Daily Papers

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform tasks by conditioning on input-output examples in the prompt, without requiring any update in model parameters. While widely adopted, it remains unclear whether prompting with multiple examples is the most effective and efficient way to convey task information. In this work, we propose Soft Injection of task embeddings. The task embeddings are constructed only once using few-shot ICL prompts and repeatedly used during inference. Soft injection is performed by softly mixing task embeddings with attention head activations using pre-optimized mixing parameters, referred to as soft head-selection parameters. This method not only allows a desired task to be performed without in-prompt demonstrations but also significantly outperforms existing ICL approaches while reducing memory usage and compute cost at inference time. An extensive evaluation is performed across 57 tasks and 12 LLMs, spanning four model families of sizes from 4B to 70B. Averaged across 57 tasks, our method outperforms 10-shot ICL by 10.2%-14.3% across 12 LLMs. Additional analyses show that our method also serves as an insightful tool for analyzing task-relevant roles of attention heads, revealing that task-relevant head positions selected by our method transfer across similar tasks but not across dissimilar ones -- underscoring the task-specific nature of head functionality. Our soft injection method opens a new paradigm for reducing prompt length and improving task performance by shifting task conditioning from the prompt space to the activation space.

Task embedding, a meta-learning technique that captures task-specific information, has gained popularity, especially in areas such as multi-task learning, model editing, and interpretability. However, it faces challenges with the emergence of prompt-guided Large Language Models (LLMs) operating in a gradient-free manner. Existing task embedding methods rely on fine-tuned, task-specific language models, which hinders the adaptability of task embeddings across diverse models, especially prompt-based LLMs. To hardness the potential of task embeddings in the era of LLMs, we propose a framework for unified task embeddings (FUTE), harmonizing task embeddings from various models, including smaller language models and LLMs with varied prompts, within a single vector space. Such uniformity enables comparison and analysis of similarities amongst different models, broadening the scope and utility of existing task embedding methods in multi-model scenarios, while maintaining their performance comparable to architecture-specific methods.

Automated Audio Captioning (AAC) involves generating natural language descriptions of audio content, using encoder-decoder architectures. An audio encoder produces audio embeddings fed to a decoder, usually a Transformer decoder, for caption generation. In this work, we describe our model, which novelty, compared to existing models, lies in the use of a ConvNeXt architecture as audio encoder, adapted from the vision domain to audio classification. This model, called CNext-trans, achieved state-of-the-art scores on the AudioCaps (AC) dataset and performed competitively on Clotho (CL), while using four to forty times fewer parameters than existing models. We examine potential biases in the AC dataset due to its origin from AudioSet by investigating unbiased encoder's impact on performance. Using the well-known PANN's CNN14, for instance, as an unbiased encoder, we observed a 1.7% absolute reduction in SPIDEr score (where higher scores indicate better performance). To improve cross-dataset performance, we conducted experiments by combining multiple AAC datasets (AC, CL, MACS, WavCaps) for training. Although this strategy enhanced overall model performance across datasets, it still fell short compared to models trained specifically on a single target dataset, indicating the absence of a one-size-fits-all model. To mitigate performance gaps between datasets, we introduced a Task Embedding (TE) token, allowing the model to identify the source dataset for each input sample. We provide insights into the impact of these TEs on both the form (words) and content (sound event types) of the generated captions. The resulting model, named CoNeTTE, an unbiased CNext-trans model enriched with dataset-specific Task Embeddings, achieved SPIDEr scores of 44.1% and 30.5% on AC and CL, respectively. Code available: https://github.com/Labbeti/conette-audio-captioning.

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) have been widely adopted in recent large language models since it can efficiently scale up the model capability without increasing the inference cost. However, evaluations on broad downstream tasks reveal a consistent suboptimality of the routers in existing MoE LLMs, which results in a severe performance gap (e.g., 10-20% in accuracy) to the optimal routing. In this paper, we show that aligning the manifold of routing weights with that of task embedding can effectively reduce the gap and improve MoE LLMs' generalization performance. Our method, "Routing Manifold Alignment (RoMA)", introduces an additional manifold regularization term in the post-training objective and only requires lightweight finetuning of routers (with other parameters frozen). Specifically, the regularization encourages the routing weights of each sample to be close to those of its successful neighbors (whose routing weights lead to correct answers) in a task embedding space. Consequently, samples targeting similar tasks will share similar expert choices across layers. Building such bindings between tasks and experts over different samples is essential to achieve better generalization. Moreover, RoMA demonstrates the advantage of unifying the task understanding (by embedding models) with solution generation (by MoE LLMs). In experiments, we finetune routers in OLMoE, DeepSeekMoE, and Qwen3-MoE using RoMA. Evaluations on diverse benchmarks and extensive comparisons with baselines show the substantial improvement brought by RoMA.

AutoML has demonstrated remarkable success in finding an effective neural architecture for a given machine learning task defined by a specific dataset and an evaluation metric. However, most present AutoML techniques consider each task independently from scratch, which requires exploring many architectures, leading to high computational cost. Here we propose AutoTransfer, an AutoML solution that improves search efficiency by transferring the prior architectural design knowledge to the novel task of interest. Our key innovation includes a task-model bank that captures the model performance over a diverse set of GNN architectures and tasks, and a computationally efficient task embedding that can accurately measure the similarity among different tasks. Based on the task-model bank and the task embeddings, we estimate the design priors of desirable models of the novel task, by aggregating a similarity-weighted sum of the top-K design distributions on tasks that are similar to the task of interest. The computed design priors can be used with any AutoML search algorithm. We evaluate AutoTransfer on six datasets in the graph machine learning domain. Experiments demonstrate that (i) our proposed task embedding can be computed efficiently, and that tasks with similar embeddings have similar best-performing architectures; (ii) AutoTransfer significantly improves search efficiency with the transferred design priors, reducing the number of explored architectures by an order of magnitude. Finally, we release GNN-Bank-101, a large-scale dataset of detailed GNN training information of 120,000 task-model combinations to facilitate and inspire future research.

Instruction-based image editing holds immense potential for a variety of applications, as it enables users to perform any editing operation using a natural language instruction. However, current models in this domain often struggle with accurately executing user instructions. We present Emu Edit, a multi-task image editing model which sets state-of-the-art results in instruction-based image editing. To develop Emu Edit we train it to multi-task across an unprecedented range of tasks, such as region-based editing, free-form editing, and Computer Vision tasks, all of which are formulated as generative tasks. Additionally, to enhance Emu Edit's multi-task learning abilities, we provide it with learned task embeddings which guide the generation process towards the correct edit type. Both these elements are essential for Emu Edit's outstanding performance. Furthermore, we show that Emu Edit can generalize to new tasks, such as image inpainting, super-resolution, and compositions of editing tasks, with just a few labeled examples. This capability offers a significant advantage in scenarios where high-quality samples are scarce. Lastly, to facilitate a more rigorous and informed assessment of instructable image editing models, we release a new challenging and versatile benchmark that includes seven different image editing tasks.

Growing concerns surrounding AI safety and data privacy have driven the development of Machine Unlearning as a potential solution. However, current machine unlearning algorithms are designed to complement the offline training paradigm. The emergence of the Continual Learning (CL) paradigm promises incremental model updates, enabling models to learn new tasks sequentially. Naturally, some of those tasks may need to be unlearned to address safety or privacy concerns that might arise. We find that applying conventional unlearning algorithms in continual learning environments creates two critical problems: performance degradation on retained tasks and task relapse, where previously unlearned tasks resurface during subsequent learning. Furthermore, most unlearning algorithms require data to operate, which conflicts with CL's philosophy of discarding past data. A clear need arises for unlearning algorithms that are data-free and mindful of future learning. To that end, we propose UnCLe, an Unlearning framework for Continual Learning. UnCLe employs a hypernetwork that learns to generate task-specific network parameters, using task embeddings. Tasks are unlearned by aligning the corresponding generated network parameters with noise, without requiring any data. Empirical evaluations on several vision data sets demonstrate UnCLe's ability to sequentially perform multiple learning and unlearning operations with minimal disruption to previously acquired knowledge.

Recently, a new Continual Learning (CL) paradigm was presented to control catastrophic forgetting, called Interval Continual Learning (InterContiNet), which relies on enforcing interval constraints on the neural network parameter space. Unfortunately, InterContiNet training is challenging due to the high dimensionality of the weight space, making intervals difficult to manage. To address this issue, we introduce HyperInterval, a technique that employs interval arithmetic within the embedding space and utilizes a hypernetwork to map these intervals to the target network parameter space. We train interval embeddings for consecutive tasks and train a hypernetwork to transform these embeddings into weights of the target network. An embedding for a given task is trained along with the hypernetwork, preserving the response of the target network for the previous task embeddings. Interval arithmetic works with a more manageable, lower-dimensional embedding space rather than directly preparing intervals in a high-dimensional weight space. Our model allows faster and more efficient training. Furthermore, HyperInterval maintains the guarantee of not forgetting. At the end of training, we can choose one universal embedding to produce a single network dedicated to all tasks. In such a framework, hypernetwork is used only for training and can be seen as a meta-trainer. HyperInterval obtains significantly better results than InterContiNet and gives SOTA results on several benchmarks.

Current methods for 3D scene reconstruction from sparse posed images employ intermediate 3D representations such as neural fields, voxel grids, or 3D Gaussians, to achieve multi-view consistent scene appearance and geometry. In this paper we introduce MVGD, a diffusion-based architecture capable of direct pixel-level generation of images and depth maps from novel viewpoints, given an arbitrary number of input views. Our method uses raymap conditioning to both augment visual features with spatial information from different viewpoints, as well as to guide the generation of images and depth maps from novel views. A key aspect of our approach is the multi-task generation of images and depth maps, using learnable task embeddings to guide the diffusion process towards specific modalities. We train this model on a collection of more than 60 million multi-view samples from publicly available datasets, and propose techniques to enable efficient and consistent learning in such diverse conditions. We also propose a novel strategy that enables the efficient training of larger models by incrementally fine-tuning smaller ones, with promising scaling behavior. Through extensive experiments, we report state-of-the-art results in multiple novel view synthesis benchmarks, as well as multi-view stereo and video depth estimation.

Continual learning under adversarial conditions remains an open problem, as existing methods often compromise either robustness, scalability, or both. We propose a novel framework that integrates Interval Bound Propagation (IBP) with a hypernetwork-based architecture to enable certifiably robust continual learning across sequential tasks. Our method, SHIELD, generates task-specific model parameters via a shared hypernetwork conditioned solely on compact task embeddings, eliminating the need for replay buffers or full model copies and enabling efficient over time. To further enhance robustness, we introduce Interval MixUp, a novel training strategy that blends virtual examples represented as ell_{infty} balls centered around MixUp points. Leveraging interval arithmetic, this technique guarantees certified robustness while mitigating the wrapping effect, resulting in smoother decision boundaries. We evaluate SHIELD under strong white-box adversarial attacks, including PGD and AutoAttack, across multiple benchmarks. It consistently outperforms existing robust continual learning methods, achieving state-of-the-art average accuracy while maintaining both scalability and certification. These results represent a significant step toward practical and theoretically grounded continual learning in adversarial settings.

Instruction-based image editing aims to modify specific image elements with natural language instructions. However, current models in this domain often struggle to accurately execute complex user instructions, as they are trained on low-quality data with limited editing types. We present AnyEdit, a comprehensive multi-modal instruction editing dataset, comprising 2.5 million high-quality editing pairs spanning over 20 editing types and five domains. We ensure the diversity and quality of the AnyEdit collection through three aspects: initial data diversity, adaptive editing process, and automated selection of editing results. Using the dataset, we further train a novel AnyEdit Stable Diffusion with task-aware routing and learnable task embedding for unified image editing. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that AnyEdit consistently boosts the performance of diffusion-based editing models. This presents prospects for developing instruction-driven image editing models that support human creativity.

Few-shot models aim at making predictions using a minimal number of labeled examples from a given task. The main challenge in this area is the one-shot setting where only one element represents each class. We propose HyperShot - the fusion of kernels and hypernetwork paradigm. Compared to reference approaches that apply a gradient-based adjustment of the parameters, our model aims to switch the classification module parameters depending on the task's embedding. In practice, we utilize a hypernetwork, which takes the aggregated information from support data and returns the classifier's parameters handcrafted for the considered problem. Moreover, we introduce the kernel-based representation of the support examples delivered to hypernetwork to create the parameters of the classification module. Consequently, we rely on relations between embeddings of the support examples instead of direct feature values provided by the backbone models. Thanks to this approach, our model can adapt to highly different tasks.

Unsupervised sentence embeddings task aims to convert sentences to semantic vector representations. Most previous works directly use the sentence representations derived from pretrained language models. However, due to the token bias in pretrained language models, the models can not capture the fine-grained semantics in sentences, which leads to poor predictions. To address this issue, we propose a novel Self-Adaptive Reconstruction Contrastive Sentence Embeddings (SARCSE) framework, which reconstructs all tokens in sentences with an AutoEncoder to help the model to preserve more fine-grained semantics during tokens aggregating. In addition, we proposed a self-adaptive reconstruction loss to alleviate the token bias towards frequency. Experimental results show that SARCSE gains significant improvements compared with the strong baseline SimCSE on the 7 STS tasks.

Prompt-based text embedding models, which generate task-specific embeddings upon receiving tailored prompts, have recently demonstrated remarkable performance. However, their resulting embeddings often have thousands of dimensions, leading to high storage costs and increased computational costs of embedding-based operations. In this paper, we investigate how post-hoc dimensionality reduction applied to the embeddings affects the performance of various tasks that leverage these embeddings, specifically classification, clustering, retrieval, and semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks. Our experiments show that even a naive dimensionality reduction, which keeps only the first 25% of the dimensions of the embeddings, results in a very slight performance degradation, indicating that these embeddings are highly redundant. Notably, for classification and clustering, even when embeddings are reduced to less than 0.5% of the original dimensionality the performance degradation is very small. To quantitatively analyze this redundancy, we perform an analysis based on the intrinsic dimensionality and isotropy of the embeddings. Our analysis reveals that embeddings for classification and clustering, which are considered to have very high dimensional redundancy, exhibit lower intrinsic dimensionality and less isotropy compared with those for retrieval and STS.

Purpose: This work explores the use of external phrase break prediction models to enhance listener comprehension in End-to-End Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems. Methods: The effectiveness of these models is evaluated based on listener preferences in subjective tests. Two approaches are explored: (1) a bidirectional LSTM model with task-specific embeddings trained from scratch, and (2) a pre-trained BERT model fine-tuned on phrase break prediction. Both models are trained on a multi-speaker English corpus to predict phrase break locations in text. The End-to-End TTS system used comprises a Tacotron2 model with Dynamic Convolutional Attention for mel spectrogram prediction and a WaveRNN vocoder for waveform generation. Results: The listening tests show a clear preference for text synthesized with predicted phrase breaks over text synthesized without them. Conclusion: These results confirm the value of incorporating external phrasing models within End-to-End TTS to enhance listener comprehension.

While deep learning has achieved remarkable success across many domains, it has historically underperformed on tabular learning tasks, which remain dominated by gradient boosting decision trees (GBDTs). However, recent advancements are paving the way for Tabular Foundation Models, which can leverage real-world knowledge and generalize across diverse datasets, particularly when the data contains free-text. Although incorporating language model capabilities into tabular tasks has been explored, most existing methods utilize static, target-agnostic textual representations, limiting their effectiveness. We introduce TabSTAR: a Foundation Tabular Model with Semantically Target-Aware Representations. TabSTAR is designed to enable transfer learning on tabular data with textual features, with an architecture free of dataset-specific parameters. It unfreezes a pretrained text encoder and takes as input target tokens, which provide the model with the context needed to learn task-specific embeddings. TabSTAR achieves state-of-the-art performance for both medium- and large-sized datasets across known benchmarks of classification tasks with text features, and its pretraining phase exhibits scaling laws in the number of datasets, offering a pathway for further performance improvements.

We introduce jina-embeddings-v3, a novel text embedding model with 570 million parameters, achieves state-of-the-art performance on multilingual data and long-context retrieval tasks, supporting context lengths of up to 8192 tokens. The model includes a set of task-specific Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters to generate high-quality embeddings for query-document retrieval, clustering, classification, and text matching. Additionally, Matryoshka Representation Learning is integrated into the training process, allowing flexible truncation of embedding dimensions without compromising performance. Evaluation on the MTEB benchmark shows that jina-embeddings-v3 outperforms the latest proprietary embeddings from OpenAI and Cohere on English tasks, while achieving superior performance compared to multilingual-e5-large-instruct across all multilingual tasks.

Workforce transformation across diverse industries has driven an increased demand for specialized natural language processing capabilities. Nevertheless, tasks derived from work-related contexts inherently reflect real-world complexities, characterized by long-tailed distributions, extreme multi-label target spaces, and scarce data availability. The rise of generalist embedding models prompts the question of their performance in the work domain, especially as progress in the field has focused mainly on individual tasks. To this end, we introduce WorkBench, the first unified evaluation suite spanning six work-related tasks formulated explicitly as ranking problems, establishing a common ground for multi-task progress. Based on this benchmark, we find significant positive cross-task transfer, and use this insight to compose task-specific bipartite graphs from real-world data, synthetically enriched through grounding. This leads to Unified Work Embeddings (UWE), a task-agnostic bi-encoder that exploits our training-data structure with a many-to-many InfoNCE objective, and leverages token-level embeddings with task-agnostic soft late interaction. UWE demonstrates zero-shot ranking performance on unseen target spaces in the work domain, enables low-latency inference by caching the task target space embeddings, and shows significant gains in macro-averaged MAP and RP@10 over generalist embedding models.

Federated Learning (FL) represents a paradigm shift in distributed machine learning (ML), enabling clients to train models collaboratively while keeping their raw data private. This paradigm shift from traditional centralized ML introduces challenges due to the non-iid (non-independent and identically distributed) nature of data across clients, significantly impacting FL's performance. Existing literature, predominantly model data heterogeneity by imposing label distribution skew across clients. In this paper, we show that label distribution skew fails to fully capture the real-world data heterogeneity among clients in computer vision tasks beyond classification. Subsequently, we demonstrate that current approaches overestimate FL's performance by relying on label/class distribution skew, exposing an overlooked gap in the literature. By utilizing pre-trained deep neural networks to extract task-specific data embeddings, we define task-specific data heterogeneity through the lens of each vision task and introduce a new level of data heterogeneity called embedding-based data heterogeneity. Our methodology involves clustering data points based on embeddings and distributing them among clients using the Dirichlet distribution. Through extensive experiments, we evaluate the performance of different FL methods under our revamped notion of data heterogeneity, introducing new benchmark performance measures to the literature. We further unveil a series of open research directions that can be pursued.

We introduce INSTRUCTOR, a new method for computing text embeddings given task instructions: every text input is embedded together with instructions explaining the use case (e.g., task and domain descriptions). Unlike encoders from prior work that are more specialized, INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate text embeddings tailored to different downstream tasks and domains, without any further training. We first annotate instructions for 330 diverse tasks and train INSTRUCTOR on this multitask mixture with a contrastive loss. We evaluate INSTRUCTOR on 70 embedding evaluation tasks (66 of which are unseen during training), ranging from classification and information retrieval to semantic textual similarity and text generation evaluation. INSTRUCTOR, while having an order of magnitude fewer parameters than the previous best model, achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average improvement of 3.4% compared to the previous best results on the 70 diverse datasets. Our analysis suggests that INSTRUCTOR is robust to changes in instructions, and that instruction finetuning mitigates the challenge of training a single model on diverse datasets. Our model, code, and data are available at https://instructor-embedding.github.io.

Key challenges for the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world are the discovery, representation and reuse of skills in the absence of a reward function. To this end, we propose a novel approach to learn a task-agnostic skill embedding space from unlabeled multi-view videos. Our method learns a general skill embedding independently from the task context by using an adversarial loss. We combine a metric learning loss, which utilizes temporal video coherence to learn a state representation, with an entropy regularized adversarial skill-transfer loss. The metric learning loss learns a disentangled representation by attracting simultaneous viewpoints of the same observations and repelling visually similar frames from temporal neighbors. The adversarial skill-transfer loss enhances re-usability of learned skill embeddings over multiple task domains. We show that the learned embedding enables training of continuous control policies to solve novel tasks that require the interpolation of previously seen skills. Our extensive evaluation with both simulation and real world data demonstrates the effectiveness of our method in learning transferable skills from unlabeled interaction videos and composing them for new tasks. Code, pretrained models and dataset are available at http://robotskills.cs.uni-freiburg.de

Transfer learning from pretrained language models recently became the dominant approach for solving many NLP tasks. A common approach to transfer learning for multiple tasks that maximize parameter sharing trains one or more task-specific layers on top of the language model. In this paper, we present an alternative approach based on adversarial reprogramming, which extends earlier work on automatic prompt generation. Adversarial reprogramming attempts to learn task-specific word embeddings that, when concatenated to the input text, instruct the language model to solve the specified task. Using up to 25K trainable parameters per task, this approach outperforms all existing methods with up to 25M trainable parameters on the public leaderboard of the GLUE benchmark. Our method, initialized with task-specific human-readable prompts, also works in a few-shot setting, outperforming GPT-3 on two SuperGLUE tasks with just 32 training samples.

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to process visual inputs has given rise to general-purpose vision systems, unifying various vision-language (VL) tasks by instruction tuning. However, due to the enormous diversity in input-output formats in the vision domain, existing general-purpose models fail to successfully integrate segmentation and multi-image inputs with coarse-level tasks into a single framework. In this work, we introduce VistaLLM, a powerful visual system that addresses coarse- and fine-grained VL tasks over single and multiple input images using a unified framework. VistaLLM utilizes an instruction-guided image tokenizer that filters global embeddings using task descriptions to extract compressed and refined features from numerous images. Moreover, VistaLLM employs a gradient-aware adaptive sampling technique to represent binary segmentation masks as sequences, significantly improving over previously used uniform sampling. To bolster the desired capability of VistaLLM, we curate CoinIt, a comprehensive coarse-to-fine instruction tuning dataset with 6.8M samples. We also address the lack of multi-image grounding datasets by introducing a novel task, AttCoSeg (Attribute-level Co-Segmentation), which boosts the model's reasoning and grounding capability over multiple input images. Extensive experiments on a wide range of V- and VL tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of VistaLLM by achieving consistent state-of-the-art performance over strong baselines across all downstream tasks. Our project page can be found at https://shramanpramanick.github.io/VistaLLM/.

This report presents a unified instruction-based framework for learning generalized text embeddings optimized for both information retrieval (IR) and non-IR tasks. Built upon a decoder-only large language model (Mistral-7B), our approach combines in-context learning, soft supervision, and adaptive hard-negative mining to generate context-aware embeddings without task-specific fine-tuning. Structured instructions and few-shot examples are used to guide the model across diverse tasks, enabling strong performance on classification, semantic similarity, clustering, and reranking benchmarks. To improve semantic discrimination, we employ a soft labeling framework where continuous relevance scores, distilled from a high-performance dense retriever and reranker, serve as fine-grained supervision signals. In addition, we introduce adaptive margin-based hard-negative mining, which filters out semantically ambiguous negatives based on their similarity to positive examples, thereby enhancing training stability and retrieval robustness. Our model is evaluated on the newly introduced MTEB (English, v2) benchmark, covering 41 tasks across seven categories. Results show that our method achieves strong generalization and ranks among the top-performing models by Borda score, outperforming several larger or fully fine-tuned baselines. These findings highlight the effectiveness of combining in-context prompting, soft supervision, and adaptive sampling for scalable, high-quality embedding generation.

Generative modeling has recently achieved remarkable success across image, video, and audio domains, demonstrating powerful capabilities for unified representation learning. Yet speech front-end tasks such as speech enhancement (SE), target speaker extraction (TSE), acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), and language-queried source separation (LASS) remain largely tackled by disparate, task-specific solutions. This fragmentation leads to redundant engineering effort, inconsistent performance, and limited extensibility. To address this gap, we introduce UniFlow, a unified framework that employs continuous generative modeling to tackle diverse speech front-end tasks in a shared latent space. Specifically, UniFlow utilizes a waveform variational autoencoder (VAE) to learn a compact latent representation of raw audio, coupled with a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) that predicts latent updates. To differentiate the speech processing task during the training, learnable condition embeddings indexed by a task ID are employed to enable maximal parameter sharing while preserving task-specific adaptability. To balance model performance and computational efficiency, we investigate and compare three generative objectives: denoising diffusion, flow matching, and mean flow within the latent domain. We validate UniFlow on multiple public benchmarks, demonstrating consistent gains over state-of-the-art baselines. UniFlow's unified latent formulation and conditional design make it readily extensible to new tasks, providing an integrated foundation for building and scaling generative speech processing pipelines. To foster future research, we will open-source our codebase.

Exploration is a key problem in reinforcement learning, since agents can only learn from data they acquire in the environment. With that in mind, maintaining a population of agents is an attractive method, as it allows data be collected with a diverse set of behaviors. This behavioral diversity is often boosted via multi-objective loss functions. However, those approaches typically leverage mean field updates based on pairwise distances, which makes them susceptible to cycling behaviors and increased redundancy. In addition, explicitly boosting diversity often has a detrimental impact on optimizing already fruitful behaviors for rewards. As such, the reward-diversity trade off typically relies on heuristics. Finally, such methods require behavioral representations, often handcrafted and domain specific. In this paper, we introduce an approach to optimize all members of a population simultaneously. Rather than using pairwise distance, we measure the volume of the entire population in a behavioral manifold, defined by task-agnostic behavioral embeddings. In addition, our algorithm Diversity via Determinants (DvD), adapts the degree of diversity during training using online learning techniques. We introduce both evolutionary and gradient-based instantiations of DvD and show they effectively improve exploration without reducing performance when better exploration is not required.

We introduce a novel suite of state-of-the-art bilingual text embedding models that are designed to support English and another target language. These models are capable of processing lengthy text inputs with up to 8192 tokens, making them highly versatile for a range of natural language processing tasks such as text retrieval, clustering, and semantic textual similarity (STS) calculations. By focusing on bilingual models and introducing a unique multi-task learning objective, we have significantly improved the model performance on STS tasks, which outperforms the capabilities of existing multilingual models in both target language understanding and cross-lingual evaluation tasks. Moreover, our bilingual models are more efficient, requiring fewer parameters and less memory due to their smaller vocabulary needs. Furthermore, we have expanded the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) to include benchmarks for German and Spanish embedding models. This integration aims to stimulate further research and advancement in text embedding technologies for these languages.

Much effort has been devoted to evaluate whether multi-task learning can be leveraged to learn rich representations that can be used in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) down-stream applications. However, there is still a lack of understanding of the settings in which multi-task learning has a significant effect. In this work, we introduce a hierarchical model trained in a multi-task learning setup on a set of carefully selected semantic tasks. The model is trained in a hierarchical fashion to introduce an inductive bias by supervising a set of low level tasks at the bottom layers of the model and more complex tasks at the top layers of the model. This model achieves state-of-the-art results on a number of tasks, namely Named Entity Recognition, Entity Mention Detection and Relation Extraction without hand-engineered features or external NLP tools like syntactic parsers. The hierarchical training supervision induces a set of shared semantic representations at lower layers of the model. We show that as we move from the bottom to the top layers of the model, the hidden states of the layers tend to represent more complex semantic information.

This paper describes our system developed for SemEval-2024 Task 8, "Multigenerator, Multidomain, and Multilingual Black-Box Machine-Generated Text Detection." Machine-generated texts have been one of the main concerns due to the use of large language models (LLM) in fake text generation, phishing, cheating in exams, or even plagiarizing copyright materials. A lot of systems have been developed to detect machine-generated text. Nonetheless, the majority of these systems rely on the text-generating model, a limitation that is impractical in real-world scenarios, as it's often impossible to know which specific model the user has used for text generation. In this work, we propose a single model based on contrastive learning, which uses ~40% of the baseline's parameters (149M vs. 355M) but shows a comparable performance on the test dataset (21st out of 137 participants). Our key finding is that even without an ensemble of multiple models, a single base model can have comparable performance with the help of data augmentation and contrastive learning.

We introduce jina-embeddings-v4, a 3.8 billion parameter multimodal embedding model that unifies text and image representations through a novel architecture supporting both single-vector and multi-vector embeddings in the late interaction style. The model incorporates task-specific Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters to optimize performance across diverse retrieval scenarios, including query-based information retrieval, cross-modal semantic similarity, and programming code search. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that jina-embeddings-v4 achieves state-of-the-art performance on both single- modal and cross-modal retrieval tasks, with particular strength in processing visually rich content such as tables, charts, diagrams, and mixed-media formats. To facilitate evaluation of this capability, we also introduce Jina-VDR, a novel benchmark specifically designed for visually rich image retrieval.

Recent advancements in text-guided diffusion models have unlocked powerful image manipulation capabilities, yet balancing reconstruction fidelity and editability for real images remains a significant challenge. In this work, we introduce Task-Oriented Diffusion Inversion (TODInv), a novel framework that inverts and edits real images tailored to specific editing tasks by optimizing prompt embeddings within the extended \(P^*\) space. By leveraging distinct embeddings across different U-Net layers and time steps, TODInv seamlessly integrates inversion and editing through reciprocal optimization, ensuring both high fidelity and precise editability. This hierarchical editing mechanism categorizes tasks into structure, appearance, and global edits, optimizing only those embeddings unaffected by the current editing task. Extensive experiments on benchmark dataset reveal TODInv's superior performance over existing methods, delivering both quantitative and qualitative enhancements while showcasing its versatility with few-step diffusion model.

Information retrieval involves selecting artifacts from a corpus that are most relevant to a given search query. The flavor of retrieval typically used in classical applications can be termed as homogeneous and relaxed, where queries and corpus elements are both natural language (NL) utterances (homogeneous) and the goal is to pick most relevant elements from the corpus in the Top-K, where K is large, such as 10, 25, 50 or even 100 (relaxed). Recently, retrieval is being used extensively in preparing prompts for large language models (LLMs) to enable LLMs to perform targeted tasks. These new applications of retrieval are often heterogeneous and strict -- the queries and the corpus contain different kinds of entities, such as NL and code, and there is a need for improving retrieval at Top-K for small values of K, such as K=1 or 3 or 5. Current dense retrieval techniques based on pretrained embeddings provide a general-purpose and powerful approach for retrieval, but they are oblivious to task-specific notions of similarity of heterogeneous artifacts. We introduce Adapted Dense Retrieval, a mechanism to transform embeddings to enable improved task-specific, heterogeneous and strict retrieval. Adapted Dense Retrieval works by learning a low-rank residual adaptation of the pretrained black-box embedding. We empirically validate our approach by showing improvements over the state-of-the-art general-purpose embeddings-based baseline.

Text embeddings are vital for tasks such as text retrieval and semantic textual similarity (STS). Recently, the advent of pretrained language models, along with unified benchmarks like the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB), has facilitated the development of versatile general-purpose text embedding models. Advanced embedding models are typically developed using large-scale multi-task data and joint training across multiple tasks. However, our experimental analysis reveals two significant drawbacks of joint training: 1) Task Conflict: Gradients from different tasks interfere with each other, leading to negative transfer. 2) Data Imbalance: Disproportionate data distribution introduces biases that negatively impact performance across tasks. To overcome these challenges, we explore model merging-a technique that combines independently trained models to mitigate gradient conflicts and balance data distribution. We introduce a novel method, Self Positioning, which efficiently searches for optimal model combinations within the interpolation space of task vectors using stochastic gradient descent. Our experiments demonstrate that Self Positioning significantly enhances multi-task performance on the MTEB dataset, achieving an absolute improvement of 0.7 points. It outperforms traditional resampling methods while reducing computational costs. This work offers a robust approach to building generalized text embedding models with superior performance across diverse embedding-related tasks.

As a key component in boosting online user growth, uplift modeling aims to measure individual user responses (e.g., whether to play the game) to various treatments, such as gaming bonuses, thereby enhancing business outcomes. However, previous research typically considers a single-task, single-treatment setting, where only one treatment exists and the overall treatment effect is measured by a single type of user response. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Treatment Multi-Task (MTMT) uplift network to estimate treatment effects in a multi-task scenario. We identify the multi-treatment problem as a causal inference problem with a tiered response, comprising a base effect (from offering a treatment) and an incremental effect (from offering a specific type of treatment), where the base effect can be numerically much larger than the incremental effect. Specifically, MTMT separately encodes user features and treatments. The user feature encoder uses a multi-gate mixture of experts (MMOE) network to encode relevant user features, explicitly learning inter-task relations. The resultant embeddings are used to measure natural responses per task. Furthermore, we introduce a treatment-user feature interaction module to model correlations between each treatment and user feature. Consequently, we separately measure the base and incremental treatment effect for each task based on the produced treatment-aware representations. Experimental results based on an offline public dataset and an online proprietary dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of MTMT in single/multi-treatment and single/multi-task settings. Additionally, MTMT has been deployed in our gaming platform to improve user experience.

In this work, we introduce a new unsupervised embedding method, Meta-Task Prompting with Explicit One-Word Limitation (MetaEOL), for generating high-quality sentence embeddings from Large Language Models (LLMs) without the need for model fine-tuning or task-specific engineering. Leveraging meta-task prompting, MetaEOL guides LLMs to produce embeddings through a series of carefully designed prompts that address multiple representational aspects. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that embeddings averaged from various meta-tasks yield competitive performance on Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) benchmarks and excel in downstream tasks, surpassing contrastive-trained models. Our findings suggest a new scaling law for embedding generation, offering a versatile, resource-efficient approach for embedding extraction across diverse sentence-centric scenarios.

Code embeddings are essential for semantic code search; however, current approaches often struggle to capture the precise syntactic and contextual nuances inherent in code. Open-source models such as CodeBERT and UniXcoder exhibit limitations in scalability and efficiency, while high-performing proprietary systems impose substantial computational costs. We introduce a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method based on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to construct task-specific adapters for code retrieval. Our approach reduces the number of trainable parameters to less than two percent of the base model, enabling rapid fine-tuning on extensive code corpora (2 million samples in 25 minutes on two H100 GPUs). Experiments demonstrate an increase of up to 9.1% in Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) for Code2Code search, and up to 86.69% for Text2Code search tasks across multiple programming languages. Distinction in task-wise and language-wise adaptation helps explore the sensitivity of code retrieval for syntactical and linguistic variations.

Relation extraction task is a crucial and challenging aspect of Natural Language Processing. Several methods have surfaced as of late, exhibiting notable performance in addressing the task; however, most of these approaches rely on vast amounts of data from large-scale knowledge graphs or language models pretrained on voluminous corpora. In this paper, we hone in on the effective utilization of solely the knowledge supplied by a corpus to create a high-performing model. Our objective is to showcase that by leveraging the hierarchical structure and relational distribution of entities within a corpus without introducing external knowledge, a relation extraction model can achieve significantly enhanced performance. We therefore proposed a relation extraction approach based on the incorporation of pretrained knowledge graph embeddings at the corpus scale into the sentence-level contextual representation. We conducted a series of experiments which revealed promising and very interesting results for our proposed approach.The obtained results demonstrated an outperformance of our method compared to context-based relation extraction models.

We introduced KaWAT (Kata Word Analogy Task), a new word analogy task dataset for Indonesian. We evaluated on it several existing pretrained Indonesian word embeddings and embeddings trained on Indonesian online news corpus. We also tested them on two downstream tasks and found that pretrained word embeddings helped either by reducing the training epochs or yielding significant performance gains.

While paragraph embedding models are remarkably effective for downstream classification tasks, what they learn and encode into a single vector remains opaque. In this paper, we investigate a state-of-the-art paragraph embedding method proposed by Zhang et al. (2017) and discover that it cannot reliably tell whether a given sentence occurs in the input paragraph or not. We formulate a sentence content task to probe for this basic linguistic property and find that even a much simpler bag-of-words method has no trouble solving it. This result motivates us to replace the reconstruction-based objective of Zhang et al. (2017) with our sentence content probe objective in a semi-supervised setting. Despite its simplicity, our objective improves over paragraph reconstruction in terms of (1) downstream classification accuracies on benchmark datasets, (2) faster training, and (3) better generalization ability.

Zero-shot image classification using auxiliary information, such as attributes describing discriminative object properties, requires time-consuming annotation by domain experts. We instead propose a method that relies on human gaze as auxiliary information, exploiting that even non-expert users have a natural ability to judge class membership. We present a data collection paradigm that involves a discrimination task to increase the information content obtained from gaze data. Our method extracts discriminative descriptors from the data and learns a compatibility function between image and gaze using three novel gaze embeddings: Gaze Histograms (GH), Gaze Features with Grid (GFG) and Gaze Features with Sequence (GFS). We introduce two new gaze-annotated datasets for fine-grained image classification and show that human gaze data is indeed class discriminative, provides a competitive alternative to expert-annotated attributes, and outperforms other baselines for zero-shot image classification.

Large Language Models (LLMs) typically represent numbers using multiple tokens, which requires the model to aggregate these tokens to interpret numerical values. This fragmentation makes both training and inference less efficient and adversely affects the model's performance on number-related tasks. Inspired by the observation that pre-trained LLMs internally learn Fourier-like features for number tokens, we propose Fourier Number Embedding (FoNE), a novel method that directly maps numbers into the embedding space with their Fourier features. FoNE encodes each number as a single token with only two embedding dimensions per digit, effectively capturing numerical values without fragmentation. This compact representation accelerates both training and inference. Compared to traditional subword and digit-wise embeddings, FoNE not only reduces computational overhead but also achieves higher accuracy across various numerical tasks including addition, subtraction and multiplication. On 6-digit decimal addition, FoNE requires 64times less data to achieve 99% accuracy than subword and digit-wise embeddings while using 3times and 6times fewer tokens per number, respectively. Furthermore, FoNE is the only method that yields 100% accuracy on over 100,000 test examples for addition, subtraction, and multiplication. The codes and visualization are available at https://fouriernumber.github.io/.

We present FIND, a generalized interface for aligning foundation models' embeddings. As shown in teaser figure, a lightweight transformer interface without tuning any foundation model weights is enough for a unified image (segmentation) and dataset-level (retrieval) understanding. The proposed interface has the following favorable attributes: (1) Generalizable. It applies to various tasks spanning retrieval, segmentation, etc., under the same architecture and weights. (2) Prototypable. Different tasks are able to be implemented through prototyping attention masks and embedding types. (3) Extendable. The proposed interface is adaptive to new tasks, and new models. (4) Interleavable. With the benefit of multi-task multi-modal training, the proposed interface creates an interleaved shared embedding space. In light of the interleaved embedding space, we introduce the FIND-Bench, which introduces new training and evaluation annotations to the COCO dataset for interleave segmentation and retrieval. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on FIND-Bench and competitive performance on standard retrieval and segmentation settings. The training, evaluation, and demo code as well as the dataset have been released at https://github.com/UX-Decoder/FIND.

A new trend uses LLMs as dense text encoders via contrastive learning. However, since LLM embeddings predict the probability distribution of the next token, they are inherently generative and distributive, conflicting with contrastive learning, which requires embeddings to capture full-text semantics and align via cosine similarity. This discrepancy hinders the full utilization of LLMs' pre-training capabilities, resulting in inefficient learning. In response to this issue, we propose AutoRegEmbed, a new contrastive learning method built on embedding conditional probability distributions, which integrates two core tasks: information compression and conditional distribution alignment. The information compression task encodes text into the embedding space, ensuring that the embedding vectors capture global semantics. The conditional distribution alignment task focuses on aligning text embeddings with positive samples embeddings by leveraging the conditional distribution of embeddings while simultaneously reducing the likelihood of generating negative samples from text embeddings, thereby achieving embedding alignment and uniformity. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms traditional contrastive learning approaches and achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art models when using the same amount of data.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) involves identifying and categorizing named entities within textual data. Despite its significance, NER research has often overlooked low-resource languages like Myanmar (Burmese), primarily due to the lack of publicly available annotated datasets. To address this, we introduce myNER, a novel word-level NER corpus featuring a 7-tag annotation scheme, enriched with Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging to provide additional syntactic information. Alongside the corpus, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of NER models, including Conditional Random Fields (CRF), Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM)-CRF, and their combinations with fastText embeddings in different settings. Our experiments reveal the effectiveness of contextualized word embeddings and the impact of joint training with POS tagging, demonstrating significant performance improvements across models. The traditional CRF joint-task model with fastText embeddings as a feature achieved the best result, with a 0.9818 accuracy and 0.9811 weighted F1 score with 0.7429 macro F1 score. BiLSTM-CRF with fine-tuned fastText embeddings gets the best result of 0.9791 accuracy and 0.9776 weighted F1 score with 0.7395 macro F1 score.

The open-vocabulary image segmentation task involves partitioning images into semantically meaningful segments and classifying them with flexible text-defined categories. The recent vision-based foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) have shown superior performance in generating class-agnostic image segments. The main challenge in open-vocabulary image segmentation now lies in accurately classifying these segments into text-defined categories. In this paper, we introduce the Universal Segment Embedding (USE) framework to address this challenge. This framework is comprised of two key components: 1) a data pipeline designed to efficiently curate a large amount of segment-text pairs at various granularities, and 2) a universal segment embedding model that enables precise segment classification into a vast range of text-defined categories. The USE model can not only help open-vocabulary image segmentation but also facilitate other downstream tasks (e.g., querying and ranking). Through comprehensive experimental studies on semantic segmentation and part segmentation benchmarks, we demonstrate that the USE framework outperforms state-of-the-art open-vocabulary segmentation methods.

Recently decades have witnessed the empirical success of framing Knowledge Graph (KG) embeddings via language models. However, language model-based KG embeddings are usually deployed as static artifacts, which are challenging to modify without re-training after deployment. To address this issue, we propose a new task of editing language model-based KG embeddings in this paper. The proposed task aims to enable data-efficient and fast updates to KG embeddings without damaging the performance of the rest. We build four new datasets: E-FB15k237, A-FB15k237, E-WN18RR, and A-WN18RR, and evaluate several knowledge editing baselines demonstrating the limited ability of previous models to handle the proposed challenging task. We further propose a simple yet strong baseline dubbed KGEditor, which utilizes additional parametric layers of the hyper network to edit/add facts. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that KGEditor can perform better when updating specific facts while not affecting the rest with low training resources. Code and datasets will be available in https://github.com/zjunlp/PromptKG/tree/main/deltaKG.

We present a simplified, task-agnostic multi-modal pre-training approach that can accept either video or text input, or both for a variety of end tasks. Existing pre-training are task-specific by adopting either a single cross-modal encoder that requires both modalities, limiting their use for retrieval-style end tasks or more complex multitask learning with two unimodal encoders, limiting early cross-modal fusion. We instead introduce new pretraining masking schemes that better mix across modalities (e.g. by forcing masks for text to predict the closest video embeddings) while also maintaining separability (e.g. unimodal predictions are sometimes required, without using all the input). Experimental results show strong performance across a wider range of tasks than any previous methods, often outperforming task-specific pre-training. Code is made available at https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/main/examples/MMPT.

In compositional zero-shot learning, the goal is to recognize unseen compositions (e.g. old dog) of observed visual primitives states (e.g. old, cute) and objects (e.g. car, dog) in the training set. This is challenging because the same state can for example alter the visual appearance of a dog drastically differently from a car. As a solution, we propose a novel graph formulation called Compositional Graph Embedding (CGE) that learns image features, compositional classifiers, and latent representations of visual primitives in an end-to-end manner. The key to our approach is exploiting the dependency between states, objects, and their compositions within a graph structure to enforce the relevant knowledge transfer from seen to unseen compositions. By learning a joint compatibility that encodes semantics between concepts, our model allows for generalization to unseen compositions without relying on an external knowledge base like WordNet. We show that in the challenging generalized compositional zero-shot setting our CGE significantly outperforms the state of the art on MIT-States and UT-Zappos. We also propose a new benchmark for this task based on the recent GQA dataset. Code is available at: https://github.com/ExplainableML/czsl

Although exact term match between queries and documents is the dominant method to perform first-stage retrieval, we propose a different approach, called RepBERT, to represent documents and queries with fixed-length contextualized embeddings. The inner products of query and document embeddings are regarded as relevance scores. On MS MARCO Passage Ranking task, RepBERT achieves state-of-the-art results among all initial retrieval techniques. And its efficiency is comparable to bag-of-words methods.

Word embeddings have been found to provide meaningful representations for words in an efficient way; therefore, they have become common in Natural Language Processing sys- tems. In this paper, we evaluated different word embedding models trained on a large Portuguese corpus, including both Brazilian and European variants. We trained 31 word embedding models using FastText, GloVe, Wang2Vec and Word2Vec. We evaluated them intrinsically on syntactic and semantic analogies and extrinsically on POS tagging and sentence semantic similarity tasks. The obtained results suggest that word analogies are not appropriate for word embedding evaluation; task-specific evaluations appear to be a better option.

Data representation is a fundamental task in machine learning. The representation of data affects the performance of the whole machine learning system. In a long history, the representation of data is done by feature engineering, and researchers aim at designing better features for specific tasks. Recently, the rapid development of deep learning and representation learning has brought new inspiration to various domains. In natural language processing, the most widely used feature representation is the Bag-of-Words model. This model has the data sparsity problem and cannot keep the word order information. Other features such as part-of-speech tagging or more complex syntax features can only fit for specific tasks in most cases. This thesis focuses on word representation and document representation. We compare the existing systems and present our new model. First, for generating word embeddings, we make comprehensive comparisons among existing word embedding models. In terms of theory, we figure out the relationship between the two most important models, i.e., Skip-gram and GloVe. In our experiments, we analyze three key points in generating word embeddings, including the model construction, the training corpus and parameter design. We evaluate word embeddings with three types of tasks, and we argue that they cover the existing use of word embeddings. Through theory and practical experiments, we present some guidelines for how to generate a good word embedding. Second, in Chinese character or word representation. We introduce the joint training of Chinese character and word. ... Third, for document representation, we analyze the existing document representation models, including recursive NNs, recurrent NNs and convolutional NNs. We point out the drawbacks of these models and present our new model, the recurrent convolutional neural networks. ...

The prohibitive cost of evaluating large language models (LLMs) on comprehensive benchmarks necessitates the creation of small yet representative data subsets (i.e., tiny benchmarks) that enable efficient assessment while retaining predictive fidelity. Current methods for this task operate under a model-centric paradigm, selecting benchmarking items based on the collective performance of existing models. Such approaches are limited by large upfront costs, an inability to immediately handle new benchmarks (`cold-start'), and the fragile assumption that future models will share the failure patterns of their predecessors. In this work, we challenge this paradigm and propose a item-centric approach to benchmark subset selection, arguing that selection should be based on the intrinsic properties of the task items themselves, rather than on model-specific failure patterns. We instantiate this item-centric efficient benchmarking approach via a novel method, Scales++, where data selection is based on the cognitive demands of the benchmark samples. Empirically, we show Scales++ reduces the upfront selection cost by over 18x while achieving competitive predictive fidelity. On the Open LLM Leaderboard, using just a 0.5\% data subset, we predict full benchmark scores with a 2.9% mean absolute error. We demonstrate that this item-centric approach enables more efficient model evaluation without significant fidelity degradation, while also providing better cold-start performance and more interpretable benchmarking.

Style embeddings are useful for stylistic analysis and style transfer; however, only English style embeddings have been made available. We introduce Multilingual StyleDistance (mStyleDistance), a multilingual style embedding model trained using synthetic data and contrastive learning. We train the model on data from nine languages and create a multilingual STEL-or-Content benchmark (Wegmann et al., 2022) that serves to assess the embeddings' quality. We also employ our embeddings in an authorship verification task involving different languages. Our results show that mStyleDistance embeddings outperform existing models on these multilingual style benchmarks and generalize well to unseen features and languages. We make our model publicly available at https://huggingface.co/StyleDistance/mstyledistance .

This paper presents AI Wizards' participation in the CLEF 2025 CheckThat! Lab Task 1: Subjectivity Detection in News Articles, classifying sentences as subjective/objective in monolingual, multilingual, and zero-shot settings. Training/development datasets were provided for Arabic, German, English, Italian, and Bulgarian; final evaluation included additional unseen languages (e.g., Greek, Romanian, Polish, Ukrainian) to assess generalization. Our primary strategy enhanced transformer-based classifiers by integrating sentiment scores, derived from an auxiliary model, with sentence representations, aiming to improve upon standard fine-tuning. We explored this sentiment-augmented architecture with mDeBERTaV3-base, ModernBERT-base (English), and Llama3.2-1B. To address class imbalance, prevalent across languages, we employed decision threshold calibration optimized on the development set. Our experiments show sentiment feature integration significantly boosts performance, especially subjective F1 score. This framework led to high rankings, notably 1st for Greek (Macro F1 = 0.51).

Depression, a prevalent mental health disorder impacting millions globally, demands reliable assessment systems. Unlike previous studies that focus solely on either detecting depression or predicting its severity, our work identifies individual symptoms of depression while also predicting its severity using speech input. We leverage self-supervised learning (SSL)-based speech models to better utilize the small-sized datasets that are frequently encountered in this task. Our study demonstrates notable performance improvements by utilizing SSL embeddings compared to conventional speech features. We compare various types of SSL pretrained models to elucidate the type of speech information (semantic, speaker, or prosodic) that contributes the most in identifying different symptoms. Additionally, we evaluate the impact of combining multiple SSL embeddings on performance. Furthermore, we show the significance of multi-task learning for identifying depressive symptoms effectively.

Cross-modal retrieval methods build a common representation space for samples from multiple modalities, typically from the vision and the language domains. For images and their captions, the multiplicity of the correspondences makes the task particularly challenging. Given an image (respectively a caption), there are multiple captions (respectively images) that equally make sense. In this paper, we argue that deterministic functions are not sufficiently powerful to capture such one-to-many correspondences. Instead, we propose to use Probabilistic Cross-Modal Embedding (PCME), where samples from the different modalities are represented as probabilistic distributions in the common embedding space. Since common benchmarks such as COCO suffer from non-exhaustive annotations for cross-modal matches, we propose to additionally evaluate retrieval on the CUB dataset, a smaller yet clean database where all possible image-caption pairs are annotated. We extensively ablate PCME and demonstrate that it not only improves the retrieval performance over its deterministic counterpart but also provides uncertainty estimates that render the embeddings more interpretable. Code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/pcme

Foundation models are a strong trend in deep learning and computer vision. These models serve as a base for applications as they require minor or no further fine-tuning by developers to integrate into their applications. Foundation models for zero-shot object segmentation such as Segment Anything (SAM) output segmentation masks from images without any further object information. When they are followed in a pipeline by an object identification model, they can perform object detection without training. Here, we focus on training such an object identification model. A crucial practical aspect for an object identification model is to be flexible in input size. As object identification is an image retrieval problem, a suitable method should handle multi-query multi-gallery situations without constraining the number of input images (e.g. by having fixed-size aggregation layers). The key solution to train such a model is the centroid triplet loss (CTL), which aggregates image features to their centroids. CTL yields high accuracy, avoids misleading training signals and keeps the model input size flexible. In our experiments, we establish a new state of the art on the ArmBench object identification task, which shows general applicability of our model. We furthermore demonstrate an integrated unseen object detection pipeline on the challenging HOPE dataset, which requires fine-grained detection. There, our pipeline matches and surpasses related methods which have been trained on dataset-specific data.

Tabular neural network (NN) has attracted remarkable attentions and its recent advances have gradually narrowed the performance gap with respect to tree-based models on many public datasets. While the mainstreams focus on calibrating NN to fit tabular data, we emphasize the importance of homogeneous embeddings and alternately concentrate on regularizing tabular inputs through supervised pretraining. Specifically, we extend a recent work (DeepTLF) and utilize the structure of pretrained tree ensembles to transform raw variables into a single vector (T2V), or an array of tokens (T2T). Without loss of space efficiency, these binarized embeddings can be consumed by canonical tabular NN with fully-connected or attention-based building blocks. Through quantitative experiments on 88 OpenML datasets with binary classification task, we validated that the proposed tree-regularized representation not only tapers the difference with respect to tree-based models, but also achieves on-par and better performance when compared with advanced NN models. Most importantly, it possesses better robustness and can be easily scaled and generalized as standalone encoder for tabular modality. Codes: https://github.com/milanlx/tree-regularized-embedding.

Effective tracking and re-identification of players is essential for analyzing soccer videos. But, it is a challenging task due to the non-linear motion of players, the similarity in appearance of players from the same team, and frequent occlusions. Therefore, the ability to extract meaningful embeddings to represent players is crucial in developing an effective tracking and re-identification system. In this paper, a multi-purpose part-based person representation method, called PRTreID, is proposed that performs three tasks of role classification, team affiliation, and re-identification, simultaneously. In contrast to available literature, a single network is trained with multi-task supervision to solve all three tasks, jointly. The proposed joint method is computationally efficient due to the shared backbone. Also, the multi-task learning leads to richer and more discriminative representations, as demonstrated by both quantitative and qualitative results. To demonstrate the effectiveness of PRTreID, it is integrated with a state-of-the-art tracking method, using a part-based post-processing module to handle long-term tracking. The proposed tracking method outperforms all existing tracking methods on the challenging SoccerNet tracking dataset.

Embedding based product recommendations have gained popularity in recent years due to its ability to easily integrate to large-scale systems and allowing nearest neighbor searches in real-time. The bulk of studies in this area has predominantly been focused on similar item recommendations. Research on complementary item recommendations, on the other hand, still remains considerably under-explored. We define similar items as items that are interchangeable in terms of their utility and complementary items as items that serve different purposes, yet are compatible when used with one another. In this paper, we apply a novel approach to finding complementary items by leveraging dual embedding representations for products. We demonstrate that the notion of relatedness discovered in NLP for skip-gram negative sampling (SGNS) models translates effectively to the concept of complementarity when training item representations using co-purchase data. Since sparsity of purchase data is a major challenge in real-world scenarios, we further augment the model using synthetic samples to extend coverage. This allows the model to provide complementary recommendations for items that do not share co-purchase data by leveraging other abundantly available data modalities such as images, text, clicks etc. We establish the effectiveness of our approach in improving both coverage and quality of recommendations on real world data for a major online retail company. We further show the importance of task specific hyperparameter tuning in training SGNS. Our model is effective yet simple to implement, making it a great candidate for generating complementary item recommendations at any e-commerce website.

Session-based recommender systems (SBRSs) have shown superior performance over conventional methods. However, they show limited scalability on large-scale industrial datasets since most models learn one embedding per item. This leads to a large memory requirement (of storing one vector per item) and poor performance on sparse sessions with cold-start or unpopular items. Using one public and one large industrial dataset, we experimentally show that state-of-the-art SBRSs have low performance on sparse sessions with sparse items. We propose M2TRec, a Metadata-aware Multi-task Transformer model for session-based recommendations. Our proposed method learns a transformation function from item metadata to embeddings, and is thus, item-ID free (i.e., does not need to learn one embedding per item). It integrates item metadata to learn shared representations of diverse item attributes. During inference, new or unpopular items will be assigned identical representations for the attributes they share with items previously observed during training, and thus will have similar representations with those items, enabling recommendations of even cold-start and sparse items. Additionally, M2TRec is trained in a multi-task setting to predict the next item in the session along with its primary category and subcategories. Our multi-task strategy makes the model converge faster and significantly improves the overall performance. Experimental results show significant performance gains using our proposed approach on sparse items on the two datasets.

Topic segmentation of meetings is the task of dividing multi-person meeting transcripts into topic blocks. Supervised approaches to the problem have proven intractable due to the difficulties in collecting and accurately annotating large datasets. In this paper we show how previous unsupervised topic segmentation methods can be improved using pre-trained neural architectures. We introduce an unsupervised approach based on BERT embeddings that achieves a 15.5% reduction in error rate over existing unsupervised approaches applied to two popular datasets for meeting transcripts.

Natural Language Understanding has seen an increasing number of publications in the last few years, especially after robust word embeddings models became prominent, when they proved themselves able to capture and represent semantic relationships from massive amounts of data. Nevertheless, traditional models often fall short in intrinsic issues of linguistics, such as polysemy and homonymy. Any expert system that makes use of natural language in its core, can be affected by a weak semantic representation of text, resulting in inaccurate outcomes based on poor decisions. To mitigate such issues, we propose a novel approach called Most Suitable Sense Annotation (MSSA), that disambiguates and annotates each word by its specific sense, considering the semantic effects of its context. Our approach brings three main contributions to the semantic representation scenario: (i) an unsupervised technique that disambiguates and annotates words by their senses, (ii) a multi-sense embeddings model that can be extended to any traditional word embeddings algorithm, and (iii) a recurrent methodology that allows our models to be re-used and their representations refined. We test our approach on six different benchmarks for the word similarity task, showing that our approach can produce state-of-the-art results and outperforms several more complex state-of-the-art systems.

In this work, we focus on the task of learning and representing dense correspondences in deformable object categories. While this problem has been considered before, solutions so far have been rather ad-hoc for specific object types (i.e., humans), often with significant manual work involved. However, scaling the geometry understanding to all objects in nature requires more automated approaches that can also express correspondences between related, but geometrically different objects. To this end, we propose a new, learnable image-based representation of dense correspondences. Our model predicts, for each pixel in a 2D image, an embedding vector of the corresponding vertex in the object mesh, therefore establishing dense correspondences between image pixels and 3D object geometry. We demonstrate that the proposed approach performs on par or better than the state-of-the-art methods for dense pose estimation for humans, while being conceptually simpler. We also collect a new in-the-wild dataset of dense correspondences for animal classes and demonstrate that our framework scales naturally to the new deformable object categories.

In this paper we present deep-learning models that submitted to the SemEval-2018 Task~1 competition: "Affect in Tweets". We participated in all subtasks for English tweets. We propose a Bi-LSTM architecture equipped with a multi-layer self attention mechanism. The attention mechanism improves the model performance and allows us to identify salient words in tweets, as well as gain insight into the models making them more interpretable. Our model utilizes a set of word2vec word embeddings trained on a large collection of 550 million Twitter messages, augmented by a set of word affective features. Due to the limited amount of task-specific training data, we opted for a transfer learning approach by pretraining the Bi-LSTMs on the dataset of Semeval 2017, Task 4A. The proposed approach ranked 1st in Subtask E "Multi-Label Emotion Classification", 2nd in Subtask A "Emotion Intensity Regression" and achieved competitive results in other subtasks.

We consider the problem of Recognizing Textual Entailment within an Information Retrieval context, where we must simultaneously determine the relevancy as well as degree of entailment for individual pieces of evidence to determine a yes/no answer to a binary natural language question. We compare several variants of neural networks for sentence embeddings in a setting of decision-making based on evidence of varying relevance. We propose a basic model to integrate evidence for entailment, show that joint training of the sentence embeddings to model relevance and entailment is feasible even with no explicit per-evidence supervision, and show the importance of evaluating strong baselines. We also demonstrate the benefit of carrying over text comprehension model trained on an unrelated task for our small datasets. Our research is motivated primarily by a new open dataset we introduce, consisting of binary questions and news-based evidence snippets. We also apply the proposed relevance-entailment model on a similar task of ranking multiple-choice test answers, evaluating it on a preliminary dataset of school test questions as well as the standard MCTest dataset, where we improve the neural model state-of-art.

Multimodal information retrieval (MIR) faces inherent challenges due to the heterogeneity of data sources and the complexity of cross-modal alignment. While previous studies have identified modal gaps in feature spaces, a systematic approach to address these challenges remains unexplored. In this work, we introduce UNITE, a universal framework that tackles these challenges through two critical yet underexplored aspects: data curation and modality-aware training configurations. Our work provides the first comprehensive analysis of how modality-specific data properties influence downstream task performance across diverse scenarios. Moreover, we propose Modal-Aware Masked Contrastive Learning (MAMCL) to mitigate the competitive relationships among the instances of different modalities. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple multimodal retrieval benchmarks, outperforming existing methods by notable margins. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that strategic modality curation and tailored training protocols are pivotal for robust cross-modal representation learning. This work not only advances MIR performance but also provides a foundational blueprint for future research in multimodal systems. Our project is available at https://friedrichor.github.io/projects/UNITE.

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) is a highly effective method for aligning images and texts in a shared embedding space. These models are widely used for tasks such as cross-modal information retrieval and multi-modal understanding. However, CLIP models often struggle with text-only tasks, underperforming compared to specialized text models. This performance disparity forces retrieval systems to rely on separate models for text-only and multi-modal tasks. In this work, we build upon our previous model, jina-clip-v1, by introducing a refined framework that utilizes multi-task, multi-stage contrastive learning across multiple languages, coupled with an improved training recipe to enhance text-only retrieval. The resulting model, jina-clip-v2, outperforms its predecessor on text-only and multimodal tasks, while adding multilingual support, better understanding of complex visual documents and efficiency gains thanks to Matryoshka Representation Learning and vector truncation. The model performs comparably to the state-of-the-art in both multilingual-multimodal and multilingual text retrieval benchmarks, addressing the challenge of unifying text-only and multi-modal retrieval systems.

The attention mechanism in a Transformer architecture matches key to query based on both content -- the what -- and position in a sequence -- the where. We present an analysis indicating that what and where are entangled in the popular RoPE rotary position embedding. This entanglement can impair performance particularly when decisions require independent matches on these two factors. We propose an improvement to RoPE, which we call Polar Coordinate Position Embeddings or PoPE, that eliminates the what-where confound. PoPE is far superior on a diagnostic task requiring indexing solely by position or by content. On autoregressive sequence modeling in music, genomic, and natural language domains, Transformers using PoPE as the positional encoding scheme outperform baselines using RoPE with respect to evaluation loss (perplexity) and downstream task performance. On language modeling, these gains persist across model scale, from 124M to 774M parameters. Crucially, PoPE shows strong zero-shot length extrapolation capabilities compared not only to RoPE but even a method designed for extrapolation, YaRN, which requires additional fine tuning and frequency interpolation.

Despite their remarkable capabilities, LLMs learn word representations that exhibit the undesirable yet poorly understood feature of anisotropy. In this paper, we argue that the second moment in Adam is a cause of anisotropic embeddings, and suggest a modified optimizer called Coupled Adam to mitigate the problem. Our experiments demonstrate that Coupled Adam significantly improves the quality of embeddings, while also leading to better upstream and downstream performance on large enough datasets.

The goal of text style transfer is to transform the style of texts while preserving their original meaning, often with only a few examples of the target style. Existing style transfer methods generally rely on the few-shot capabilities of large language models or on complex controllable text generation approaches that are inefficient and underperform on fluency metrics. We introduce TinyStyler, a lightweight but effective approach, which leverages a small language model (800M params) and pre-trained authorship embeddings to perform efficient, few-shot text style transfer. We evaluate on the challenging task of authorship style transfer and find TinyStyler outperforms strong approaches such as GPT-4. We also evaluate TinyStyler's ability to perform text attribute style transfer (formal leftrightarrow informal) with automatic and human evaluations and find that the approach outperforms recent controllable text generation methods. Our model has been made publicly available at https://huggingface.co/tinystyler/tinystyler .

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) emerged as a promising tool for mechanistic interpretability of transformer-based foundation models. Very recently, SAEs were also adopted for the visual domain, enabling the discovery of visual concepts and their patch-wise attribution to tokens in the transformer model. While a growing number of foundation models emerged for medical imaging, tools for explaining their inferences are still lacking. In this work, we show the applicability of SAEs for hematology. We propose CytoSAE, a sparse autoencoder which is trained on over 40,000 peripheral blood single-cell images. CytoSAE generalizes to diverse and out-of-domain datasets, including bone marrow cytology, where it identifies morphologically relevant concepts which we validated with medical experts. Furthermore, we demonstrate scenarios in which CytoSAE can generate patient-specific and disease-specific concepts, enabling the detection of pathognomonic cells and localized cellular abnormalities at the patch level. We quantified the effect of concepts on a patient-level AML subtype classification task and show that CytoSAE concepts reach performance comparable to the state-of-the-art, while offering explainability on the sub-cellular level. Source code and model weights are available at https://github.com/dynamical-inference/cytosae.

Instruction tuning improves the ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow diverse human instructions, but achieving strong performance on specific target tasks remains challenging. A critical bottleneck is selecting the most relevant data to maximize task-specific performance. Existing data selection approaches include unstable influence-based methods and more stable distribution alignment methods, the latter of which critically rely on the underlying sample representation. In practice, most distribution alignment methods, from shallow features (e.g., BM25) to neural embeddings (e.g., BGE, LLM2Vec), may fail to capture how the model internally processes samples. To bridge this gap, we adopt a model-centric strategy in which each sample is represented by its neuronal activation pattern in the model, directly reflecting internal computation. However, directly using raw neuron activations leads to spurious similarity between unrelated samples due to neuron polysemanticity, where a single neuron may respond to multiple, unrelated concepts. To address this, we employ sparse autoencoders to disentangle polysemantic activations into sparse, monosemantic representations, and introduce a dedicated similarity metric for this space to better identify task-relevant data. Comprehensive experiments across multiple instruction datasets, models, tasks, and selection ratios show that our approach consistently outperforms existing data selection baselines in both stability and task-specific performance.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are widely used to derive semantic representations from item metadata in recommendation and search. In sequential recommendation, PLMs enhance ID-based embeddings through textual metadata, while in product search, they align item characteristics with user intent. Recent studies suggest task and domain-specific fine-tuning are needed to improve representational power. This paper challenges this assumption, showing that Generalist Text Embedding Models (GTEs), pre-trained on large-scale corpora, can guarantee strong zero-shot performance without specialized adaptation. Our experiments demonstrate that GTEs outperform traditional and fine-tuned models in both sequential recommendation and product search. We attribute this to a superior representational power, as they distribute features more evenly across the embedding space. Finally, we show that compressing embedding dimensions by focusing on the most informative directions (e.g., via PCA) effectively reduces noise and improves the performance of specialized models. To ensure reproducibility, we provide our repository at https://split.to/gte4ps.

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities as zero-shot planners for embodied agents, their inability to learn from experience and build persistent mental models limits their robustness in complex open-world environments like Minecraft. We introduce MINDSTORES, an experience-augmented planning framework that enables embodied agents to build and leverage mental models through natural interaction with their environment. Drawing inspiration from how humans construct and refine cognitive mental models, our approach extends existing zero-shot LLM planning by maintaining a database of past experiences that informs future planning iterations. The key innovation is representing accumulated experiences as natural language embeddings of (state, task, plan, outcome) tuples, which can then be efficiently retrieved and reasoned over by an LLM planner to generate insights and guide plan refinement for novel states and tasks. Through extensive experiments in the MineDojo environment, a simulation environment for agents in Minecraft that provides low-level controls for Minecraft, we find that MINDSTORES learns and applies its knowledge significantly better than existing memory-based LLM planners while maintaining the flexibility and generalization benefits of zero-shot approaches, representing an important step toward more capable embodied AI systems that can learn continuously through natural experience.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) for low-resource languages presents significant challenges, particularly due to the scarcity of high-quality annotated data and linguistic resources. The choice of embeddings plays a critical role in enhancing the performance of NLP tasks, such as news classification, sentiment analysis, and hate speech detection, especially for low-resource languages like Marathi. In this study, we investigate the impact of various embedding techniques- Contextual BERT-based, Non-Contextual BERT-based, and FastText-based on NLP classification tasks specific to the Marathi language. Our research includes a thorough evaluation of both compressed and uncompressed embeddings, providing a comprehensive overview of how these embeddings perform across different scenarios. Specifically, we compare two BERT model embeddings, Muril and MahaBERT, as well as two FastText model embeddings, IndicFT and MahaFT. Our evaluation includes applying embeddings to a Multiple Logistic Regression (MLR) classifier for task performance assessment, as well as TSNE visualizations to observe the spatial distribution of these embeddings. The results demonstrate that contextual embeddings outperform non-contextual embeddings. Furthermore, BERT-based non-contextual embeddings extracted from the first BERT embedding layer yield better results than FastText-based embeddings, suggesting a potential alternative to FastText embeddings.

Both graph structures and textual information play a critical role in Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC). With the success of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) such as BERT, they have been applied for text encoding for KGC. However, the current methods mostly prefer to fine-tune PLMs, leading to huge training costs and limited scalability to larger PLMs. In contrast, we propose to utilize prompts and perform KGC on a frozen PLM with only the prompts trained. Accordingly, we propose a new KGC method named PDKGC with two prompts -- a hard task prompt which is to adapt the KGC task to the PLM pre-training task of token prediction, and a disentangled structure prompt which learns disentangled graph representation so as to enable the PLM to combine more relevant structure knowledge with the text information. With the two prompts, PDKGC builds a textual predictor and a structural predictor, respectively, and their combination leads to more comprehensive entity prediction. Solid evaluation on two widely used KGC datasets has shown that PDKGC often outperforms the baselines including the state-of-the-art, and its components are all effective. Our codes and data are available at https://github.com/genggengcss/PDKGC.

The popularity of transformer-based text embeddings calls for better statistical tools for measuring distributions of such embeddings. One such tool would be a method for ranking texts within a corpus by centrality, i.e. assigning each text a number signifying how representative that text is of the corpus as a whole. However, an intrinsic center-outward ordering of high-dimensional text representations is not trivial. A statistical depth is a function for ranking k-dimensional objects by measuring centrality with respect to some observed k-dimensional distribution. We adopt a statistical depth to measure distributions of transformer-based text embeddings, transformer-based text embedding (TTE) depth, and introduce the practical use of this depth for both modeling and distributional inference in NLP pipelines. We first define TTE depth and an associated rank sum test for determining whether two corpora differ significantly in embedding space. We then use TTE depth for the task of in-context learning prompt selection, showing that this approach reliably improves performance over statistical baseline approaches across six text classification tasks. Finally, we use TTE depth and the associated rank sum test to characterize the distributions of synthesized and human-generated corpora, showing that five recent synthetic data augmentation processes cause a measurable distributional shift away from associated human-generated text.

Retrieving adverbs that describe an action in a video poses a crucial step towards fine-grained video understanding. We propose a framework for video-to-adverb retrieval (and vice versa) that aligns video embeddings with their matching compositional adverb-action text embedding in a joint embedding space. The compositional adverb-action text embedding is learned using a residual gating mechanism, along with a novel training objective consisting of triplet losses and a regression target. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on five recent benchmarks for video-adverb retrieval. Furthermore, we introduce dataset splits to benchmark video-adverb retrieval for unseen adverb-action compositions on subsets of the MSR-VTT Adverbs and ActivityNet Adverbs datasets. Our proposed framework outperforms all prior works for the generalisation task of retrieving adverbs from videos for unseen adverb-action compositions. Code and dataset splits are available at https://hummelth.github.io/ReGaDa/.

Semantic segmentation is a computer vision task that associates a label with each pixel in an image. Modern approaches tend to introduce class embeddings into semantic segmentation for deeply utilizing category semantics, and regard supervised class masks as final predictions. In this paper, we explore the mechanism of class embeddings and have an insight that more explicit and meaningful class embeddings can be generated based on class masks purposely. Following this observation, we propose ECENet, a new segmentation paradigm, in which class embeddings are obtained and enhanced explicitly during interacting with multi-stage image features. Based on this, we revisit the traditional decoding process and explore inverted information flow between segmentation masks and class embeddings. Furthermore, to ensure the discriminability and informativity of features from backbone, we propose a Feature Reconstruction module, which combines intrinsic and diverse branches together to ensure the concurrence of diversity and redundancy in features. Experiments show that our ECENet outperforms its counterparts on the ADE20K dataset with much less computational cost and achieves new state-of-the-art results on PASCAL-Context dataset. The code will be released at https://gitee.com/mindspore/models and https://github.com/Carol-lyh/ECENet.

Task-oriented Dialogue (ToD) agents are mostly limited to a few widely-spoken languages, mainly due to the high cost of acquiring training data for each language. Existing low-cost approaches that rely on cross-lingual embeddings or naive machine translation sacrifice a lot of accuracy for data efficiency, and largely fail in creating a usable dialogue agent. We propose automatic methods that use ToD training data in a source language to build a high-quality functioning dialogue agent in another target language that has no training data (i.e. zero-shot) or a small training set (i.e. few-shot). Unlike most prior work in cross-lingual ToD that only focuses on Dialogue State Tracking (DST), we build an end-to-end agent. We show that our approach closes the accuracy gap between few-shot and existing full-shot methods for ToD agents. We achieve this by (1) improving the dialogue data representation, (2) improving entity-aware machine translation, and (3) automatic filtering of noisy translations. We evaluate our approach on the recent bilingual dialogue dataset BiToD. In Chinese to English transfer, in the zero-shot setting, our method achieves 46.7% and 22.0% in Task Success Rate (TSR) and Dialogue Success Rate (DSR) respectively. In the few-shot setting where 10% of the data in the target language is used, we improve the state-of-the-art by 15.2% and 14.0%, coming within 5% of full-shot training.

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) have achieved state-of-art results on single text classification tasks like sentiment analysis, emotion detection, etc. However, the performance is achieved by testing and reporting on resource-rich languages like English. Applying GCN for multi-task text classification is an unexplored area. Moreover, training a GCN or adopting an English GCN for Indian languages is often limited by data availability, rich morphological variation, syntax, and semantic differences. In this paper, we study the use of GCN for the Telugu language in single and multi-task settings for four natural language processing (NLP) tasks, viz. sentiment analysis (SA), emotion identification (EI), hate-speech (HS), and sarcasm detection (SAR). In order to evaluate the performance of GCN with one of the Indian languages, Telugu, we analyze the GCN based models with extensive experiments on four downstream tasks. In addition, we created an annotated Telugu dataset, TEL-NLP, for the four NLP tasks. Further, we propose a supervised graph reconstruction method, Multi-Task Text GCN (MT-Text GCN) on the Telugu that leverages to simultaneously (i) learn the low-dimensional word and sentence graph embeddings from word-sentence graph reconstruction using graph autoencoder (GAE) and (ii) perform multi-task text classification using these latent sentence graph embeddings. We argue that our proposed MT-Text GCN achieves significant improvements on TEL-NLP over existing Telugu pretrained word embeddings, and multilingual pretrained Transformer models: mBERT, and XLM-R. On TEL-NLP, we achieve a high F1-score for four NLP tasks: SA (0.84), EI (0.55), HS (0.83) and SAR (0.66). Finally, we show our model's quantitative and qualitative analysis on the four NLP tasks in Telugu.

Static and contextual multilingual embeddings have complementary strengths. Static embeddings, while less expressive than contextual language models, can be more straightforwardly aligned across multiple languages. We combine the strengths of static and contextual models to improve multilingual representations. We extract static embeddings for 40 languages from XLM-R, validate those embeddings with cross-lingual word retrieval, and then align them using VecMap. This results in high-quality, highly multilingual static embeddings. Then we apply a novel continued pre-training approach to XLM-R, leveraging the high quality alignment of our static embeddings to better align the representation space of XLM-R. We show positive results for multiple complex semantic tasks. We release the static embeddings and the continued pre-training code. Unlike most previous work, our continued pre-training approach does not require parallel text.

Contrastive learning has been demonstrated to be effective in enhancing pre-trained language models (PLMs) to derive superior universal sentence embeddings. However, existing contrastive methods still have two limitations. Firstly, previous works may acquire poor performance under domain shift settings, thus hindering the application of sentence representations in practice. We attribute this low performance to the over-parameterization of PLMs with millions of parameters. To alleviate it, we propose PromCSE (Prompt-based Contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddings), which only trains small-scale Soft Prompt (i.e., a set of trainable vectors) while keeping PLMs fixed. Secondly, the commonly used NT-Xent loss function of contrastive learning does not fully exploit hard negatives in supervised learning settings. To this end, we propose to integrate an Energy-based Hinge loss to enhance the pairwise discriminative power, inspired by the connection between the NT-Xent loss and the Energy-based Learning paradigm. Empirical results on seven standard semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks and a domain-shifted STS task both show the effectiveness of our method compared with the current state-of-the-art sentence embedding models. Our code is publicly avaliable at https://github.com/YJiangcm/PromCSE

Machine translation is highly sensitive to the size and quality of the training data, which has led to an increasing interest in collecting and filtering large parallel corpora. In this paper, we propose a new method for this task based on multilingual sentence embeddings. In contrast to previous approaches, which rely on nearest neighbor retrieval with a hard threshold over cosine similarity, our proposed method accounts for the scale inconsistencies of this measure, considering the margin between a given sentence pair and its closest candidates instead. Our experiments show large improvements over existing methods. We outperform the best published results on the BUCC mining task and the UN reconstruction task by more than 10 F1 and 30 precision points, respectively. Filtering the English-German ParaCrawl corpus with our approach, we obtain 31.2 BLEU points on newstest2014, an improvement of more than one point over the best official filtered version.

In this paper, we introduce a novel and simple method for obtaining high-quality text embeddings using only synthetic data and less than 1k training steps. Unlike existing methods that often depend on multi-stage intermediate pre-training with billions of weakly-supervised text pairs, followed by fine-tuning with a few labeled datasets, our method does not require building complex training pipelines or relying on manually collected datasets that are often constrained by task diversity and language coverage. We leverage proprietary LLMs to generate diverse synthetic data for hundreds of thousands of text embedding tasks across nearly 100 languages. We then fine-tune open-source decoder-only LLMs on the synthetic data using standard contrastive loss. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves strong performance on highly competitive text embedding benchmarks without using any labeled data. Furthermore, when fine-tuned with a mixture of synthetic and labeled data, our model sets new state-of-the-art results on the BEIR and MTEB benchmarks.

Domain-specific embedding models have shown promise for applications that require specialized semantic understanding, such as coding agents and financial retrieval systems, often achieving higher performance gains than general models. However, state-of-the-art embedding models are typically based on LLMs, which contain billions of parameters, making deployment challenging in resource-constrained environments. Model compression through pruning offers a promising solution, but existing pruning methods treat all parameters uniformly, failing to distinguish between general semantic representations and domain-specific patterns, leading to suboptimal pruning decisions. Thus, we propose GAPrune, a pruning framework that addresses this challenge by considering both domain importance and preserving general linguistic foundation. Our method uses Fisher Information to measure importance and general-domain gradient alignment to assess parameter behavior, then combines these signals using our Domain Alignment Importance (DAI) scoring. Lower DAI scores indicate that the parameter is either less important for the domain task or creates conflicts between domain and general objectives. Experiments on two domain benchmarks, FinMTEB and ChemTEB, show that GAPrune maintains performance within 2.5% of dense models in one-shot pruning at 50% sparsity, while outperforming all baselines. With retraining in 100 steps, GAPrune achieves +4.51% improvement on FinMTEB and +1.73% on ChemTEB, demonstrating that our pruning strategy not only preserves but enhances domain-specific capabilities. Our findings demonstrate that principled pruning strategies can achieve model compression and enhanced domain specialization, providing the research community with a new approach for development.

Recent advancements in multi-modal models have significantly improved vision-language alignment in radiology. However, existing approaches struggle to effectively utilize complex radiology reports for learning, rely on low-resolution images, and offer limited interpretability in attention mechanisms. To address these challenges, we introduce RadZero, a novel similarity-based cross-attention framework for vision-language alignment in radiology with zero-shot multi-task capability. RadZero leverages large language models to extract minimal semantic sentences from radiology reports and employs a multi-positive contrastive learning strategy to effectively capture relationships between images and multiple relevant textual descriptions. It also utilizes a pre-trained vision encoder with additional trainable Transformer layers, allowing efficient high-resolution image processing. By computing similarity between text embeddings and local image patch features, RadZero enables zero-shot inference with similarity probability for classification and pixel-level cross-modal similarity maps for grounding and segmentation. Experimental results on public chest radiograph benchmarks show that RadZero outperforms state-of-the-art methods in zero-shot classification, grounding, and segmentation. Furthermore, cross-modal similarity map analysis highlights its potential for improving explainability in vision-language alignment. Additionally, qualitative evaluation demonstrates RadZero's capability for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, further validating its effectiveness in medical imaging.

Language models and specialized table embedding models have recently demonstrated strong performance on many tasks over tabular data. Researchers and practitioners are keen to leverage these models in many new application contexts; but limited understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of these models, and the table representations they generate, makes the process of finding a suitable model for a given task reliant on trial and error. There is an urgent need to gain a comprehensive understanding of these models to minimize inefficiency and failures in downstream usage. To address this need, we propose Observatory, a formal framework to systematically analyze embedding representations of relational tables. Motivated both by invariants of the relational data model and by statistical considerations regarding data distributions, we define eight primitive properties, and corresponding measures to quantitatively characterize table embeddings for these properties. Based on these properties, we define an extensible framework to evaluate language and table embedding models. We collect and synthesize a suite of datasets and use Observatory to analyze nine such models. Our analysis provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of learned representations over tables. We find, for example, that some models are sensitive to table structure such as column order, that functional dependencies are rarely reflected in embeddings, and that specialized table embedding models have relatively lower sample fidelity. Such insights help researchers and practitioners better anticipate model behaviors and select appropriate models for their downstream tasks, while guiding researchers in the development of new models.

Observing the close relationship among panoptic, semantic and instance segmentation tasks, we propose to train a universal multi-dataset multi-task segmentation model: DaTaSeg.We use a shared representation (mask proposals with class predictions) for all tasks. To tackle task discrepancy, we adopt different merge operations and post-processing for different tasks. We also leverage weak-supervision, allowing our segmentation model to benefit from cheaper bounding box annotations. To share knowledge across datasets, we use text embeddings from the same semantic embedding space as classifiers and share all network parameters among datasets. We train DaTaSeg on ADE semantic, COCO panoptic, and Objects365 detection datasets. DaTaSeg improves performance on all datasets, especially small-scale datasets, achieving 54.0 mIoU on ADE semantic and 53.5 PQ on COCO panoptic. DaTaSeg also enables weakly-supervised knowledge transfer on ADE panoptic and Objects365 instance segmentation. Experiments show DaTaSeg scales with the number of training datasets and enables open-vocabulary segmentation through direct transfer. In addition, we annotate an Objects365 instance segmentation set of 1,000 images and will release it as a public benchmark.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) for graph neural networks (GNNs) has attracted increasing attention from the graph machine learning community in recent years, owing to its capability to learn performant node embeddings without costly label information. One weakness of conventional SSL frameworks for GNNs is that they learn through a single philosophy, such as mutual information maximization or generative reconstruction. When applied to various downstream tasks, these frameworks rarely perform equally well for every task, because one philosophy may not span the extensive knowledge required for all tasks. To enhance the task generalization across tasks, as an important first step forward in exploring fundamental graph models, we introduce PARETOGNN, a multi-task SSL framework for node representation learning over graphs. Specifically, PARETOGNN is self-supervised by manifold pretext tasks observing multiple philosophies. To reconcile different philosophies, we explore a multiple-gradient descent algorithm, such that PARETOGNN actively learns from every pretext task while minimizing potential conflicts. We conduct comprehensive experiments over four downstream tasks (i.e., node classification, node clustering, link prediction, and partition prediction), and our proposal achieves the best overall performance across tasks on 11 widely adopted benchmark datasets. Besides, we observe that learning from multiple philosophies enhances not only the task generalization but also the single task performances, demonstrating that PARETOGNN achieves better task generalization via the disjoint yet complementary knowledge learned from different philosophies. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jumxglhf/ParetoGNN.

Understanding how the brain represents visual information is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience and artificial intelligence. While AI-driven decoding of neural data has provided insights into the human visual system, integrating multimodal neuroimaging signals, such as EEG, MEG, and fMRI, remains a critical hurdle due to their inherent spatiotemporal misalignment. Current approaches often analyze these modalities in isolation, limiting a holistic view of neural representation. In this study, we introduce BrainFLORA, a unified framework for integrating cross-modal neuroimaging data to construct a shared neural representation. Our approach leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) augmented with modality-specific adapters and task decoders, achieving state-of-the-art performance in joint-subject visual retrieval task and has the potential to extend multitasking. Combining neuroimaging analysis methods, we further reveal how visual concept representations align across neural modalities and with real world object perception. We demonstrate that the brain's structured visual concept representations exhibit an implicit mapping to physical-world stimuli, bridging neuroscience and machine learning from different modalities of neural imaging. Beyond methodological advancements, BrainFLORA offers novel implications for cognitive neuroscience and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Our code is available at https://github.com/ncclab-sustech/BrainFLORA.

Effective video retrieval remains challenging due to the complexity of integrating visual, auditory, and textual modalities. In this paper, we explore unified retrieval methods using OmniEmbed, a powerful multimodal embedding model from the Tevatron 2.0 toolkit, in the context of the MAGMaR shared task. Evaluated on the comprehensive MultiVENT 2.0 dataset, OmniEmbed generates unified embeddings for text, images, audio, and video, enabling robust multimodal retrieval. By finetuning OmniEmbed with the combined multimodal data--visual frames, audio tracks, and textual descriptions provided in MultiVENT 2.0, we achieve substantial improvements in complex, multilingual video retrieval tasks. Our submission achieved the highest score on the MAGMaR shared task leaderboard among public submissions as of May 20th, 2025, highlighting the practical effectiveness of our unified multimodal retrieval approach. Model checkpoint in this work is opensourced.

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of various static word embeddings for Hungarian, including traditional models such as Word2Vec, FastText, as well as static embeddings derived from BERT-based models using different extraction methods. We evaluate these embeddings on both intrinsic and extrinsic tasks to provide a holistic view of their performance. For intrinsic evaluation, we employ a word analogy task, which assesses the embeddings ability to capture semantic and syntactic relationships. Our results indicate that traditional static embeddings, particularly FastText, excel in this task, achieving high accuracy and mean reciprocal rank (MRR) scores. Among the BERT-based models, the X2Static method for extracting static embeddings demonstrates superior performance compared to decontextualized and aggregate methods, approaching the effectiveness of traditional static embeddings. For extrinsic evaluation, we utilize a bidirectional LSTM model to perform Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging tasks. The results reveal that embeddings derived from dynamic models, especially those extracted using the X2Static method, outperform purely static embeddings. Notably, ELMo embeddings achieve the highest accuracy in both NER and POS tagging tasks, underscoring the benefits of contextualized representations even when used in a static form. Our findings highlight the continued relevance of static word embeddings in NLP applications and the potential of advanced extraction methods to enhance the utility of BERT-based models. This piece of research contributes to the understanding of embedding performance in the Hungarian language and provides valuable insights for future developments in the field. The training scripts, evaluation codes, restricted vocabulary, and extracted embeddings will be made publicly available to support further research and reproducibility.

A key challenge with procedure planning in instructional videos lies in how to handle a large decision space consisting of a multitude of action types that belong to various tasks. To understand real-world video content, an AI agent must proficiently discern these action types (e.g., pour milk, pour water, open lid, close lid, etc.) based on brief visual observation. Moreover, it must adeptly capture the intricate semantic relation of the action types and task goals, along with the variable action sequences. Recently, notable progress has been made via the integration of diffusion models and visual representation learning to address the challenge. However, existing models employ rudimentary mechanisms to utilize task information to manage the decision space. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a simple yet effective enhancement - a masked diffusion model. The introduced mask acts akin to a task-oriented attention filter, enabling the diffusion/denoising process to concentrate on a subset of action types. Furthermore, to bolster the accuracy of task classification, we harness more potent visual representation learning techniques. In particular, we learn a joint visual-text embedding, where a text embedding is generated by prompting a pre-trained vision-language model to focus on human actions. We evaluate the method on three public datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/ffzzy840304/Masked-PDPP.

Document embeddings and similarity measures underpin content-based recommender systems, whereby a document is commonly represented as a single generic embedding. However, similarity computed on single vector representations provides only one perspective on document similarity that ignores which aspects make two documents alike. To address this limitation, aspect-based similarity measures have been developed using document segmentation or pairwise multi-class document classification. While segmentation harms the document coherence, the pairwise classification approach scales poorly to large scale corpora. In this paper, we treat aspect-based similarity as a classical vector similarity problem in aspect-specific embedding spaces. We represent a document not as a single generic embedding but as multiple specialized embeddings. Our approach avoids document segmentation and scales linearly w.r.t.the corpus size. In an empirical study, we use the Papers with Code corpus containing 157,606 research papers and consider the task, method, and dataset of the respective research papers as their aspects. We compare and analyze three generic document embeddings, six specialized document embeddings and a pairwise classification baseline in the context of research paper recommendations. As generic document embeddings, we consider FastText, SciBERT, and SPECTER. To compute the specialized document embeddings, we compare three alternative methods inspired by retrofitting, fine-tuning, and Siamese networks. In our experiments, Siamese SciBERT achieved the highest scores. Additional analyses indicate an implicit bias of the generic document embeddings towards the dataset aspect and against the method aspect of each research paper. Our approach of aspect-based document embeddings mitigates potential risks arising from implicit biases by making them explicit.

There have been many successful applications of sentence embedding methods. However, it has not been well understood what properties are captured in the resulting sentence embeddings depending on the supervision signals. In this paper, we focus on two types of sentence embedding methods with similar architectures and tasks: one fine-tunes pre-trained language models on the natural language inference task, and the other fine-tunes pre-trained language models on word prediction task from its definition sentence, and investigate their properties. Specifically, we compare their performances on semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks using STS datasets partitioned from two perspectives: 1) sentence source and 2) superficial similarity of the sentence pairs, and compare their performances on the downstream and probing tasks. Furthermore, we attempt to combine the two methods and demonstrate that combining the two methods yields substantially better performance than the respective methods on unsupervised STS tasks and downstream tasks.

Contrastive language image pretraining (CLIP) encoders have been shown to be beneficial for a range of visual tasks from classification and detection to captioning and image manipulation. We investigate the effectiveness of CLIP visual backbones for Embodied AI tasks. We build incredibly simple baselines, named EmbCLIP, with no task specific architectures, inductive biases (such as the use of semantic maps), auxiliary tasks during training, or depth maps -- yet we find that our improved baselines perform very well across a range of tasks and simulators. EmbCLIP tops the RoboTHOR ObjectNav leaderboard by a huge margin of 20 pts (Success Rate). It tops the iTHOR 1-Phase Rearrangement leaderboard, beating the next best submission, which employs Active Neural Mapping, and more than doubling the % Fixed Strict metric (0.08 to 0.17). It also beats the winners of the 2021 Habitat ObjectNav Challenge, which employ auxiliary tasks, depth maps, and human demonstrations, and those of the 2019 Habitat PointNav Challenge. We evaluate the ability of CLIP's visual representations at capturing semantic information about input observations -- primitives that are useful for navigation-heavy embodied tasks -- and find that CLIP's representations encode these primitives more effectively than ImageNet-pretrained backbones. Finally, we extend one of our baselines, producing an agent capable of zero-shot object navigation that can navigate to objects that were not used as targets during training. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/allenai/embodied-clip

Pre-trained language models have been found to capture a surprisingly rich amount of lexical knowledge, ranging from commonsense properties of everyday concepts to detailed factual knowledge about named entities. Among others, this makes it possible to distill high-quality word vectors from pre-trained language models. However, it is currently unclear to what extent it is possible to distill relation embeddings, i.e. vectors that characterize the relationship between two words. Such relation embeddings are appealing because they can, in principle, encode relational knowledge in a more fine-grained way than is possible with knowledge graphs. To obtain relation embeddings from a pre-trained language model, we encode word pairs using a (manually or automatically generated) prompt, and we fine-tune the language model such that relationally similar word pairs yield similar output vectors. We find that the resulting relation embeddings are highly competitive on analogy (unsupervised) and relation classification (supervised) benchmarks, even without any task-specific fine-tuning. Source code to reproduce our experimental results and the model checkpoints are available in the following repository: https://github.com/asahi417/relbert

In this paper, we present our approaches for the FinSim-3 Shared Task 2021: Learning Semantic Similarities for the Financial Domain. The aim of this shared task is to correctly classify a list of given terms from the financial domain into the most relevant hypernym (or top-level) concept in an external ontology. For our system submission, we evaluate two methods: a Sentence-RoBERTa (SRoBERTa) embeddings model pre-trained on a custom corpus, and a dual word-sentence embeddings model that builds on the first method by improving the proposed baseline word embeddings construction using the FastText model to boost the classification performance. Our system ranks 2nd overall on both metrics, scoring 0.917 on Average Accuracy and 1.141 on Mean Rank.

Pretrained contextualized embeddings are powerful word representations for structured prediction tasks. Recent work found that better word representations can be obtained by concatenating different types of embeddings. However, the selection of embeddings to form the best concatenated representation usually varies depending on the task and the collection of candidate embeddings, and the ever-increasing number of embedding types makes it a more difficult problem. In this paper, we propose Automated Concatenation of Embeddings (ACE) to automate the process of finding better concatenations of embeddings for structured prediction tasks, based on a formulation inspired by recent progress on neural architecture search. Specifically, a controller alternately samples a concatenation of embeddings, according to its current belief of the effectiveness of individual embedding types in consideration for a task, and updates the belief based on a reward. We follow strategies in reinforcement learning to optimize the parameters of the controller and compute the reward based on the accuracy of a task model, which is fed with the sampled concatenation as input and trained on a task dataset. Empirical results on 6 tasks and 21 datasets show that our approach outperforms strong baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance with fine-tuned embeddings in all the evaluations.

Embedding representations power machine intelligence in many applications, including recommendation systems, but they are space intensive -- potentially occupying hundreds of gigabytes in large-scale settings. To help manage this outsized memory consumption, we explore mixed dimension embeddings, an embedding layer architecture in which a particular embedding vector's dimension scales with its query frequency. Through theoretical analysis and systematic experiments, we demonstrate that using mixed dimensions can drastically reduce the memory usage, while maintaining and even improving the ML performance. Empirically, we show that the proposed mixed dimension layers improve accuracy by 0.1% using half as many parameters or maintain it using 16X fewer parameters for click-through rate prediction task on the Criteo Kaggle dataset.

In this paper we present two deep-learning systems that competed at SemEval-2018 Task 3 "Irony detection in English tweets". We design and ensemble two independent models, based on recurrent neural networks (Bi-LSTM), which operate at the word and character level, in order to capture both the semantic and syntactic information in tweets. Our models are augmented with a self-attention mechanism, in order to identify the most informative words. The embedding layer of our word-level model is initialized with word2vec word embeddings, pretrained on a collection of 550 million English tweets. We did not utilize any handcrafted features, lexicons or external datasets as prior information and our models are trained end-to-end using back propagation on constrained data. Furthermore, we provide visualizations of tweets with annotations for the salient tokens of the attention layer that can help to interpret the inner workings of the proposed models. We ranked 2nd out of 42 teams in Subtask A and 2nd out of 31 teams in Subtask B. However, post-task-completion enhancements of our models achieve state-of-the-art results ranking 1st for both subtasks.

Several recent publications have proposed methods for mapping images into continuous semantic embedding spaces. In some cases the embedding space is trained jointly with the image transformation. In other cases the semantic embedding space is established by an independent natural language processing task, and then the image transformation into that space is learned in a second stage. Proponents of these image embedding systems have stressed their advantages over the traditional classification framing of image understanding, particularly in terms of the promise for zero-shot learning -- the ability to correctly annotate images of previously unseen object categories. In this paper, we propose a simple method for constructing an image embedding system from any existing image classifier and a semantic word embedding model, which contains the n class labels in its vocabulary. Our method maps images into the semantic embedding space via convex combination of the class label embedding vectors, and requires no additional training. We show that this simple and direct method confers many of the advantages associated with more complex image embedding schemes, and indeed outperforms state of the art methods on the ImageNet zero-shot learning task.

Massively multilingual models are promising for transfer learning across tasks and languages. However, existing methods are unable to fully leverage training data when it is available in different task-language combinations. To exploit such heterogeneous supervision, we propose Hyper-X, a single hypernetwork that unifies multi-task and multilingual learning with efficient adaptation. This model generates weights for adapter modules conditioned on both tasks and language embeddings. By learning to combine task and language-specific knowledge, our model enables zero-shot transfer for unseen languages and task-language combinations. Our experiments on a diverse set of languages demonstrate that Hyper-X achieves the best or competitive gain when a mixture of multiple resources is available, while being on par with strong baselines in the standard scenario. Hyper-X is also considerably more efficient in terms of parameters and resources compared to methods that train separate adapters. Finally, Hyper-X consistently produces strong results in few-shot scenarios for new languages, showing the versatility of our approach beyond zero-shot transfer.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising advancements in general visual and language understanding. However, the representation of multimodal information using MLLMs remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce a new framework, E5-V, designed to adapt MLLMs for achieving universal multimodal embeddings. Our findings highlight the significant potential of MLLMs in representing multimodal inputs compared to previous approaches. By leveraging MLLMs with prompts, E5-V effectively bridges the modality gap between different types of inputs, demonstrating strong performance in multimodal embeddings even without fine-tuning. We propose a single modality training approach for E5-V, where the model is trained exclusively on text pairs. This method demonstrates significant improvements over traditional multimodal training on image-text pairs, while reducing training costs by approximately 95%. Additionally, this approach eliminates the need for costly multimodal training data collection. Extensive experiments across four types of tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of E5-V. As a universal multimodal model, E5-V not only achieves but often surpasses state-of-the-art performance in each task, despite being trained on a single modality.

Effective approaches that can scale embedding model depth (i.e. layers) and embedding size allow for the creation of models that are highly scalable across different computational resources and task requirements. While the recently proposed 2D Matryoshka training approach can efficiently produce a single embedding model such that its sub-layers and sub-dimensions can measure text similarity, its effectiveness is significantly worse than if smaller models were trained separately. To address this issue, we propose Starbucks, a new training strategy for Matryoshka-like embedding models, which encompasses both the fine-tuning and pre-training phases. For the fine-tuning phase, we discover that, rather than sampling a random sub-layer and sub-dimensions for each training steps, providing a fixed list of layer-dimension pairs, from small size to large sizes, and computing the loss across all pairs significantly improves the effectiveness of 2D Matryoshka embedding models, bringing them on par with their separately trained counterparts. To further enhance performance, we introduce a new pre-training strategy, which applies masked autoencoder language modelling to sub-layers and sub-dimensions during pre-training, resulting in a stronger backbone for subsequent fine-tuning of the embedding model. Experimental results on both semantic text similarity and retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed pre-training and fine-tuning strategies significantly improved the effectiveness over 2D Matryoshka models, enabling Starbucks models to perform more efficiently and effectively than separately trained models.

Building effective dense retrieval systems remains difficult when relevance supervision is not available. Recent work has looked to overcome this challenge by using a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate hypothetical documents that can be used to find the closest real document. However, this approach relies solely on the LLM to have domain-specific knowledge relevant to the query, which may not be practical. Furthermore, generating hypothetical documents can be inefficient as it requires the LLM to generate a large number of tokens for each query. To address these challenges, we introduce Real Document Embeddings from Relevance Feedback (ReDE-RF). Inspired by relevance feedback, ReDE-RF proposes to re-frame hypothetical document generation as a relevance estimation task, using an LLM to select which documents should be used for nearest neighbor search. Through this re-framing, the LLM no longer needs domain-specific knowledge but only needs to judge what is relevant. Additionally, relevance estimation only requires the LLM to output a single token, thereby improving search latency. Our experiments show that ReDE-RF consistently surpasses state-of-the-art zero-shot dense retrieval methods across a wide range of low-resource retrieval datasets while also making significant improvements in latency per-query.

Efficiently deriving structured workflows from unannotated dialogs remains an underexplored and formidable challenge in computational linguistics. Automating this process could significantly accelerate the manual design of workflows in new domains and enable the grounding of large language models in domain-specific flowcharts, enhancing transparency and controllability. In this paper, we introduce Dialog2Flow (D2F) embeddings, which differ from conventional sentence embeddings by mapping utterances to a latent space where they are grouped according to their communicative and informative functions (i.e., the actions they represent). D2F allows for modeling dialogs as continuous trajectories in a latent space with distinct action-related regions. By clustering D2F embeddings, the latent space is quantized, and dialogs can be converted into sequences of region/action IDs, facilitating the extraction of the underlying workflow. To pre-train D2F, we build a comprehensive dataset by unifying twenty task-oriented dialog datasets with normalized per-turn action annotations. We also introduce a novel soft contrastive loss that leverages the semantic information of these actions to guide the representation learning process, showing superior performance compared to standard supervised contrastive loss. Evaluation against various sentence embeddings, including dialog-specific ones, demonstrates that D2F yields superior qualitative and quantitative results across diverse domains.

The paper describes a system designed by Advacheck team to recognise machine-generated and human-written texts in the monolingual subtask of GenAI Detection Task 1 competition. Our developed system is a multi-task architecture with shared Transformer Encoder between several classification heads. One head is responsible for binary classification between human-written and machine-generated texts, while the other heads are auxiliary multiclass classifiers for texts of different domains from particular datasets. As multiclass heads were trained to distinguish the domains presented in the data, they provide a better understanding of the samples. This approach led us to achieve the first place in the official ranking with 83.07% macro F1-score on the test set and bypass the baseline by 10%. We further study obtained system through ablation, error and representation analyses, finding that multi-task learning outperforms single-task mode and simultaneous tasks form a cluster structure in embeddings space.

Recent approaches to improving the extraction of text embeddings from autoregressive large language models (LLMs) have largely focused on improvements to data, backbone pretrained language models, or improving task-differentiation via instructions. In this work, we address an architectural limitation of autoregressive models: token embeddings cannot contain information from tokens that appear later in the input. To address this limitation, we propose a simple approach, "echo embeddings," in which we repeat the input twice in context and extract embeddings from the second occurrence. We show that echo embeddings of early tokens can encode information about later tokens, allowing us to maximally leverage high-quality LLMs for embeddings. On the MTEB leaderboard, echo embeddings improve over classical embeddings by over 9% zero-shot and by around 0.7% when fine-tuned. Echo embeddings with a Mistral-7B model achieve state-of-the-art compared to prior open source models that do not leverage synthetic fine-tuning data.

We present FastRP, a scalable and performant algorithm for learning distributed node representations in a graph. FastRP is over 4,000 times faster than state-of-the-art methods such as DeepWalk and node2vec, while achieving comparable or even better performance as evaluated on several real-world networks on various downstream tasks. We observe that most network embedding methods consist of two components: construct a node similarity matrix and then apply dimension reduction techniques to this matrix. We show that the success of these methods should be attributed to the proper construction of this similarity matrix, rather than the dimension reduction method employed. FastRP is proposed as a scalable algorithm for network embeddings. Two key features of FastRP are: 1) it explicitly constructs a node similarity matrix that captures transitive relationships in a graph and normalizes matrix entries based on node degrees; 2) it utilizes very sparse random projection, which is a scalable optimization-free method for dimension reduction. An extra benefit from combining these two design choices is that it allows the iterative computation of node embeddings so that the similarity matrix need not be explicitly constructed, which further speeds up FastRP. FastRP is also advantageous for its ease of implementation, parallelization and hyperparameter tuning. The source code is available at https://github.com/GTmac/FastRP.

Contextual word embedding models such as ELMo (Peters et al., 2018) and BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) have dramatically improved performance for many natural language processing (NLP) tasks in recent months. However, these models have been minimally explored on specialty corpora, such as clinical text; moreover, in the clinical domain, no publicly-available pre-trained BERT models yet exist. In this work, we address this need by exploring and releasing BERT models for clinical text: one for generic clinical text and another for discharge summaries specifically. We demonstrate that using a domain-specific model yields performance improvements on three common clinical NLP tasks as compared to nonspecific embeddings. These domain-specific models are not as performant on two clinical de-identification tasks, and argue that this is a natural consequence of the differences between de-identified source text and synthetically non de-identified task text.

Word alignment over parallel corpora has a wide variety of applications, including learning translation lexicons, cross-lingual transfer of language processing tools, and automatic evaluation or analysis of translation outputs. The great majority of past work on word alignment has worked by performing unsupervised learning on parallel texts. Recently, however, other work has demonstrated that pre-trained contextualized word embeddings derived from multilingually trained language models (LMs) prove an attractive alternative, achieving competitive results on the word alignment task even in the absence of explicit training on parallel data. In this paper, we examine methods to marry the two approaches: leveraging pre-trained LMs but fine-tuning them on parallel text with objectives designed to improve alignment quality, and proposing methods to effectively extract alignments from these fine-tuned models. We perform experiments on five language pairs and demonstrate that our model can consistently outperform previous state-of-the-art models of all varieties. In addition, we demonstrate that we are able to train multilingual word aligners that can obtain robust performance on different language pairs. Our aligner, AWESOME (Aligning Word Embedding Spaces of Multilingual Encoders), with pre-trained models is available at https://github.com/neulab/awesome-align

Rapidly growing numbers of multilingual news consumers pose an increasing challenge to news recommender systems in terms of providing customized recommendations. First, existing neural news recommenders, even when powered by multilingual language models (LMs), suffer substantial performance losses in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer (ZS-XLT). Second, the current paradigm of fine-tuning the backbone LM of a neural recommender on task-specific data is computationally expensive and infeasible in few-shot recommendation and cold-start setups, where data is scarce or completely unavailable. In this work, we propose a news-adapted sentence encoder (NaSE), domain-specialized from a pretrained massively multilingual sentence encoder (SE). To this end, we construct and leverage PolyNews and PolyNewsParallel, two multilingual news-specific corpora. With the news-adapted multilingual SE in place, we test the effectiveness of (i.e., question the need for) supervised fine-tuning for news recommendation, and propose a simple and strong baseline based on (i) frozen NaSE embeddings and (ii) late click-behavior fusion. We show that NaSE achieves state-of-the-art performance in ZS-XLT in true cold-start and few-shot news recommendation.

Extracting planes from a 3D scene is useful for downstream tasks in robotics and augmented reality. In this paper we tackle the problem of estimating the planar surfaces in a scene from posed images. Our first finding is that a surprisingly competitive baseline results from combining popular clustering algorithms with recent improvements in 3D geometry estimation. However, such purely geometric methods are understandably oblivious to plane semantics, which are crucial to discerning distinct planes. To overcome this limitation, we propose a method that predicts multi-view consistent plane embeddings that complement geometry when clustering points into planes. We show through extensive evaluation on the ScanNetV2 dataset that our new method outperforms existing approaches and our strong geometric baseline for the task of plane estimation.

This paper presents a significant improvement on the previous conference paper known as DefSent. The prior study seeks to improve sentence embeddings of language models by projecting definition sentences into the vector space of dictionary entries. We discover that this approach is not fully explored due to the methodological limitation of using word embeddings of language models to represent dictionary entries. This leads to two hindrances. First, dictionary entries are constrained by the single-word vocabulary, and thus cannot be fully exploited. Second, semantic representations of language models are known to be anisotropic, but pre-processing word embeddings for DefSent is not allowed because its weight is frozen during training and tied to the prediction layer. In this paper, we propose a novel method to progressively build entry embeddings not subject to the limitations. As a result, definition sentences can be projected into a quasi-isotropic or isotropic vector space of unlimited dictionary entries, so that sentence embeddings of noticeably better quality are attainable. We abbreviate our approach as DefSent+ (a plus version of DefSent), involving the following strengths: 1) the task performance on measuring sentence similarities is significantly improved compared to DefSent; 2) when DefSent+ is used to further train data-augmented models like SIMCSE, SNCSE, and SynCSE, state-of-the-art performance on measuring sentence similarities can be achieved among the approaches without using manually labeled datasets; 3) DefSent+ is also competitive in feature-based transfer for NLP downstream tasks.

The field of general time series analysis has recently begun to explore unified modeling, where a common architectural backbone can be retrained on a specific task for a specific dataset. In this work, we approach unification from a complementary vantage point: unification across tasks and domains. To this end, we explore the impact of discrete, learnt, time series data representations that enable generalist, cross-domain training. Our method, TOTEM, or TOkenized Time Series EMbeddings, proposes a simple tokenizer architecture that embeds time series data from varying domains using a discrete vectorized representation learned in a self-supervised manner. TOTEM works across multiple tasks and domains with minimal to no tuning. We study the efficacy of TOTEM with an extensive evaluation on 17 real world time series datasets across 3 tasks. We evaluate both the specialist (i.e., training a model on each domain) and generalist (i.e., training a single model on many domains) settings, and show that TOTEM matches or outperforms previous best methods on several popular benchmarks. The code can be found at: https://github.com/SaberaTalukder/TOTEM.

In this paper, we discuss the methods we applied at SemEval-2023 Task 10: Towards the Explainable Detection of Online Sexism. Given an input text, we perform three classification tasks to predict whether the text is sexist and classify the sexist text into subcategories in order to provide an additional explanation as to why the text is sexist. We explored many different types of models, including GloVe embeddings as the baseline approach, transformer-based deep learning models like BERT, RoBERTa, and DeBERTa, ensemble models, and model blending. We explored various data cleaning and augmentation methods to improve model performance. Pre-training transformer models yielded significant improvements in performance, and ensembles and blending slightly improved robustness in the F1 score.

Recent studies have revealed a security threat to natural language processing (NLP) models, called the Backdoor Attack. Victim models can maintain competitive performance on clean samples while behaving abnormally on samples with a specific trigger word inserted. Previous backdoor attacking methods usually assume that attackers have a certain degree of data knowledge, either the dataset which users would use or proxy datasets for a similar task, for implementing the data poisoning procedure. However, in this paper, we find that it is possible to hack the model in a data-free way by modifying one single word embedding vector, with almost no accuracy sacrificed on clean samples. Experimental results on sentiment analysis and sentence-pair classification tasks show that our method is more efficient and stealthier. We hope this work can raise the awareness of such a critical security risk hidden in the embedding layers of NLP models. Our code is available at https://github.com/lancopku/Embedding-Poisoning.