LLMs have improved the fluency and informativeness of abstractive summarization but remain prone to hallucinations, where generated content deviates from the source document. Recent PMI decoding strategies mitigate over-reliance on prior knowledge by comparing output probabilities with and without source documents, effectively enhancing contextual utilization and improving faithfulness. However, existing strategies often neglect the explicit use of salient contextual information and rely on static hyperparameters to fix the balance between contextual and prior knowledge, limiting their flexibility. In this work, we propose Salience-Aware Reinforced Adaptive decoding (SARA), which incorporates salient information and allows the model to adaptively determine reliance on the source document’s context, salient context, and the model’s prior knowledge based on pointwise mutual information. Moreover, a tokenwise adaptive decoding mechanism via reinforcement learning is proposed in SARA to dynamically adjust the contributions of context and prior knowledge at each decoding timestep. Experiments on CNN/DM, WikiHow, and NYT50 datasets show that SARA consistently improves the quality and faithfulness of summaries across various LLM backbones without modifying their weights.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable generative capabilities, enabling the generation of valuable information. Despite these advancements, previous research found that LLMs sometimes struggle with adhering to specific constraints, such as being in a specific place or at a specific time, and at times even overlook them, which leads to responses that are either too generic or not fully satisfactory. Existing approaches attempted to address this issue by decomposing and rewriting input instructions or reflecting on prior failings, yet they fall short in adequately emphasizing specific constraints and unlocking the underlying knowledge, such as programming within the context of software development. In response, this paper proposes a simple yet effective method called Chain-of-Specificity (CoS). Specifically, CoS emphasizes the specific constraints in the input instructions, unlocks knowledge within LLMs, and refines responses. Experiments conducted on publicly available and self-built complex datasets demonstrate that CoS outperforms existing methods in enhancing generated content, especially in terms of specificity. Additionally, as the number of specific constraints increases, other baselines falter, while CoS still performs well. Moreover, we show that distilling responses generated by CoS effectively enhances the ability of smaller models to follow constrained instructions.

Key Information Extraction (KIE) is a challenging multimodal task aimed at extracting structured value entities from visually rich documents. Despite recent advancements, two major challenges remain. First, existing datasets typically feature fixed layouts and a limited set of entity categories, while current methods are based on a full-shot setting that is difficult to apply in real-world scenarios, where new entity categories frequently emerge. Secondly, current methods often treat key entities simply as parts of the OCR-parsed context, neglecting the positive impact of the relationships between key-value entities. To address the first challenge, we introduce a new large-scale, human-annotated dataset, Complex Layout document for Key Information Extraction (CLEX). Comprising 5,860 images with 1,162 entity categories, CLEX is larger and more complex than existing datasets. It also primarily focuses on the zero-shot and few-shot KIE tasks, which are more aligned with real-world applications. To tackle the second challenge, we propose the Parallel Pointer-based Network (P²Net). This model frames KIE as a pointer-based classification task and effectively leverages implicit relationships between key-value entities to enhance extraction. Its parallel extraction mechanism enables simultaneous and efficient extraction of multiple results. Experiments on widely-used datasets, including SROIE, CORD, and the newly introduced CLEX, demonstrate that P²Net outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods (including GPT-4V) while maintaining fast inference speeds.

Locate-then-Edit Knowledge Editing (LEKE) is a key technique for updating large language models (LLMs) without full retraining. However, existing methods assume a single-user setting and become inefficient in real-world multi-client scenarios, where decentralized organizations (e.g., hospitals, financial institutions) independently update overlapping knowledge, leading to redundant mediator knowledge vector (MKV) computations and privacy concerns.To address these challenges, we introduce Federated Locate-then-Edit Knowledge Editing (FedLEKE), a novel task that enables multiple clients to collaboratively perform LEKE while preserving privacy and reducing computational overhead. To achieve this, we propose FedEdit, a two-stage framework that optimizes MKV selection and reuse.In the first stage, clients locally apply LEKE and upload the computed MKVs. In the second stage, rather than relying solely on server-based MKV sharing, FedLEKE allows clients retrieve relevant MKVs based on cosine similarity, enabling knowledge re-edit and minimizing redundant computations.Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that FedEdit retains over 96% of the performance of non-federated LEKE while significantly outperforming a FedAvg-based baseline by approximately twofold. Besides, we find that MEMIT performs more consistently than PMET in the FedLEKE task with our FedEdit framework. Our code is available at https://github.com/zongkaiz/FedLEKE.

Multimodal multi-label emotion recognition (MMER) aims to identify the concurrent presence of multiple emotions in multimodal data. Existing studies primarily focus on improving fusion strategies and modeling modality-to-label dependencies. However, they often overlook the impact of aleatoric uncertainty, which is the inherent noise in the multimodal data and hinders the effectiveness of modality fusion by introducing ambiguity into feature representations.To address this issue and effectively model aleatoric uncertainty, this paper proposes Latent emotional Distribution Decomposition with Uncertainty perception (LDDU) framework from a novel perspective of latent emotional space probabilistic modeling. Specifically, we introduce a contrastive disentangled distribution mechanism within the emotion space to model the multimodal data, allowing for the extraction of semantic features and uncertainty. Furthermore, we design an uncertainty-aware fusion multimodal method that accounts for the dispersed distribution of uncertainty and integrates distribution information. Experimental results show that LDDU achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CMU-MOSEI and M³ED datasets, highlighting the importance of uncertainty modeling in MMER. Code is available at https://github.com/201983290498/lddu_mmer.git.

The illustration or visualization of figurative language, such as linguistic metaphors, is an emerging challenge for existing Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal models. Due to their comparison of seemingly unrelated concepts in metaphors, existing LLMs have a tendency of over-literalization, which illustrates figurative language solely based on literal objects, ignoring the underlying groundings and associations across disparate metaphorical domains. Furthermore, prior approaches have ignored the binding process between visual objects and metaphorical attributes, which further intensifies the infidelity of visual metaphors. To address the issues above, we propose GOME (Grounding-based Metaphor Binding), which illustrates linguistic metaphors from the grounding perspective elaborated through LLMs. GOME consists of two steps for metaphor illustration, including grounding-based elaboration and scenario visualization. In the elaboration step, metaphorical knowledge is integrated into systematic instructions for LLMs, which employs a CoT prompting method rooted in rhetoric. This approach specifies metaphorical devices such as vehicles and groundings, to ensure accurate and faithful descriptions consumed by text-to-image models. In the visualization step, an inference-time metaphor binding method is realized based on elaboration outputs, which register attentional control during the diffusion process, and captures the underlying attributes from the abstract metaphorical domain. Comprehensive evaluations using multiple downstream tasks confirm that, GOME is superior to isolated LLMs, diffusion models, or their direct collaboration.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) serves as an efficient method for transferring language knowledge from open-source large language models (LLMs) to more computationally efficient models. However, challenges arise when attempting to apply vanilla KD methods to transfer knowledge from closed-source Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) models based on LLMs. In this scenario, the soft labels and training data are not accessible, making it difficult to achieve effective knowledge transfer. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Teacher Assistant enhanced Knowledge Distillation (TAeKD) method to augment the knowledge transfer capacity from closed-source MNMT models. Specifically, TAeKD designs a fusion model that integrates translation outputs from multiple closed-source models to generate soft labels and training samples. Furthermore, a quality assessment learning mechanism is introduced to enhance the generalization of the fusion model and elevate the quality of the fusion data used to train the student model. To facilitate research on knowledge transfer from MNMT models, we also introduce FuseData, a benchmark consisting of a blend of translations from multiple closed-source systems. The experimental results show that TAeKD outperforms the previous state-of-the-art KD methods on both WMT22 and FLORES-101 test sets.

Open Information Extraction (OIE) seeks to extract structured information from raw text without the limitations of close ontology. Recently, the detection-based OIE methods have received great attention from the community due to their parallelism. However, as the essential step of those models, how to assign ground truth labels to the parallelly generated tuple proposals remains under-exploited. The commonly utilized Hungarian algorithm for this procedure is restricted to handling one-to-one assignment among the desired tuples and tuple proposals, which ignores the correlation between proposals and affects the recall of the models. To solve this problem, we propose a dynamic many-to-one label assignment strategy named IOT. Concretely, the label assignment process in OIE is formulated as an Optimal Transport (OT) problem. We leverage the intersection-over-union (IoU) as the assignment quality measurement, and convert the problem of finding the best assignment solution to the one of solving the optimal transport plan by maximizing the IoU values. To further utilize the knowledge from the assignment, we design an Assignment-guided Multi-granularity loss (AM) by simultaneously considering word-level and tuple-level information. Experiment results show the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models on three benchmarks.

Demonstration learning aims to guide the prompt prediction by providing answered demonstrations in the few shot settings. Despite achieving promising results, existing work only concatenates the answered examples as demonstrations to the prompt template (including the raw context) without any additional operation, neglecting the prompt-demonstration dependencies. Besides, prior research found that randomly replacing the labels of demonstrations marginally hurts performance, illustrating that the model could not properly learn the knowledge brought by the demonstrations. Inspired by the human learning process, in this paper, we introduce Imitation DEMOnstration learning (Imitation-Demo) to strengthen demonstration learning via explicitly imitating human review behaviour, which includes: (1) contrastive learning mechanism to concentrate on similar demonstrations.(2) demonstration-label re-prediction method to consolidate known knowledge. Experiment results show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on 5 out of 14 classification corpus. Further studies also prove that Imitation-Demo strengthens the associations between the prompt and demonstrations, which could provide the basis for exploring how demonstration learning works.

Event Causality Extraction (ECE) aims to extract the cause-effect event pairs from the given text, which requires the model to possess a strong reasoning ability to capture event causalities. However, existing works have not adequately exploited the interactions between the cause and effect event that could provide crucial clues for causality reasoning. To this end, we propose an Implicit Cause-Effect interaction (ICE) framework, which formulates ECE as a template-based conditional generation problem. The proposed method captures the implicit intra- and inter-event interactions by incorporating the privileged information (ground truth event types and arguments) for reasoning, and a knowledge distillation mechanism is introduced to alleviate the unavailability of privileged information in the test stage. Furthermore, to facilitate knowledge transfer from teacher to student, we design an event-level alignment strategy named Cause-Effect Optimal Transport (CEOT) to strengthen the semantic interactions of cause-effect event types and arguments. Experimental results indicate that ICE achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ECE-CCKS dataset.

To create a captivating story, a writer often plans a sequence of logically coherent events and ingeniously manipulates the narrative order to generate flashback in place. However, existing storytelling systems suffer from both insufficient understanding of event correlations and inadequate awareness of event temporal order (e.g., go to hospital <after> get ill), making it challenging to generate high-quality events that balance the logic and narrative order of story. In this paper, we propose a narrative order aware framework BPOT (Bidirectional Pretraining Model with Optimal Transport Reward) for story generation, which presents a bidirectional pretrained model to encode event correlations and pairwise event order. We also design a reinforcement learning algorithm with novel optimal transport reward to further improve the quality of generated events in the fine-tuning stage. Specifically, a narrative order aware event sequence model is pretrained with the joint learning objectives of event blank infilling and pairwise order prediction. Then, reinforcement learning with novel optimal transport reward is designed to further improve the generated event quality in the fine-tuning stage. The novel optimal transport reward captures the mappings between the generated events and the sentences in the story, effectively measuring the quality of generated events. Both automatic and manual evaluation results demonstrate the superiority of our framework in generating logically coherent stories with flashbacks.

Multimodal summarization for videos aims to generate summaries from multi-source information (videos, audio transcripts), which has achieved promising progress. However, existing works are restricted to monolingual video scenarios, ignoring the demands of non-native video viewers to understand the cross-language videos in practical applications. It stimulates us to propose a new task, named Multimodal Cross-Lingual Summarization for videos (MCLS), which aims to generate cross-lingual summaries from multimodal inputs of videos. First, to make it applicable to MCLS scenarios, we conduct a Video-guided Dual Fusion network (VDF) that integrates multimodal and cross-lingual information via diverse fusion strategies at both encoder and decoder. Moreover, to alleviate the problem of high annotation costs and limited resources in MCLS, we propose a triple-stage training framework to assist MCLS by transferring the knowledge from monolingual multimodal summarization data, which includes: 1) multimodal summarization on sufficient prevalent language videos with a VDF model; 2) knowledge distillation (KD) guided adjustment on bilingual transcripts; 3) multimodal summarization for cross-lingual videos with a KD induced VDF model. Experiment results on the reorganized How2 dataset show that the VDF model alone outperforms previous methods for multimodal summarization, and the performance further improves by a large margin via the proposed triple-stage training framework.

Implicit Event Argument Extraction seeks to identify arguments that play direct or implicit roles in a given event. However, most prior works focus on capturing direct relations between arguments and the event trigger. The lack of reasoning ability brings many challenges to the extraction of implicit arguments. In this work, we present a Frame-aware Event Argument Extraction (FEAE) learning framework to tackle this issue through reasoning in event frame-level scope. The proposed method leverages related arguments of the expected one as clues to guide the reasoning process. To bridge the gap between oracle knowledge used in the training phase and the imperfect related arguments in the test stage, we further introduce a curriculum knowledge distillation strategy to drive a final model that could operate without extra inputs through mimicking the behavior of a well-informed teacher model. Experimental results demonstrate FEAE obtains new state-of-the-art performance on the RAMS dataset.