Large Vision Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have significantly contributed to various computer vision tasks, including object recognition and object detection. Their open vocabulary feature enhances their value. However, their black-box nature and lack of explainability in predictions make them less trustworthy in critical domains. Recently, some work has been done to force VLMs to provide reasonable rationales for object recognition, but this often comes at the expense of classification accuracy. In this paper, we first propose a mathematical definition of explainability in the object recognition task based on the joint probability distribution of categories and rationales, then leverage this definition to fine-tune CLIP in an explainable manner. Through evaluations of different datasets, our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in explainable classification. Notably, it excels in zero-shot settings, showcasing its adaptability. This advancement improves explainable object recognition, enhancing trust across diverse applications. The code will be made available online upon publication.

Text-centric visual question answering (VQA) has made great strides with the development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet open-source models still fall short of leading models like GPT4V and Gemini, partly due to a lack of extensive, high-quality instruction tuning data. To this end, we introduce a new approach for creating a massive, high-quality instruction-tuning dataset, Square-10M, which is generated using closed-source MLLMs. The data construction process, termed Square, consists of four steps: Self-Questioning, Answering, Reasoning, and Evaluation. Our experiments with Square-10M led to three key findings: 1) Our model, TextSquare, considerably surpasses open-source previous state-of-the-art Text-centric MLLMs and sets a new standard on OCRBench(62.2%). It even outperforms top-tier models like GPT4V and Gemini in 6 of 10 text-centric benchmarks. 2) Additionally, we demonstrate the critical role of VQA reasoning data in offering comprehensive contextual insights for specific questions. This not only improves accuracy but also significantly mitigates hallucinations. Specifically, TextSquare scores an average of 75.1% across four general VQA and hallucination evaluation datasets, outperforming previous state-of-the-art models. 3) Notably, the phenomenon observed in scaling text-centric VQA datasets reveals a vivid pattern: the exponential increase of instruction tuning data volume is directly proportional to the improvement in model performance, thereby validating the necessity of the dataset scale and the high quality of Square-10M.

Query rewrite, which aims to generate more efficient queries by altering a SQL query's structure without changing the query result, has been an important research problem. In order to maintain equivalence between the rewritten query and the original one during rewriting, traditional query rewrite methods always rewrite the queries following certain rewrite rules. However, some problems still remain. Firstly, existing methods of finding the optimal choice or sequence of rewrite rules are still limited and the process always costs a lot of resources. Methods involving discovering new rewrite rules typically require complicated proofs of structural logic or extensive user interactions. Secondly, current query rewrite methods usually rely highly on DBMS cost estimators which are often not accurate. In this paper, we address these problems by proposing a novel method of query rewrite named LLM-R2, adopting a large language model (LLM) to propose possible rewrite rules for a database rewrite system. To further improve the inference ability of LLM in recommending rewrite rules, we train a contrastive model by curriculum to learn query representations and select effective query demonstrations for the LLM. Experimental results have shown that our method can significantly improve the query execution efficiency and outperform the baseline methods. In addition, our method enjoys high robustness across different datasets.

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) plays a crucial role in the application of Large Language Models (LLMs), existing retrieval methods in knowledge-dense domains like law and medicine still suffer from a lack of multi-perspective views, which are essential for improving interpretability and reliability. Previous research on multi-view retrieval often focused solely on different semantic forms of queries, neglecting the expression of specific domain knowledge perspectives. This paper introduces a novel multi-view RAG framework, MVRAG, tailored for knowledge-dense domains that utilizes intention-aware query rewriting from multiple domain viewpoints to enhance retrieval precision, thereby improving the effectiveness of the final inference. Experiments conducted on legal and medical case retrieval demonstrate significant improvements in recall and precision rates with our framework. Our multi-perspective retrieval approach unleashes the potential of multi-view information enhancing RAG tasks, accelerating the further application of LLMs in knowledge-intensive fields.

We audited large language models (LLMs) for their ability to create evidence-based and stylistic counter-arguments to posts from the Reddit ChangeMyView dataset. We benchmarked their rhetorical quality across a host of qualitative and quantitative metrics and then ultimately evaluated them on their persuasive abilities as compared to human counter-arguments. Our evaluation is based on Counterfire: a new dataset of 32,000 counter-arguments generated from large language models (LLMs): GPT-3.5 Turbo and Koala and their fine-tuned variants, and PaLM 2, with varying prompts for evidence use and argumentative style. GPT-3.5 Turbo ranked highest in argument quality with strong paraphrasing and style adherence, particularly in `reciprocity' style arguments. However, the stylistic counter-arguments still fall short of human persuasive standards, where people also preferred reciprocal to evidence-based rebuttals. The findings suggest that a balance between evidentiality and stylistic elements is vital to a compelling counter-argument. We close with a discussion of future research directions and implications for evaluating LLM outputs.

Large language models (LLMs) introduce new security risks, but there are few comprehensive evaluation suites to measure and reduce these risks. We present BenchmarkName, a novel benchmark to quantify LLM security risks and capabilities. We introduce two new areas for testing: prompt injection and code interpreter abuse. We evaluated multiple state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs, including GPT-4, Mistral, Meta Llama 3 70B-Instruct, and Code Llama. Our results show that conditioning away risk of attack remains an unsolved problem; for example, all tested models showed between 26% and 41% successful prompt injection tests. We further introduce the safety-utility tradeoff: conditioning an LLM to reject unsafe prompts can cause the LLM to falsely reject answering benign prompts, which lowers utility. We propose quantifying this tradeoff using False Refusal Rate (FRR). As an illustration, we introduce a novel test set to quantify FRR for cyberattack helpfulness risk. We find many LLMs able to successfully comply with "borderline" benign requests while still rejecting most unsafe requests. Finally, we quantify the utility of LLMs for automating a core cybersecurity task, that of exploiting software vulnerabilities. This is important because the offensive capabilities of LLMs are of intense interest; we quantify this by creating novel test sets for four representative problems. We find that models with coding capabilities perform better than those without, but that further work is needed for LLMs to become proficient at exploit generation. Our code is open source and can be used to evaluate other LLMs.

The increase in parameter size of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) introduces significant capabilities, particularly in-context learning, where MLLMs enhance task performance without updating pre-trained parameters. This effectiveness, however, hinges on the appropriate selection of in-context examples, a process that is currently biased towards visual data, overlooking textual information. Furthermore, the area of supervised retrievers for MLLMs, crucial for optimal in-context example selection, continues to be uninvestigated. Our study offers an in-depth evaluation of the impact of textual information on the unsupervised selection of in-context examples in multimodal contexts, uncovering a notable sensitivity of retriever performance to the employed modalities. Responding to this, we introduce a novel supervised MLLM-retriever MSIER that employs a neural network to select examples that enhance multimodal in-context learning efficiency. This approach is validated through extensive testing across three distinct tasks, demonstrating the method's effectiveness. Additionally, we investigate the influence of modalities on our supervised retrieval method's training and pinpoint factors contributing to our model's success. This exploration paves the way for future advancements, highlighting the potential for refined in-context learning in MLLMs through the strategic use of multimodal data.

Sequential recommendation is dedicated to offering items of interest for users based on their history behaviors. The attribute-opinion pairs, expressed by users in their reviews for items, provide the potentials to capture user preferences and item characteristics at a fine-grained level. To this end, we propose a novel framework FineRec that explores the attribute-opinion pairs of reviews to finely handle sequential recommendation. Specifically, we utilize a large language model to extract attribute-opinion pairs from reviews. For each attribute, a unique attribute-specific user-opinion-item graph is created, where corresponding opinions serve as the edges linking heterogeneous user and item nodes. To tackle the diversity of opinions, we devise a diversity-aware convolution operation to aggregate information within the graphs, enabling attribute-specific user and item representation learning. Ultimately, we present an interaction-driven fusion mechanism to integrate attribute-specific user/item representations across all attributes for generating recommendations. Extensive experiments conducted on several realworld datasets demonstrate the superiority of our FineRec over existing state-of-the-art methods. Further analysis also verifies the effectiveness of our fine-grained manner in handling the task.

We introduce Groma, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) with grounded and fine-grained visual perception ability. Beyond holistic image understanding, Groma is adept at region-level tasks such as region captioning and visual grounding. Such capabilities are built upon a localized visual tokenization mechanism, where an image input is decomposed into regions of interest and subsequently encoded into region tokens. By integrating region tokens into user instructions and model responses, we seamlessly enable Groma to understand user-specified region inputs and ground its textual output to images. Besides, to enhance the grounded chat ability of Groma, we curate a visually grounded instruction dataset by leveraging the powerful GPT-4V and visual prompting techniques. Compared with MLLMs that rely on the language model or external module for localization, Groma consistently demonstrates superior performances in standard referring and grounding benchmarks, highlighting the advantages of embedding localization into image tokenization. Project page: https://groma-mllm.github.io/.

Large language models (LLMs) are a promising venue for natural language understanding and generation tasks. However, current LLMs are far from reliable: they are prone to generate non-factual information and, more crucially, to contradict themselves when prompted to reason about beliefs of the world. These problems are currently addressed with large scale fine-tuning or by delegating consistent reasoning to external tools. In this work, we strive for a middle ground and introduce a training objective based on principled probabilistic reasoning that teaches a LLM to be consistent with external knowledge in the form of a set of facts and rules. Fine-tuning with our loss on a limited set of facts enables our LLMs to be more logically consistent than previous baselines and allows them to extrapolate to unseen but semantically similar factual knowledge more systematically.