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Vision-language generative reward models (VL-GenRMs) play a crucial role in aligning and evaluating multimodal AI systems, yet their own evaluation remains under-explored. Current assessment methods primarily rely on AI-annotated preference labels from traditional VL tasks, which can introduce biases and often fail to effectively challenge state-of-the-art models. To address these limitations, we introduce VL-RewardBench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning general multimodal queries, visual hallucination detection, and complex reasoning tasks. Through our AI-assisted annotation pipeline combining sample selection with human verification, we curate 1,250 high-quality examples specifically designed to probe model limitations. Comprehensive evaluation across 16 leading large vision-language models, demonstrates VL-RewardBench's effectiveness as a challenging testbed, where even GPT-4o achieves only 65.4% accuracy, and state-of-the-art open-source models such as Qwen2-VL-72B, struggle to surpass random-guessing. Importantly, performance on VL-RewardBench strongly correlates (Pearson's r > 0.9) with MMMU-Pro accuracy using Best-of-N sampling with VL-GenRMs. Analysis experiments uncover three critical insights for improving VL-GenRMs: (i) models predominantly fail at basic visual perception tasks rather than reasoning tasks; (ii) inference-time scaling benefits vary dramatically by model capacity; and (iii) training VL-GenRMs to learn to judge substantially boosts judgment capability (+14.7% accuracy for a 7B VL-GenRM). We believe VL-RewardBench along with the experimental insights will become a valuable resource for advancing VL-GenRMs., Comment: Project page: https://vl-rewardbench.github.io

Text-rich visual understanding-the ability to process environments where dense textual content is integrated with visuals-is crucial for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to interact effectively with structured environments. To enhance this capability, we propose synthesizing general multimodal instructions from webpage UIs using text-based large language models (LLMs). Despite lacking direct visual input, text-based LLMs are able to process structured text representations from webpage accessibility trees. These instructions are then paired with UI screenshots to train multimodal models. We introduce MultiUI, a dataset containing 7.3 million samples from 1 million websites, covering diverse multimodal tasks and UI layouts. Models trained on MultiUI not only excel in web UI tasks-achieving up to a 48% improvement on VisualWebBench and a 19.1% boost in element accuracy on a web agent dataset Mind2Web-but also generalize surprisingly well to non-web UI tasks and even to non-UI domains, such as document understanding, OCR, and chart interpretation. These results highlight the broad applicability of web UI data for advancing text-rich visual understanding across various scenarios.

Perceiving and generating diverse modalities are crucial for AI models to effectively learn from and engage with real-world signals, necessitating reliable evaluations for their development. We identify two major issues in current evaluations: (1) inconsistent standards, shaped by different communities with varying protocols and maturity levels; and (2) significant query, grading, and generalization biases. To address these, we introduce MixEval-X, the first any-to-any, real-world benchmark designed to optimize and standardize evaluations across diverse input and output modalities. We propose multi-modal benchmark mixture and adaptation-rectification pipelines to reconstruct real-world task distributions, ensuring evaluations generalize effectively to real-world use cases. Extensive meta-evaluations show our approach effectively aligns benchmark samples with real-world task distributions. Meanwhile, MixEval-X's model rankings correlate strongly with that of crowd-sourced real-world evaluations (up to 0.98) while being much more efficient. We provide comprehensive leaderboards to rerank existing models and organizations and offer insights to enhance understanding of multi-modal evaluations and inform future research.

Fine-tuning on agent-environment interaction trajectory data holds significant promise for surfacing generalized agent capabilities in open-source large language models (LLMs). In this work, we introduce AgentBank, by far the largest trajectory tuning data collection featuring more than 50k diverse high-quality interaction trajectories which comprises 16 tasks covering five distinct agent skill dimensions. Leveraging a novel annotation pipeline, we are able to scale the annotated trajectories and generate a trajectory dataset with minimized difficulty bias. Furthermore, we fine-tune LLMs on AgentBank to get a series of agent models, Samoyed. Our comparative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of scaling the interaction trajectory data to acquire generalized agent capabilities. Additional studies also reveal some key observations regarding trajectory tuning and agent skill generalization., Comment: Findings of EMNLP 2024

Urban region representation is crucial for various urban downstream tasks. However, despite the proliferation of methods and their success, acquiring general urban region knowledge and adapting to different tasks remains challenging. Previous work often neglects the spatial structures and functional layouts between entities, limiting their ability to capture transferable knowledge across regions. Further, these methods struggle to adapt effectively to specific downstream tasks, as they do not adequately address the unique features and relationships required for different downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a $\textbf{G}$raph-based $\textbf{U}$rban $\textbf{R}$egion $\textbf{P}$re-training and $\textbf{P}$rompting framework ($\textbf{GURPP}$) for region representation learning. Specifically, we first construct an urban region graph that integrates detailed spatial entity data for more effective urban region representation. Then, we develop a subgraph-centric urban region pre-training model to capture the heterogeneous and transferable patterns of interactions among entities. To further enhance the adaptability of these embeddings to different tasks, we design two graph-based prompting methods to incorporate explicit/hidden task knowledge. Extensive experiments on various urban region prediction tasks and different cities demonstrate the superior performance of our GURPP framework.

Current evaluations of large language models (LLMs) often overlook non-determinism, typically focusing on a single output per example. This limits our understanding of LLM performance variability in real-world applications. Our study addresses this issue by exploring key questions about the performance differences between greedy decoding and sampling, identifying benchmarks' consistency regarding non-determinism, and examining unique model behaviors. Through extensive experiments, we observe that greedy decoding generally outperforms sampling methods for most evaluated tasks. We also observe consistent performance across different LLM sizes and alignment methods, noting that alignment can reduce sampling variance. Moreover, our best-of-N sampling approach demonstrates that smaller LLMs can match or surpass larger models such as GPT-4-Turbo, highlighting the untapped potential of smaller LLMs. This research shows the importance of considering non-determinism in LLM evaluations and provides insights for future LLM development and evaluation.

Large language model agents have exhibited exceptional performance across a range of complex interactive tasks. Recent approaches have utilized tuning with expert trajectories to enhance agent performance, yet they primarily concentrate on outcome rewards, which may lead to errors or suboptimal actions due to the absence of process supervision signals. In this paper, we introduce the Iterative step-level Process Refinement (IPR) framework, which provides detailed step-by-step guidance to enhance agent training. Specifically, we adopt the Monte Carlo method to estimate step-level rewards. During each iteration, the agent explores along the expert trajectory and generates new actions. These actions are then evaluated against the corresponding step of expert trajectory using step-level rewards. Such comparison helps identify discrepancies, yielding contrastive action pairs that serve as training data for the agent. Our experiments on three complex agent tasks demonstrate that our framework outperforms a variety of strong baselines. Moreover, our analytical findings highlight the effectiveness of IPR in augmenting action efficiency and its applicability to diverse models., Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2024 (Main Conference)

Embedding models play a pivot role in modern NLP applications such as IR and RAG. While the context limit of LLMs has been pushed beyond 1 million tokens, embedding models are still confined to a narrow context window not exceeding 8k tokens, refrained from application scenarios requiring long inputs such as legal contracts. This paper explores context window extension of existing embedding models, pushing the limit to 32k without requiring additional training. First, we examine the performance of current embedding models for long context retrieval on our newly constructed LongEmbed benchmark. LongEmbed comprises two synthetic tasks and four carefully chosen real-world tasks, featuring documents of varying length and dispersed target information. Benchmarking results underscore huge room for improvement in these models. Based on this, comprehensive experiments show that training-free context window extension strategies like position interpolation can effectively extend the context window of existing embedding models by several folds, regardless of their original context being 512 or beyond 4k. Furthermore, for models employing absolute position encoding (APE), we show the possibility of further fine-tuning to harvest notable performance gains while strictly preserving original behavior for short inputs. For models using rotary position embedding (RoPE), significant enhancements are observed when employing RoPE-specific methods, such as NTK and SelfExtend, indicating RoPE's superiority over APE for context window extension. To facilitate future research, we release E5-Base-4k and E5-RoPE-Base, along with the LongEmbed benchmark., Comment: EMNLP 2024 Camera Ready

Multimodal Large Language models (MLLMs) have shown promise in web-related tasks, but evaluating their performance in the web domain remains a challenge due to the lack of comprehensive benchmarks. Existing benchmarks are either designed for general multimodal tasks, failing to capture the unique characteristics of web pages, or focus on end-to-end web agent tasks, unable to measure fine-grained abilities such as OCR, understanding, and grounding. In this paper, we introduce \bench{}, a multimodal benchmark designed to assess the capabilities of MLLMs across a variety of web tasks. \bench{} consists of seven tasks, and comprises 1.5K human-curated instances from 139 real websites, covering 87 sub-domains. We evaluate 14 open-source MLLMs, Gemini Pro, Claude-3 series, and GPT-4V(ision) on \bench{}, revealing significant challenges and performance gaps. Further analysis highlights the limitations of current MLLMs, including inadequate grounding in text-rich environments and subpar performance with low-resolution image inputs. We believe \bench{} will serve as a valuable resource for the research community and contribute to the creation of more powerful and versatile MLLMs for web-related applications.

Coherence evaluation aims to assess the organization and structure of a discourse, which remains challenging even in the era of large language models. Due to the scarcity of annotated data, data augmentation is commonly used for training coherence evaluation models. However, previous augmentations for this task primarily rely on heuristic rules, lacking designing criteria as guidance. In this paper, we take inspiration from linguistic theory of discourse structure, and propose a data augmentation framework named CoUDA. CoUDA breaks down discourse coherence into global and local aspects, and designs augmentation strategies for both aspects, respectively. Especially for local coherence, we propose a novel generative strategy for constructing augmentation samples, which involves post-pretraining a generative model and applying two controlling mechanisms to control the difficulty of generated samples. During inference, CoUDA also jointly evaluates both global and local aspects to comprehensively assess the overall coherence of a discourse. Extensive experiments in coherence evaluation show that, with only 233M parameters, CoUDA achieves state-of-the-art performance in both pointwise scoring and pairwise ranking tasks, even surpassing recent GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 based metrics., Comment: NAACL 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral components in various autonomous agent systems. In this study, we present an exploration-based trajectory optimization approach, referred to as ETO. This learning method is designed to enhance the performance of open LLM agents. Contrary to previous studies that exclusively train on successful expert trajectories, our method allows agents to learn from their exploration failures. This leads to improved performance through an iterative optimization framework. During the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment while completing given tasks, gathering failure trajectories to create contrastive trajectory pairs. In the subsequent training phase, the agent utilizes these trajectory preference pairs to update its policy using contrastive learning methods like DPO. This iterative cycle of exploration and training fosters continued improvement in the agents. Our experiments on three complex tasks demonstrate that ETO consistently surpasses baseline performance by a large margin. Furthermore, an examination of task-solving efficiency and potential in scenarios lacking expert trajectory underscores the effectiveness of our approach., Comment: Accepted to ACL 2024 Main Conference; Camera Ready

Link recommendation systems in online social networks (OSNs), such as Facebook's ``People You May Know'', Twitter's ``Who to Follow'', and Instagram's ``Suggested Accounts'', facilitate the formation of new connections among users. This paper addresses the challenge of link recommendation for the purpose of social influence maximization. In particular, given a graph $G$ and the seed set $S$, our objective is to select $k$ edges that connect seed nodes and ordinary nodes to optimize the influence dissemination of the seed set. This problem, referred to as influence maximization with augmentation (IMA), has been proven to be NP-hard. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, namely \textsf{AIS}, consisting of an efficient estimator for augmented influence estimation and an accelerated sampling approach. \textsf{AIS} provides a $(1-1/\mathrm{e}-\varepsilon)$-approximate solution with a high probability of $1-\delta$, and runs in $O(k^2 (m+n) \log (n / \delta) / \varepsilon^2 + k \left|E_{\mathcal{C}}\right|)$ time assuming that the influence of any singleton node is smaller than that of the seed set. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that can be implemented on large graphs containing millions of nodes while preserving strong theoretical guarantees. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm., Comment: TheWebConf'24; Corresponding author: Jing Tang

Human body reconstruction with Millimeter Wave (mmWave) radar point clouds has gained significant interest due to its ability to work in adverse environments and its capacity to mitigate privacy concerns associated with traditional camera-based solutions. Despite pioneering efforts in this field, two challenges persist. Firstly, raw point clouds contain massive noise points, usually caused by the ambient objects and multi-path effects of Radio Frequency (RF) signals. Recent approaches typically rely on prior knowledge or elaborate preprocessing methods, limiting their applicability. Secondly, even after noise removal, the sparse and inconsistent body-related points pose an obstacle to accurate human body reconstruction. To address these challenges, we introduce mmBaT, a novel multi-task deep learning framework that concurrently estimates the human body and predicts body translations in subsequent frames to extract body-related point clouds. Our method is evaluated on two public datasets that are collected with different radar devices and noise levels. A comprehensive comparison against other state-of-the-art methods demonstrates our method has a superior reconstruction performance and generalization ability from noisy raw data, even when compared to methods provided with body-related point clouds., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, accepted by IEEE ICASSP 2024

Continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to solve the problem of catastrophic forgetting when learning a sequence of newly emerging relations. Recent CRE studies have found that catastrophic forgetting arises from the model's lack of robustness against future analogous relations. To address the issue, we introduce rationale, i.e., the explanations of relation classification results generated by large language models (LLM), into CRE task. Specifically, we design the multi-task rationale tuning strategy to help the model learn current relations robustly. We also conduct contrastive rationale replay to further distinguish analogous relations. Experimental results on two standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art CRE models., Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 2023

Continual learning (CL) aims to constantly learn new knowledge over time while avoiding catastrophic forgetting on old tasks. We focus on continual text classification under the class-incremental setting. Recent CL studies have identified the severe performance decrease on analogous classes as a key factor for catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, through an in-depth exploration of the representation learning process in CL, we discover that the compression effect of the information bottleneck leads to confusion on analogous classes. To enable the model learn more sufficient representations, we propose a novel replay-based continual text classification method, InfoCL. Our approach utilizes fast-slow and current-past contrastive learning to perform mutual information maximization and better recover the previously learned representations. In addition, InfoCL incorporates an adversarial memory augmentation strategy to alleviate the overfitting problem of replay. Experimental results demonstrate that InfoCL effectively mitigates forgetting and achieves state-of-the-art performance on three text classification tasks. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Yifan-Song793/InfoCL., Comment: Findings of EMNLP 2023. An improved version of arXiv:2305.07289

This work leverages the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration's Traffic Flow Management System dataset and DV8, a recently developed tool for highly interactive visualization of air traffic data, to develop clustering algorithms for categorizing air traffic by their varying flight paths. Two clustering methodologies, a spatial-based geographic distance model, and a vector-based cosine similarity model, are demonstrated and compared for their clustering effectiveness. Examples of their applications reveal successful, realistic clustering based on automated clustering result determination and human-in-the-loop processes, with geographic distance algorithms performing better for enroute portions of flight paths and cosine similarity algorithms performing better for near-terminal operations, such as arrival paths. A point extraction technique is applied to improve computation efficiency., Comment: Published in the 9th International Conference on Research in Air Transportation (ICRAT'20): https://www.icrat.org/previous-conferences/9th-international-conference/papers/

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained with a pre-defined context length, restricting their use in scenarios requiring long inputs. Previous efforts for adapting LLMs to a longer length usually requires fine-tuning with this target length (Full-length fine-tuning), suffering intensive training cost. To decouple train length from target length for efficient context window extension, we propose Positional Skip-wisE (PoSE) training that smartly simulates long inputs using a fixed context window. This is achieved by first dividing the original context window into several chunks, then designing distinct skipping bias terms to manipulate the position indices of each chunk. These bias terms and the lengths of each chunk are altered for every training example, allowing the model to adapt to all positions within target length. Experimental results show that PoSE greatly reduces memory and time overhead compared with Full-length fine-tuning, with minimal impact on performance. Leveraging this advantage, we have successfully extended the LLaMA model to 128k tokens using a 2k training context window. Furthermore, we empirically confirm that PoSE is compatible with all RoPE-based LLMs and position interpolation strategies. Notably, our method can potentially support infinite length, limited only by memory usage in inference. With ongoing progress for efficient inference, we believe PoSE can further scale the context window beyond 128k., Comment: ICLR 2024

Underwater image restoration has been a challenging problem for decades since the advent of underwater photography. Most solutions focus on shallow water scenarios, where the scene is uniformly illuminated by the sunlight. However, the vast majority of uncharted underwater terrain is located beyond 200 meters depth where natural light is scarce and artificial illumination is needed. In such cases, light sources co-moving with the camera, dynamically change the scene appearance, which make shallow water restoration methods inadequate. In particular for multi-light source systems (composed of dozens of LEDs nowadays), calibrating each light is time-consuming, error-prone and tedious, and we observe that only the integrated illumination within the viewing volume of the camera is critical, rather than the individual light sources. The key idea of this paper is therefore to exploit the appearance changes of objects or the seafloor, when traversing the viewing frustum of the camera. Through new constraints assuming Lambertian surfaces, corresponding image pixels constrain the light field in front of the camera, and for each voxel a signal factor and a backscatter value are stored in a volumetric grid that can be used for very efficient image restoration of camera-light platforms, which facilitates consistently texturing large 3D models and maps that would otherwise be dominated by lighting and medium artifacts. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted extensive experiments on simulated and real-world datasets. The results of these experiments demonstrate the robustness of our approach in restoring the true albedo of objects, while mitigating the influence of lighting and medium effects. Furthermore, we demonstrate our approach can be readily extended to other scenarios, including in-air imaging with artificial illumination or other similar cases.

Despite impressive results achieved by many on-land visual mapping algorithms in the recent decades, transferring these methods from land to the deep sea remains a challenge due to harsh environmental conditions. Images captured by autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), equipped with high-resolution cameras and artificial illumination systems, often suffer from heterogeneous illumination and quality degradation caused by attenuation and scattering, on top of refraction of light rays. These challenges often result in the failure of on-land SLAM approaches when applied underwater or cause SfM approaches to exhibit drifting or omit challenging images. Consequently, this leads to gaps, jumps, or weakly reconstructed areas. In this work, we present a navigation-aided hierarchical reconstruction approach to facilitate the automated robotic 3D reconstruction of hectares of seafloor. Our hierarchical approach combines the advantages of SLAM and global SfM that is much more efficient than incremental SfM, while ensuring the completeness and consistency of the global map. This is achieved through identifying and revisiting problematic or weakly reconstructed areas, avoiding to omit images and making better use of limited dive time. The proposed system has been extensively tested and evaluated during several research cruises, demonstrating its robustness and practicality in real-world conditions., Comment: 24 pages, 19 figures

Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in tackling a broad range of tasks. However, existing methods are mainly restricted to specifically designed tools and fail to fulfill complex instructions, having great limitations when confronted with real-world scenarios. In this paper, we explore a more realistic scenario by connecting LLMs with RESTful APIs, which adhere to the widely adopted REST software architectural style for web service development. To address the practical challenges of tackling complex instructions, we propose RestGPT, which exploits the power of LLMs and conducts a coarse-to-fine online planning mechanism to enhance the abilities of task decomposition and API selection. RestGPT also contains an API executor tailored for calling RESTful APIs, which can meticulously formulate parameters and parse API responses. To fully evaluate the performance of RestGPT, we propose RestBench, a high-quality benchmark which consists of two real-world scenarios and human-annotated instructions with gold solution paths. Experiments show that RestGPT is able to achieve impressive results in complex tasks and has strong robustness, which paves a new way towards AGI. RestGPT and RestBench is publicly available at https://restgpt.github.io/., Comment: Add RestBench to evaluate RestGPT

Continual learning (CL) aims to constantly learn new knowledge over time while avoiding catastrophic forgetting on old tasks. In this work, we focus on continual text classification under the class-incremental setting. Recent CL studies find that the representations learned in one task may not be effective for other tasks, namely representation bias problem. For the first time we formally analyze representation bias from an information bottleneck perspective and suggest that exploiting representations with more class-relevant information could alleviate the bias. To this end, we propose a novel replay-based continual text classification method, RepCL. Our approach utilizes contrastive and generative representation learning objectives to capture more class-relevant features. In addition, RepCL introduces an adversarial replay strategy to alleviate the overfitting problem of replay. Experiments demonstrate that RepCL effectively alleviates forgetting and achieves state-of-the-art performance on three text classification tasks.

Joint entity and relation extraction (JERE) is one of the most important tasks in information extraction. However, most existing works focus on sentence-level coarse-grained JERE, which have limitations in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we construct a large-scale document-level fine-grained JERE dataset DocRED-FE, which improves DocRED with Fine-Grained Entity Type. Specifically, we redesign a hierarchical entity type schema including 11 coarse-grained types and 119 fine-grained types, and then re-annotate DocRED manually according to this schema. Through comprehensive experiments we find that: (1) DocRED-FE is challenging to existing JERE models; (2) Our fine-grained entity types promote relation classification. We make DocRED-FE with instruction and the code for our baselines publicly available at https://github.com/PKU-TANGENT/DOCRED-FE., Comment: Accepted by IEEE ICASSP 2023. The first two authors contribute equally

We evaluated the capability of generative pre-trained transformers (GPT), to pass assessments in introductory and intermediate Python programming courses at the postsecondary level. Discussions of potential uses (e.g., exercise generation, code explanation) and misuses (e.g., cheating) of this emerging technology in programming education have intensified, but to date there has not been a rigorous analysis of the models' capabilities in the realistic context of a full-fledged programming course with diverse set of assessment instruments. We evaluated GPT on three Python courses that employ assessments ranging from simple multiple-choice questions (no code involved) to complex programming projects with code bases distributed into multiple files (599 exercises overall). Further, we studied if and how successfully GPT models leverage feedback provided by an auto-grader. We found that the current models are not capable of passing the full spectrum of assessments typically involved in a Python programming course (<70% on even entry-level modules). Yet, it is clear that a straightforward application of these easily accessible models could enable a learner to obtain a non-trivial portion of the overall available score (>55%) in introductory and intermediate courses alike. While the models exhibit remarkable capabilities, including correcting solutions based on auto-grader's feedback, some limitations exist (e.g., poor handling of exercises requiring complex chains of reasoning steps). These findings can be leveraged by instructors wishing to adapt their assessments so that GPT becomes a valuable assistant for a learner as opposed to an end-to-end solution., Comment: 7 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2303.08033

Continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to continually learn new relations from a class-incremental data stream. CRE model usually suffers from catastrophic forgetting problem, i.e., the performance of old relations seriously degrades when the model learns new relations. Most previous work attributes catastrophic forgetting to the corruption of the learned representations as new relations come, with an implicit assumption that the CRE models have adequately learned the old relations. In this paper, through empirical studies we argue that this assumption may not hold, and an important reason for catastrophic forgetting is that the learned representations do not have good robustness against the appearance of analogous relations in the subsequent learning process. To address this issue, we encourage the model to learn more precise and robust representations through a simple yet effective adversarial class augmentation mechanism (ACA), which is easy to implement and model-agnostic. Experimental results show that ACA can consistently improve the performance of state-of-the-art CRE models on two popular benchmarks., Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 2022

Previous literature has proved that Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) can store factual knowledge. However, we find that facts stored in the PLMs are not always correct. It motivates us to explore a fundamental question: How do we calibrate factual knowledge in PLMs without re-training from scratch? In this work, we propose a simple and lightweight method CaliNet to achieve this goal. To be specific, we first detect whether PLMs can learn the right facts via a contrastive score between right and fake facts. If not, we then use a lightweight method to add and adapt new parameters to specific factual texts. Experiments on the knowledge probing task show the calibration effectiveness and efficiency. In addition, through closed-book question answering, we find that the calibrated PLM possesses knowledge generalization ability after fine-tuning. Beyond the calibration performance, we further investigate and visualize the knowledge calibration mechanism., Comment: Accepted by Findings of EMNLP 2022

Figures of speech, such as metaphor and irony, are ubiquitous in literature works and colloquial conversations. This poses great challenge for natural language understanding since figures of speech usually deviate from their ostensible meanings to express deeper semantic implications. Previous research lays emphasis on the literary aspect of figures and seldom provide a comprehensive exploration from a view of computational linguistics. In this paper, we first propose the concept of figurative unit, which is the carrier of a figure. Then we select 12 types of figures commonly used in Chinese, and build a Chinese corpus for Contextualized Figure Recognition (ConFiguRe). Different from previous token-level or sentence-level counterparts, ConFiguRe aims at extracting a figurative unit from discourse-level context, and classifying the figurative unit into the right figure type. On ConFiguRe, three tasks, i.e., figure extraction, figure type classification and figure recognition, are designed and the state-of-the-art techniques are utilized to implement the benchmarks. We conduct thorough experiments and show that all three tasks are challenging for existing models, thus requiring further research. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/pku-tangent/ConFiguRe., Comment: Accepted to Coling 2022

Continual relation extraction (CRE) requires the model to continually learn new relations from class-incremental data streams. In this paper, we propose a Frustratingly easy but Effective Approach (FEA) method with two learning stages for CRE: 1) Fast Adaption (FA) warms up the model with only new data. 2) Balanced Tuning (BT) finetunes the model on the balanced memory data. Despite its simplicity, FEA achieves comparable (on TACRED or superior (on FewRel) performance compared with the state-of-the-art baselines. With careful examinations, we find that the data imbalance between new and old relations leads to a skewed decision boundary in the head classifiers over the pretrained encoders, thus hurting the overall performance. In FEA, the FA stage unleashes the potential of memory data for the subsequent finetuning, while the BT stage helps establish a more balanced decision boundary. With a unified view, we find that two strong CRE baselines can be subsumed into the proposed training pipeline. The success of FEA also provides actionable insights and suggestions for future model designing in CRE.

In this paper, we compare different methods to extract skill requirements from job advertisements. We consider three top-down methods that are based on expert-created dictionaries of keywords, and a bottom-up method of unsupervised topic modeling, the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model. We measure the skill requirements based on these methods using a U.K. dataset of job advertisements that contains over 1 million entries. We estimate the returns of the identified skills using wage regressions. Finally, we compare the different methods by the wage variation they can explain, assuming that better-identified skills will explain a higher fraction of the wage variation in the labor market. We find that the top-down methods perform worse than the LDA model, as they can explain only about 20% of the wage variation, while the LDA model explains about 45% of it.

Fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) on downstream tasks has become common practice in natural language processing. However, most of the PLMs are vulnerable, e.g., they are brittle under adversarial attacks or imbalanced data, which hinders the application of the PLMs on some downstream tasks, especially in safe-critical scenarios. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective fine-tuning method called Match-Tuning to force the PLMs to be more robust. For each instance in a batch, we involve other instances in the same batch to interact with it. To be specific, regarding the instances with other labels as a perturbation, Match-Tuning makes the model more robust to noise at the beginning of training. While nearing the end, Match-Tuning focuses more on performing an interpolation among the instances with the same label for better generalization. Extensive experiments on various tasks in GLUE benchmark show that Match-Tuning consistently outperforms the vanilla fine-tuning by $1.64$ scores. Moreover, Match-Tuning exhibits remarkable robustness to adversarial attacks and data imbalance., Comment: IJCAI-ECAI 2022 (the 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 25th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence)