Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) provide interpretable prediction by introducing an intermediate Concept Bottleneck Layer (CBL), which encodes human-understandable concepts to explain models' decision. Recent works proposed to utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) and pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to automate the training of CBMs, making it more scalable and automated. However, existing approaches still fall short in two aspects: First, the concepts predicted by CBL often mismatch the input image, raising doubts about the faithfulness of interpretation. Second, it has been shown that concept values encode unintended information: even a set of random concepts could achieve comparable test accuracy to state-of-the-art CBMs. To address these critical limitations, in this work, we propose a novel framework called Vision-Language-Guided Concept Bottleneck Model (VLG-CBM) to enable faithful interpretability with the benefits of boosted performance. Our method leverages off-the-shelf open-domain grounded object detectors to provide visually grounded concept annotation, which largely enhances the faithfulness of concept prediction while further improving the model performance. In addition, we propose a new metric called Number of Effective Concepts (NEC) to control the information leakage and provide better interpretability. Extensive evaluations across five standard benchmarks show that our method, VLG-CBM, outperforms existing methods by at least 4.27% and up to 51.09% on accuracy at NEC=5, and by at least 0.45% and up to 29.78% on average accuracy across different NECs, while preserves both faithfulness and interpretability of the learned concepts as demonstrated in extensive experiments.

This paper addresses the problem of correctly formatting numeric expressions in automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcripts. This is challenging since the expected transcript format depends on the context, e.g., 1945 (year) vs. 19:45 (timestamp). We compare cascaded and end-to-end approaches to recognize and format numeric expression, such as years, timestamps, currency amounts, and quantities. For the end-to-end approach we employed a data generation strategy using a large language model (LLM) together with a text to speech (TTS) model to generate adaptation data. The results on our test dataset show that while approaches based on LLMs perform well on recognizing formatted numeric expressions, adapted end-to-end models offer competitive performance with the advantage of lower latency and inference cost.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become pivotal in advancing natural language processing, yet their potential to perpetuate biases poses significant concerns. This paper introduces a new framework employing Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to mitigate gender, racial, and religious biases in LLM-generated English text. By developing a loss function that favors less biased over biased completions, our approach cultivates a preference for respectful and non-discriminatory language in LLMs. We also contribute a manually designed dataset for training LLMs to recognize and correct biases. This dataset encompasses a diverse range of prompts paired with both biased and unbiased completions. Implementing this approach on the Microsoft Phi-2 model, we demonstrate substantial reductions in biased outputs as our model outperforms the baseline model on almost all bias benchmarks. Our model also achieves better performance compared to other open-source models on most benchmarks. By reducing biases in the language generated by the model, our study marks a significant step towards developing more ethical and socially responsible LLMs. We publicly release BiasDPO dataset on HuggingFace.

Recent advancements in multi-modal pre-training for 3D point clouds have demonstrated promising results by aligning heterogeneous features across 3D shapes and their corresponding 2D images and language descriptions. However, current straightforward solutions often overlook intricate structural relations among samples, potentially limiting the full capabilities of multi-modal learning. To address this issue, we introduce Multi-modal Relation Distillation (MRD), a tri-modal pre-training framework, which is designed to effectively distill reputable large Vision-Language Models (VLM) into 3D backbones. MRD aims to capture both intra-relations within each modality as well as cross-relations between different modalities and produce more discriminative 3D shape representations. Notably, MRD achieves significant improvements in downstream zero-shot classification tasks and cross-modality retrieval tasks, delivering new state-of-the-art performance.

This paper introduces LLAssist, an open-source tool designed to streamline literature reviews in academic research. In an era of exponential growth in scientific publications, researchers face mounting challenges in efficiently processing vast volumes of literature. LLAssist addresses this issue by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to automate key aspects of the review process. Specifically, it extracts important information from research articles and evaluates their relevance to user-defined research questions. The goal of LLAssist is to significantly reduce the time and effort required for comprehensive literature reviews, allowing researchers to focus more on analyzing and synthesizing information rather than on initial screening tasks. By automating parts of the literature review workflow, LLAssist aims to help researchers manage the growing volume of academic publications more efficiently.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown great success as foundational models for downstream vision and natural language applications in a variety of domains. However, these models lack the spatial understanding necessary for robotics applications where the agent must reason about the affordances provided by the 3D world around them. We present a system which trains on spatially-localized egocentric videos in order to connect visual input and task descriptions to predict a task's spatial affordance, that is the location where a person would go to accomplish the task. We show our approach outperforms the baseline of using a VLM to map similarity of a task's description over a set of location-tagged images. Our learning-based approach has less error both on predicting where a task may take place and on predicting what tasks are likely to happen at the current location. The resulting system enables robots to use egocentric sensing to navigate to physical locations of novel tasks specified in natural language.

This paper addresses the challenges of efficiently fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) by exploring data efficiency and hyperparameter optimization. We investigate the minimum data required for effective fine-tuning and propose a novel hyperparameter optimization method that leverages early-stage model performance. Our experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning with as few as 200 samples can improve model accuracy from 70\% to 88\% in a product attribute extraction task. We identify a saturation point of approximately 6,500 samples, beyond which additional data yields diminishing returns. Our proposed bayesian hyperparameter optimization method, which evaluates models at 20\% of total training time, correlates strongly with final model performance, with 4 out of 5 top early-stage models remaining in the top 5 at completion. This approach led to a 2\% improvement in accuracy over baseline models when evaluated on an independent test set. These findings offer actionable insights for practitioners, potentially reducing computational load and dependency on extensive datasets while enhancing overall performance of fine-tuned LLMs.

Question answering based on retrieval augmented generation (RAG-QA) is an important research topic in NLP and has a wide range of real-world applications. However, most existing datasets for this task are either constructed using a single source corpus or consist of short extractive answers, which fall short of evaluating large language model (LLM) based RAG-QA systems on cross-domain generalization. To address these limitations, we create Long-form RobustQA (LFRQA), a new dataset comprising human-written long-form answers that integrate short extractive answers from multiple documents into a single, coherent narrative, covering 26K queries and large corpora across seven different domains. We further propose RAG-QA Arena by directly comparing model-generated answers against LFRQA's answers using LLMs as evaluators. We show via extensive experiments that RAG-QA Arena and human judgments on answer quality are highly correlated. Moreover, only 41.3% of the most competitive LLM's answers are preferred to LFRQA's answers, demonstrating RAG-QA Arena as a challenging evaluation platform for future research.

This paper introduces Werewolf Arena, a novel framework for evaluating large language models (LLMs) through the lens of the classic social deduction game, Werewolf. In Werewolf Arena, LLMs compete against each other, navigating the game's complex dynamics of deception, deduction, and persuasion. The framework introduces a dynamic turn-taking system based on bidding, mirroring real-world discussions where individuals strategically choose when to speak. We demonstrate the framework's utility through an arena-style tournament featuring Gemini and GPT models. Our results reveal distinct strengths and weaknesses in the models' strategic reasoning and communication. These findings highlight Werewolf Arena's potential as a challenging and scalable LLM benchmark.

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have revolutionized the field of vision-language understanding by integrating visual perception capabilities into Large Language Models (LLMs). The prevailing trend in this field involves the utilization of a vision encoder derived from vision-language contrastive learning (CL), showing expertise in capturing overall representations while facing difficulties in capturing detailed local patterns. In this work, we focus on enhancing the visual representations for MLLMs by combining high-frequency and detailed visual representations, obtained through masked image modeling (MIM), with semantically-enriched low-frequency representations captured by CL. To achieve this goal, we introduce X-Former which is a lightweight transformer module designed to exploit the complementary strengths of CL and MIM through an innovative interaction mechanism. Specifically, X-Former first bootstraps vision-language representation learning and multimodal-to-multimodal generative learning from two frozen vision encoders, i.e., CLIP-ViT (CL-based) and MAE-ViT (MIM-based). It further bootstraps vision-to-language generative learning from a frozen LLM to ensure visual features from X-Former can be interpreted by the LLM. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we assess its performance on tasks demanding detailed visual understanding. Extensive evaluations indicate that X-Former excels in visual reasoning tasks involving both structural and semantic categories in the GQA dataset. Assessment on fine-grained visual perception benchmark further confirms its superior capabilities in visual understanding.