Vision-language (VL) models often exhibit a limited understanding of complex expressions of visual objects (e.g., attributes, shapes, and their relations), given complex and diverse language queries. Traditional approaches attempt to improve VL models using hard negative synthetic text, but their effectiveness is limited. In this paper, we harness the exceptional compositional understanding capabilities of generative foundational models. We introduce a novel method for structured synthetic data generation aimed at enhancing the compositional understanding of VL models in language-based object detection. Our framework generates densely paired positive and negative triplets (image, text descriptions, and bounding boxes) in both image and text domains. By leveraging these synthetic triplets, we transform 'weaker' VL models into 'stronger' models in terms of compositional understanding, a process we call "Weak-to-Strong Compositional Learning" (WSCL). To achieve this, we propose a new compositional contrastive learning formulation that discovers semantics and structures in complex descriptions from synthetic triplets. As a result, VL models trained with our synthetic data generation exhibit a significant performance boost in the Omnilabel benchmark by up to +5AP and the D3 benchmark by +6.9AP upon existing baselines.

The maximum supported context length is a critical bottleneck limiting the practical application of the Large Language Model (LLM). Although existing length extrapolation methods can extend the context of LLMs to millions of tokens, these methods all have an explicit upper bound. In this work, we propose LongCache, a training-free approach that enables LLM to support an infinite context with finite context scope, through full-context cache selection and training-free integration. This effectively frees LLMs from the length extrapolation issue. We validate LongCache on the LongBench and L-Eval and demonstrate its performance is on par with traditional full-attention mechanisms. Furthermore, we have applied LongCache on mainstream LLMs, including LLaMA3 and Mistral-v0.3, enabling them to support context lengths of at least 400K in Needle-In-A-Haystack tests. We will improve the efficiency of LongCache by GPU-aware optimization soon.

In machine translation, the problem of ambiguously gendered input has been pointed out, where the gender of an entity is not available in the source sentence. To address this ambiguity issue, the task of controlled translation that takes the gender of the ambiguous entity as additional input have been proposed. However, most existing works have only considered a simplified setup of one target gender for input. In this paper, we tackle controlled translation in a more realistic setting of inputs with multiple entities and propose Gender-of-Entity (GoE) prompting method for LLMs. Our proposed method instructs the model with fine-grained entity-level gender information to translate with correct gender inflections. By utilizing four evaluation benchmarks, we investigate the controlled translation capability of LLMs in multiple dimensions and find that LLMs reach state-of-the-art performance in controlled translation. Furthermore, we discover an emergence of gender interference phenomenon when controlling the gender of multiple entities. Finally, we address the limitations of existing gender accuracy evaluation metrics and propose leveraging LLMs as an evaluator for gender inflection in machine translation.

The integration of new modalities into frontier AI systems offers exciting capabilities, but also increases the possibility such systems can be adversarially manipulated in undesirable ways. In this work, we focus on a popular class of vision-language models (VLMs) that generate text outputs conditioned on visual and textual inputs. We conducted a large-scale empirical study to assess the transferability of gradient-based universal image "jailbreaks" using a diverse set of over 40 open-parameter VLMs, including 18 new VLMs that we publicly release. Overall, we find that transferable gradient-based image jailbreaks are extremely difficult to obtain. When an image jailbreak is optimized against a single VLM or against an ensemble of VLMs, the jailbreak successfully jailbreaks the attacked VLM(s), but exhibits little-to-no transfer to any other VLMs; transfer is not affected by whether the attacked and target VLMs possess matching vision backbones or language models, whether the language model underwent instruction-following and/or safety-alignment training, or many other factors. Only two settings display partially successful transfer: between identically-pretrained and identically-initialized VLMs with slightly different VLM training data, and between different training checkpoints of a single VLM. Leveraging these results, we then demonstrate that transfer can be significantly improved against a specific target VLM by attacking larger ensembles of "highly-similar" VLMs. These results stand in stark contrast to existing evidence of universal and transferable text jailbreaks against language models and transferable adversarial attacks against image classifiers, suggesting that VLMs may be more robust to gradient-based transfer attacks.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly find their way into the most diverse areas of our everyday lives. They indirectly influence people's decisions or opinions through their daily use. Therefore, understanding how and which moral judgements these LLMs make is crucial. However, morality is not universal and depends on the cultural background. This raises the question of whether these cultural preferences are also reflected in LLMs when prompted in different languages or whether moral decision-making is consistent across different languages. So far, most research has focused on investigating the inherent values of LLMs in English. While a few works conduct multilingual analyses of moral bias in LLMs in a multilingual setting, these analyses do not go beyond atomic actions. To the best of our knowledge, a multilingual analysis of moral bias in dilemmas has not yet been conducted. To address this, our paper builds on the moral machine experiment (MME) to investigate the moral preferences of five LLMs, Falcon, Gemini, Llama, GPT, and MPT, in a multilingual setting and compares them with the preferences collected from humans belonging to different cultures. To accomplish this, we generate 6500 scenarios of the MME and prompt the models in ten languages on which action to take. Our analysis reveals that all LLMs inhibit different moral biases to some degree and that they not only differ from the human preferences but also across multiple languages within the models themselves. Moreover, we find that almost all models, particularly Llama 3, divert greatly from human values and, for instance, prefer saving fewer people over saving more.

Large language models based on the transformer architectures can solve highly complex tasks. But are there simple tasks that such models cannot solve? Here we focus on very simple counting tasks, that involve counting how many times a token in the vocabulary have appeared in a string. We show that if the dimension of the transformer state is linear in the context length, this task can be solved. However, the solution we propose does not scale beyond this limit, and we provide theoretical arguments for why it is likely impossible for a size limited transformer to implement this task. Our empirical results demonstrate the same phase-transition in performance, as anticipated by the theoretical argument. Our results demonstrate the importance of understanding how transformers can solve simple tasks.

Event Factuality Detection (EFD) task determines the factuality of textual events, i.e., classifying whether an event is a fact, possibility, or impossibility, which is essential for faithfully understanding and utilizing event knowledge. However, due to the lack of high-quality large-scale data, event factuality detection is under-explored in event understanding research, which limits the development of EFD community. To address these issues and provide faithful event understanding, we introduce MAVEN-Fact, a large-scale and high-quality EFD dataset based on the MAVEN dataset. MAVEN-Fact includes factuality annotations of 112,276 events, making it the largest EFD dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAVEN-Fact is challenging for both conventional fine-tuned models and large language models (LLMs). Thanks to the comprehensive annotations of event arguments and relations in MAVEN, MAVEN-Fact also supports some further analyses and we find that adopting event arguments and relations helps in event factuality detection for fine-tuned models but does not benefit LLMs. Furthermore, we preliminarily study an application case of event factuality detection and find it helps in mitigating event-related hallucination in LLMs. Our dataset and codes can be obtained from \url{https://github.com/lcy2723/MAVEN-FACT}

The DimABSA task requires fine-grained sentiment intensity prediction for restaurant reviews, including scores for Valence and Arousal dimensions for each Aspect Term. In this study, we propose a Coarse-to-Fine In-context Learning(CFICL) method based on the Baichuan2-7B model for the DimABSA task in the SIGHAN 2024 workshop. Our method improves prediction accuracy through a two-stage optimization process. In the first stage, we use fixed in-context examples and prompt templates to enhance the model's sentiment recognition capability and provide initial predictions for the test data. In the second stage, we encode the Opinion field using BERT and select the most similar training data as new in-context examples based on similarity. These examples include the Opinion field and its scores, as well as related opinion words and their average scores. By filtering for sentiment polarity, we ensure that the examples are consistent with the test data. Our method significantly improves prediction accuracy and consistency by effectively utilizing training data and optimizing in-context examples, as validated by experimental results.

We introduce Mini-Sequence Transformer (MsT), a simple and effective methodology for highly efficient and accurate LLM training with extremely long sequences. MsT partitions input sequences and iteratively processes mini-sequences to reduce intermediate memory usage. Integrated with activation recomputation, it enables significant memory savings in both forward and backward passes. In experiments with the Llama3-8B model, with MsT, we measure no degradation in throughput or convergence even with 12x longer sequences than standard implementations due to our careful memory optimizations. MsT is fully general, implementation-agnostic, and requires minimal code changes to integrate with existing LLM training frameworks.

Large Vision Language Models (VLMs) extend and enhance the perceptual abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite offering new possibilities for LLM applications, these advancements raise significant security and ethical concerns, particularly regarding the generation of harmful content. While LLMs have undergone extensive security evaluations with the aid of red teaming frameworks, VLMs currently lack a well-developed one. To fill this gap, we introduce Arondight, a standardized red team framework tailored specifically for VLMs. Arondight is dedicated to resolving issues related to the absence of visual modality and inadequate diversity encountered when transitioning existing red teaming methodologies from LLMs to VLMs. Our framework features an automated multi-modal jailbreak attack, wherein visual jailbreak prompts are produced by a red team VLM, and textual prompts are generated by a red team LLM guided by a reinforcement learning agent. To enhance the comprehensiveness of VLM security evaluation, we integrate entropy bonuses and novelty reward metrics. These elements incentivize the RL agent to guide the red team LLM in creating a wider array of diverse and previously unseen test cases. Our evaluation of ten cutting-edge VLMs exposes significant security vulnerabilities, particularly in generating toxic images and aligning multi-modal prompts. In particular, our Arondight achieves an average attack success rate of 84.5\% on GPT-4 in all fourteen prohibited scenarios defined by OpenAI in terms of generating toxic text. For a clearer comparison, we also categorize existing VLMs based on their safety levels and provide corresponding reinforcement recommendations. Our multimodal prompt dataset and red team code will be released after ethics committee approval. CONTENT WARNING: THIS PAPER CONTAINS HARMFUL MODEL RESPONSES.