I propose a paradigm for scientific progress in NLP centered around developing scalable, data-driven theories of linguistic structure. The idea is to collect data in tightly scoped, carefully defined ways which allow for exhaustive annotation of behavioral phenomena of interest, and then use machine learning to construct explanatory theories of these phenomena which can form building blocks for intelligible AI systems. After laying some conceptual groundwork, I describe several investigations into data-driven theories of shallow semantic structure using Question-Answer driven Semantic Role Labeling (QA-SRL), a schema for annotating verbal predicate-argument relations using highly constrained question-answer pairs. While this only scratches the surface of the complex language behaviors of interest in AI, I outline principles for data collection and theoretical modeling which can inform future scientific progress. This note summarizes and draws heavily on my PhD thesis.

Hallucinations and unfaithful synthesis due to inaccurate prompts with insufficient semantic details are widely observed in multimodal generative models. A prevalent strategy to align multiple modalities is to fine-tune the generator with a large number of annotated text-image pairs. However, such a procedure is labor-consuming and resource-draining. The key question we ask is: can we enhance the quality and faithfulness of text-driven generative models beyond extensive text-image pair annotations? To address this question, we propose Knowledge Pursuit Prompting (KPP), a zero-shot framework that iteratively incorporates external knowledge to help generators produce reliable visual content. Instead of training generators to handle generic prompts, KPP employs a recursive knowledge query process to gather informative external facts from the knowledge base, instructs a language model to compress the acquired knowledge for prompt refinement, and utilizes text-driven generators for visual synthesis. The entire process is zero-shot, without accessing the architectures and parameters of generative models. We evaluate the framework across multiple text-driven generative tasks (image, 3D rendering, and video) on datasets of different domains. We further demonstrate the extensibility and adaptability of KPP through varying foundation model bases and instructions. Our results show that KPP is capable of generating faithful and semantically rich content across diverse visual domains, offering a promising solution to improve multimodal generative models.

Multivariate time series is prevalent in many scientific and industrial domains. Modeling multivariate signals is challenging due to their long-range temporal dependencies and intricate interactions--both direct and indirect. To confront these complexities, we introduce a method of representing multivariate signals as nodes in a graph with edges indicating interdependency between them. Specifically, we leverage graph neural networks (GNN) and attention mechanisms to efficiently learn the underlying relationships within the time series data. Moreover, we suggest employing hierarchical signal decompositions running over the graphs to capture multiple spatial dependencies. The effectiveness of our proposed model is evaluated across various real-world benchmark datasets designed for long-term forecasting tasks. The results consistently showcase the superiority of our model, achieving an average 23\% reduction in mean squared error (MSE) compared to existing models.

Query-focused Summarization (QfS) deals with systems that generate summaries from document(s) based on a query. Motivated by the insight that Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides a generalization to Supervised Learning (SL) for Natural Language Generation, and thereby performs better (empirically) than SL, we use an RL-based approach for this task of QfS. Additionally, we also resolve the conflict of employing RL in Transformers with Teacher Forcing. We develop multiple Policy Gradient networks, trained on various reward signals: ROUGE, BLEU, and Semantic Similarity, which lead to a 10-point improvement over the State-of-the-Art approach on the ROUGE-L metric for a benchmark dataset (ELI5). We also show performance of our approach in zero-shot setting for another benchmark dataset (DebatePedia) -- our approach leads to results comparable to baselines, which were specifically trained on DebatePedia. To aid the RL training, we propose a better semantic similarity reward, enabled by a novel Passage Embedding scheme developed using Cluster Hypothesis. Lastly, we contribute a gold-standard test dataset to further research in QfS and Long-form Question Answering (LfQA).

We introduce HallusionBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed for the evaluation of image-context reasoning. This benchmark presents significant challenges to advanced large visual-language models (LVLMs), such as GPT-4V(Vision) and LLaVA-1.5, by emphasizing nuanced understanding and interpretation of visual data. The benchmark comprises 346 images paired with 1129 questions, all meticulously crafted by human experts. We introduce a novel structure for these visual questions designed to establish control groups. This structure enables us to conduct a quantitative analysis of the models' response tendencies, logical consistency, and various failure modes. In our evaluation on HallusionBench, we benchmarked 13 different models, highlighting a 31.42% question-pair accuracy achieved by the state-of-the-art GPT-4V. Notably, all other evaluated models achieve accuracy below 16%. Moreover, our analysis not only highlights the observed failure modes, including language hallucination and visual illusion, but also deepens an understanding of these pitfalls. Our comprehensive case studies within HallusionBench shed light on the challenges of hallucination and illusion in LVLMs. Based on these insights, we suggest potential pathways for their future improvement. The benchmark and codebase can be accessed at https://github.com/tianyi-lab/HallusionBench.

Machine translation (MT) is routinely evaluated using various segment-level similarity metrics against one or more reference translations. At the same time, reference translations acquired in the standard way are often criticized for their flaws of various types. For several high-resourced language pairs, MT quality reaches levels comparable to the quality of the reference translation (Freitag et al. 2022; Hassan et al. 2018) and sometimes MT even significantly surpasses humans in a particular evaluation setting (Popel et al. 2020). Given this, one could conclude that state-of-the-art MT has reached the point where reference-based evaluation is no longer reliable and we have to resort to other methods (such as targeted expert evaluation of particular outputs), even if they are costly, subjective and possibly impossible to automate. The narrow goal of the presented work is to allow for an "extension of the expiry date" for reference-based evaluation methods. In a broader perspective, we want to formulate a methodology for creating reference translations which avoid the often-observed deficiencies of "standard" or "professional" reference translations, be it multiple interfering phenomena, inappropriate expressions, ignorance of topic-focus articulation (information structure) or other abundant shortcomings in the translation, indicating their authors' insensitivity to the topic itself, but above all to the source and target language. To this end, we introduce so-called optimal reference translations (ORT), which are intended to represent optimal (ideal or excellent) human translations (should they be the subject of a translation quality evaluation).

Recent advances in text-to-image generation models have unlocked vast potential for visual creativity. However, these models struggle with generation of consistent characters, a crucial aspect for numerous real-world applications such as story visualization, game development asset design, advertising, and more. Current methods typically rely on multiple pre-existing images of the target character or involve labor-intensive manual processes. In this work, we propose a fully automated solution for consistent character generation, with the sole input being a text prompt. We introduce an iterative procedure that, at each stage, identifies a coherent set of images sharing a similar identity and extracts a more consistent identity from this set. Our quantitative analysis demonstrates that our method strikes a better balance between prompt alignment and identity consistency compared to the baseline methods, and these findings are reinforced by a user study. To conclude, we showcase several practical applications of our approach. Project page is available at https://omriavrahami.com/the-chosen-one

As an important clean and renewable kind of energy, wind power plays an important role in coping with energy crisis and environmental pollution. However, the volatility and intermittency of wind speed restrict the development of wind power. To improve the utilization of wind power, this study proposes a new wind speed prediction model based on data noise reduction technology, temporal convolutional network (TCN), and gated recurrent unit (GRU). Firstly, an adaptive data noise reduction algorithm P-SSA is proposed based on singular spectrum analysis (SSA) and Pearson correlation coefficient. The original wind speed is decomposed into multiple subsequences by SSA and then reconstructed. When the Pearson correlation coefficient between the reconstructed sequence and the original sequence is greater than 0.99, other noise subsequences are deleted to complete the data denoising. Then, the receptive field of the samples is expanded through the causal convolution and dilated convolution of TCN, and the characteristics of wind speed change are extracted. Then, the time feature information of the sequence is extracted by GRU, and then the wind speed is predicted to form the wind speed sequence prediction model of P-SSA-TCN-GRU. The proposed model was validated on three wind farms in Shandong Province. The experimental results show that the prediction performance of the proposed model is better than that of the traditional model and other models based on TCN, and the wind speed prediction of wind farms with high precision and strong stability is realized. The wind speed predictions of this model have the potential to become the data that support the operation and management of wind farms. The code is available at link.

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The presence of multivariate time series data is extensively documented across a variety of sectors including economics, transportation, healthcare, and meteorology, as evidenced in several studies [1, 2, 3, 4]. A range of statistical and machine learning techniques have been shown to perform effectively on complete datasets in several time series tasks, including forecasting [5], classification [6], and anomaly detection [7]. However, it is often observed that multivariate time series data collected from real-world scenarios are prone to missing values due to various factors, such as sensor malfunctions and data transmission errors. These missing values can considerably affect the quality of the data, subsequently impacting the effectiveness of the aforementioned methods in their respective tasks. Extensive research efforts have been dedicated to addressing the challenges in spatiotemporal imputation. A typical approach involves the development of a distinct framework for initially estimating missing values, followed by the application of the completed dataset in another sophisticated framework for subsequent operations like forecasting, classification, and anomaly detection. To fill in missing values, various statistical and machine learning techniques are applied.