The Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) task holds significant potential for applications. Compared to traditional unimodal approaches, the multi-modal input of AVQA makes feature extraction and fusion processes more challenging. Euclidean space is difficult to effectively represent multi-dimensional relationships of data. Especially when extracting and processing data with a tree structure or hierarchical structure, Euclidean space is not suitable as an embedding space. Additionally, the self-attention mechanism in Transformers is effective in capturing the dynamic relationships between elements in a sequence. However, the self-attention mechanism's limitations in window modeling and quadratic computational complexity reduce its effectiveness in modeling long sequences. To address these limitations, we propose SHMamba: Structured Hyperbolic State Space Model to integrate the advantages of hyperbolic geometry and state space models. Specifically, SHMamba leverages the intrinsic properties of hyperbolic space to represent hierarchical structures and complex relationships in audio-visual data. Meanwhile, the state space model captures dynamic changes over time by globally modeling the entire sequence. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive curvature hyperbolic alignment module and a cross fusion block to enhance the understanding of hierarchical structures and the dynamic exchange of cross-modal information, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SHMamba outperforms previous methods with fewer parameters and computational costs. Our learnable parameters are reduced by 78.12\%, while the average performance improves by 2.53\%. Experiments show that our method demonstrates superiority among all current major methods and is more suitable for practical application scenarios.

Knowledge-intensive visual question answering requires models to effectively use external knowledge to help answer visual questions. A typical pipeline includes a knowledge retriever and an answer generator. However, a retriever that utilizes local information, such as an image patch, may not provide reliable question-candidate relevance scores. Besides, the two-tower architecture also limits the relevance score modeling of a retriever to select top candidates for answer generator reasoning. In this paper, we introduce an additional module, a multi-modal reranker, to improve the ranking quality of knowledge candidates for answer generation. Our reranking module takes multi-modal information from both candidates and questions and performs cross-item interaction for better relevance score modeling. Experiments on OK-VQA and A-OKVQA show that multi-modal reranker from distant supervision provides consistent improvements. We also find a training-testing discrepancy with reranking in answer generation, where performance improves if training knowledge candidates are similar to or noisier than those used in testing.

Question-Options Generation (QOG) is a task that involves generating a set of question-options pairs given context. This task has various applications, including fine-tuning large models, information retrieval, and automated multiple-choice question generation for education. In this paper, we develop QOG models using three different methods based on fine-tuning sequence-to-sequence language models (LMs). Experiments demonstrate that the end-to-end QOG model is computationally efficient and stable during both training and inference, outperforming other methods. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that our QOG models are competitive on the QOG task compared to the large language model Llama 3-8B.

Long-form question answering (LFQA) aims to provide thorough and in-depth answers to complex questions, enhancing comprehension. However, such detailed responses are prone to hallucinations and factual inconsistencies, challenging their faithful evaluation. This work introduces HaluQuestQA, the first hallucination dataset with localized error annotations for human-written and model-generated LFQA answers. HaluQuestQA comprises 698 QA pairs with 4.7k span-level error annotations for five different error types by expert annotators, along with preference judgments. Using our collected data, we thoroughly analyze the shortcomings of long-form answers and find that they lack comprehensiveness and provide unhelpful references. We train an automatic feedback model on this dataset that predicts error spans with incomplete information and provides associated explanations. Finally, we propose a prompt-based approach, Error-informed refinement, that uses signals from the learned feedback model to refine generated answers, which we show reduces hallucination and improves answer quality. Furthermore, humans find answers generated by our approach comprehensive and highly prefer them (84%) over the baseline answers.

In healthcare and medical diagnostics, Visual Question Answering (VQA) mayemergeasapivotal tool in scenarios where analysis of intricate medical images becomes critical for accurate diagnoses. Current text-based VQA systems limit their utility in scenarios where hands-free interaction and accessibility are crucial while performing tasks. A speech-based VQA system may provide a better means of interaction where information can be accessed while performing tasks simultaneously. To this end, this work implements a speech-based VQA system by introducing a Textless Multilingual Pathological VQA (TMPathVQA) dataset, an expansion of the PathVQA dataset, containing spoken questions in English, German & French. This dataset comprises 98,397 multilingual spoken questions and answers based on 5,004 pathological images along with 70 hours of audio. Finally, this work benchmarks and compares TMPathVQA systems implemented using various combinations of acoustic and visual features.

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) with large language models (LLMs) for Question Answering (QA) entails furnishing relevant context within the prompt to facilitate the LLM in answer generation. During the generation, inaccuracies or hallucinations frequently occur due to two primary factors: inadequate or distracting context in the prompts, and the inability of LLMs to effectively reason through the facts. In this paper, we investigate whether providing aligned context via a carefully selected passage sequence leads to better answer generation by the LLM for multi-hop QA. We introduce, "GenSco", a novel approach of selecting passages based on the predicted decomposition of the multi-hop questions}. The framework consists of two distinct LLMs: (i) Generator LLM, which is used for question decomposition and final answer generation; (ii) an auxiliary open-sourced LLM, used as the scorer, to semantically guide the Generator for passage selection. The generator is invoked only once for the answer generation, resulting in a cost-effective and efficient approach. We evaluate on three broadly established multi-hop question answering datasets: 2WikiMultiHop, Adversarial HotPotQA and MuSiQue and achieve an absolute gain of $15.1$ and $5.9$ points in Exact Match score with respect to the best performing baselines over MuSiQue and 2WikiMultiHop respectively.

Seeking answers to questions within long scientific research articles is a crucial area of study that aids readers in quickly addressing their inquiries. However, existing question-answering (QA) datasets based on scientific papers are limited in scale and focus solely on textual content. To address this limitation, we introduce SPIQA (Scientific Paper Image Question Answering), the first large-scale QA dataset specifically designed to interpret complex figures and tables within the context of scientific research articles across various domains of computer science. Leveraging the breadth of expertise and ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to understand figures, we employ automatic and manual curation to create the dataset. We craft an information-seeking task involving multiple images that cover a wide variety of plots, charts, tables, schematic diagrams, and result visualizations. SPIQA comprises 270K questions divided into training, validation, and three different evaluation splits. Through extensive experiments with 12 prominent foundational models, we evaluate the ability of current multimodal systems to comprehend the nuanced aspects of research articles. Additionally, we propose a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation strategy with in-context retrieval that allows fine-grained, step-by-step assessment and improves model performance. We further explore the upper bounds of performance enhancement with additional textual information, highlighting its promising potential for future research and the dataset's impact on revolutionizing how we interact with scientific literature.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) allows overcoming the limited knowledge of LLMs by extending the input with external information. As a consequence, the contextual inputs to the model become much longer which slows down decoding time directly translating to the time a user has to wait for an answer. We address this challenge by presenting COCOM, an effective context compression method, reducing long contexts to only a handful of Context Embeddings speeding up the generation time by a large margin. Our method allows for different compression rates trading off decoding time for answer quality. Compared to earlier methods, COCOM allows for handling multiple contexts more effectively, significantly reducing decoding time for long inputs. Our method demonstrates a speed-up of up to 5.69 $\times$ while achieving higher performance compared to existing efficient context compression methods.

Exploratory data analysis (EDA) is an essential step for analyzing a dataset to derive insights. Several EDA techniques have been explored in the literature. Many of them leverage visualizations through various plots. But it is not easy to interpret them for a non-technical user, and producing appropriate visualizations is also tough when there are a large number of columns. Few other works provide a view of some interesting slices of data but it is still difficult for the user to draw relevant insights from them. Of late, conversational data exploration is gaining a lot of traction among non-technical users. It helps the user to explore the dataset without having deep technical knowledge about the data. Towards this, we propose a system that recommends interesting questions in natural language based on relevant slices of a dataset in a conversational setting. Specifically, given a dataset, we pick a select set of interesting columns and identify interesting slices of such columns and column combinations based on few interestingness measures. We use our own fine-tuned variation of a pre-trained language model(T5) to generate natural language questions in a specific manner. We then slot-fill values in the generated questions and rank them for recommendations. We show the utility of our proposed system in a coversational setting with a collection of real datasets.

We introduce SciQAG, a novel framework for automatically generating high-quality science question-answer pairs from a large corpus of scientific literature based on large language models (LLMs). SciQAG consists of a QA generator and a QA evaluator, which work together to extract diverse and research-level questions and answers from scientific papers. Utilizing this framework, we construct a large-scale, high-quality, open-ended science QA dataset containing 188,042 QA pairs extracted from 22,743 scientific papers across 24 scientific domains. We also introduce SciQAG-24D, a new benchmark task designed to evaluate the science question-answering ability of LLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning LLMs on the SciQAG dataset significantly improves their performance on both open-ended question answering and scientific tasks. To foster research and collaboration, we make the datasets, models, and evaluation codes publicly available, contributing to the advancement of science question answering and developing more interpretable and reasoning-capable AI systems.