Although Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate coherent text, they often struggle to recognise user intent behind queries. In contrast, Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models interpret the purpose and key information of user input for responsive interactions. Existing NLU models typically map utterances to a dual-level semantic frame, involving sentence-level intent (SI) and word-level slot (WS) labels. However, real-life conversations primarily consist of multi-turn dialogues, requiring the interpretation of complex and extended exchanges. Researchers encounter challenges in addressing all facets of multi-turn dialogue using a unified NLU model. This paper introduces MIDAS, a novel approach leveraging multi-level intent, domain, and slot knowledge distillation for multi-turn NLU. We construct distinct teachers for SI detection, WS filling, and conversation-level domain (CD) classification, each fine-tuned for specific knowledge. A multi-teacher loss is proposed to facilitate the integration of these teachers, guiding a student model in multi-turn dialogue tasks. Results demonstrate the efficacy of our model in improving multi-turn conversation understanding, showcasing the potential for advancements in NLU through multi-level dialogue knowledge distillation. Our implementation is open-sourced on GitHub (https://github.com/adlnlp/Midas).

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection in multimodal contexts is essential for identifying deviations in different modalities, particularly for interactive dialogue systems in real-life interactions, where the systems are usually infeasible to deploy large language models (LLMs) to generate dialogue responses due to data privacy and ethical issues. This paper aims to improve label detection that involves multi-round long dialogues by efficiently detecting OOD dialogues and images. We introduce a novel scoring framework named Dialogue Image Aligning and Enhancing Framework (DIAEF) that integrates the visual language models with the novel proposed scores that detect OOD in two key scenarios (1) mismatches between the dialogue and image input pair and (2) input pairs with previously unseen labels. Our experimental results, derived from various benchmarks, demonstrate that integrating image and multi-round dialogue OOD detection is more effective with previously unseen labels than using either modality independently. In the presence of mismatched pairs, our proposed score effectively identifies these mismatches and demonstrates strong robustness in long dialogues. This approach enhances domain-aware, adaptive conversational agents and establishes baselines for future studies.

Transformer-based models have achieved remarkable success in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, yet their ability to handle long documents is constrained by computational limitations. Traditional approaches, such as truncating inputs, sparse self-attention, and chunking, attempt to mitigate these issues, but they often lead to information loss and hinder the model’s ability to capture long-range dependencies. In this paper, we introduce ChuLo, a novel chunk representation method for long document understanding that addresses these limitations. Our ChuLo groups input tokens using unsupervised keyphrase extraction, emphasizing semantically important keyphrase based chunks to retain core document content while reducing input length. This approach minimizes information loss and improves the efficiency of Transformer-based models. Preserving all tokens in long document understanding, especially token classification tasks, is important to ensure that fine-grained annotations, which depend on the entire sequence context, are not lost. We evaluate our method on multiple long document classification tasks and long document token classification tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness through comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analysis.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) necessitates models to reason effectively across visual and textual modalities. However, existing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) often fall short in achieving human-like reasoning due to a lack of integrated commonsense knowledge, limiting their robustness and accuracy in real-world scenarios where both explicit facts and implicit understanding are crucial. To address this challenge, we present MAGIC-VQA: Multimodal And Grounded Inference with Commonsense Knowledge, a novel framework designed to enhance multimodal inference by integrating commonsense reasoning. MAGIC-VQA introduces a three-stage process: (1) Explicit Commonsense Knowledge Retrieval from external knowledge graphs, (2) By-Type Commonsense Knowledge Post-Processing to refine contextual relevance, and (3) Implicit Commonsense Knowledge Augmentation using a heterogeneous graph processed by a Graph Neural Network (GNN). These stages collectively enable nuanced, context-aware reasoning without extensive pre-training or intricate prompt tuning.Our MAGIC-VQA significantly improves comprehensive benchmark datasets, surpassing existing models in tasks requiring advanced commonsense reasoning. MAGIC-VQA establishes a robust pathway for integrating commonsense knowledge into VQA, bridging the gap between vision-language inputs and high-level reasoning for improved reliability and contextual accuracy.

Visual storytelling aims to automatically generate a coherent story based on a given image sequence. Unlike tasks like image captioning, visual stories should contain factual descriptions, worldviews, and human social commonsense to put disjointed elements together to form a coherent and engaging human-writeable story. However, most models mainly focus on applying factual information and using taxonomic/lexical external knowledge when attempting to create stories. This paper introduces SCO-VIST, a framework representing the image sequence as a graph with objects and relations that includes human action motivation and its social interaction commonsense knowledge. SCO-VIST then takes this graph representing plot points and creates bridges between plot points with semantic and occurrence-based edge weights. This weighted story graph produces the storyline in a sequence of events using Floyd-Warshall’s algorithm. Our proposed framework produces stories superior across multiple metrics in terms of visual grounding, coherence, diversity, and humanness, per both automatic and human evaluations.

This paper presents a groundbreaking multimodal, multi-task, multi-teacher joint-grained knowledge distillation model for visually-rich form document understanding. The model is designed to leverage insights from both fine-grained and coarse-grained levels by facilitating a nuanced correlation between token and entity representations, addressing the complexities inherent in form documents. Additionally, we introduce new inter-grained and cross-grained loss functions to further refine diverse multi-teacher knowledge distillation transfer process, presenting distribution gaps and a harmonised understanding of form documents. Through a comprehensive evaluation across publicly available form document understanding datasets, our proposed model consistently outperforms existing baselines, showcasing its efficacy in handling the intricate structures and content of visually complex form documents.

Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (TKGC) under the extrapolation setting aims to predict the missing entity from a fact in the future, posing a challenge that aligns more closely with real-world prediction problems. Existing research mostly encodes entities and relations using sequential graph neural networks applied to recent snapshots. However, these approaches tend to overlook the ability to skip irrelevant snapshots according to entity-related relations in the query and disregard the importance of explicit temporal information. To address this, we propose our model, Re-Temp (Relation-Aware Temporal Representation Learning), which leverages explicit temporal embedding as input and incorporates skip information flow after each timestamp to skip unnecessary information for prediction. Additionally, we introduce a two-phase forward propagation method to prevent information leakage. Through the evaluation on six TKGC (extrapolation) datasets, we demonstrate that our model outperforms all eight recent state-of-the-art models by a significant margin.

Visual storytelling (VST) is the task of generating a story paragraph that describes a given image sequence. Most existing storytelling approaches have evaluated their models using traditional natural language generation metrics like BLEU or CIDEr. However, such metrics based on n-gram matching tend to have poor correlation with human evaluation scores and do not explicitly consider other criteria necessary for storytelling such as sentence structure or topic coherence. Moreover, a single score is not enough to assess a story as it does not inform us about what specific errors were made by the model. In this paper, we propose 3 evaluation metrics sets that analyses which aspects we would look for in a good story: 1) visual grounding, 2) coherence, and 3) non-redundancy. We measure the reliability of our metric sets by analysing its correlation with human judgement scores on a sample of machine stories obtained from 4 state-of-the-arts models trained on the Visual Storytelling Dataset (VIST). Our metric sets outperforms other metrics on human correlation, and could be served as a learning based evaluation metric set that is complementary to existing rule-based metrics.

Text-to-image multimodal tasks, generating/retrieving an image from a given text description, are extremely challenging tasks since raw text descriptions cover quite limited information in order to fully describe visually realistic images. We propose a new visual contextual text representation for text-to-image multimodal tasks, VICTR, which captures rich visual semantic information of objects from the text input. First, we use the text description as initial input and conduct dependency parsing to extract the syntactic structure and analyse the semantic aspect, including object quantities, to extract the scene graph. Then, we train the extracted objects, attributes, and relations in the scene graph and the corresponding geometric relation information using Graph Convolutional Networks, and it generates text representation which integrates textual and visual semantic information. The text representation is aggregated with word-level and sentence-level embedding to generate both visual contextual word and sentence representation. For the evaluation, we attached VICTR to the state-of-the-art models in text-to-image generation.VICTR is easily added to existing models and improves across both quantitative and qualitative aspects.

Online abusive language detection (ALD) has become a societal issue of increasing importance in recent years. Several previous works in online ALD focused on solving a single abusive language problem in a single domain, like Twitter, and have not been successfully transferable to the general ALD task or domain. In this paper, we introduce a new generic ALD framework, MACAS, which is capable of addressing several types of ALD tasks across different domains. Our generic framework covers multi-aspect abusive language embeddings that represent the target and content aspects of abusive language and applies a textual graph embedding that analyses the user’s linguistic behaviour. Then, we propose and use the cross-attention gate flow mechanism to embrace multiple aspects of abusive language. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation results show that our ALD algorithm rivals or exceeds the six state-of-the-art ALD algorithms across seven ALD datasets covering multiple aspects of abusive language and different online community domains.