Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and Visual Language Pretrained Models (VLPMs) have shown remarkable performances in general Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, these models struggle with VQA questions that require external commonsense knowledge due to the challenges in generating high-quality prompts and the high computational costs of fine-tuning. In this work, we propose a novel graph-based multimodal commonsense knowledge distillation framework that constructs a unified relational graph over commonsense knowledge, visual objects and questions through a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) following a teacher-student environment. This proposed framework is flexible with any type of teacher and student models without further fine-tuning, and has achieved competitive performances on the ScienceQA dataset. The code is in https://github.com/adlnlp/MCKDVQA.

The significance of mental health classification is paramount in contemporary society, where digital platforms serve as crucial sources for monitoring individuals' well-being. However, existing social media mental health datasets primarily consist of text-only samples, potentially limiting the efficacy of models trained on such data. Recognising that humans utilise cross-modal information to comprehend complex situations or issues, we present a novel approach to address the limitations of current methodologies. In this work, we introduce a Multimodal and Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation model for Mental Health Classification, leveraging insights from cross-modal human understanding. Unlike conventional approaches that often rely on simple concatenation to integrate diverse features, our model addresses the challenge of appropriately representing inputs of varying natures (e.g., texts and sounds). To mitigate the computational complexity associated with integrating all features into a single model, we employ a multimodal and multi-teacher architecture. By distributing the learning process across multiple teachers, each specialising in a particular feature extraction aspect, we enhance the overall mental health classification performance. Through experimental validation, we demonstrate the efficacy of our model in achieving improved performance.

Document understanding and information extraction include different tasks to understand a document and extract valuable information automatically. Recently, there has been a rising demand for developing document understanding among different domains, including business, law, and medicine, to boost the efficiency of work that is associated with a large number of documents. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and industry developers in the field of document intelligence and understanding diverse document types to boost automatic document processing and understanding techniques. We also release a data challenge on the recently introduced document-level VQA dataset, PDFVQA. The PDFVQA challenge examines the model's structural and contextual understandings on the natural full document level of multiple consecutive document pages by including questions with a sequence of answers extracted from multi-pages of the full document. This task helps to boost the document understanding step from the single-page level to the full document level understanding.

We propose a PiggyBack, a Visual Question Answering platform that allows users to apply the state-of-the-art visual-language pretrained models easily. We integrate visual-language models, pretrained by HuggingFace, an open-source API platform of deep learning technologies; however, it cannot be runnable without programming skills or deep learning understanding. Hence, our PiggyBack supports an easy-to-use browser-based user interface with several deep-learning visual language pretrained models for general users and domain experts. The PiggyBack includes the following benefits: Portability due to web-based and thus runs on almost any platform, A comprehensive data creation and processing technique, and ease of use on visual language pretrained models. The demo video can be found at https://youtu.be/iz44RZ1lF4s.

Recognizing the layout of unstructured digital documents is crucial when parsing the documents into the structured, machine-readable format for downstream applications. Recent studies in Document Layout Analysis usually rely on visual cues to understand documents while ignoring other information, such as contextual information or the relationships between document layout components, which are vital to boost better layout analysis performance. Our Doc-GCN presents an effective way to harmonize and integrate heterogeneous aspects for Document Layout Analysis. We construct different graphs to capture the four main features aspects of document layout components, including syntactic, semantic, density, and appearance features. Then, we apply graph convolutional networks to enhance each aspect of features and apply the node-level pooling for integration. Finally, we concatenate features of all aspects and feed them into the 2-layer MLPs for document layout component classification. Our Doc-GCN achieves state-of-the-art results on three widely used DLA datasets: PubLayNet, FUNSD, and DocBank. The code will be released at https://github.com/adlnlp/doc_gcn

Text-to-image multimodal tasks, generating/retrieving an image from a given text description, are extremely challenging tasks since raw text descriptions cover quite limited information in order to fully describe visually realistic images.We propose a new visual contextual text representation for text-to-image multimodal tasks, VICTR, which captures rich visual semantic information of objects from the text input.First, we use the text description as initial input and conduct dependency parsing to extract the syntactic structure and analyse the semantic aspect, including object quantities, to extract the scene graph.Then, we train the extracted objects, attributes, and relations in the scene graph and the corresponding geometric relation information using Graph Convolutional Networks, and it generates text representation which integrates textual and visual semantic information.The text representation is aggregated with word-level and sentencelevel embedding to generate both visual contextual word and sentence representation.For the evaluation, we attached VICTR to the state-of-the-art models in text-to-image generation.VICTR is easily added to existing models and improves across both quantitative and qualitative aspects 1 .