I am an Associate Professor at the College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. My research interests lie mainly in Computational Narrative Intelligence, Multi-modal Learning, Data-centric AI, and Machine Learning.

Prior to NTU, I was a Senior Research Scientist at Baidu Research USA, and a Research Scientist and Group Leader at Disney Research. I received my Ph.D. degree from Georgia Institute of Technology.

A recent interest of mine is training on synthetic data. Some notable works of mine in multimodal learning include InstructBLIP, Plug-and-Play VQA, and VisualGPT. I also made contributions to major areas of Computational Narrative Intelligence, ranging from story generation and interactive narratives to human cognition, from learning story knowledge to story understanding.

I teach a PhD-level Deep Learning course, CE7454, which constantly receives student scores of 90/100 or above. You can find one slide deck here. According to CCDS rules, this course is open only to CCDS and IGP graduate students.

gs.ude.utn@il.gnayob :liamE


Selected Papers

Jaewoo Lee, Boyang Li, and Sung Ju Hwang. Concept-skill Transferability-based Data Selection for Large Vision-Language Models. EMNLP 2024.

TL;DR: We prune vision-language instruction tuning data by identifying data clusters that represent semantic concepts and skills. After that, we select representative data from clusters that transfer well to other clusters.

Paper Code bibtex

Anthony Tiong, Junqi Zhao, Boyang Li, Junnan Li, Steven Hoi, and Caiming Xiong. What Are We Measuring When We Evaluate Large Vision-Language Models? An Analysis of Latent Factors and Biases. NAACL 2024.

TL;DR: What vision-language capabilities of the vision-language models are we actually evaluating? We propose to identify these capabilities using Factor Analysis. We also identify a length bias in evaluation and release a new evaluation dataset, OLIVE.

Paper Dataset bibtex

Yidan Sun, Qin Chao, and Boyang Li. Event Causality Is Key to Computational Story Understanding. The 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). 2024.

TL;DR: We demonstrate the value of LLM-extracted causal relations between events in story understanding tasks.

Paper Code bibtex

Haoxin Li, Yuan Liu, Hanwang Zhang, and Boyang Li. Mitigating and Evaluating Static Bias of Action Representations in the Background and the Foreground. International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) (Oral Presentation). 2023.

TL;DR: Video classifiers often rely on static features to make biased predictions. We show that static bias is caused by not only the background, but also the foreground, such as human actor's outfit or instrument. We propose a theory-inspired method to mitigate bias without having to locate the source.

Paper Supplemental Code bibtex

Wenliang Dai, Junnan Li, Dongxu Li, Anthony Meng Huat Tiong, Junqi Zhao, Weisheng Wang, Boyang Li, Pascale Fung, and Steven Hoi. InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning. NeurIPS. 2023.

TL;DR: An instruction-tuned vision-language model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks.

Paper Code Model Zoo bibtex

Yidan Sun, Qin Chao, Yangfeng Ji, and Boyang Li. Synopses of Movie Narratives: a Video-Language Dataset for Story Understanding. ArXiv Preprint 2203.05711. 2022.

TL;DR: A large, plot-level, multimodal dataset for story understanding. The storytelling techniques of the paper create unique challenges for the current generation of multimodal networks.

Paper Data bibtex

Anthony Meng Huat Tiong, Junnan Li, Boyang Li, Silvio Savarese, and Steven C.H. Hoi. Plug-and-Play VQA: Zero-shot VQA by Conjoining Large Pretrained Models with Zero Training. Findings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Findings of EMNLP). 2022.

TL;DR: An unexpected modular approach to visual question answering. We translate relevant portions of an image to text and rely on text-based reasoning entirely. On VQAv2, the results are better than Deepmind's Flamingo by 8.5%. This is in contrast to conventional wisdom that end-to-end learning is necessary for good performance.

Paper Video Code bibtex

Xu Guo, Boyang Li, and Han Yu. Improving the Sample Efficiency of Prompt Tuning with Domain Adaptation. Findings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Findings of EMNLP). 2022.

TL;DR: Prompt tuning is great for large model deployment but requires a lot of training data. To our knowledge, we are the first in using unlabeled data in the target domain to improve prompt tuning.

Paper Code bibtex

Jun Chen, Han Guo, Kai Yi, Boyang Li, and Mohamed Elhoseiny. VisualGPT: Data-efficient Adaptation of Pretrained Language Models for Image Captioning. The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). 2022.

TL;DR: We developed a data-efficient method to adapt large-scale pretrained language models for image captioning and achieved SOTA results on X-ray image captioning.

Paper Code bibtex

Yinan Zhang, Boyang Li, Yong Liu, Hao Wang, Chunyan Miao. Initialization Matters: Regularizing Manifold-informed Initialization for Neural Recommendation Systems. ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). 2021.

TL;DR: If neural recommenders performed poorly (e.g., worse than well-tuned k-nearest-neighbors), it is probably because they did not use this data-dependent, manifold-informed initialization.

Paper Video Code bibtex

Xu Guo, Boyang Li, Han Yu, and Chunyan Miao. Latent-Optimized Adversarial Neural Transfer for Sarcasm Detection. The Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT). 2021.

TL;DR: Sarcasm detection is an ideal problem for transfer learning. We identify the competition between losses in adversarial transfer learning and propose a modified optimization technique to solve the problem, which achieves the SOTA result on the iSarcasm dataset.

Paper Code bibtex

Chang Liu, Han Yu, Boyang Li, Zhiqi Shen, Zhanning Gao, Peiran Ren, Xuansong Xie, Lizhen Cui, and Chunyan Miao. Noise-resistant Deep Metric Learning with Ranking-based Instance Selection. The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). 2021.

TL;DR: We introduce a simple, efficient, and (we believe) the first technique for deep metric learning under noisy training data; the method outperforms 12 baseline methods under both synthetic and natural noise.

Paper Supplemental Video 视频 Code bibtex

Yuanyuan Chen, Boyang Li, Han Yu, Pengcheng Wu, and Chunyan Miao. HyDRA: Hypergradient Data Relevance Analysis for Interpreting Deep Neural Networks. The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). 2021.

TL;DR: We provide an approximate hypergradient method for estimating how training data contribute to individual network predictions and a theoretical bound on the approximation error.

Paper Supplemental Code bibtex

Adam Noack, Isaac Ahern, Dejing Dou, and Boyang Li. An Empirical Study on the Relation between Network Interpretability and Adversarial Robustness Springer Nature Computer Science. 2020.

TL;DR: Does the interpretability of neural networks imply robustness against adversarial attack? We provide some positive empirical evidence.

Paper Code bibtex

Hannah Kim, Denys Katerenchuk, Daniel Billet, Jun Huan, Haesun Park, and Boyang Li. Understanding Actors and Evaluating Personae with Gaussian Embeddings. The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). 2019.

TL;DR: We computationally model movie casting decisions and actors' versatility.

Paper Code & Data bibtex

Pelin Dogan, Boyang Li, Leonid Sigal, Markus Gross. A Neural Multi-sequence Alignment TeCHnique (NeuMATCH). The Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). 2018.

TL;DR: We propose the first end-to-end optimizable network for aligning video and text sequences.

Paper Data bibtex

Ng Annalyn, Maarten Bos, Leonid Sigal, Boyang Li. Predicting Personality from Book Preferences with User-Generated Content Labels. IEEE Transaction on Affective Computing. 2018.

TL;DR: We can infer your personality from the books you read.

Paper bibtex

Hiring

I have multiple open positions for Ph.D. students, postdocs, and research engineers. Please send me your CV.

What's New

  • Sep 2024: 4 EMNLP acceptance (1 Main, 3 Findings).
  • Aug 2024: I was tenured.
  • Aug 2024: I received a Young Faculty Research Award (Special Mention) from the College of Engineering, NTU.
  • Jul 2024: 1 paper accepted to the Conference on Language Modeling (COLM).
  • Jun 2024: 1 paper accepted to the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction.
  • Mar 2024: 2 papers accepted to NAACL 2024.
  • Jan/Feb 2024: 1 AAAI paper and 1 CVPR paper accepted.
  • Dec 2023: I presented recent work as an invited speaker at the Workshop on Effective Multimodal Perception and Interactive Learning, at the 6th Asia Conference on Cognitive Engineering and Intelligent Interaction.
  • Nov 2023: I presented recent work as an invited speaker at the Workshop on Large Generative Models Meet Multimodal Applications, ACM Multimedia.
  • Aug 2023: 1 paper accepted to ACM Computing Surveys.
  • Jul 2023: 1 paper accepted to ICCV as Oral presentation (~1% of submissions) and 1 paper accepted to ACM MM.
  • Jun 2023: Presented recent work at the University of British Columbia, Canada. [Slides]
  • Jun 2023: Attended CVPR in Vancover, Canada.
  • Apr 2023: Visiting University of Malaya at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
  • Mar 2023: One paper on Visual Question Answering accepted to CVPR 2023. One paper accepted to ICME 2023.
  • Feb 2023: I presented recent work at Tsinghua University and Shandong University.
  • Jan 2023: I served as a Senior Action Editor for ACL Rolling Review.
  • Dec 2022: I was at EMNLP 2022 in Abu Dhabi, UAE.
  • Oct 2022: Three papers accepted to EMNLP Findings 2022.
  • Mar 2021: Received the NRF Fellowship award with funding of 3M SGD.