Braille plays a vital role in education and information accessibility for visually impaired individuals. However, Braille information processing faces challenges such as data scarcity and ambiguities in mixed-text contexts. We construct English and Chinese Braille Mixed Datasets (EBMD/CBMD) with mathematical formulas to support diverse Braille domain research, and propose a syntax tree-based augmentation method tailored for Braille data. To address the underperformance of traditional fine-tuning methods in braille-related tasks, we investigate Braille Knowledge-Based Fine-Tuning (BKFT), which reduces the learning difficulty of Braille contextual features. BrailleLLM employs BKFT via instruction tuning to achieve unified Braille translation, formula-to-Braille conversion, and mixed-text translation. Experiments demonstrate that BKFT achieves significant performance improvements over conventional fine-tuning in Braille translation scenarios. Our open-sourced datasets and methodologies establish a foundation for low-resource multilingual Braille research.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in document understanding, a rapidly growing research area with significant industrial demand. As a multimodal task, document understanding requires models to possess both perceptual and cognitive abilities. However, due to different types of annotation noise in training, current MLLMs often face conflicts between perception and cognition. Taking a document VQA task (cognition) as an example, an MLLM might generate answers that do not match the corresponding visual content identified by its OCR (perception). This conflict suggests that the MLLM might struggle to establish an intrinsic connection between the information it “sees” and what it “understands”. Such conflicts challenge the intuitive notion that cognition is consistent with perception, hindering the performance and explainability of MLLMs. In this paper, we define the conflicts between cognition and perception as Cognition and Perception (C&P) knowledge conflicts, a form of multimodal knowledge conflicts, and systematically assess them with a focus on document understanding. Our analysis reveals that even GPT-4o, a leading MLLM, achieves only 75.26% C&P consistency. To mitigate the C&P knowledge conflicts, we propose a novel method called Multimodal Knowledge Consistency Fine-tuning. Our method reduces C&P knowledge conflicts across all tested MLLMs and enhances their performance in both cognitive and perceptual tasks.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive performance in generating long-form content, they frequently present a hazard of producing factual inaccuracies or hallucinations. An effective strategy to mitigate this hazard is to leverage off-the-shelf LLMs to detect hallucinations after the generation. The primary challenge resides in the comprehensive elicitation of the intrinsic knowledge acquired during their pre-training phase. However, existing methods that employ multi-step reasoning chains predominantly fall short of addressing this issue. Moreover, since existing methods for hallucination detection tend to decompose text into isolated statements, they are unable to understand the contextual semantic relations in long-form content. In this paper, we study a novel concept, self-elicitation, to leverage self-generated thoughts derived from prior statements as catalysts to elicit the expression of intrinsic knowledge and understand contextual semantics. We present a framework, SelfElicit, to integrate self-elicitation with graph structures to effectively organize the elicited knowledge and facilitate factual evaluations. Extensive experiments on five datasets in various domains demonstrate the effectiveness of self-elicitation and the superiority of our proposed method.

Parsing documents from pixels, such as pictures and scanned PDFs, into hierarchical structures is extensively demanded in the daily routines of data storage, retrieval and understanding. However, previously the research on this topic has been largely hindered since most existing datasets are small-scale, or contain documents of only a single type, which are characterized by a lack of document diversity. Moreover, there is a significant discrepancy in the annotation standards across datasets. In this paper, we introduce a large and diverse document hierarchy parsing (DHP) dataset to compensate for the data scarcity and inconsistency problem. We aim to set a new standard as a more practical, long-standing benchmark. Meanwhile, we present a new DHP framework designed to grasp both fine-grained text content and coarse-grained pattern at layout element level, enhancing the capacity of pre-trained text-layout models in handling the multi-page and multi-level challenges in DHP. Through exhaustive experiments, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed dataset and method.

Measuring semantic similarity between texts is a crucial task in natural language processing. While existing semantic text matching focuses on pairs of similar-length sequences, matching texts with non-comparable lengths has broader applications in specific domains, such as comparing professional document summaries and content. Current approaches struggle with text pairs of non-comparable lengths due to truncation issues. To address this, we split texts into natural sentences and decouple sentence representations using supervised contrastive learning (SCL). Meanwhile, we adopt the embedded topic model (ETM) for specific domain data. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, based on decoupled and topic-informed sentence embeddings, in matching texts of significantly different lengths across three well-studied datasets.

Audio Description (AD) aims to generate narrations of information that is not accessible through unimodal hearing in movies to aid the visually impaired in following film narratives. Current solutions rely heavily on manual work, resulting in high costs and limited scalability. While automatic methods have been introduced, they often yield descriptions that are sparse and omit key details. ddressing these challenges, we propose a novel automated pipeline, the Multi-modal Movie Audio Description (MMAD). MMAD harnesses the capabilities of three key modules as well as the power of Llama2 to augment the depth and breadth of the generated descriptions. Specifically, first, we propose an Audio-aware Feature Enhancing Module to provide the model with multi-modal perception capabilities, enriching the background descriptions with a more comprehensive understanding of the environmental features. Second, we propose an Actor-tracking-aware Story Linking Module to aid in the generation of contextual and character-centric descriptions, thereby enhancing the richness of character depictions. Third, we incorporate a Subtitled Movie Clip Contextual Alignment Module, supplying semantic information about various time periods throughout the movie, which facilitates the consideration of the full movie narrative context when describing silent segments, thereby enhancing the richness of the descriptions. Experiments on widely used datasets convincingly demonstrates that MMAD significantly surpasses existing strong baselines in performance, establishing a new state-of-the-art in the field. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Daria8976/MMAD.

Inexhaustible web content carries abundant perceptible information beyond text. Unfortunately, most prior efforts in pre-trained Language Models (LMs) ignore such cyber-richness, while few of them only employ plain HTMLs, and crucial information in the rendered web, such as visual, layout, and style, are excluded. Intuitively, those perceptible web information can provide essential intelligence to facilitate content understanding tasks. This study presents an innovative Gestalt Enhanced Markup (GEM) Language Model inspired by Gestalt psychological theory for hosting heterogeneous visual information from the render tree into the language model without requiring additional visual input. Comprehensive experiments on multiple downstream tasks, i.e., web question answering and web information extraction, validate GEM superiority.

Simultaneous Speech Translation (SimulST) is a task focused on ensuring high-quality translation of speech in low-latency situations. Despite this, the modality gap (e.g., unknown word boundaries) between audio and text presents a challenge. This gap hinders the effective application of policies from simultaneous text translation (SimulMT) and compromises the performance of offline speech translation. To address this issue, we first leverage the Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA) and utilize audio transcription pairs in pre-training the acoustic encoder, and introduce a token-level cross-modal alignment that allows the wait-k policy from SimulMT to better adapt to SimulST. This token-level boundary alignment simplifies the decision-making process for predicting read/write actions, as if the decoder were directly processing text tokens. Subsequently, to optimize the SimulST task, we propose a robust and random wait-k-tokens strategy. This strategy allows a single model to meet various latency requirements and minimizes error accumulation of boundary alignment during inference. Our experiments on the MuST-C dataset show that our method achieves better trade-off between translation quality and latency.

Song translation requires both translation of lyrics and alignment of music notes so that the resulting verse can be sung to the accompanying melody, which is a challenging problem that has attracted some interests in different aspects of the translation process. In this paper, we propose Lyrics-Melody Translation with Adaptive Grouping (LTAG), a holistic solution to automatic song translation by jointly modeling lyric translation and lyrics-melody alignment. It is a novel encoder-decoder framework that can simultaneously translate the source lyrics and determine the number of aligned notes at each decoding step through an adaptive note grouping module. To address data scarcity, we commissioned a small amount of training data annotated specifically for this task and used large amounts of automatic training data through back-translation. Experiments conducted on an English-Chinese song translation data set show the effectiveness of our model in both automatic and human evaluations.