Paraphrase generation is a pivotal task in natural language processing (NLP). Existing datasets in the domain lack syntactic and lexical diversity, resulting in paraphrases that closely resemble the source sentences. Moreover, these datasets often contain hate speech and noise, and may unintentionally include non-English language sentences. This research introduces ParaFusion, a large-scale, high-quality English paraphrase dataset developed using Large Language Models (LLM) to address these challenges. ParaFusion augments existing datasets with high-quality data, significantly enhancing both lexical and syntactic diversity while maintaining close semantic similarity. It also mitigates the presence of hate speech and reduces noise, ensuring a cleaner and more focused English dataset. Results show that ParaFusion offers at least a 25% improvement in both syntactic and lexical diversity, measured across several metrics for each data source. The paper also aims to set a gold standard for paraphrase evaluation as it contains one of the most comprehensive evaluation strategies to date. The results underscore the potential of ParaFusion as a valuable resource for improving NLP applications.

Extracting structured event knowledge, including event triggers and corresponding arguments, from military texts is fundamental to many applications, such as intelligence analysis and decision assistance. However, event extraction in the military field faces the data scarcity problem, which impedes the research of event extraction models in this domain. To alleviate this problem, we propose CMNEE, a large-scale, document-level open-source Chinese Military News Event Extraction dataset. It contains 17,000 documents and 29,223 events, which are all manually annotated based on a pre-defined schema for the military domain including 8 event types and 11 argument role types. We designed a two-stage, multi-turns annotation strategy to ensure the quality of CMNEE and reproduced several state-of-the-art event extraction models with a systematic evaluation. The experimental results on CMNEE fall shorter than those on other domain datasets obviously, which demonstrates that event extraction for military domain poses unique challenges and requires further research efforts. Our code and data can be obtained from https://github.com/Mzzzhu/CMNEE.

The clustering method based on graph models has garnered increased attention for its widespread applicability across various knowledge domains. Its adaptability to integrate seamlessly with other relevant applications endows the graph model-based clustering analysis with the ability to robustly extract "natural associations" or "graph structures" within datasets, facilitating the modelling of relationships between data points. Despite its efficacy, the current clustering method utilizing the graph-based model overlooks the uncertainty associated with random walk access between nodes and the embedded structural information in the data. To address this gap, we present a novel Clustering method for Maximizing Decoding Information within graph-based models, named CMDI. CMDI innovatively incorporates two-dimensional structural information theory into the clustering process, consisting of two phases: graph structure extraction and graph vertex partitioning. Within CMDI, graph partitioning is reformulated as an abstract clustering problem, leveraging maximum decoding information to minimize uncertainty associated with random visits to vertices. Empirical evaluations on three real-world datasets demonstrate that CMDI outperforms classical baseline methods, exhibiting a superior decoding information ratio (DI-R). Furthermore, CMDI showcases heightened efficiency, particularly when considering prior knowledge (PK). These findings underscore the effectiveness of CMDI in enhancing decoding information quality and computational efficiency, positioning it as a valuable tool in graph-based clustering analyses.

Large-scale geolocation telematics data acquired from connected vehicles has the potential to significantly enhance mobility infrastructures and operational systems within smart cities. To effectively utilize this data, it is essential to accurately match the geolocation data to the road segments. However, this matching is often not trivial due to the low sampling rate and errors exacerbated by multipath effects in urban environments. Traditionally, statistical modeling techniques such as Hidden-Markov models incorporating domain knowledge into the matching process have been extensively used for map-matching tasks. However, rule-based map-matching tasks are noise-sensitive and inefficient in processing large-scale trajectory data. Deep learning techniques directly learn the relationship between observed data and road networks from the data, often without the need for hand-crafted rules or domain knowledge. This renders them an efficient approach for map-matching large-scale datasets and makes them more robust to the noise. This paper introduces a sequence-to-sequence deep-learning model, specifically the transformer-based encoder-decoder model, to perform as a surrogate for map-matching algorithms. The encoder-decoder architecture initially encodes the series of noisy GPS points into a representation that automatically captures autoregressive behavior and spatial correlations between GPS points. Subsequently, the decoder associates data points with the road network features and thus transforms these representations into a sequence of road segments. The model is trained and evaluated using GPS traces collected in Manhattan, New York. Achieving an accuracy of 76%, transformer-based encoder-decoder models extensively employed in natural language processing presented a promising performance for translating noisy GPS data to the navigated routes in urban road networks.

In the multi-modal domain, the dependence of various models on specific input formats leads to user confusion and hinders progress. To address this challenge, we introduce \textbf{LLMBind}, a novel framework designed to unify a diverse array of multi-modal tasks. By harnessing a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Large Language Model (LLM), LLMBind processes multi-modal inputs and generates task-specific tokens, enabling the invocation of corresponding models to accomplish tasks. This unique approach empowers LLMBind to interpret inputs and generate outputs across various modalities, including image, text, video, and audio. Furthermore, we have constructed an interaction dataset comprising 400k instructions, which unlocks the ability of LLMBind for interactive visual generation and editing tasks. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that LLMBind achieves very superior performance across diverse tasks and outperforms existing models in user evaluations conducted in real-world scenarios. Moreover, the adaptability of LLMBind allows for seamless integration with the latest models and extension to new modality tasks, highlighting its potential to serve as a unified AI agent for modeling universal modalities.

The correct model response in the face of uncertainty is to abstain from answering a question so as not to mislead the user. In this work, we study the ability of LLMs to abstain from answering context-dependent science questions when provided insufficient or incorrect context. We probe model sensitivity in several settings: removing gold context, replacing gold context with irrelevant context, and providing additional context beyond what is given. In experiments on four QA datasets with four LLMs, we show that performance varies greatly across models, across the type of context provided, and also by question type; in particular, many LLMs seem unable to abstain from answering boolean questions using standard QA prompts. Our analysis also highlights the unexpected impact of abstention performance on QA task accuracy. Counter-intuitively, in some settings, replacing gold context with irrelevant context or adding irrelevant context to gold context can improve abstention performance in a way that results in improvements in task performance. Our results imply that changes are needed in QA dataset design and evaluation to more effectively assess the correctness and downstream impacts of model abstention.

Video summarization aims to create short, accurate, and cohesive summaries of longer videos. Despite the existence of various video summarization datasets, a notable limitation is their limited amount of source videos, which hampers the effective fine-tuning of advanced large vision-language models (VLMs). Additionally, most existing datasets are created for video-to-video summarization, overlooking the contemporary need for multimodal video content summarization. Recent efforts have been made to expand from unimodal to multimodal video summarization, categorizing the task into three sub-tasks based on the summary's modality: video-to-video (V2V), video-to-text (V2T), and a combination of video and text summarization (V2VT). However, the textual summaries in previous multimodal datasets are inadequate. To address these issues, we introduce Instruct-V2Xum, a cross-modal video summarization dataset featuring 30,000 diverse videos sourced from YouTube, with lengths ranging from 40 to 940 seconds and an average summarization ratio of 16.39\%. Each video summary in Instruct-V2Xum is paired with a textual summary that references specific frame indexes, facilitating the generation of aligned video and textual summaries. In addition, we propose a new video summarization framework named V2Xum-LLM. V2Xum-LLM, specifically V2Xum-LLaMA in this study, is the first framework that unifies different video summarization tasks into one large language model's (LLM) text decoder and achieves task-controllable video summarization with temporal prompts and task instructions. Experiments show that V2Xum-LLaMA outperforms strong baseline models on multiple video summarization tasks. Furthermore, we propose an enhanced evaluation metric for V2V and V2VT summarization tasks.

Over the past year, the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG) has experienced an exponential surge, largely due to the introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs). These models have exhibited the most effective performance in a range of domains within the Natural Language Processing and Generation domains. However, their application in domain-specific tasks, such as paraphrasing, presents significant challenges. The extensive number of parameters makes them difficult to operate on commercial hardware, and they require substantial time for inference, leading to high costs in a production setting. In this study, we tackle these obstacles by employing LLMs to develop three distinct models for the paraphrasing field, applying a method referred to as sequence-level knowledge distillation. These distilled models are capable of maintaining the quality of paraphrases generated by the LLM. They demonstrate faster inference times and the ability to generate diverse paraphrases of comparable quality. A notable characteristic of these models is their ability to exhibit syntactic diversity while also preserving lexical diversity, features previously uncommon due to existing data quality issues in datasets and not typically observed in neural-based approaches. Human evaluation of our models shows that there is only a 4% drop in performance compared to the LLM teacher model used in the distillation process, despite being 1000 times smaller. This research provides a significant contribution to the NLG field, offering a more efficient and cost-effective solution for paraphrasing tasks.

Recognizing places from an opposing viewpoint during a return trip is a common experience for human drivers. However, the analogous robotics capability, visual place recognition (VPR) with limited field of view cameras under 180 degree rotations, has proven to be challenging to achieve. To address this problem, this paper presents Same Place Opposing Trajectory (SPOT), a technique for opposing viewpoint VPR that relies exclusively on structure estimated through stereo visual odometry (VO). The method extends recent advances in lidar descriptors and utilizes a novel double (similar and opposing) distance matrix sequence matching method. We evaluate SPOT on a publicly available dataset with 6.7-7.6 km routes driven in similar and opposing directions under various lighting conditions. The proposed algorithm demonstrates remarkable improvement over the state-of-the-art, achieving up to 91.7% recall at 100% precision in opposing viewpoint cases, while requiring less storage than all baselines tested and running faster than all but one. Moreover, the proposed method assumes no a priori knowledge of whether the viewpoint is similar or opposing, and also demonstrates competitive performance in similar viewpoint cases.

In this paper, we introduce a novel class of neural differential equation, which are intrinsically Lyapunov stable, exponentially stable or passive. We take a recently proposed Polyak Lojasiewicz network (PLNet) as an Lyapunov function and then parameterize the vector field as the descent directions of the Lyapunov function. The resulting models have a same structure as the general Hamiltonian dynamics, where the Hamiltonian is lower- and upper-bounded by quadratic functions. Moreover, it is also positive definite w.r.t. either a known or learnable equilibrium. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model on a damped double pendulum system.