Pre-trained language models (PLMs) that rely solely on textual data may exhibit limitations in multimodal semantics comprehension. Existing solutions attempt to alleviate this issue by incorporating explicit image retrieval or generation techniques. However, these methods: (1) focus exclusively on the static image modality; (2) inevitably encounter modality gaps and noise; (3) indiscriminately treat all modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal-augmented framework termed MaCSC, which can infuse multimodal semantics into PLMs and facilitate a self-balancing calibration of information allocation. Specifically, MaCSC obtains modal-specific conceptual prototypes from contrastive pre-training models (e.g., CLIP), and aggregates the intra- and inter-modal semantics of the conceptual prototype to enhance PLMs. In addition, we utilize a novel self-balancing contrastive loss to achieve multi-scale self-balancing calibration of multimodal information during fine-tuning PLMs. Experimental results show that MaCSC consistently improves the performance of PLMs across various architectures and scales, and outperforms competitive baselines on multiple NLP tasks.

MaCSC: Towards Multimodal-augmented Pre-trained Language Models via Conceptual Prototypes and Self-balancing Calibration

Multi-intent spoken language understanding (SLU) has garnered growing attention due to its ability to handle multi-intent utterances, which closely mirrors practical scenarios. Unlike traditional SLU,  each intent in multi-intent SLU corresponds to its designated scope for slots,  which occurs in certain fragments within the utterance. As a result, establishing precise scope alignment to mitigate noise impact emerges as a key challenge. More seriously, they lack alignment between the predictions of the two tasks due to task-independent decoding, resulting in a limitation on the overall performance.  To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework termed Aligner$^2$, which contains an Adjustive Cross-task Aligner (ACA) and a Forced Cross-task Aligner (FCA). ACA utilizes the information conveyed by joint label embeddings to accurately align the scope of intent and corresponding slots, before the interaction of the two tasks. FCA introduces reinforcement learning, to enforce the alignment of the task-specific hidden states after the interaction, which is explicitly guided by the prediction. Extensive experiments on two public multi-intent SLU datasets demonstrate the superiority of our Aligner$^2$ over cutting-edge methods. More encouragingly, the proposed method can be easily integrated into existing SLU frameworks, to further improve performance. We will release the codes and parameters to facilitate the research community.

Aligner$^2$: Enhancing Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling via Adjustive and Forced Cross-Task Alignment

Multi-Intent spoken language understanding (SLU) can handle complicated utterances expressing multiple intents, which has attracted increasing attention from researchers. Although existing models have obtained promising performance, most of them still suffer from two main problems: (1) each intent has its specific scope and the semantic information outside the scope might potentially hinder accurate predictions, i.e. scope barrier; (2) only the guidance from intent to slot is modeled but the guidance from slot to intent is often neglected, i.e. unidirectional guidance. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Intent SLU framework termed HAOT, which utilizes hierarchical attention to divide the scopes of each intent and applies optimal transport to model the mutual guidance between slot and intent. Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two public Multi-Intent SLU datasets, obtaining the 3.4 improvement on MixATIS dataset compared to the previous best models in overall accuracy.

Towards Multi-Intent Spoken Language Understanding via Hierarchical Attention and Optimal Transport

Video grounding aims to locate a moment of interest matching the given query sentence from an untrimmed video. Previous works ignore the \emph{sparsity dilemma} in video annotations, which fails to provide the context information between potential events and query sentences in the dataset. In this paper, we contend that exploiting easily available captions which describe general actions \ie, auxiliary captions defined in our paper, will significantly boost the performance. To this end, we propose an Auxiliary Caption Network (ACNet) for video grounding. Specifically, we first introduce dense video captioning to generate dense captions and then obtain auxiliary captions by Non-Auxiliary Caption Suppression (NACS). To capture the potential information in auxiliary captions, we propose Caption Guided Attention (CGA) project the semantic relations between auxiliary captions and query sentences into temporal space and fuse them into visual representations. Considering the gap between auxiliary captions and ground truth, we propose Asymmetric Cross-modal Contrastive Learning  (ACCL) for constructing more negative pairs to maximize cross-modal mutual information. Extensive experiments on three public datasets (\ie, ActivityNet Captions, TACoS and ActivityNet-CG) demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Exploiting Auxiliary Caption for Video Grounding

Recent joint models for multi-intent detection and slot filling have obtained promising results through modeling the unidirectional or bidirectional guidance between intent and slot. However, existing works design joint models heuristically and lack some theoretical exploration, including (1) theoretical measurement of the joint-interaction quality; (2) explainability of design and optimization methods of joint models, which may limit the performance and efficiency of designs. In this paper, we mathematically define the cross-task information gain (CIG) to measure the quality of joint processes from an information-theoretic perspective and discover an implicit optimization of CIG in previous models. Based on this, we propose a novel multi-stage iterative framework with theoretical effectiveness, explainability, and convergence, which can explicitly optimize information for cross-task interactions. Further, we devise an information-based joint model (InfoJoint) that conforms to this theoretical framework to gradually reduce the cross-task propagation of erroneous semantics through CIG iterative maximization. Extensive experiment results on two public datasets show that InfoJoint outperforms the state-of-the-art models by a large margin.

Towards Explainable Joint Models via Information Theory for Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling

While vision-language pre-trained models (VL-PTMs) have advanced multimodal research in recent years, their mastery in a few languages like English restricts their applicability in broader communities. To this end, there is an increasing interest in developing multilingual VL models via a joint-learning setup, which, however, could be unrealistic due to expensive costs and data availability. In this work, we propose to extend VL-PTMs' language capacity by continual language learning (CLL), where a model needs to update its linguistic knowledge incrementally without suffering from catastrophic forgetting (CF). We begin our study by introducing a model dubbed CLL-CLIP, which builds upon CLIP, a prevailing VL-PTM that has acquired image-English text alignment. Specifically, CLL-CLIP contains an expandable token embedding layer to handle linguistic differences. It solely trains token embeddings to improve memory stability and is optimized under cross-modal and cross-lingual objectives to learn the alignment between images and multilingual texts. To alleviate CF raised by covariate shift and lexical overlap, we further propose a novel approach that ensures the identical distribution of all token embeddings during initialization and regularizes token embedding learning during training. We construct a CLL benchmark covering 36 languages based on MSCOCO and XM3600 datasets and then evaluate multilingual image-text retrieval performance. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of CLL-CLIP and show that our approach can boost CLL-CLIP, e.g., by 6.7% in text-to-image average Recall@1 on XM3600, and improve various state-of-the-art methods consistently. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/yangbang18/CLFM.

Xuxin Cheng

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