Large vision language models (LVLMs) have achieved rapid development. However, just like large language models (LLMs), LVLMs face the critical challenge of hallucination, which refers to the phenomenon that the generation text containing references or descriptions of the input image is incorrect or inconsistent. The causes of hallucinations are complex and therefore difficult to avoid directly during the generation process. To alleviate hallucinations, existing studies mainly employ an instruction-tuning approach that requires model retraining with specific data. Other methods use decoding constraints to penalize specific tokens during the decoding process. These will incur expensive annotation costs and computation burden. In this paper, we propose a framework named AQAH to alleviate hallucinations without relying on manual data and large-scale parameter tuning. AQAH compares multiple generated samples to locate the hallucination factors, and then asks questions about the uncertain information. Finally, the answers to the questions are used to add auxiliary information to the prompt to correct the hallucination of LVLMs during regeneration. To facilitate this process, we constructed an automatic process that involves the training of a small model for question generation, and the agent collaboration framework including the small question generation model and large question answering foundation model. Since AQAH does not directly constrain the decoding, it will not cause a significant degradation in inference efficiency, nor force LVLMs to suffer the notorious problem of shortened text generation length. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of AQAH in hallucination alleviation through the proposed “active questioning & answer verification” paradigm in various multimodal tasks such as captioning and visual question answering. Beyond the promising performance and fewer training/inference time costs against other hallucination reduction methods, our method is highly interpretable and flexible, showing great potential in improving LVLMs by exploiting small-scale models. The code is available at https://github.com/bcxbg/AQAH.

The Visual Question Generation (VQG) task generally aims to produce questions based on images in natural language. Existing studies often handle VQG as a reverse Visual Question Answering (VQA), training data-driven generators on VQA datasets. However, this solution pipeline struggles to generate high-quality questions that effectively challenge robots and humans, even by leveraging the most advanced large-scale foundational models. There are also some other VQG methods depending on elaborate and costly manual preprocessing heavily. To address these limitations, we propose a novel method with a two-module framework for automatically generating inferential visual questions that also follow commonsense. The “Scene Graph Generation” module constructs specialized scene graphs by progressively expanding connections from high-confidence nodes. This module ensures semantic consistency by aligning visual, textual, and salient features. Additionally, we incorporate external knowledge to extend abstract semantic concepts and associated facts, enriching the content of generated questions and facilitating the generated question to better follow the commonsense of human. Another module “Question Generation” utilizes the above scene graph as a foundation to search and instantiate for the question. The generated questions will match with the program templates and have diverse inferential paths. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is both effective and highly scalable. The generated questions are controllable in terms of semantic richness and difficulty, exhibiting clear inferential and commonsense properties. Furthermore, we automatically utilize our method to create a large-scale dataset, ICVQA, which includes approximately 160,000 images and 800,000 questionanswer pairs, thereby facilitating further research in VQA and visual dialogue.

The recent emergence of commodity persistent memory (PM) hardware has altered the landscape of the storage hierarchy. It brings multi-fold benefits to database systems, with its large capacity, low latency, byte addressability, and persistence. However, PM has not been incorporated into the popular disaggregated architecture of cloud-native databases.

The task of Visual Question Generation (VQG) aims to generate natural language questions for images. Many methods regard it as a reverse Visual Question Answering (VQA) task. They trained a data-driven generator on VQA datasets, which is hard to obtain questions that can challenge robots and humans. Other methods rely heavily on elaborate but expensive artificial preprocessing to generate. To overcome these limitations, we propose a method to generate inferential questions from the image with noisy captions. Our method first introduces a core scene graph generation module, which can align text features and salient visual features to the initial scene graph. It constructs a special core scene graph with expanded linkage outwards from the high-confidence nodes hop by hop. Next, a question generation module uses the core scene graph as a basis to instantiate the function templates, resulting in questions with varying inferential paths. Experiments show that the visual questions generated by our method are controllable in both content and difficulty, and demonstrate clear inferential properties. In addition, since the salient region, captions, and function templates can be replaced by human-customized ones, our method has strong scalability and potential for more interactive applications. Finally, we use our method to automatically build a new dataset, InVQA, containing about 120k images and 480k question-answer pairs, to facilitate the development of more versatile VQA models.

It is challenging for cloud-native relational databases to meet the ever-increasing needs of scaling compute and memory resources independently and elastically. The recent emergence of memory disaggregation architecture, relying on high-speed RDMA network, offers opportunities to build cost-effective and elastic cloud-native databases. There exist proposals to let unmodified applications run transparently on disaggregated systems. However, running relational database kernel atop such proposals experiences notable performance degradation and time-consuming failure recovery, offsetting the benefits of disaggregation. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel database architecture called LegoBase, which explores the co-design of database kernel and memory disaggregation. It pushes the memory management back to the database layer for bypassing the Linux I/O stack and re-using or designing (remote) memory access optimizations with an understanding of data access patterns. LegoBase further splits the conventional ARIES fault tolerance protocol to independently handle the local and remote memory failures for fast recovery of compute instances. We implemented LegoBase atop MySQL. We compare LegoBase against MySQL running on a standalone machine and the state-of-the-art disaggregation proposal Infiniswap. Our evaluation shows that even with a large fraction of data placed on the remote memory, LegoBase's system performance in terms of throughput (up to 9.41% drop) and P99 latency (up to 11.58% increase) is comparable to the monolithic MySQL setup, and significantly outperforms (1.99x-2.33x, respectively) the deployment of MySQL over Infiniswap. Meanwhile, LegoBase introduces an up to 3.87x and 5.48x speedup of the recovery and warm-up time, respectively, over the monolithic MySQL and MySQL over Infiniswap, when handling failures or planned re-configurations.