-only SoTA baselines significantly in 7 quantitative QA tasks and our human evaluation.

Evaluating the External and Parametric Knowledge Fusion of Large Language Models

Integrating external knowledge into large language models (LLMs) presents a promising solution to overcome the limitations imposed by their antiquated and static parametric memory. Prior studies, however, have tended to over-reliance on external knowledge, underestimating the valuable contributions of an LLMs' intrinsic parametric knowledge. The efficacy of LLMs in blending external and parametric knowledge remains largely unexplored, especially in cases where external knowledge is incomplete and necessitates supplementation by their parametric knowledge. We propose to deconstruct knowledge fusion into four distinct scenarios, offering the first thorough investigation of LLM behavior across each. We develop a systematic pipeline for data construction and knowledge infusion to simulate these fusion scenarios, facilitating a series of controlled experiments. Our investigation reveals that enhancing parametric knowledge within LLMs can significantly bolster their capability for knowledge integration. Nonetheless, we identify persistent challenges in memorizing and eliciting parametric knowledge, and determining parametric knowledge boundaries. Our findings aim to steer future explorations on harmonizing external and parametric knowledge within LLMs.

Retrieval-based Full-length Wikipedia Generation for Emergent Events

In today's fast-paced world, the growing demand to quickly generate comprehensive and accurate Wikipedia documents for emerging events is both crucial and challenging. However, previous efforts in Wikipedia generation have often fallen short of meeting real-world requirements. Some approaches focus solely on generating segments of a complete Wikipedia document, while others overlook the importance of faithfulness in generation or fail to consider the influence of the pre-training corpus. In this paper, we simulate a real-world scenario where structured full-length Wikipedia documents are generated for emergent events using input retrieved from web sources. To ensure that Large Language Models (LLMs) are not trained on corpora related to recently occurred events, we select events that have taken place recently and introduce a new benchmark Wiki-GenBen, which consists of 309 events paired with their corresponding retrieved web pages for generating evidence. Additionally, we design a comprehensive set of systematic evaluation metrics and baseline methods, to evaluate the capability of LLMs in generating factual full-length Wikipedia documents. The data and code are open-sourced at WikiGenBench.

Does the Generator Mind its Contexts? An Analysis of Generative Model Faithfulness under Context Transfer

The present study introduces the knowledge-augmented generator, which is specifically designed to produce information that remains grounded in contextual knowledge, regardless of alterations in the context. Previous research has predominantly focused on examining hallucinations stemming from static input, such as in the domains of summarization or machine translation. However, our investigation delves into the faithfulness of generative question answering in the presence of dynamic knowledge. Our objective is to explore the existence of hallucinations arising from parametric memory when contextual knowledge undergoes changes, while also analyzing the underlying causes for their occurrence. In order to efficiently address this issue, we propose a straightforward yet effective measure for detecting such hallucinations. Intriguingly, our investigation uncovers that all models exhibit a tendency to generate previous answers as hallucinations. To gain deeper insights into the underlying causes of this phenomenon, we conduct a series of experiments that verify the critical role played by context in hallucination, both during training and testing, from various perspectives.

PROXYQA: An Alternative Framework for Evaluating Long-Form Text Generation with Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable success in long-form context comprehension tasks. However, their capacity to generate long contents, such as reports and articles, remains insufficiently explored. Current benchmarks do not adequately assess LLMs' ability to produce informative and comprehensive content, necessitating a more rigorous evaluation approach. In this study, we introduce \textsc{ProxyQA}, a framework for evaluating long-form text generation, comprising in-depth human-curated \textit{meta-questions} spanning various domains. Each meta-question contains corresponding \textit{proxy-questions} with annotated answers. LLMs are prompted to generate extensive content in response to these meta-questions. Utilizing an evaluator and incorporating generated content as background context, \textsc{ProxyQA} evaluates the quality of generated content based on the evaluator's performance in answering the \textit{proxy-questions}. We examine multiple LLMs, emphasizing \textsc{ProxyQA}'s demanding nature as a high-quality assessment tool. Human evaluation demonstrates that evaluating through \textit{proxy-questions} is a highly self-consistent and human-criteria-correlated validation method. The dataset and leaderboard will be available at \url{https://github.com/Namco0816/ProxyQA}.

NoMIRACL: Knowing When You Don't Know for Robust Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds large language model (LLM) output by leveraging external knowledge sources to reduce factual hallucinations. However, prior works lack a comprehensive evaluation of different language families, making it challenging to evaluate LLM robustness against errors in external retrieved knowledge. To overcome this, we establish NoMIRACL, a human-annotated dataset for evaluating LLM robustness in RAG across 18 typologically diverse languages. NoMIRACL includes both a non-relevant and a relevant subset. Queries in the non-relevant subset contain passages manually judged as non-relevant or noisy, whereas queries in the relevant subset include at least a single judged relevant passage. We measure LLM robustness using two metrics: (i) hallucination rate, measuring model tendency to hallucinate an answer, when the answer is not present in passages in the non-relevant subset, and (ii) error rate, measuring model inaccuracy to recognize relevant passages in the relevant subset. We build a GPT-4 baseline which achieves a 33.2% hallucination rate on the non-relevant and a 14.9% error rate on the relevant subset on average. Our evaluation reveals that GPT-4 hallucinates frequently in high-resource languages, such as French or English. This work highlights an important avenue for future research to improve LLM robustness to learn how to better reject non-relevant information in RAG.