Investigating Prompting Techniques for Zero- and Few-Shot Visual Question Answering
Rabiul Awal
Le Zhang
In this paper, we explore effective prompting techniques to enhance zero- and few-shot Visual Question Answering (VQA) performance in contem… (voir plus)porary Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Central to our investigation is the role of question templates in guiding VLMs to generate accurate answers. We identify that specific templates significantly influence VQA outcomes, underscoring the need for strategic template selection. Another pivotal aspect of our study is augmenting VLMs with image captions, providing them with additional visual cues alongside direct image features in VQA tasks. Surprisingly, this augmentation significantly improves the VLMs' performance in many cases, even though VLMs"see"the image directly! We explore chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and find that while standard CoT reasoning causes drops in performance, advanced methods like self-consistency can help recover it. Furthermore, we find that text-only few-shot examples enhance VLMs' alignment with the task format, particularly benefiting models prone to verbose zero-shot answers. Lastly, to mitigate the challenges associated with evaluating free-form open-ended VQA responses using string-matching based VQA metrics, we introduce a straightforward LLM-guided pre-processing technique to adapt the model responses to the expected ground-truth answer distribution. In summary, our research sheds light on the intricacies of prompting strategies in VLMs for VQA, emphasizing the synergistic use of captions, templates, and pre-processing to enhance model efficacy.
Preventing Dimensional Collapse in Contrastive Local Learning with Subsampling
Louis Fournier
Adeetya Patel
Michael Eickenberg
Edouard Oyallon
Block-State Transformers
Mahan Fathi
Jonathan Pilault
Orhan Firat
Block-State Transformers
Mahan Fathi
Jonathan Pilault
Orhan Firat
Block-State Transformers
Mahan Fathi
Jonathan Pilault
Orhan Firat
Block-State Transformers
Mahan Fathi
Jonathan Pilault
Orhan Firat
Block-State Transformers
Mahan Fathi
Jonathan Pilault
Orhan Firat
State space models (SSMs) have shown impressive results on tasks that require modeling long-range dependencies and efficiently scale to long… (voir plus) sequences owing to their subquadratic runtime complexity. Originally designed for continuous signals, SSMs have shown superior performance on a plethora of tasks, in vision and audio; however, SSMs still lag Transformer performance in Language Modeling tasks. In this work, we propose a hybrid layer named Block-State Transformer (BST), that internally combines an SSM sublayer for long-range contextualization, and a Block Transformer sublayer for short-term representation of sequences. We study three different, and completely parallelizable, variants that integrate SSMs and block-wise attention. We show that our model outperforms similar Transformer-based architectures on language modeling perplexity and generalizes to longer sequences. In addition, the Block-State Transformer demonstrates more than tenfold increase in speed at the layer level compared to the Block-Recurrent Transformer when model parallelization is employed.
GEANT4-DNA simulation of temperature-dependent and pH-dependent yields of chemical radiolytic species
Jingyi Bian
Juan Duran
Wook-Geun Shin
Jose Ramos-Méndez
Jack C Sankey
Lilian Childress
Jan Seuntjens
A solution algorithm for chance-constrained problems with integer second-stage recourse decisions
Andrea Lodi
Enrico Malaguti
Michele Monaci
Giacomo Nannicini
Paolo
Paronuzzi
A2CiD2: Accelerating Asynchronous Communication in Decentralized Deep Learning
Adel Nabli
Edouard Oyallon
Best-Case Retrieval Evaluation: Improving the Sensitivity of Reciprocal Rank with Lexicographic Precision
Across a variety of ranking tasks, researchers use reciprocal rank to measure the effectiveness for users interested in exactly one relevant… (voir plus) item. Despite its widespread use, evidence suggests that reciprocal rank is brittle when discriminating between systems. This brittleness, in turn, is compounded in modern evaluation settings where current, high-precision systems may be difficult to distinguish. We address the lack of sensitivity of reciprocal rank by introducing and connecting it to the concept of best-case retrieval, an evaluation method focusing on assessing the quality of a ranking for the most satisfied possible user across possible recall requirements. This perspective allows us to generalize reciprocal rank and define a new preference-based evaluation we call lexicographic precision or lexiprecision. By mathematical construction, we ensure that lexiprecision preserves differences detected by reciprocal rank, while empirically improving sensitivity and robustness across a broad set of retrieval and recommendation tasks.
Who Controlled the Evidence? Question Answering for Disclosure Information Extraction
Hardy Hardy
Derek Ruths
Nicholas B King
Conflict of interest (COI) disclosure statements provide rich information to support trans-parency and reduce bias in research. We introduce… (voir plus) a novel task to identify relationships between sponsoring entities and the research studies they sponsor from the disclosure statement. This task is challenging due to the complexity of recognizing all potential relationship patterns and the hierarchical nature of identifying entities first and then extracting their relationships to the study. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we also constructed a new annotated dataset and proposed a Question Answering-based method to recognize entities and extract relationships. Our method has demonstrated robustness in handling diverse relationship patterns, and it remains effective even when trained on a low-resource dataset.