Leveraging Weak Cross-Modal Guidance for Coherence Modelling via Iterative Learning

Cross-modal coherence modeling is essential for intelligent systems to help them organize and structure information, thereby understanding and creating content of the physical world coherently like human-beings. Previous work on cross-modal coherence modeling attempted to leverage the order information from another modality to assist the coherence recovering of the target modality. Despite of the effectiveness, labeled associated coherency information is not always available and might be costly to acquire, making the cross-modal guidance hard to leverage. To tackle this challenge, this paper explores a new way to take advantage of cross-modal guidance without gold labels on coherency, and proposes the Weak Cross-Modal Guided Ordering (WeGO) model. More specifically, it leverages high-confidence predicted pairwise order in one modality as reference information to guide the coherence modeling in another. An iterative learning paradigm is further designed to jointly optimize the coherence modeling in two modalities with selected guidance from each other. The iterative cross-modal boosting also functions in inference to further enhance coherence prediction in each modality. Experimental results on two public datasets have demonstrated that the proposed method outperforms existing methods for cross-modal coherence modeling tasks. Major technical modules have been evaluated effective through ablation studies. Codes are available at: \url{https://github.com/scvready123/IterWeGO}.

GalleryGPT: Analyzing Paintings with Large Multimodal Models

Artwork analysis is important and fundamental skill for art appreciation, which could enrich personal aesthetic sensibility and facilitate the critical thinking ability. Understanding artworks is challenging due to its subjective nature, diverse interpretations, and complex visual elements, requiring expertise in art history, cultural background, and aesthetic theory. However, limited by the data collection and model ability, previous works for automatically analyzing artworks mainly focus on classification, retrieval, and other simple tasks, which is far from the goal of AI. To facilitate the research progress, in this paper, we step further to compose comprehensive analysis inspired by the remarkable perception and generation ability of large multimodal models. Specifically, we first propose a task of composing paragraph analysis for artworks, i.e., painting in this paper, only focusing on visual characteristics to formulate more comprehensive understanding of artworks. To support the research on formal analysis, we collect a large dataset PaintingForm, with about 19k painting images and 50k analysis paragraphs. We further introduce a superior large multimodal model for painting analysis composing, dubbed GalleryGPT, which is slightly modified and fine-tuned based on LLaVA architecture leveraging our collected data. We conduct formal analysis generation and zero-shot experiments across several datasets to assess the capacity of our model. The results show remarkable performance improvements comparing with powerful baseline LMMs, demonstrating its superb ability of art analysis and generalization. \textcolor{blue}{The codes and model are available at: https://github.com/steven640pixel/GalleryGPT.

A Survey on RAG Meets LLMs: Towards Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models

As one of the most advanced techniques in AI, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques can offer reliable and up-to-date external knowledge, providing huge convenience for numerous tasks. Particularly in the era of AI-generated content (AIGC), the powerful capacity of retrieval in RAG in providing additional knowledge enables retrieval-augmented generation to assist existing generative AI in producing high-quality outputs. Recently, large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated revolutionary abilities in language understanding and generation, while still facing inherent limitations, such as hallucinations and out-of-date internal knowledge. Given the powerful abilities of RAG in providing the latest and helpful auxiliary information, retrieval-augmented large language models have emerged to harness external and authoritative knowledge bases, rather than solely relying on the model's internal knowledge, to augment the generation quality of LLMs. In this survey, we comprehensively review existing research studies in retrieval-augmented large language models (RA-LLMs), covering three primary technical perspectives: architectures, training strategies, and applications. As the preliminary knowledge, we briefly introduce the foundations and recent advances of LLMs. Then, to illustrate the practical significance of RAG for LLMs, we categorize mainstream relevant work by application areas, detailing specifically the challenges of each and the corresponding capabilities of RA-LLMs. Finally, to deliver deeper insights, we discuss current limitations and several promising directions for future research.

FashionReGen: LLM-Empowered Fashion Report Generation

Fashion analysis refers to the process of examining and evaluating trends, styles, and elements within the fashion industry to understand and interpret its current state, generating fashion reports. It is traditionally performed by fashion professionals based on their expertise and experience, which requires high labour cost and may also produce biased results for relying heavily on a small group of people. In this paper, to tackle the Fashion Report Generation (FashionReGen) task, we propose an intelligent Fashion Analyzing and Reporting system based the advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), debbed as GPT-FAR. Specifically, it tries to deliver FashionReGen based on effective catwalk analysis, which is equipped with several key procedures, namely, catwalk understanding, collective organization and analysis, and report generation. By posing and exploring such an open-ended, complex and domain-specific task of FashionReGen, it is able to test the general capability of LLMs in fashion domain. It also inspires the explorations of more high-level tasks with industrial significance in other domains. Video illustration and more materials of GPT-FAR can be found in https://github.com/CompFashion/FashionReGen.

Non-Autoregressive Sentence Ordering

Existing sentence ordering approaches generally employ encoder-decoder frameworks with the pointer net to recover the coherence by recurrently predicting each sentence step-by-step. Such an autoregressive manner only leverages unilateral dependencies during decoding and cannot fully explore the semantic dependency between sentences for ordering. To overcome these limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel Non-Autoregressive Ordering Network, dubbed \textit{NAON}, which explores bilateral dependencies between sentences and predicts the sentence for each position in parallel. We claim that the non-autoregressive manner is not just applicable but also particularly suitable to the sentence ordering task because of two peculiar characteristics of the task: 1) each generation target is in deterministic length, and 2) the sentences and positions should match exclusively. Furthermore, to address the repetition issue of the naive non-autoregressive Transformer, we introduce an exclusive loss to constrain the exclusiveness between positions and sentences. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed model, we conduct extensive experiments on several common-used datasets and the experimental results show that our method outperforms all the autoregressive approaches and yields competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-arts. The codes are available at: \url{https://github.com/steven640pixel/nonautoregressive-sentence-ordering}.

Solving Math Word Problems with Reexamination

Math word problem (MWP) solving aims to understand the descriptive math problem and calculate the result, for which previous efforts are mostly devoted to upgrade different technical modules. This paper brings a different perspective of \textit{reexamination process} during training by introducing a pseudo-dual task to enhance the MWP solving. We propose a pseudo-dual (PseDual) learning scheme to model such process, which is model-agnostic thus can be adapted to any existing MWP solvers. The pseudo-dual task is specifically defined as filling the numbers in the expression back into the original word problem with numbers masked. To facilitate the effective joint learning of the two tasks, we further design a scheduled fusion strategy for the number infilling task, which smoothly switches the input from the ground-truth math expressions to the predicted ones. Our pseudo-dual learning scheme has been tested and proven effective when being equipped in several representative MWP solvers through empirical studies. \textit{The codes and trained models are available at:} \url{https://github.com/steven640pixel/PsedualMWP}. \end{abstract}

Computational Technologies for Fashion Recommendation: A Survey

Fashion recommendation is a key research field in computational fashion research and has attracted considerable interest in the computer vision, multimedia, and information retrieval communities in recent years. Due to the great demand for applications, various fashion recommendation tasks, such as personalized fashion product recommendation, complementary (mix-and-match) recommendation, and outfit recommendation, have been posed and explored in the literature. The continuing research attention and advances impel us to look back and in-depth into the field for a better understanding. In this paper, we comprehensively review recent research efforts on fashion recommendation from a technological perspective. We first introduce fashion recommendation at a macro level and analyse its characteristics and differences with general recommendation tasks. We then clearly categorize different fashion recommendation efforts into several sub-tasks and focus on each sub-task in terms of its problem formulation, research focus, state-of-the-art methods, and limitations. We also summarize the datasets proposed in the literature for use in fashion recommendation studies to give readers a brief illustration. Finally, we discuss several promising directions for future research in this field. Overall, this survey systematically reviews the development of fashion recommendation research. It also discusses the current limitations and gaps between academic research and the real needs of the fashion industry. In the process, we offer a deep insight into how the fashion industry could benefit from fashion recommendation technologies. the computational technologies of fashion recommendation.

Modeling Field-level Factor Interactions for Fashion Recommendation

Personalized fashion recommendation aims to explore patterns from historical interactions between users and fashion items and thereby predict the future ones. It is challenging due to the sparsity of the interaction data and the diversity of user preference in fashion. To tackle the challenge, this paper investigates multiple factor fields in fashion domain, such as colour, style, brand, and tries to specify the implicit user-item interaction into field level. Specifically, an attentional factor field interaction graph (AFFIG) approach is proposed which models both the user-factor interactions and cross-field factors interactions for predicting the recommendation probability at specific field. In addition, an attention mechanism is equipped to aggregate the cross-field factor interactions for each field. Extensive experiments have been conducted on three E-Commerce fashion datasets and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for fashion recommendation. The influence of various factor fields on recommendation in fashion domain is also discussed through experiments.

Leveraging Two Types of Global Graph for Sequential Fashion Recommendation

Sequential fashion recommendation is of great significance in online fashion shopping, which accounts for an increasing portion of either fashion retailing or online e-commerce. The key to building an effective sequential fashion recommendation model lies in capturing two types of patterns: the personal fashion preference of users and the transitional relationships between adjacent items. The two types of patterns are usually related to user-item interaction and item-item transition modeling respectively. However, due to the large sets of users and items as well as the sparse historical interactions, it is difficult to train an effective and efficient sequential fashion recommendation model. To tackle these problems, we propose to leverage two types of global graph, i.e., the user-item interaction graph and item-item transition graph, to obtain enhanced user and item representations by incorporating higher-order connections over the graphs. In addition, we adopt the graph kernel of LightGCN for the information propagation in both graphs and propose a new design for item-item transition graph. Extensive experiments on two established sequential fashion recommendation datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

Reproducibility Companion Paper: Knowledge Enhanced Neural Fashion Trend Forecasting

This companion paper supports the replication of the fashion trend forecasting experiments with the KERN (Knowledge Enhanced Recurrent Network) method that we presented in the ICMR 2020. We provide an artifact that allows the replication of the experiments using a Python implementation. The artifact is easy to deploy with simple installation, training and evaluation. We reproduce the experiments conducted in the original paper and obtain similar performance as previously reported. The replication results of the experiments support the main claims in the original paper.