RealCQA-V2 : Visual Premise Proving

We introduce Visual Premise Proving (VPP), a novel task tailored to refine the process of chart question answering by deconstructing it into a series of logical premises. Each of these premises represents an essential step in comprehending a chart's content and deriving logical conclusions, thereby providing a granular look at a model's reasoning abilities. This approach represents a departure from conventional accuracy-based evaluation methods, emphasizing the model's ability to sequentially validate each premise and ideally mimic human analytical processes. A model adept at reasoning is expected to demonstrate proficiency in both data retrieval and the structural understanding of charts, suggesting a synergy between these competencies. However, in our zero-shot study using the sophisticated MATCHA model on a scientific chart question answering dataset, an intriguing pattern emerged. The model showcased superior performance in chart reasoning (27\%) over chart structure (19\%) and data retrieval (14\%). This performance gap suggests that models might more readily generalize reasoning capabilities across datasets, benefiting from consistent mathematical and linguistic semantics, even when challenged by changes in the visual domain that complicate structure comprehension and data retrieval. Furthermore, the efficacy of using accuracy of binary QA for evaluating chart reasoning comes into question if models can deduce correct answers without parsing chart data or structure. VPP highlights the importance of integrating reasoning with visual comprehension to enhance model performance in chart analysis, pushing for a balanced approach in evaluating visual data interpretation capabilities.

Language-guided Robust Navigation for Mobile Robots in Dynamically-changing Environments

In this paper, we develop an embodied AI system for human-in-the-loop navigation with a wheeled mobile robot. We propose a direct yet effective method of monitoring the robot's current plan to detect changes in the environment that impact the intended trajectory of the robot significantly and then query a human for feedback. We also develop a means to parse human feedback expressed in natural language into local navigation waypoints and integrate it into a global planning system, by leveraging a map of semantic features and an aligned obstacle map. Extensive testing in simulation and physical hardware experiments with a resource-constrained wheeled robot tasked to navigate in a real-world environment validate the efficacy and robustness of our method. This work can support applications like precision agriculture and construction, where persistent monitoring of the environment provides a human with information about the environment state.

Towards Unsupervised Eye-Region Segmentation for Eye Tracking

Finding the eye and parsing out the parts (e.g. pupil and iris) is a key prerequisite for image-based eye tracking, which has become an indispensable module in today's head-mounted VR/AR devices. However, a typical route for training a segmenter requires tedious handlabeling. In this work, we explore an unsupervised way. First, we utilize priors of human eye and extract signals from the image to establish rough clues indicating the eye-region structure. Upon these sparse and noisy clues, a segmentation network is trained to gradually identify the precise area for each part. To achieve accurate parsing of the eye-region, we first leverage the pretrained foundation model Segment Anything (SAM) in an automatic way to refine the eye indications. Then, the learning process is designed in an end-to-end manner following progressive and prior-aware principle. Experiments show that our unsupervised approach can easily achieve 90% (the pupil and iris) and 85% (the whole eye-region) of the performances under supervised learning.

Neural-Bayesian Program Learning for Few-shot Dialogue Intent Parsing

With the growing importance of customer service in contemporary business, recognizing the intents behind service dialogues has become essential for the strategic success of enterprises. However, the nature of dialogue data varies significantly across different scenarios, and implementing an intent parser for a specific domain often involves tedious feature engineering and a heavy workload of data labeling. In this paper, we propose a novel Neural-Bayesian Program Learning model named Dialogue-Intent Parser (DI-Parser), which specializes in intent parsing under data-hungry settings and offers promising performance improvements. DI-Parser effectively utilizes data from multiple sources in a "Learning to Learn" manner and harnesses the "wisdom of the crowd" through few-shot learning capabilities on human-annotated datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that DI-Parser outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning models and offers practical advantages for industrial-scale applications.

Learning AND-OR Templates for Professional Photograph Parsing and Guidance

Since the development of photography art, many so-called "templates" have been formed, namely visual styles summarized from a series of themed and stylized photography works. In this paper, we propose to analysize and and summarize these 'templates' in photography by learning composite templates of photography images. We present a framework for learning a hierarchical reconfigurable image template from photography images to learn and characterize the "templates" used in these photography images. Using this method, we measured the artistic quality of photography on the photos and conducted photography guidance. In addition, we also utilized the "templates" for guidance in several image generation tasks. Experimental results show that the learned templates can well describe the photography techniques and styles, whereas the proposed approach can assess the quality of photography images as human being does.

World to Code: Multi-modal Data Generation via Self-Instructed Compositional Captioning and Filtering

Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and the scarcity of high-quality multi-modal alignment data have inspired numerous researches on synthetic VLM data generation. The conventional norm in VLM data construction uses a mixture of specialists in caption and OCR, or stronger VLM APIs and expensive human annotation. In this paper, we present World to Code (W2C), a meticulously curated multi-modal data construction pipeline that organizes the final generation output into a Python code format. The pipeline leverages the VLM itself to extract cross-modal information via different prompts and filter the generated outputs again via a consistency filtering strategy. Experiments have demonstrated the high quality of W2C by improving various existing visual question answering and visual grounding benchmarks across different VLMs. Further analysis also demonstrates that the new code parsing ability of VLMs presents better cross-modal equivalence than the commonly used detail caption ability. Our code is available at https://github.com/foundation-multimodal-models/World2Code.

Enhancing Temporal Sensitivity and Reasoning for Time-Sensitive Question Answering

Time-Sensitive Question Answering (TSQA) demands the effective utilization of specific temporal contexts, encompassing multiple time-evolving facts, to address time-sensitive questions. This necessitates not only the parsing of temporal information within questions but also the identification and understanding of time-evolving facts to generate accurate answers. However, current large language models still have limited sensitivity to temporal information and their inadequate temporal reasoning capabilities.In this paper, we propose a novel framework that enhances temporal awareness and reasoning through Temporal Information-Aware Embedding and Granular Contrastive Reinforcement Learning. Experimental results on four TSQA datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing LLMs in TSQA tasks, marking a step forward in bridging the performance gap between machine and human temporal understanding and reasoning.

Measuring Human and AI Values based on Generative Psychometrics with Large Language Models

Human values and their measurement are long-standing interdisciplinary inquiry. Recent advances in AI have sparked renewed interest in this area, with large language models (LLMs) emerging as both tools and subjects of value measurement. This work introduces Generative Psychometrics for Values (GPV), an LLM-based, data-driven value measurement paradigm, theoretically grounded in text-revealed selective perceptions. We begin by fine-tuning an LLM for accurate perception-level value measurement and verifying the capability of LLMs to parse texts into perceptions, forming the core of the GPV pipeline. Applying GPV to human-authored blogs, we demonstrate its stability, validity, and superiority over prior psychological tools. Then, extending GPV to LLM value measurement, we advance the current art with 1) a psychometric methodology that measures LLM values based on their scalable and free-form outputs, enabling context-specific measurement; 2) a comparative analysis of measurement paradigms, indicating response biases of prior methods; and 3) an attempt to bridge LLM values and their safety, revealing the predictive power of different value systems and the impacts of various values on LLM safety. Through interdisciplinary efforts, we aim to leverage AI for next-generation psychometrics and psychometrics for value-aligned AI.

Exploring LLM-Driven Explanations for Quantum Algorithms

Background: Quantum computing is a rapidly growing new programming paradigm that brings significant changes to the design and implementation of algorithms. Understanding quantum algorithms requires knowledge of physics and mathematics, which can be challenging for software developers. Aims: In this work, we provide a first analysis of how LLMs can support developers' understanding of quantum code. Method: We empirically analyse and compare the quality of explanations provided by three widely adopted LLMs (Gpt3.5, Llama2, and Tinyllama) using two different human-written prompt styles for seven state-of-the-art quantum algorithms. We also analyse how consistent LLM explanations are over multiple rounds and how LLMs can improve existing descriptions of quantum algorithms. Results: Llama2 provides the highest quality explanations from scratch, while Gpt3.5 emerged as the LLM best suited to improve existing explanations. In addition, we show that adding a small amount of context to the prompt significantly improves the quality of explanations. Finally, we observe how explanations are qualitatively and syntactically consistent over multiple rounds. Conclusions: This work highlights promising results, and opens challenges for future research in the field of LLMs for quantum code explanation. Future work includes refining the methods through prompt optimisation and parsing of quantum code explanations, as well as carrying out a systematic assessment of the quality of explanations.

μgat: Improving Single-Page Document Parsing by Providing Multi-Page Context

Regesta are catalogs of summaries of other documents and, in some cases, are the only source of information about the content of such full-length documents. For this reason, they are of great interest to scholars in many social and humanities fields. In this work, we focus on Regesta Pontificum Romanum, a large collection of papal registers. Regesta are visually rich documents, where the layout is as important as the text content to convey the contained information through the structure, and are inherently multi-page documents. Among Digital Humanities techniques that can help scholars efficiently exploit regesta and other documental sources in the form of scanned documents, Document Parsing has emerged as a task to process document images and convert them into machine-readable structured representations, usually markup language. However, current models focus on scientific and business documents, and most of them consider only single-paged documents. To overcome this limitation, in this work, we propose {\mu}gat, an extension of the recently proposed Document parsing Nougat architecture, which can handle elements spanning over the single page limits. Specifically, we adapt Nougat to process a larger, multi-page context, consisting of the previous and the following page, while parsing the current page. Experimental results, both qualitative and quantitative, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach also in the case of the challenging Regesta Pontificum Romanorum.