Efficient Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering by Learning to Compress and Aggregate Contextual Information

Centrala begrepp

RACC, a framework that learns to compress and aggregate retrieved contexts, achieves state-of-the-art performance on knowledge-based visual question answering tasks while significantly reducing inference latency and storage requirements.

Sammanfattning

The paper proposes RACC, a framework for efficient knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) using multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The key insights are:

1. RACC learns to compress retrieved documents into short soft prompts using a hyperMLLM, which helps reduce the number of input tokens for the downstream baseMLLM.

2. RACC employs several strategies to effectively aggregate the compressed prompts of retrieved documents, including:

   • Decoupled Compression of Vision and Question (DCVQ) to better capture the relationship between images and questions.
   • Retrieval-Guided Cross-Attention (RGCA) to leverage the retrieval scores of documents.
   • Pseudo-Relevance-based Backpropagation Dropout (PRDB) to mitigate the impact of irrelevant retrieved documents.

3. The aggregated compressed prompts are then used to generate a compact modulation in the form of a Key-Value cache to adapt the frozen baseMLLM, enabling efficient inference.

4. RACC achieves state-of-the-art performance on the OK-VQA and AOK-VQA datasets, while significantly reducing inference latency (22.0%-59.7%) and storage requirements (91.0%) compared to previous methods.

5. RACC demonstrates broad applicability, as it can leverage different types of knowledge sources (textual and multimodal documents) and various off-the-shelf MLLMs.

Statistik

RACC achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy of 62.9% on the OK-VQA dataset.
RACC reduces inference latency by 22.0%-59.7% compared to RAVQA-v2.
RACC reduces disk space usage by 91.0% compared to RAVQA-v2.

Citat

"RACC not only significantly reduces inference latency but also minimizes disk space usage by pre-saving compressed prompts corresponding to the documents of the knowledge source."
"RACC demonstrates broad applicability, as experiments show that it is applicable to different MLLMs and various kinds of external knowledge sources."

Viktiga insikter från

Learning to Compress Contexts for Efficient Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering

by Weixi Weng, ... på arxiv.org 09-12-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.07331.pdf

Djupare frågor

How can RACC's strategies for compressing and aggregating retrieved contexts be extended to other retrieval-augmented generation tasks beyond KB-VQA?

RACC's strategies for compressing and aggregating retrieved contexts can be effectively extended to various retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) tasks beyond knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) by leveraging its core principles of context compression, aggregation, and efficient modulation. For instance, in tasks such as text summarization or dialogue generation, the process of compressing lengthy documents into concise prompts can enhance the model's ability to focus on relevant information while minimizing input token count.
The use of a hyperMLLM for context compression can be adapted to summarize large text corpora into manageable prompts that retain essential information, thereby improving the efficiency of downstream models. Additionally, the aggregation strategies employed in RACC, such as Decoupled Compression of Vision and Question (DCVQ) and Retrieval-Guided Cross-Attention (RGCA), can be modified to enhance the relevance of retrieved contexts in other domains. For example, in a document retrieval task, these strategies could prioritize the most relevant sections of a document based on user queries, ensuring that the generated output is contextually rich and pertinent.
Moreover, the Pseudo-Relevance-based Backpropagation Dropout (PRDB) strategy can be utilized to filter out irrelevant information during training, which is crucial in tasks where noise in the data can lead to poor model performance. By applying these strategies across different RAG tasks, models can achieve improved accuracy and efficiency, making them more suitable for real-world applications where context and relevance are paramount.

What are the potential limitations of RACC's approach, and how could it be further improved to handle more challenging or diverse knowledge-based VQA scenarios?

While RACC demonstrates significant advancements in efficiency and performance for KB-VQA, several potential limitations exist. One major limitation is its reliance on the quality and relevance of the retrieved documents. If the retrieval process yields irrelevant or low-quality documents, the effectiveness of RACC's compression and aggregation strategies may be compromised, leading to suboptimal answers. This issue is particularly pronounced in specialized domains where the knowledge base may be sparse or outdated.
To improve RACC's handling of more challenging or diverse KB-VQA scenarios, several enhancements could be considered. First, integrating a more sophisticated retrieval mechanism that incorporates user feedback or contextual understanding could enhance the relevance of retrieved documents. Implementing a feedback loop where the model learns from previous interactions could refine the retrieval process over time.
Second, expanding the framework to include multi-modal knowledge sources beyond textual and visual documents could enrich the context available for answering questions. For instance, incorporating audio or video data could provide additional layers of information that enhance the model's understanding of complex queries.
Lastly, enhancing the model's ability to reason over the retrieved contexts could improve its performance in scenarios requiring deeper understanding or inference. This could involve integrating reasoning modules that allow the model to synthesize information from multiple sources and draw conclusions based on the aggregated knowledge.

Given the importance of inference efficiency highlighted in this work, how might the principles of RACC be applied to improve the real-world deployment of other large language models and multimodal systems?

The principles of RACC, particularly its focus on inference efficiency through context compression and aggregation, can be applied to enhance the real-world deployment of other large language models (LLMs) and multimodal systems in several ways.
Firstly, the concept of compressing input contexts into manageable prompts can be utilized across various LLM applications, such as chatbots or virtual assistants, where quick response times are critical. By reducing the input size while retaining essential information, these systems can achieve faster inference times, leading to improved user experiences.
Secondly, the aggregation strategies employed in RACC can be adapted for use in multimodal systems that integrate text, images, and other data types. For instance, in applications like augmented reality or interactive learning environments, efficiently aggregating information from diverse sources can enhance the system's ability to provide relevant and context-aware responses.
Additionally, the use of a modular approach, as seen in RACC's design, allows for the integration of various components tailored to specific tasks. This modularity can facilitate the deployment of LLMs in different domains by enabling the customization of retrieval and aggregation strategies based on the unique requirements of each application.
Finally, the emphasis on inference efficiency can guide the development of lightweight models that maintain high performance while being resource-efficient. This is particularly important for deploying models on edge devices or in environments with limited computational resources, where traditional large models may struggle to operate effectively.
By applying RACC's principles, developers can create more efficient, responsive, and versatile LLMs and multimodal systems that meet the demands of real-world applications.