Recent advancements in deep learning have led to the development of powerful language models (LMs) that excel in various tasks. Despite these achievements, there is still room for improvement, particularly in enhancing reasoning abilities and incorporating multimodal data. This report investigates the potential impact of combining Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and Visual Question Answering (VQA) techniques to improve LM's accuracy in solving multiple-choice questions. By employing TextVQA and ScienceQA datasets, we assessed the effectiveness of three text embedding methods and three visual embedding approaches. Our experiments aimed to fill the gap in current research by investigating the combined impact of CoT and VQA, contributing to the understanding of how these techniques can improve the reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art models like GPT-4. Results from our experiments demonstrated the potential of these approaches in enhancing LM's reasoning and question-answering capabilities, providing insights for further research and development in the field, and paving the way for more accurate and reliable AI systems that can handle complex reasoning tasks across multiple modalities.

Understanding user intentions is crucial for enhancing product recommendations, navigation suggestions, and query reformulations. However, user intentions can be complex, involving multiple sessions and attribute requirements connected by logical operators such as And, Or, and Not. For example, a user may search for Nike or Adidas running shoes across various sessions, with a preference for the color purple. In another case, a user may have purchased a mattress in a previous session and is now seeking a corresponding bed frame without intending to buy another mattress. Prior research on session understanding has not sufficiently addressed how to make product or attribute recommendations for such complex intentions. In this paper, we introduce the task of logical session complex query answering, where sessions are treated as hyperedges of items, and we formulate the problem of complex intention understanding as a task of logical session complex queries answering (LS-CQA) on an aggregated hypergraph of sessions, items, and attributes. The proposed task is a special type of complex query answering task with sessions as ordered hyperedges. We also propose a new model, the Logical Session Graph Transformer (LSGT), which captures interactions among items across different sessions and their logical connections using a transformer structure. We analyze the expressiveness of LSGT and prove the permutation invariance of the inputs for the logical operators. We evaluate LSGT on three datasets and demonstrate that it achieves state-of-the-art results.

Visual question answering is a multimodal task that requires the joint comprehension of visual and textual information. However, integrating visual and textual semantics solely through attention layers is insufficient to comprehensively understand and align information from both modalities. Intuitively, object attributes can naturally serve as a bridge to unify them, which has been overlooked in previous research. In this paper, we propose a novel VQA approach from the perspective of utilizing object attribute, aiming to achieve better object-level visual-language alignment and multimodal scene understanding. Specifically, we design an attribute fusion module and a contrastive knowledge distillation module. The attribute fusion module constructs a multimodal graph neural network to fuse attributes and visual features through message passing. The enhanced object-level visual features contribute to solving fine-grained problem like counting-question. The better object-level visual-language alignment aids in understanding multimodal scenes, thereby improving the model's robustness. Furthermore, to augment scene understanding and the out-of-distribution performance, the contrastive knowledge distillation module introduces a series of implicit knowledge. We distill knowledge into attributes through contrastive loss, which further strengthens the representation learning of attribute features and facilitates visual-linguistic alignment. Intensive experiments on six datasets, COCO-QA, VQAv2, VQA-CPv2, VQA-CPv1, VQAvs and TDIUC, show the superiority of the proposed method.

Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering(KBQA) aims to find the answer entity in a knowledge graph (KG), which requires multiple steps of reasoning. Existing retrieval-based approaches solve this task by concentrating on the specific relation at different hops and predicting the intermediate entity within the reasoning path. During the reasoning process of these methods, the representation of relations are fixed but the initial relation representation may not be optimal. We claim they fail to utilize information from head-tail entities and the semantic connection between relations to enhance the current relation representation, which undermines the ability to capture information of relations in KGs. To address this issue, we construct a \textbf{dual relation graph} where each node denotes a relation in the original KG (\textbf{primal entity graph}) and edges are constructed between relations sharing same head or tail entities. Then we iteratively do primal entity graph reasoning, dual relation graph information propagation, and interaction between these two graphs. In this way, the interaction between entity and relation is enhanced, and we derive better entity and relation representations. Experiments on two public datasets, WebQSP and CWQ, show that our approach achieves a significant performance gain over the prior state-of-the-art. Our code is available on \url{https://github.com/yanmenxue/RAH-KBQA}.

Generative information retrieval, encompassing two major tasks of Generative Document Retrieval (GDR) and Grounded Answer Generation (GAR), has gained significant attention in the area of information retrieval and natural language processing. Existing methods for GDR and GAR rely on separate retrieval and reader modules, which hinder simultaneous optimization. To overcome this, we present \textbf{UniGen}, a \textbf{Uni}fied \textbf{Gen}erative framework for retrieval and question answering that integrates both tasks into a single generative model leveraging the capabilities of large language models. UniGen employs a shared encoder and two distinct decoders for generative retrieval and question answering. To facilitate the learning of both tasks, we introduce connectors, generated by large language models, to bridge the gaps between query inputs and generation targets, as well as between document identifiers and answers. Furthermore, we propose an iterative enhancement strategy that leverages generated answers and retrieved documents to iteratively improve both tasks. Through extensive experiments on the MS MARCO and NQ datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of UniGen, showcasing its superior performance in both the retrieval and the question answering tasks.

Automatic text simplification (TS) aims to automate the process of rewriting text to make it easier for people to read. A pre-requisite for TS to be useful is that it should convey information that is consistent with the meaning of the original text. However, current TS evaluation protocols assess system outputs for simplicity and meaning preservation without regard for the document context in which output sentences occur and for how people understand them. In this work, we introduce a human evaluation framework to assess whether simplified texts preserve meaning using reading comprehension questions. With this framework, we conduct a thorough human evaluation of texts by humans and by nine automatic systems. Supervised systems that leverage pre-training knowledge achieve the highest scores on the reading comprehension (RC) tasks amongst the automatic controllable TS systems. However, even the best-performing supervised system struggles with at least 14% of the questions, marking them as "unanswerable'' based on simplified content. We further investigate how existing TS evaluation metrics and automatic question-answering systems approximate the human judgments we obtained.

Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) is a fast growing branch of document understanding. Despite the fact that documents contain sensitive or copyrighted information, none of the current DocVQA methods offers strong privacy guarantees. In this work, we explore privacy in the domain of DocVQA for the first time. We highlight privacy issues in state of the art multi-modal LLM models used for DocVQA, and explore possible solutions. Specifically, we focus on the invoice processing use case as a realistic, widely used scenario for document understanding, and propose a large scale DocVQA dataset comprising invoice documents and associated questions and answers. We employ a federated learning scheme, that reflects the real-life distribution of documents in different businesses, and we explore the use case where the ID of the invoice issuer is the sensitive information to be protected. We demonstrate that non-private models tend to memorise, behaviour that can lead to exposing private information. We then evaluate baseline training schemes employing federated learning and differential privacy in this multi-modal scenario, where the sensitive information might be exposed through any of the two input modalities: vision (document image) or language (OCR tokens). Finally, we design an attack exploiting the memorisation effect of the model, and demonstrate its effectiveness in probing different DocVQA models.

While question answering over knowledge bases (KBQA) has shown progress in addressing factoid questions, KBQA with numerical reasoning remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we focus on the complex numerical reasoning in KBQA and propose a new task, NR-KBQA, which necessitates the ability to perform both multi-hop reasoning and numerical reasoning. We design a logic form in Python format called PyQL to represent the reasoning process of numerical reasoning questions. To facilitate the development of NR-KBQA, we present a large dataset called MarkQA, which is automatically constructed from a small set of seeds. Each question in MarkQA is equipped with its corresponding SPARQL query, alongside the step-by-step reasoning process in the QDMR format and PyQL program. Experimental results of some state-of-the-art QA methods on the MarkQA show that complex numerical reasoning in KBQA faces great challenges.

Multi-Hop Question Answering (MHQA) is a significant area in question answering, requiring multiple reasoning components, including document retrieval, supporting sentence prediction, and answer span extraction. In this work, we analyze the primary factors limiting the performance of multi-hop reasoning and introduce label smoothing into the MHQA task. This is aimed at enhancing the generalization capabilities of MHQA systems and mitigating overfitting of answer spans and reasoning paths in training set. We propose a novel label smoothing technique, F1 Smoothing, which incorporates uncertainty into the learning process and is specifically tailored for Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) tasks. Inspired by the principles of curriculum learning, we introduce the Linear Decay Label Smoothing Algorithm (LDLA), which progressively reduces uncertainty throughout the training process. Experiment on the HotpotQA dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of our methods in enhancing performance and generalizability in multi-hop reasoning, achieving new state-of-the-art results on the leaderboard.

Medical Visual Question Answering (Med-VQA) is a very important task in healthcare industry, which answers a natural language question with a medical image. Existing VQA techniques in information systems can be directly applied to solving the task. However, they often suffer from (i) the data insufficient problem, which makes it difficult to train the state of the arts (SOTAs) for the domain-specific task, and (ii) the reproducibility problem, that many existing models have not been thoroughly evaluated in a unified experimental setup. To address these issues, this paper develops a Benchmark Evaluation SysTem for Medical Visual Question Answering, denoted by BESTMVQA. Given self-collected clinical data, our system provides a useful tool for users to automatically build Med-VQA datasets, which helps overcoming the data insufficient problem. Users also can conveniently select a wide spectrum of SOTA models from our model library to perform a comprehensive empirical study. With simple configurations, our system automatically trains and evaluates the selected models over a benchmark dataset, and reports the comprehensive results for users to develop new techniques or perform medical practice. Limitations of existing work are overcome (i) by the data generation tool, which automatically constructs new datasets from unstructured clinical data, and (ii) by evaluating SOTAs on benchmark datasets in a unified experimental setup. The demonstration video of our system can be found at https://youtu.be/QkEeFlu1x4A. Our code and data will be available soon.