He, Conghui
Can LLMs be Good Graph Judger for Knowledge Graph Construction?
Huang, Haoyu, Chen, Chong, He, Conghui, Li, Yang, Jiang, Jiawei, Zhang, Wentao
In real-world scenarios, most of the data obtained from information retrieval (IR) system is unstructured. Converting natural language sentences into structured Knowledge Graphs (KGs) remains a critical challenge. The quality of constructed KGs may also impact the performance of some KG-dependent domains like GraphRAG systems and recommendation systems. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in addressing a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, there are still challenges when utilizing LLMs to address the task of generating structured KGs. And we have identified three limitations with respect to existing KG construction methods. (1)There is a large amount of information and excessive noise in real-world documents, which could result in extracting messy information. (2)Native LLMs struggle to effectively extract accuracy knowledge from some domain-specific documents. (3)Hallucinations phenomenon cannot be overlooked when utilizing LLMs directly as an unsupervised method for constructing KGs. In this paper, we propose GraphJudger, a knowledge graph construction framework to address the aforementioned challenges. We introduce three innovative modules in our method, which are entity-centric iterative text denoising, knowledge aware instruction tuning and graph judgement, respectively. We seek to utilize the capacity of LLMs to function as a graph judger, a capability superior to their role only as a predictor for KG construction problems. Experiments conducted on two general text-graph pair datasets and one domain-specific text-graph pair dataset show superior performances compared to baseline methods. The code of our proposed method is available at https://github.com/hhy-huang/GraphJudger.
Document Parsing Unveiled: Techniques, Challenges, and Prospects for Structured Information Extraction
Zhang, Qintong, Huang, Victor Shea-Jay, Wang, Bin, Zhang, Junyuan, Wang, Zhengren, Liang, Hao, Wang, Shawn, Lin, Matthieu, He, Conghui, Zhang, Wentao
Document parsing is essential for converting unstructured and semi-structured documents--such as contracts, academic papers, and invoices--into structured, machine-readable data. Document parsing extract reliable structured data from unstructured inputs, providing huge convenience for numerous applications. Especially with recent achievements in Large Language Models, document parsing plays an indispensable role in both knowledge base construction and training data generation. This survey presents a comprehensive review of the current state of document parsing, covering key methodologies, from modular pipeline systems to end-to-end models driven by large vision-language models. Core components such as layout detection, content extraction (including text, tables, and mathematical expressions), and multi-modal data integration are examined in detail. Additionally, this paper discusses the challenges faced by modular document parsing systems and vision-language models in handling complex layouts, integrating multiple modules, and recognizing high-density text. It emphasizes the importance of developing larger and more diverse datasets and outlines future research directions.
MIA-DPO: Multi-Image Augmented Direct Preference Optimization For Large Vision-Language Models
Liu, Ziyu, Zang, Yuhang, Dong, Xiaoyi, Zhang, Pan, Cao, Yuhang, Duan, Haodong, He, Conghui, Xiong, Yuanjun, Lin, Dahua, Wang, Jiaqi
Visual preference alignment involves training Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to predict human preferences between visual inputs. This is typically achieved by using labeled datasets of chosen/rejected pairs and employing optimization algorithms like direct preference optimization (DPO). Existing visual alignment methods, primarily designed for single-image scenarios, struggle to effectively handle the complexity of multi-image tasks due to the scarcity of diverse training data and the high cost of annotating chosen/rejected pairs. We present Multi-Image Augmented Direct Preference Optimization (MIA-DPO), a visual preference alignment approach that effectively handles multi-image inputs. MIA-DPO mitigates the scarcity of diverse multi-image training data by extending single-image data with unrelated images arranged in grid collages or pic-in-pic formats, significantly reducing the costs associated with multi-image data annotations. Our observation reveals that attention values of LVLMs vary considerably across different images. We use attention values to identify and filter out rejected responses the model may have mistakenly focused on. Our attentionaware selection for constructing the chosen/rejected pairs without relying on (i) human annotation, (ii) extra data, and (iii) external models or APIs. MIA-DPO is compatible with various architectures and outperforms existing methods on five multi-image benchmarks, achieving an average performance boost of 3.0% on LLaVA-v1.5 and 4.3% on the recent InternLM-XC2.5. Moreover, MIA-DPO has a minimal effect on the model's ability to understand single images. Recent progress in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) marks a significant breakthrough in AI research. While proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4o (OpenAI, 2024)) excel at handling multiimage contexts, current open-source LVLMs (Liu et al., 2024b;a) yield promising results but are primarily focused on single-image visual question answering. In real-world environments, such as digital documents and web pages, multiple figures and texts are interleaved to convey complex information effectively. The ability to understand multi-image contexts is a crucial direction for the future development of LVLMs. LVLMs typically have three stages: (1) Pre-Training, (2) Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), and (3) Preference Alignment (i.e., Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) (Ouyang et al., 2022) or from AI Feedback (RLAIF) (Bai et al., 2022)). Pre-training and SFT on multi-image data can enhance the model's ability to handle multiple images to some extent. Nevertheless, similar to single-image scenarios, hallucinations remain an inevitable issue.
PyramidDrop: Accelerating Your Large Vision-Language Models via Pyramid Visual Redundancy Reduction
Xing, Long, Huang, Qidong, Dong, Xiaoyi, Lu, Jiajie, Zhang, Pan, Zang, Yuhang, Cao, Yuhang, He, Conghui, Wang, Jiaqi, Wu, Feng, Lin, Dahua
In large vision-language models (LVLMs), images serve as inputs that carry a wealth of information. As the idiom "A picture is worth a thousand words" implies, representing a single image in current LVLMs can require hundreds or even thousands of tokens. This results in significant computational costs, which grow quadratically as input image resolution increases, thereby severely impacting the efficiency of both training and inference. Previous approaches have attempted to reduce the number of image tokens either before or within the early layers of LVLMs. However, these strategies inevitably result in the loss of crucial image information, ultimately diminishing model performance. To address this challenge, we conduct an empirical study revealing that all visual tokens are necessary for LVLMs in the shallow layers, and token redundancy progressively increases in the deeper layers of the model. To this end, we propose PyramidDrop, a visual redundancy reduction strategy for LVLMs to boost their efficiency in both training and inference with neglectable performance loss. Specifically, we partition the LVLM into several stages and drop part of the image tokens at the end of each stage with a pre-defined ratio, creating pyramid-like visual tokens across model layers. The dropping is based on a lightweight similarity calculation with a negligible time overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PyramidDrop can achieve a 40% training time and 55% inference FLOPs acceleration of LLaVA-NeXT with comparable performance. Besides, the PyramidDrop could also serve as a plug-and-play strategy for inference acceleration without training, with better performance and lower inference cost than counterparts. We hope that the insights and approach introduced by PyramidDrop will inspire future research to further investigate the role of image tokens in LVLMs.
Multi-Agent Collaborative Data Selection for Efficient LLM Pretraining
Bai, Tianyi, Yang, Ling, Wong, Zhen Hao, Peng, Jiahui, Zhuang, Xinlin, Zhang, Chi, Wu, Lijun, Qiu, Jiantao, Zhang, Wentao, Yuan, Binhang, He, Conghui
Efficient data selection is crucial to accelerate the pretraining of large language models (LLMs). While various methods have been proposed to enhance data efficiency, limited research has addressed the inherent conflicts between these approaches to achieve optimal data selection for LLM pretraining. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel multi-agent collaborative data selection mechanism. In this framework, each data selection method serves as an independent agent, and an agent console is designed to dynamically integrate the information from all agents throughout the LLM training process. We conduct extensive empirical studies to evaluate our multi-agent framework. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves data efficiency, accelerates convergence in LLM training, and achieves an average performance gain up to 10.5% across multiple language model benchmarks compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
Gradual Learning: Optimizing Fine-Tuning with Partially Mastered Knowledge in Large Language Models
Li, Bozhou, Liang, Hao, Li, Yang, Fu, Fangcheng, Yin, Hongzhi, He, Conghui, Zhang, Wentao
During the pretraining phase, large language models (LLMs) acquire vast amounts of knowledge from extensive text corpora. Nevertheless, in later stages such as fine-tuning and inference, the model may encounter knowledge not covered in the initial training, which can lead to hallucinations and degraded performance. This issue has a profound impact on the model's capabilities, as it will inevitably face out-of-scope knowledge after pretraining. Furthermore, fine-tuning is often required to adapt LLMs to domain-specific tasks. However, this phenomenon limits the model's ability to learn and integrate new information during fine-tuning. The effectiveness of fine-tuning largely depends on the type of knowledge involved. Existing research suggests that fine-tuning the model on partially mastered knowledge-for instance, question-answer pairs where the model has a chance of providing correct responses under non-greedy decoding-can enable the model to acquire new knowledge while mitigating hallucination. Notably, this approach can still lead to the forgetting of fully mastered knowledge, constraining the fine-tuning dataset to a narrower range and limiting the model's overall potential for improvement. Given the model's intrinsic reasoning abilities and the interconnectedness of different knowledge areas, it is likely that as the model's capacity to utilize existing knowledge improves during fine-tuning, previously unmastered knowledge may become more understandable. To explore this hypothesis, we conducted experiments and, based on the results, proposed a two-stage fine-tuning strategy. This approach not only improves the model's overall test accuracy and knowledge retention but also preserves its accuracy on previously mastered content. When fine-tuning on the WikiQA dataset, our method increases the amount of knowledge acquired by the model in this stage by 24%.
Harnessing Diversity for Important Data Selection in Pretraining Large Language Models
Zhang, Chi, Zhong, Huaping, Zhang, Kuan, Chai, Chengliang, Wang, Rui, Zhuang, Xinlin, Bai, Tianyi, Qiu, Jiantao, Cao, Lei, Fan, Ju, Yuan, Ye, Wang, Guoren, He, Conghui
Data selection is of great significance in pre-training large language models, given the variation in quality within the large-scale available training corpora. To achieve this, researchers are currently investigating the use of data influence to measure the importance of data instances, $i.e.,$ a high influence score indicates that incorporating this instance to the training set is likely to enhance the model performance. Consequently, they select the top-$k$ instances with the highest scores. However, this approach has several limitations. (1) Computing the influence of all available data is time-consuming. (2) The selected data instances are not diverse enough, which may hinder the pre-trained model's ability to generalize effectively to various downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce \texttt{Quad}, a data selection approach that considers both quality and diversity by using data influence to achieve state-of-the-art pre-training results. In particular, noting that attention layers capture extensive semantic details, we have adapted the accelerated $iHVP$ computation methods for attention layers, enhancing our ability to evaluate the influence of data, $i.e.,$ its quality. For the diversity, \texttt{Quad} clusters the dataset into similar data instances within each cluster and diverse instances across different clusters. For each cluster, if we opt to select data from it, we take some samples to evaluate the influence to prevent processing all instances. To determine which clusters to select, we utilize the classic Multi-Armed Bandit method, treating each cluster as an arm. This approach favors clusters with highly influential instances (ensuring high quality) or clusters that have been selected less frequently (ensuring diversity), thereby well balancing between quality and diversity.
BEATS: Optimizing LLM Mathematical Capabilities with BackVerify and Adaptive Disambiguate based Efficient Tree Search
Sun, Linzhuang, Liang, Hao, Wei, Jingxuan, Yu, Bihui, He, Conghui, Zhou, Zenan, Zhang, Wentao
Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional performance across a broad range of tasks and domains. However, they still encounter difficulties in solving mathematical problems due to the rigorous and logical nature of mathematics. Previous studies have employed techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT), prompt engineering, and search-based methods to improve the mathematical problem-solving abilities of LLMs. Despite these efforts, their performance remains suboptimal and demands substantial computational resources. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach, BEATS, to enhance mathematical problem-solving abilities. Our method leverages newly designed prompts that guide the model to iteratively rewrite, advance by one step, and generate answers based on previous steps. Additionally, we employ a pruning tree search to optimize search time while achieving strong performance. Furthermore, we introduce a new back-verification technique that uses LLMs to validate the correctness of the generated answers. Notably, our method improves Qwen2-7b-Instruct's score from 36.94 to 61.52 (outperforming GPT-4's 42.5) on the MATH benchmark.
OmniCorpus: A Unified Multimodal Corpus of 10 Billion-Level Images Interleaved with Text
Li, Qingyun, Chen, Zhe, Wang, Weiyun, Wang, Wenhai, Ye, Shenglong, Jin, Zhenjiang, Chen, Guanzhou, He, Yinan, Gao, Zhangwei, Cui, Erfei, Yu, Jiashuo, Tian, Hao, Zhou, Jiasheng, Xu, Chao, Wang, Bin, Wei, Xingjian, Li, Wei, Zhang, Wenjian, Zhang, Bo, Cai, Pinlong, Wen, Licheng, Yan, Xiangchao, Li, Zhenxiang, Chu, Pei, Wang, Yi, Dou, Min, Tian, Changyao, Zhu, Xizhou, Lu, Lewei, Chen, Yushi, He, Junjun, Tu, Zhongying, Lu, Tong, Wang, Yali, Wang, Limin, Lin, Dahua, Qiao, Yu, Shi, Botian, He, Conghui, Dai, Jifeng
Image-text interleaved data, consisting of multiple images and texts arranged in a natural document format, aligns with the presentation paradigm of internet data and closely resembles human reading habits. Recent studies have shown that such data aids multimodal in-context learning and maintains the capabilities of large language models during multimodal fine-tuning. However, the limited scale and diversity of current image-text interleaved data restrict the development of multimodal large language models. In this paper, we introduce OmniCorpus, a 10 billion-level image-text interleaved dataset. Using an efficient data engine, we filter and extract large-scale high-quality documents, which contain 8.6 billion images and 1,696 billion text tokens. Compared to counterparts (e.g., MMC4, OBELICS), our dataset 1) has 15 times larger scales while maintaining good data quality; 2) features more diverse sources, including both English and non-English websites as well as video-centric websites; 3) is more flexible, easily degradable from an image-text interleaved format to pure text corpus and image-text pairs. Through comprehensive analysis and experiments, we validate the quality, usability, and effectiveness of the proposed dataset. We hope this could provide a solid data foundation for future multimodal model research.
InternLM-XComposer-2.5: A Versatile Large Vision Language Model Supporting Long-Contextual Input and Output
Zhang, Pan, Dong, Xiaoyi, Zang, Yuhang, Cao, Yuhang, Qian, Rui, Chen, Lin, Guo, Qipeng, Duan, Haodong, Wang, Bin, Ouyang, Linke, Zhang, Songyang, Zhang, Wenwei, Li, Yining, Gao, Yang, Sun, Peng, Zhang, Xinyue, Li, Wei, Li, Jingwen, Wang, Wenhai, Yan, Hang, He, Conghui, Zhang, Xingcheng, Chen, Kai, Dai, Jifeng, Qiao, Yu, Lin, Dahua, Wang, Jiaqi
We present InternLM-XComposer-2.5 (IXC-2.5), a versatile large-vision language model that supports long-contextual input and output. IXC-2.5 excels in various text-image comprehension and composition applications, achieving GPT-4V level capabilities with merely 7B LLM backend. Trained with 24K interleaved image-text contexts, it can seamlessly extend to 96K long contexts via RoPE extrapolation. This long-context capability allows IXC-2.5 to excel in tasks requiring extensive input and output contexts. Compared to its previous 2.0 version, InternLM-XComposer-2.5 features three major upgrades in vision-language comprehension: (1) Ultra-High Resolution Understanding, (2) Fine-Grained Video Understanding, and (3) Multi-Turn Multi-Image Dialogue. In addition to comprehension, IXC-2.5 extends to two compelling applications using extra LoRA parameters for text-image composition: (1) Crafting Webpages and (2) Composing High-Quality Text-Image Articles. IXC-2.5 has been evaluated on 28 benchmarks, outperforming existing open-source state-of-the-art models on 16 benchmarks. It also surpasses or competes closely with GPT-4V and Gemini Pro on 16 key tasks. The InternLM-XComposer-2.5 is publicly available at https://github.com/InternLM/InternLM-XComposer.