Enhanced Chart Understanding in Vision and Language Task via Cross-modal Pre-training on Plot Table Pairs

Building cross-model intelligence that can understand charts and communicate the salient information hidden behind them is an appealing challenge in the vision and language(V+L) community. The capability to uncover the underlined table data of chart figures is a critical key to automatic chart understanding. We introduce ChartT5, a V+L model that learns how to interpret table information from chart images via cross-modal pre-training on plot table pairs. Specifically, we propose two novel pre-training objectives: Masked Header Prediction (MHP) and Masked Value Prediction (MVP) to facilitate the model with different skills to interpret the table information. We have conducted extensive experiments on chart question answering and chart summarization to verify the effectiveness of the proposed pre-training strategies. In particular, on the ChartQA benchmark, our ChartT5 outperforms the state-of-the-art non-pretraining methods by over 8% performance gains.Comment: Accepted by Findings of ACL 202

TempTabQA: Temporal Question Answering for Semi-Structured Tables

Semi-structured data, such as Infobox tables, often include temporal information about entities, either implicitly or explicitly. Can current NLP systems reason about such information in semi-structured tables? To tackle this question, we introduce the task of temporal question answering on semi-structured tables. We present a dataset, TempTabQA, which comprises 11,454 question-answer pairs extracted from 1,208 Wikipedia Infobox tables spanning more than 90 distinct domains. Using this dataset, we evaluate several state-of-the-art models for temporal reasoning. We observe that even the top-performing LLMs lag behind human performance by more than 13.5 F1 points. Given these results, our dataset has the potential to serve as a challenging benchmark to improve the temporal reasoning capabilities of NLP models.Comment: EMNLP 2023(Main), 23 Figures, 32 Table

VDC: Versatile Data Cleanser for Detecting Dirty Samples via Visual-Linguistic Inconsistency

The role of data in building AI systems has recently been emphasized by the emerging concept of data-centric AI. Unfortunately, in the real-world, datasets may contain dirty samples, such as poisoned samples from backdoor attack, noisy labels in crowdsourcing, and even hybrids of them. The presence of such dirty samples makes the DNNs vunerable and unreliable.Hence, it is critical to detect dirty samples to improve the quality and realiability of dataset. Existing detectors only focus on detecting poisoned samples or noisy labels, that are often prone to weak generalization when dealing with dirty samples from other domains.In this paper, we find a commonality of various dirty samples is visual-linguistic inconsistency between images and associated labels. To capture the semantic inconsistency between modalities, we propose versatile data cleanser (VDC) leveraging the surpassing capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLM) in cross-modal alignment and reasoning.It consists of three consecutive modules: the visual question generation module to generate insightful questions about the image; the visual question answering module to acquire the semantics of the visual content by answering the questions with MLLM; followed by the visual answer evaluation module to evaluate the inconsistency.Extensive experiments demonstrate its superior performance and generalization to various categories and types of dirty samples.Comment: 22 pages,5 figures,17 table

Privacy Aware Question-Answering System for Online Mental Health Risk Assessment

Social media platforms have enabled individuals suffering from mental illnesses to share their lived experiences and find the online support necessary to cope. However, many users fail to receive genuine clinical support, thus exacerbating their symptoms. Screening users based on what they post online can aid providers in administering targeted healthcare and minimize false positives. Pre-trained Language Models (LMs) can assess users' social media data and classify them in terms of their mental health risk. We propose a Question-Answering (QA) approach to assess mental health risk using the Unified-QA model on two large mental health datasets. To protect user data, we extend Unified-QA by anonymizing the model training process using differential privacy. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of modeling risk assessment as a QA task, specifically for mental health use cases. Furthermore, the model's performance decreases by less than 1% with the inclusion of differential privacy. The proposed system's performance is indicative of a promising research direction that will lead to the development of privacy-aware diagnostic systems.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, 3 table