The context of modern smart voice assistants is often multi-modal, where images, audio and video content are consumed by users simultaneously. In such a setup, co-reference resolution is especially challenging, and runs across modalities and dialogue turns. We explore the problem of multi-modal co-reference resolution in multi-turn dialogues and quantify the performance of multi-modal LLMs on a specially curated dataset of long, image-interleaved conversations between a voice assistant and human in a shopping use case. We propose a custom architecture for multi-modal embedding alignment using a novel parameter augmentation technique. Our proposed Parameter Augmented LLM approach shows a 4.9% absolute F1 improvement above a cross-attention baseline while reducing the number of parameters being trained by 4x.

We introduce a novel framework, LM-Guided CoT, that leverages a lightweight (i.e., <1B) language model (LM) for guiding a black-box large (i.e., >10B) LM in reasoning tasks. Specifically, the lightweight LM first generates a rationale for each input instance. The Frozen large LM is then prompted to predict a task output based on the rationale generated by the lightweight LM. Our approach is resource-efficient in the sense that it only requires training the lightweight LM. We optimize the model through 1) knowledge distillation and 2) reinforcement learning from rationale-oriented and task-oriented reward signals. We assess our method with multi-hop extractive question answering (QA) benchmarks, HotpotQA, and 2WikiMultiHopQA. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms all baselines regarding answer prediction accuracy. We also find that reinforcement learning helps the model to produce higher-quality rationales with improved QA performance.

Visual Relationship Detection aims to understand real-world objects’ interactions by grounding visual concepts to compositional visual relation triples, written in the form of (subject, predicate, object). Previous works have explored the use of contrastive learning to implicitly predict the predicates from the relevant image regions. However, these models often directly leverage in-distribution spatial and language co-occurrences biases during training, preventing the models from generalizing to out-of-distribution compositions. In this work, we examine whether contrastive vision and language models pre-trained on large-scale external image and text dataset can assist the detection of compositional visual relationships. To this end, we propose a semi-supervised contrastive fine-tuning approach for the visual relationship detection task. The results show that fine-tuned models that were pre-trained on larger datasets do not yield better performance when performing visual relationship detection, and larger models can yield lower performance when compared with their smaller counterparts.

We present our HABERTOR model for detecting hatespeech in large scale user-generated content. Inspired by the recent success of the BERT model, we propose several modifications to BERT to enhance the performance on the downstream hatespeech classification task. HABERTOR inherits BERT’s architecture, but is different in four aspects: (i) it generates its own vocabularies and is pre-trained from the scratch using the largest scale hatespeech dataset; (ii) it consists of Quaternion-based factorized components, resulting in a much smaller number of parameters, faster training and inferencing, as well as less memory usage; (iii) it uses our proposed multi-source ensemble heads with a pooling layer for separate input sources, to further enhance its effectiveness; and (iv) it uses a regularized adversarial training with our proposed fine-grained and adaptive noise magnitude to enhance its robustness. Through experiments on the large-scale real-world hatespeech dataset with 1.4M annotated comments, we show that HABERTOR works better than 15 state-of-the-art hatespeech detection methods, including fine-tuning Language Models. In particular, comparing with BERT, our HABERTOR is 4 5 times faster in the training/inferencing phase, uses less than 1/3 of the memory, and has better performance, even though we pre-train it by using less than 1% of the number of words. Our generalizability analysis shows that HABERTOR transfers well to other unseen hatespeech datasets and is a more efficient and effective alternative to BERT for the hatespeech classification.