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The great success of large language models has encouraged the development of large multimodal models, with a focus on image-language interaction. Despite promising results in various image-language downstream tasks, it is still challenging and unclear how to extend the capabilities of these models to the more complex video domain, especially when dealing with explicit temporal signals. To address the problem in existing large multimodal models, in this paper we adopt visual instruction tuning to build a unified causal video-oriented language modeling framework, named UNICORN. Specifically, we collect a comprehensive dataset under the instruction-following format, and instruction-tune the model accordingly. Experimental results demonstrate that without customized training objectives and intensive pre-training, UNICORN can achieve comparable or better performance on established temporal video-language tasks including moment retrieval, video paragraph captioning and dense video captioning. Moreover, the instruction-tuned model can be used to automatically annotate internet videos with temporally-aligned captions. Compared to commonly used ASR captions, we show that training on our generated captions improves the performance of video-language models on both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings. Source code can be found at https://github.com/xyh97/UNICORN.

EMNLP 2024

UNICORN: A Unified Causal Video-Oriented Language-Modeling Framework for Temporal Video-Language Tasks

zero/few-shot extraction

nlp tools for social analysis

narratives

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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## 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.

Benchmarking the performance of information retrieval (IR) is mostly conducted with a fixed set of documents (static corpora). However, in realistic scenarios, this is rarely the case and the documents to be retrieved are constantly updated and added. In this paper, we focus on Generative Retrievals (GR), which apply autoregressive language models to IR problems, and explore their adaptability and robustness in dynamic scenarios. We also conduct an extensive evaluation of computational and memory efficiency, crucial factors for real-world deployment of IR systems handling vast and ever-changing document collections. Our results on the StreamingQA benchmark demonstrate that GR is more adaptable to evolving knowledge (4–11%), robust in learning knowledge with temporal information, and efficient in terms of inference FLOPs (x2), indexing time (x6), and storage footprint (x4) compared to Dual Encoders (DE), which are commonly used in retrieval systems. Our paper highlights the potential of GR for future use in practical IR systems within dynamic environments.

Exploring the Practicality of Generative Retrieval on Dynamic Corpora

Cross-lingual open domain question answering (CLQA) is a complex problem, comprising cross-lingual retrieval from a multilingual knowledge base, followed by answer generation in the query language. Both steps are usually tackled by separate models, requiring substantial annotated datasets, and typically auxiliary resources, like machine translation systems to bridge between languages. In this paper, we show that CLQA can be addressed using a single encoder-decoder model. To effectively train this model, we propose a self-supervised method based on exploiting the cross-lingual link structure within Wikipedia. We demonstrate how linked Wikipedia pages can be used to synthesise supervisory signals for cross-lingual retrieval, through a form of cloze query, and generate more natural questions to supervise answer generation. Together, we show our approach, $\texttt{CLASS}$, outperforms comparable methods on both supervised and zero-shot language adaptation settings, including those using machine translation.

Pre-training Cross-lingual Open Domain Question Answering with Large-scale Synthetic Supervision

Flashcard schedulers rely on 1) *student models* to predict the flashcards a student knows; and 2) *teaching policies* to pick which cards to show next via these predictions.
Prior student models, however, just use study data like the student's past responses, ignoring the text on cards. 
We propose **content-aware scheduling**, the first schedulers exploiting flashcard content.
To give the first evidence that such schedulers enhance student learning, we build KARL, a simple but effective content-aware student model employing deep knowledge tracing (DKT), retrieval, and BERT to predict student recall.
We train KARL by collecting a new dataset of 123,143 study logs on diverse trivia questions.
KARL bests existing student models in AUC and calibration error.
To ensure our improved predictions lead to better student learning, we create a novel delta-based teaching policy to deploy KARL online.
Based on 32 study paths from 27 users, KARL improves learning efficiency over SOTA, showing KARL's strength and encouraging researchers to look beyond historical study data to fully capture student abilities.

KARL: Knowledge-Aware Retrieval and Representations aid Retention and Learning in Students

Tools have become a mainstay of LLMs, allowing them to retrieve knowledge not in their weights, to perform tasks on the web, and even to control robots. However, most ontologies and surveys of tool-use have assumed the core challenge for LLMs is choosing the tool. Instead, we introduce a framework for tools more broadly which guides us to explore a model's ability to detect "silent" tool errors, and reflect on how to plan. This more directly aligns with the increasingly popular use of models as tools. We provide an initial approach to failure recovery with promising results both on a controlled calculator setting and embodied agent planning.

Tools Fail: Detecting Silent Errors in Faulty Tools

This study explores replacing Transformers in Visual Language Models (VLMs) with Mamba, a recent structured state space model (SSM) that demonstrates promising performance in sequence modeling. We test models up to 3B parameters under controlled conditions, showing that Mamba-based VLMs outperforms Transformers-based VLMs in captioning, question answering, and reading comprehension. However, we find that Transformers achieve greater performance in visual grounding and the performance gap widens with scale. We explore two hypotheses to explain this phenomenon: 1) the effect of task-agnostic visual encoding on the updates of the hidden states, and 2) the difficulty in performing visual grounding from the perspective of in-context multimodal retrieval. Our results indicate that a task-aware encoding yields minimal performance gains on grounding, however, Transformers significantly outperform Mamba at in-context multimodal retrieval. Overall, Mamba shows promising performance on tasks where the correct output relies on a summary of the image but struggles when retrieval of explicit information from the context is required.

Shaking Up VLMs: Comparing Transformers and Structured State Space Models for Vision & Language Modeling

In the realm of multi-intent spoken language understanding, recent advancements have leveraged the potential of prompt learning frameworks. However, critical gaps exist in these frameworks: the lack of explicit modeling of dual-task dependencies and the oversight of task-specific semantic differences among utterances. To address these shortcomings, we propose DC-Instruct, a novel generative framework based on Dual-task Inter-dependent Instructions (DII) and Supervised Contrastive Instructions (SCI). Specifically, DII guides large language models (LLMs) to generate labels for one task based on the other task's labels, thereby explicitly capturing dual-task inter-dependencies. Moreover, SCI leverages utterance semantics differences by guiding LLMs to determine whether a pair of utterances share the same or similar labels. This can improve LLMs on extracting and discriminating task-specific semantics, thus enhancing their SLU reasoning abilities. Extensive experiments on public benchmark datasets show that DC-Instruct markedly outperforms current generative models and state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing dialogue language understanding and reasoning.

DC-Instruct: An Effective Framework for Generative Multi-intent Spoken Language Understanding

Improving the effectiveness and efficiency of large language models (LLMs) simultaneously is a critical yet challenging research goal. In this paper, we find that low-rank pre-training, normally considered as efficient methods that will compromise performance, can be scalably effective when reduced parameters are precisely targeted. Specifically, by applying low-dimensional module only to the attention layer — resolves this issue and enhances both effectiveness and efficiency. We refer to this structure as *Low-dimensional Projected Attention (LPA)* and provide an explanatory analysis. Through extensive experimentation at parameter scales of 130M, 370M, and scaling up to 3B, we have validated the effectiveness and scalability of LPA. Our results show that LPA model can save up to 12.4% in time while achieving an approximate 5% improvement in test perplexity (ppl) and on downstream tasks compared with vanilla Transformer.

Scalable Efficient Training of Large Language Models with Low-dimensional Projected Attention

We study open-world multi-label text classification under extremely weak supervision (XWS), where the user only provides a brief description for classification objectives without any labels or ground-truth label space. Similar single-label XWS settings have been explored recently, however, these methods cannot be easily adapted for multi-label. We observe that (1) most documents have a dominant class covering the majority of content and (2) long-tail labels would appear in some documents as a dominant class. Therefore, we first utilize the user description to prompt a large language model (LLM) for dominant keyphrases of a subset of raw documents, and then construct a (initial) label space via clustering. We further apply a zero-shot multi-label classifier to locate the documents with small top predicted scores, so we can revisit their dominant keyphrases for more long-tail labels. We iterate this process to discover a comprehensive label space and construct a multi-label classifier as a novel method, X-MLClass. X-MLClass exhibits a remarkable increase in ground-truth label space coverage on various datasets, for example, a 40% improvement on the AAPD dataset over topic modeling and keyword extraction methods. Moreover, X-MLClass achieves the best end-to-end multi-label classification accuracy.

Open-world Multi-label Text Classification with Extremely Weak Supervision

Document structure editing involves manipulating localized textual, visual, and layout components in document images based on the user's requests. Past works have shown that multimodal grounding of user requests in the document image and identifying the accurate structural components and their associated attributes remain key challenges for this task. To address these, we introduce the DocEditAgent, a novel framework that performs end-to-end document editing by leveraging Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). It consists of three novel components -- (1) Doc2Command to simultaneously localize edit regions of interest (RoI) and disambiguate user edit requests into edit commands. (2) LLM-based Command Reformulation prompting to tailor edit commands originally intended for specialized software into edit instructions suitable for generalist LMMs. (3) Moreover, DocEditAgent processes these outputs via Large Multimodal Models like GPT-4V and Gemini, to parse the document layout, execute edits on grounded Region of Interest (RoI), and generate the edited document image. Extensive experiments on the DocEdit dataset show that DocEditAgent significantly outperforms strong baselines on edit command generation (2-33%), RoI bounding box detection (12-31%), and overall document editing (1-12%) tasks.

DocEditAgent: Document Structure Editing Via Multimodal LLM Grounding

In-Context-learning and few-shot prompting are viable methods compositional output generation. However, these methods can be very sensitive to the choice of support examples used. Retrieving good supports from the training data for a given test query is already a difficult problem, but in some cases solving this may not even be enough. We consider the setting of grounded language learning problems where finding relevant supports in the same or similar states as the query may be difficult. We design an agent which instead generates possible supports inputs and targets current state of the world, then uses them in-context-learning to solve the test query. We show substantially improved performance on a previously unsolved compositional generalization test without a loss of performance in other areas. The approach is general and can even scale to instructions expressed in natural language.

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Exploring the Practicality of Generative Retrieval on Dynamic Corpora

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