United States

Existing text-to-video diffusion models rely solely on text-only encoders for their pretraining. This limitation stems from the absence of large-scale multimodal prompt video datasets, resulting in a lack of visual grounding and restricting their versatility and application in multimodal integration. To address this, we construct a large-scale multimodal prompt dataset by employing retrieval methods to pair in-context examples with the given text prompts and then utilize a two-stage training strategy to enable diverse video generation tasks within a model. In the first stage, we propose a multimodal conditional video generation framework for pretraining on these augmented datasets, establishing a foundational model for grounded video generation. Secondly, we fine-tune the model from the first stage on various video generation tasks, incorporating multimodal instructions. This process further refines the model&#39;s ability to handle diverse inputs and tasks, ensuring seamless integration of multimodal information. After this two-stage training process, VIMI demonstrates multimodal understanding capabilities, producing contextually rich and personalized videos grounded in the provided inputs, as shown in Figure1. Compared to previous subject-driven video generation methods, our generator can synthesize consistent and temporally coherent videos with large motion while retaining the semantic control. Our generator also achieves state-of-the-art text-to-video generation results on UCF101 benchmark.

EMNLP 2024

VIMI: Grounding Video Generation through Multi-modal Instruction

large language model

counterspeech generation

reinforcement learning

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

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***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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EMNLP 2022

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Existing text-to-video diffusion models rely solely on text-only encoders for their pretraining. This limitation stems from the absence of large-scale multimodal prompt video datasets, resulting in a lack of visual grounding and restricting their versatility and application in multimodal integration. To address this, we construct a large-scale multimodal prompt dataset by employing retrieval methods to pair in-context examples with the given text prompts and then utilize a two-stage training strategy to enable diverse video generation tasks within a model. In the first stage, we propose a multimodal conditional video generation framework for pretraining on these augmented datasets, establishing a foundational model for grounded video generation. Secondly, we fine-tune the model from the first stage on various video generation tasks, incorporating multimodal instructions. This process further refines the model's ability to handle diverse inputs and tasks, ensuring seamless integration of multimodal information. After this two-stage training process, VIMI demonstrates multimodal understanding capabilities, producing contextually rich and personalized videos grounded in the provided inputs, as shown in Figure1. Compared to previous subject-driven video generation methods, our generator can synthesize consistent and temporally coherent videos with large motion while retaining the semantic control. Our generator also achieves state-of-the-art text-to-video generation results on UCF101 benchmark.

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
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EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

In the age of mobile internet, user data, often referred to as memories, is continuously generated on personal devices. Effectively managing and utilizing this data to deliver services to users is a compelling research topic. In this paper, we introduce a novel task of crafting personalized agents powered by large language models (LLMs), which utilize a user's smartphone memories to enhance downstream applications with advanced LLM capabilities. To achieve this goal, we introduce EMG-RAG, a solution that combines Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques with an Editable Memory Graph (EMG). This approach is further optimized using Reinforcement Learning to address three distinct challenges: data collection, editability, and selectability. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset validate the effectiveness of EMG-RAG, achieving an improvement of approximately 10% over the best existing approach. Additionally, the personalized agents have been transferred into a real smartphone AI assistant, which leads to enhanced usability.

Crafting Personalized Agents through Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Editable Memory Graphs

We study LMs pretrained sequentially on two languages (“L2LMs”) for modeling nonnative sentence processing. In particular, we pretrain GPT2 on 6 different first languages (L1s), followed by English as the second language (L2). We examine the effect of the choice of pretraining L1 on the model’s ability to predict human reading times, evaluating on English readers from a range of L1 backgrounds. Experimental results show that, while all of the LMs’ word surprisals improve prediction of L2 reading times, especially for human L1s distant from English, there is no reliable effect of the choice of L2LM’s L1. We also evaluate the learning trajectory of a monolingual English LM: for predicting L2 as opposed to L1 reading, it peaks much earlier and immediately falls off, possibly mirroring the difference in proficiency between the native and nonnative populations. Lastly, we provide examples of L2LMs’ surprisals, which could potentially generate hypotheses about human L2 reading.

Predicting Nonnative Sentence Processing with L2LMs

We explore multi-step reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs). The problem is challenging, as reasoning data consisting of multiple steps of visual and language processing are barely available. To overcome the challenge, we first introduce a least-to-most visual reasoning paradigm, which interleaves steps of decomposing a question into sub-questions and invoking external tools for resolving sub-questions. Based on the paradigm, we further propose a novel data synthesis approach that can automatically create questions and multi-step reasoning paths for an image in a bottom-up manner. Our approach divides the complex synthesis task into a few simple sub-tasks, and (almost entirely) relies on open-sourced models to accomplish the sub-tasks. Therefore, the entire synthesis process is reproducible and cost-efficient, and the synthesized data is quality guaranteed. With the approach, we construct $50$k visual reasoning examples. Then, we develop a visual reasoner through supervised fine-tuning, which is capable of generally enhancing the reasoning abilities of a wide range of existing VLMs in a plug-and-play fashion. Extensive experiments indicate that the visual reasoner can consistently and significantly improve four VLMs on four VQA benchmarks.

From the Least to the Most: Building a Plug-and-Play Visual Reasoner via Data Synthesis

Image-text contrastive models like CLIP have wide applications in zero-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and transfer learning. However, they often struggle on compositional visio-linguistic tasks (e.g., attribute-binding or object-relationships) where their performance is no better than random chance. To address this, we introduce SDS-CLIP, a lightweight and sample-efficient distillation method to enhance CLIP's compositional visio-linguistic reasoning. Our approach fine-tunes CLIP using a distillation objective borrowed from large text-to-image generative models like Stable-Diffusion, which are known for their strong visio-linguistic reasoning abilities. On the challenging Winoground benchmark, SDS-CLIP improves the visio-linguistic performance of various CLIP models by up to 7%, while on the ARO dataset, it boosts performance by up to 3%. This work underscores the potential of well-designed distillation objectives from generative models to enhance contrastive image-text models with improved visio-linguistic reasoning capabilities.

Distilling Knowledge from Text-to-Image Generative Models Improves Visio-Linguistic Reasoning in CLIP

Recent advances in instruction-tuned Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have imbued the models with the ability to generate high-level, image-grounded explanations with ease. While such capability is largely attributed to the rich world knowledge contained within the Large Language Models (LLMs), our work reveals their shortcomings in fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) across six different benchmark settings. Most recent state-of-the-art LVLMs such as LLaVa-1.5, InstructBLIP and GPT-4V not only severely deteriorate in terms of classification performance, e.g., average drop of 65.58 in EM for Stanford Dogs for LLaVA-1.5, but also struggle to generate descriptive visual attributes based on a concept that appears within an input image despite their prominent zero-shot image captioning ability. In-depth analyses show that instruction-tuned LVLMs suffer from modality gap, showing discrepancy when given textual and visual inputs that correspond to the same concept. In an effort to further the community's endeavor in this direction, we propose a multiple granularity attribute-centric benchmark and training mixture, Finer, which aims to establish a ground to evaluate LVLMs' fine-grained visual comprehension ability and provide significantly improved explainability.

Finer: Investigating and Enhancing Fine-Grained Visual Concept Recognition in Large Vision Language Models

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to achieve rapid task adaptation by learning from demonstrations. With the increase in available context length of LLMs, recent experiments have shown that the performance of ICL does not necessarily scale well in many-shot (demonstration) settings. We hypothesize that the reason lies in more demonstrations dispersing the model attention from the query, hindering its understanding of key content, which we validate both theoretically and experimentally. Inspired by how humans learn from examples, we propose a training-free method FocusICL, which conducts triviality filtering to avoid attention being diverted by unimportant contents at token-level and operates hierarchical attention to further ensure sufficient attention towards current query at demonstration-level. We also design an efficient hyperparameter searching strategy for FocusICL based on model perplexity of demonstrations. Comprehensive experiments validate that FocusICL achieves an average performance improvement of 5.2% over vanilla ICL and scales well with many-shot demonstrations.

Focused Large Language Models are Stable Many-Shot Learners

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of producing documents, and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) has shown itself to be a powerful method for improving accuracy without sacrificing fluency. However, not all information can be retrieved from text. We propose an approach that uses the analysis of structured data to generate fact sets that are used to guide generation in much the same way that retrieved documents are used in RAG. This analytics augmented generation (AAG) approach supports the ability to utilize standard analytic techniques to generate facts that are then converted to text and passed to an LLM. We present a neurosymbolic platform, Satyrn, that leverages AAG to produce accurate, fluent, and coherent reports grounded in large scale databases. In our experiments, we find that Satyrn generates reports in which over 86% of claims are accurate while maintaining high levels of fluency and coherence, even when using smaller language models such as Mistral-7B, as compared to GPT-4 Code Interpreter in which just 57% of claims are accurate.

Satyrn: A Platform for Analytics Augmented Generation

Smaller-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often claim to perform on par with larger models in general-domain visual grounding and question-answering benchmarks while offering advantages in computational efficiency and storage. However, their ability to handle rare objects, which fall into the long tail of data distributions, is less understood. To rigorously evaluate this aspect, we introduce the "Uncontextualized Uncommon Objects" (UOUO) benchmark. This benchmark focuses on systematically testing VLMs with both large and small parameter counts on rare and specialized objects. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that while smaller VLMs maintain competitive performance on common datasets, they significantly underperform on tasks involving uncommon objects. We also propose an advanced, scalable pipeline for data collection and cleaning, ensuring the UOUO benchmark provides high-quality, challenging instances. These findings highlight the need to consider long-tail distributions when assessing the true capabilities of VLMs. Code and project details for UOUO can be found at https://zoezheng126.github.io/UOUO-Website/.

UOUO: Uncontextualized Uncommon Objects for Measuring Knowledge Horizons of Vision Language Models

Personalized large language models (LLMs) aim to tailor interactions, content, and recommendations to individual user preferences. While parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods excel in performance and generalization, they are costly and limit communal benefits when used individually. To this end, we introduce Personalized Pieces (Per-Pcs), a framework that allows users to safely share and assemble personalized PEFT efficiently with collaborative efforts. Per-Pcs involves selecting sharers, breaking their PEFT into pieces, and training gates for each piece. These pieces are added to a pool, from which target users can select and assemble personalized PEFT using their history data. This approach preserves privacy and enables fine-grained user modeling without excessive storage and computation demands. Experimental results show Per-Pcs outperforms non-personalized and PEFT retrieval baselines, offering performance comparable to OPPU with significantly lower resource use across six tasks. Further analysis highlights Per-Pcs's robustness concerning sharer count and selection strategy, pieces sharing ratio, and scalability in computation time and storage space. Per-Pcs's modularity promotes safe sharing, making LLM personalization more efficient, effective, and widely accessible through collaborative efforts.

Personalized Pieces: Efficient Personalized Large Language Models through Collaborative Efforts

In the real world, documents are organized in different formats and varied modalities. Traditional retrieval pipelines require tailored document parsing techniques and content extraction modules to prepare input for indexing. This process is tedious, prone to errors, and has information loss. To this end, we propose Document Screenshot Embedding (DSE), a novel retrieval paradigm that regards document screenshots as a unified input format, which does not require any content extraction preprocess and preserves all the information in a document (e.g., text, image and layout). DSE leverages a large vision-language model to directly encode document screenshots into dense representations for retrieval. To evaluate our method, we first craft the dataset of Wiki-SS, a 1.3M Wikipedia web page screenshots as the corpus to answer the questions from the Natural Questions dataset. In such a text-intensive document retrieval setting, DSE shows competitive effectiveness compared to other text retrieval methods relying on parsing. For example, DSE outperforms BM25 by 17 points in top-1 retrieval accuracy. Additionally, in a mixed-modality task of slide retrieval, DSE significantly outperforms OCR text retrieval methods by over 15 points in nDCG@10. These experiments show that DSE is an effective document retrieval paradigm for diverse types of documents. Model checkpoints, code, and Wiki-SS collection will be released.

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Crafting Personalized Agents through Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Editable Memory Graphs

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