Thailand

Fine-grained vision-language models (VLM) have been widely used for inter-modality local alignment between the predefined fixed patches and textual words. However, in medical analysis, lesions exhibit varying sizes and positions, and using fixed patches may cause incomplete representations of lesions. Moreover, these methods provide explainability by using heatmaps to show the general image areas potentially associated with texts rather than specific regions, making their explanations not explicit and specific enough. To address these issues, we propose a novel Adaptive patch-word Matching (AdaMatch) model to correlate chest X-ray (CXR) image regions with words in medical reports and apply it to CXR-report generation to provide explainability for the generation process. AdaMatch exploits the fine-grained relation between adaptive patches and words to provide explanations of specific image regions with corresponding words. To capture the abnormal regions of varying sizes and positions, we introduce an Adaptive Patch extraction (AdaPatch) module to acquire adaptive patches for these regions adaptively. Aiming to provide explicit explainability for the CXR-report generation task, we propose an AdaMatch-based bidirectional LLM for Cyclic CXR-report generation (AdaMatch-Cyclic). It employs AdaMatch to obtain the keywords for CXR images and `keypatches&#39; for medical reports as hints to guide CXR-report generation. Extensive experiments on two publicly available CXR datasets validate the effectiveness of our method and its superior performance over existing methods. Source code will be released.

ACL 2024

Fine-Grained Image-Text Alignment in Medical Imaging Enables Explainable Cyclic Image-Report Generation

adamatch-cyclic

adamatch

vision-language alignment

cxr generation

fine-grained vision-language model

report generation

large language model

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Fine-grained vision-language models (VLM) have been widely used for inter-modality local alignment between the predefined fixed patches and textual words. However, in medical analysis, lesions exhibit varying sizes and positions, and using fixed patches may cause incomplete representations of lesions. Moreover, these methods provide explainability by using heatmaps to show the general image areas potentially associated with texts rather than specific regions, making their explanations not explicit and specific enough. To address these issues, we propose a novel Adaptive patch-word Matching (AdaMatch) model to correlate chest X-ray (CXR) image regions with words in medical reports and apply it to CXR-report generation to provide explainability for the generation process. AdaMatch exploits the fine-grained relation between adaptive patches and words to provide explanations of specific image regions with corresponding words. To capture the abnormal regions of varying sizes and positions, we introduce an Adaptive Patch extraction (AdaPatch) module to acquire adaptive patches for these regions adaptively. Aiming to provide explicit explainability for the CXR-report generation task, we propose an AdaMatch-based bidirectional LLM for Cyclic CXR-report generation (AdaMatch-Cyclic). It employs AdaMatch to obtain the keywords for CXR images and `keypatches' for medical reports as hints to guide CXR-report generation. Extensive experiments on two publicly available CXR datasets validate the effectiveness of our method and its superior performance over existing methods. Source code will be released.

poster

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Information retrieval (IR) plays a crucial role in locating relevant resources from vast amounts of data, and its applications have evolved from traditional knowledge bases to modern retrieval models (RMs). The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has further revolutionized the IR field by enabling users to interact with search systems in natural languages. In this paper, we explore the advantages and disadvantages of LLMs and RMs, highlighting their respective strengths in understanding user-issued queries and retrieving up-to-date information. To leverage the benefits of both paradigms while circumventing their limitations, we propose **InteR**, a novel framework that facilitates information refinement through synergy between RMs and LLMs. InteR allows RMs to expand knowledge in queries using LLM-generated knowledge collections and enables LLMs to enhance prompt formulation using retrieved documents. This iterative refinement process augments the inputs of RMs and LLMs, leading to more accurate retrieval. Experiments on large-scale retrieval benchmarks involving web search and low-resource retrieval tasks show that InteR achieves overall superior **zero-shot** retrieval performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, even those using relevance judgment. Source code is available at https://github.com/Cyril-JZ/InteR.

Synergistic Interplay between Search and Large Language Models for Information Retrieval

We introduce AnyGPT, an any-to-any multimodal language model that utilizes discrete representations for the unified processing of various modalities, including speech, text, images, and music. AnyGPT can be trained stably without any alterations to the current large language model (LLM) architecture or training paradigms. Instead, it relies exclusively on data-level preprocessing, facilitating the seamless integration of new modalities into LLMs, akin to the incorporation of new languages.We build a multimodal text-centric dataset for multimodal alignment pre-training. Utilizing generative models, we synthesize the first large-scale any-to-any multimodal instruction dataset. It consists of 108k samples of multi-turn conversations that intricately interweave various modalities, thus equipping the model to handle arbitrary combinations of multimodal inputs and outputs.Experimental results demonstrate that AnyGPT is capable of facilitating any-to-any multimodal conversation while achieving performance comparable to specialized models across all modalities, proving that discrete representations can effectively and conveniently unify multiple modalities within a language model. Demos are shown in \href{https://junzhan2000.github.io/AnyGPT.github.io/}{https://junzhan2000.github.io/AnyGPT.github.io/}.

AnyGPT: Unified Multimodal LLM with Discrete Sequence Modeling

Text-to-image diffusion models (T2I) use a latent representation of a text prompt to guide the image generation process. However, the process by which the encoder produces the text representation is unknown. We propose the Diffusion Lens, a method for analyzing the text encoder of T2I models by generating images from its intermediate representations. Using the Diffusion Lens, we perform an extensive analysis of two recent T2I models. Exploring compound prompts, we find that complex scenes describing multiple objects are composed progressively and more slowly compared to simple scenes; Exploring knowledge retrieval, we find that representation of uncommon concepts require further computation compared to common concepts, and that knowledge retrieval is gradual across layers. Overall, our findings provide valuable insights into the text encoder component in T2I pipelines.

Diffusion Lens: Interpreting Text Encoders in Text-to-Image Pipelines

While human speakers use a variety of different expressions when describing the same object in an image, giving rise to a distribution of plausible labels driven by pragmatic constraints, the extent to which current Vision & Language Large Language Models (VLLMs) can mimic this crucial feature of language use is an open question. This applies to common, everyday objects, but it is particularly interesting for uncommon or novel objects for which a category label may be lacking or fuzzy. Furthermore, similar patterns of variation are observed among human speakers for highly context-sensitive expressions, such as the quantifiers ‘few’ or ‘most’. In our work, we evaluate VLLMs (FROMAGe, BLIP-2, LLaVA) on three categories (nouns, attributes, and quantifiers) where humans show great subjective variability concerning the distribution over plausible labels, using datasets and resources mostly under-explored in previous work. Our results reveal mixed evidence on the ability of VLLMs to capture human naming preferences at generation time: while some models are good at mimicking human distributions for nouns and attributes, all of them fail to assign quantifiers, a task that requires more accurate, high-level reasoning.

Naming, Describing, and Quantifying Visual Objects in Humans and LLMs

Embodied agents equipped with GPT as their brain have exhibited extraordinary decision-making and generalization abilities across various tasks. However, existing zero-shot agents for vision-and-language navigation (VLN) only prompt the GPT-4 to select potential locations within localized environments, without constructing an effective "global-view'' for the agent to understand the overall environment. In this work, we present a novel **map**-guided **GPT**-based agent, dubbed **MapGPT**, which introduces an online linguistic-formed map to encourage the global exploration. Specifically, we build an online map and incorporate it into the prompts that include node information and topological relationships, to help GPT understand the spatial environment. Benefiting from this design, we further propose an adaptive planning mechanism to assist the agent in performing multi-step path planning based on a map, systematically exploring multiple candidate nodes or sub-goals step by step. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MapGPT is applicable to both GPT-4 and GPT-4V, achieving state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on the R2R and REVERIE simultaneously ($\sim$10\% and $\sim$12\% improvements in SR), and showcasing the newly emergent global thinking and path planning abilities of the GPT.

MapGPT: Map-Guided Prompting with Adaptive Path Planning for Vision-and-Language Navigation

In the field of speech synthesis, there is a growing emphasis on employing multimodal speech to enhance robustness. A key challenge in this area is the scarcity of datasets that pair audio with corresponding video. We employ a methodology that incorporates modality alignment during the pre-training phase on multimodal datasets, uniquely facilitating zero-shot generalization through the process of freezing the video modality feature extraction component and the encoder module within the pretrained weights, thereby enabling effective cross-modal and cross-lingual transfer. We have named this method `Uni-Dubbing'. Our method finely tunes with both multimodal and single-modality audio data. In multimodal scenarios, it achieves a reduced word error rate (WER) of 31.73\%, surpassing the previous best of 33.9\%. It also excels in metrics like tone quality and synchronization. With single-modality audio, it achieves a WER of 36.08\%, demonstrating adaptability to limited data. Its domain generalization capabilities are proven across various language tasks in video translation and audio generation. Trained on 433 hours of audio data, it surpasses techniques using 200 hours of audiovisual data. The code and demo are available at \href{https://diracer.github.io/unidubbing}{https://diracer.github.io/unidubbing}.

Uni-Dubbing: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis from Visual Articulation

We study whether Large Language Models (LLMs) latently perform multi-hop reasoning with complex prompts such as "The mother of the singer of 'Superstition' is". We look for evidence of a latent reasoning pathway where an LLM (1) latently identifies "the singer of 'Superstition'" as Stevie Wonder, the bridge entity, and (2) uses its knowledge of Stevie Wonder's mother to complete the prompt. We analyze these two hops individually and consider their co-occurrence as indicative of latent multi-hop reasoning. For the first hop, we test if changing the prompt to indirectly mention the bridge entity instead of any other entity increases the LLM's internal recall of the bridge entity. For the second hop, we test if increasing this recall causes the LLM to better utilize what it knows about the bridge entity. We find strong evidence of latent multi-hop reasoning for the prompts of certain relation types, with the reasoning pathway used in more than 80% of the prompts. However, the utilization is highly contextual, varying across different types of prompts. Also, on average, the evidence for the second hop and the full multi-hop traversal is rather moderate and only substantial for the first hop. Moreover, we find a clear scaling trend with increasing model size for the first hop of reasoning but not for the second hop. Our experimental findings suggest potential challenges and opportunities for future development and applications of LLMs.

Do Large Language Models Latently Perform Multi-Hop Reasoning?

In math reasoning with large language models (LLMs), fine-tuning data augmentation by query evolution and diverse reasoning paths is empirically verified effective, profoundly narrowing the gap between open-sourced LLMs and cutting-edge proprietary LLMs. 
In this paper, we conduct an investigation for such data augmentation in math reasoning and are intended to answer: 
(1) What strategies of data augmentation are more effective; 
(2) What is the scaling relationship between the amount of augmented data and model performance; and 
(3) Can data augmentation incentivize generalization to out-of-domain mathematical reasoning tasks?
To this end, we create two new dataset AugGSM8K and AugMATH, by complicating and diversifying the queries and sampling multiple reasoning paths from GSM8K and MATH.
We obtained a series of LLMs called MuggleMath by fine-tuning LLaMA models on AugGSM8K and AugMATH. MuggleMath substantially achieves new state-of-the-art on GSM8K and MATH.
A log-linear relationship and a segmented log-linear are presented between MuggleMath's performance and the amount of augmented data on GSM8K and MATH, respectively.
We also find that it is weak in out-of-domain math reasoning generalization from AugGSM8K to MATH and from AugMATH to GSM8K, which suggests that augmenting queries that cover a broader range of subjects is more beneficial for generalization.

MuggleMath: Assessing the Impact of Query and Response Augmentation on Math Reasoning

Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) is often used to evaluate large language models (LLMs). To see if MCQA assesses LLMs as intended, we probe if LLMs can perform MCQA with choices-only prompts, where models must select the correct answer only from the choices. In three MCQA datasets and four LLMs, this prompt bests a majority baseline in 11/12 cases, with up to 0.33 accuracy gain. To help explain this behavior, we conduct an in-depth, black-box analysis on memorization, choice dynamics, and question inference. Our key findings are threefold. First, we find no evidence that the choices-only accuracy stems from memorization alone. Second, priors over individual choices do not fully explain choices-only accuracy, hinting that LLMs use the group dynamics of choices. Third, LLMs have some ability to infer a relevant question from choices, and surprisingly can sometimes even match the original question. We hope to motivate the use of stronger baselines in MCQA benchmarks, the design of robust MCQA datasets, and further efforts to explain LLM decision-making.

Artifacts or Abduction: How Do LLMs Answer Multiple-Choice Questions Without the Question?

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising results in a variety of tasks that combine vision and language. As these models become more integral to research and applications, conducting comprehensive evaluations of their capabilities has grown increasingly important. However, most existing benchmarks fail to consider that, in certain situations, images need to be interpreted within a broader context. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark, named as CODIS, designed to assess the ability of models to use context provided in free-form text to enhance visual comprehension. Our findings indicate that MLLMs consistently fall short of human performance on this benchmark. Further analysis confirms that these models struggle to effectively extract and utilize contextual information to improve their understanding of images. This underscores the pressing need to enhance the ability of MLLMs to comprehend visuals in a context-dependent manner.

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Synergistic Interplay between Search and Large Language Models for Information Retrieval

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