The deductive closure of an ideal knowledge base (KB) contains exactly the logical queries that the KB can answer. However, in practice KBs are both incomplete and over-specified, failing to answer some queries that have real-world answers. However, experiments in this paper show that QE systems may disagree with deductive reasoning on answers that do not require generalization or relaxation. We address this problem with a novel QE method that is more faithful to deductive reasoning, and show that this leads to better performance on complex queries to incomplete KBs. Finally we show that inserting this new QE module into a neural question-answering system leads to substantial improvements over the state-of-the-art.

Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires VQA systems to utilize knowledge from external knowledge bases to answer visually-grounded questions. Retrieval-Augmented Visual Question Answering (RA-VQA), a strong framework to tackle KB-VQA, first retrieves related documents with Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) and then uses them to answer questions. This paper proposes Fine-grained Late-interaction Multi-modal Retrieval (FLMR) which significantly improves knowledge retrieval in RA-VQA. FLMR addresses two major limitations in RA-VQA's retriever: (1) the image representations obtained via image-to-text transforms can be incomplete and inaccurate and (2) similarity scores between queries and documents are computed with one-dimensional embeddings, which can be insensitive to finer-grained similarities.FLMR overcomes these limitations by obtaining image representations that complement those from the image-to-text transform using a vision model aligned with an existing text-based retriever through a simple alignment network. FLMR also encodes images and questions using multi-dimensional embeddings to capture finer-grained similarities between queries and documents.

In the context of knowledge-driven seq-to-seq generation tasks, such as document-based question answering and document summarization systems, two fundamental knowledge sources play crucial roles: the inherent knowledge embedded within model parameters and the external knowledge obtained through context. Recent studies revealed a significant challenge: when there exists a misalignment between the model's inherent knowledge and the ground truth answers in training data, the system may exhibit problematic behaviors during inference, such as ignoring input context, or generating unfaithful content. Our investigation proposes a strategy to minimize hallucination by building explicit connection between source inputs and generated outputs. We specifically target a common hallucination pattern in question answering, examining how the correspondence between entities and their contexts during model training influences the system's performance at inference time.

Question answering (QA) models are well-known to exploit data bias, e.g., the language prior in visual QA and the position bias in reading comprehension. Recent debiasing methods achieve good out-of-distribution (OOD) generalizability with a considerable sacrifice of the in-distribution (ID) performance. Therefore, they are only applicable in domains where the test distribution is known in advance. In this paper, we present a novel debiasing method called Introspective Distillation (IntroD) to make the best of both worlds for QA. Our key technical contribution is to blend the inductive bias of OOD and ID by introspecting whether a training sample fits in the factual ID world or the counterfactual OOD one.

With the rapid growth in sensor data, effectively interpreting and interfacing with these data in a human-understandable way has become crucial. While existing research primarily focuses on learning classification models, fewer studies have explored how end users can actively extract useful insights from sensor data, often hindered by the lack of a proper dataset. To address this gap, we introduce SensorQA, the first human-created question-answering (QA) dataset for long-term time-series sensor data for daily life monitoring. SensorQA is created by human workers and includes 5.6K diverse and practical queries that reflect genuine human interests, paired with accurate answers derived from sensor data. We further establish benchmarks for state-of-the-art AI models on this dataset and evaluate their performance on typical edge devices. Our results reveal a gap between current models and optimal QA performance and efficiency, highlighting the need for new contributions. The dataset and code are available at: \url{https://github.com/benjamin-reichman/SensorQA}.

The development of Automatic Question Generation (QG) models has the potential to significantly improve educational practices by reducing the teacher workload associated with creating educational content. This paper introduces a novel approach to educational question generation that controls the topical focus of questions. The proposed Topic-Controlled Question Generation (T-CQG) method enhances the relevance and effectiveness of the generated content for educational purposes. Our approach uses fine-tuning on a pre-trained T5-small model, employing specially created datasets tailored to educational needs. The research further explores the impacts of pre-training strategies, quantisation, and data augmentation on the model's performance. We specifically address the challenge of generating semantically aligned questions with paragraph-level contexts, thereby improving the topic specificity of the generated questions. In addition, we introduce and explore novel evaluation methods to assess the topical relatedness of the generated questions. Our results, validated through rigorous offline and human-backed evaluations, demonstrate that the proposed models effectively generate high-quality, topic-focused questions. These models have the potential to reduce teacher workload and support personalised tutoring systems by serving as bespoke question generators. With its relatively small number of parameters, the proposals not only advance the capabilities of question generation models for handling specific educational topics but also offer a scalable solution that reduces infrastructure costs. This scalability makes them feasible for widespread use in education without reliance on proprietary large language models like ChatGPT.

The enhancement of generalization in robots by large vision-language models (LVLMs) is increasingly evident. Therefore, the embodied cognitive abilities of LVLMs based on egocentric videos are of great interest. However, current datasets for embodied video question answering lack comprehensive and systematic evaluation frameworks. Critical embodied cognitive issues, such as robotic self-cognition, dynamic scene perception, and hallucination, are rarely addressed. To tackle these challenges, we propose ECBench, a high-quality benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the embodied cognitive abilities of LVLMs. ECBench features a diverse range of scene video sources, open and varied question formats, and 30 dimensions of embodied cognition. To ensure quality, balance, and high visual dependence, ECBench uses class-independent meticulous human annotation and multi-round question screening strategies. Additionally, we introduce ECEval, a comprehensive evaluation system that ensures the fairness and rationality of the indicators. Utilizing ECBench, we conduct extensive evaluations of proprietary, open-source, and task-specific LVLMs. ECBench is pivotal in advancing the embodied cognitive capabilities of LVLMs, laying a solid foundation for developing reliable core models for embodied agents. All data and code are available at https://github.com/Rh-Dang/ECBench.

Previous studies have pointed out that visual question answering (VQA) models are prone to relying on language priors for answer predictions. In this context, predictions often depend on linguistic shortcuts rather than a comprehensive grasp of multimodal knowledge, which diminishes their generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a novel method, namely, KDAR, leveraging knowledge distillation to address the prior-dependency dilemmas within the VQA task. Specifically, the regularization effect facilitated by soft labels from a well-trained teacher is employed to penalize overfitting to the most common answers. The soft labels, which serve a regularization role, also provide semantic guidance that narrows the range of candidate answers. Additionally, we design an adaptive sample-wise reweighting learning strategy to further mitigate bias by dynamically adjusting the importance of each sample. Experimental results demonstrate that our method enhances performance in both OOD and IID settings. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the VQA-CPv2 out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmark, significantly outperforming previous state-of-the-art approaches.

Question answering over temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) is crucial for understanding evolving facts and relationships, yet its development is hindered by limited datasets and difficulties in generating custom QA pairs. We propose a novel categorization framework based on timeline-context relationships, along with \textbf{TimelineKGQA}, a universal temporal QA generator applicable to any TKGs. The code is available at: \url{https://github.com/PascalSun/TimelineKGQA} as an open source Python package.

This work deals with the challenge of learning and reasoning over multi-modal multi-hop question answering (QA). We propose a graph reasoning network based on the semantic structure of the sentences to learn multi-source reasoning paths and find the supporting facts across both image and text modalities for answering the question. In this paper, we investigate the importance of graph structure for multi-modal multi-hop question answering. Our analysis is centered on WebQA. We construct a strong baseline model, that finds relevant sources using a pairwise classification task. We establish that, with the proper use of feature representations from pre-trained models, graph structure helps in improving multi-modal multi-hop question answering. We point out that both graph structure and adjacency matrix are task-related prior knowledge, and graph structure can be leveraged to improve the retrieval performance for the task. Experiments and visualized analysis demonstrate that message propagation over graph networks or the entire graph structure can replace massive multimodal transformers with token-wise cross-attention. We demonstrated the applicability of our method and show a performance gain of \textbf{4.6$\%$} retrieval F1score over the transformer baselines, despite being a very light model. We further demonstrated the applicability of our model to a large scale retrieval setting.