Related papers: Data Efficient Masked Language Modeling for Vision…

In vision-language pre-training (VLP), masked image modeling (MIM) has recently been introduced for fine-grained cross-modal alignment. However, in most existing methods, the reconstruction targets for MIM lack high-level semantics, and…

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to Autoregressive Language Models (ARLMs), leveraging a denoising objective that, in principle, should enable more uniform context utilisation. In…

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…

Transformer language models have achieved state-of-the-art performance for a variety of natural language tasks but have been shown to encode unwanted biases. We evaluate the social biases encoded by transformers trained with the masked…

Large Language Models (LLMs), benefiting from the auto-regressive modelling approach performed on massive unannotated texts corpora, demonstrates powerful perceptual and reasoning capabilities. However, as for extending auto-regressive…

The current era of natural language processing (NLP) has been defined by the prominence of pre-trained language models since the advent of BERT. A feature of BERT and models with similar architecture is the objective of masked language…

Cross-lingual pre-training has achieved great successes using monolingual and bilingual plain text corpora. However, most pre-trained models neglect multilingual knowledge, which is language agnostic but comprises abundant cross-lingual…

Images in the medical domain are fundamentally different from the general domain images. Consequently, it is infeasible to directly employ general domain Visual Question Answering (VQA) models for the medical domain. Additionally, medical…

This thesis focuses on improving the pre-training of natural language models using unsupervised raw data to make them more efficient and aligned with downstream applications. In the first part, we introduce three alternative pre-training…

Masked Language Models (MLMs) have shown superior performances in numerous downstream NLP tasks when used as text encoders. Unfortunately, MLMs also demonstrate significantly worrying levels of social biases. We show that the previously…

Masked language models (MLMs) such as BERT and RoBERTa have revolutionized the field of Natural Language Understanding in the past few years. However, existing pre-trained MLMs often output an anisotropic distribution of token…

As the performance of Large-scale Vision Language Models (LVLMs) improves, they are increasingly capable of responding in multiple languages, and there is an expectation that the demand for explanations generated by LVLMs will grow.…

Latent Action Models (LAMs) have rapidly gained traction as an important component in the pre-training pipelines of leading Vision-Language-Action models. However, they fail when observations contain action-correlated distractors, often…

Large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained language models (xPLMs) have shown effectiveness in cross-lingual sequence labeling tasks (xSL), such as cross-lingual machine reading comprehension (xMRC) by transferring knowledge from a high-resource…

The development of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) with the ability to perceive data formats beyond text, significantly advancing a range of downstream applications, such as visual question…

Although speech is a simple and effective way for humans to communicate with the outside world, a more realistic speech interaction contains multimodal information, e.g., vision, text. How to design a unified framework to integrate…

Currently, large language models (LLMs) predominantly focus on the text modality. To enable more natural human-AI interaction, speech LLMs are emerging, but building effective end-to-end speech LLMs remains challenging due to limited data…

Vision-Language models (VLMs) have excelled in the image-domain -- especially in zero-shot settings -- thanks to the availability of vast pretraining data (i.e., paired image-text samples). However for videos, such paired data is not as…

While modern Transformer-based language models (LMs) have achieved major success in multi-task generalization, they often struggle to capture long-range dependencies within their context window. This work introduces a novel approach using…

Hyperscaling of data and parameter count in LLMs is yielding diminishing improvement when weighed against training costs, underlining a growing need for more efficient finetuning and inference without sacrificing performance. This is…