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Bang Yang

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4 papers

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Not All Tokens and Heads Are Equally Important: Dual-Level Attention Intervention for Hallucination Mitigation

Lexiang Tang
Xianwei Zhuang
Bang Yang
Zhiyuan Hu
Hongxiang Li
Lu Ma
Jinghan Ru
Yuexian Zou

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across diverse multimodal tasks, yet they remain highly susceptible to visual hallucinations (VH), often producing confident but inaccurate descriptions of visual content. Building on the insight that not all tokens and attention heads contribute equally to VH mitigation, we introduce VisFlow, a lightweight and training-free framework that alleviates hallucinations by directly modulating attention patterns during inference. To address two primary challenges of VH, namely insufficient visual attention and the dominance of language priors, we identify three problematic attention behaviors in LVLMs: (1) disproportionate allocation of attention to uninformative or trailing visual tokens, (2) over-dependence on the previously generated token, and (3) excessive fixation on system prompts that hinders multimodal integration. To overcome these issues, VisFlow introduces a dual-level Attention Intervention, consisting of Token-level Attention Intervention (TAI), which reinforces attention to salient visual regions, and Head-level Attention Intervention (HAI), which suppresses undue focus on system prompts and adjacent text tokens. Together, these interventions strengthen visual alignment while reducing linguistic bias. Extensive experiments across diverse models and benchmarks demonstrate that VisFlow effectively mitigates hallucinations with minimal computational overhead.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Embracing Language Inclusivity and Diversity in CLIP through Continual Language Learning

Bang Yang
Yong Dai
Xuxin Cheng
Yaowei Li
Asif Raza
Yuexian Zou

While vision-language pre-trained models (VL-PTMs) have advanced multimodal research in recent years, their mastery in a few languages like English restricts their applicability in broader communities. To this end, there is an increasing interest in developing multilingual VL models via a joint-learning setup, which, however, could be unrealistic due to expensive costs and data availability. In this work, we propose to extend VL-PTMs' language capacity by continual language learning (CLL), where a model needs to update its linguistic knowledge incrementally without suffering from catastrophic forgetting (CF). We begin our study by introducing a model dubbed CLL-CLIP, which builds upon CLIP, a prevailing VL-PTM that has acquired image-English text alignment. Specifically, CLL-CLIP contains an expandable token embedding layer to handle linguistic differences. It solely trains token embeddings to improve memory stability and is optimized under cross-modal and cross-lingual objectives to learn the alignment between images and multilingual texts. To alleviate CF raised by covariate shift and lexical overlap, we further propose a novel approach that ensures the identical distribution of all token embeddings during initialization and regularizes token embedding learning during training. We construct a CLL benchmark covering 36 languages based on MSCOCO and XM3600 datasets and then evaluate multilingual image-text retrieval performance. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of CLL-CLIP and show that our approach can boost CLL-CLIP, e.g., by 6.7% in text-to-image average Recall@1 on XM3600, and improve various state-of-the-art methods consistently. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/yangbang18/CLFM.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Retrieve, Reason, and Refine: Generating Accurate and Faithful Patient Instructions

Fenglin Liu
Bang Yang
Chenyu You
Xian Wu
Shen Ge
Zhangdaihong Liu
Xu Sun
Yang Yang

The "Patient Instruction" (PI), which contains critical instructional information provided both to carers and to the patient at the time of discharge, is essential for the patient to manage their condition outside hospital. An accurate and easy-to-follow PI can improve the self-management of patients which can in turn reduce hospital readmission rates. However, writing an appropriate PI can be extremely time consuming for physicians, and is subject to being incomplete or error-prone for (potentially overworked) physicians. Therefore, we propose a new task that can provide an objective means of avoiding incompleteness, while reducing clinical workload: the automatic generation of the PI, which is imagined as being a document that the clinician can review, modify, and approve as necessary (rather than taking the human "out of the loop"). We build a benchmark clinical dataset and propose the Re$^3$Writer, which imitates the working patterns of physicians to first retrieve related working experience from historical PIs written by physicians, then reason related medical knowledge. Finally, it refines the retrieved working experience and reasoned medical knowledge to extract useful information, which is used to generate the PI for previously-unseen patient according to their health records during hospitalization. Our experiments show that, using our method, the performance of 6 different models can be substantially boosted across all metrics, with up to 20%, 11%, and 19% relative improvements in BLEU-4, ROUGE-L, and METEOR, respectively. Meanwhile, we show results from human evaluations to measure the effectiveness in terms of its usefulness for clinical practice. The code is available at https: //github. com/AI-in-Health/Patient-Instructions.

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AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Non-Autoregressive Coarse-to-Fine Video Captioning

Bang Yang
Yuexian Zou
Fenglin Liu
Can Zhang

It is encouraged to see that progress has been made to bridge videos and natural language. However, mainstream video captioning methods suffer from slow inference speed due to the sequential manner of autoregressive decoding, and prefer generating generic descriptions due to the insufficient training of visual words (e. g. , nouns and verbs) and inadequate decoding paradigm. In this paper, we propose a nonautoregressive decoding based model with a coarse-to-fine captioning procedure to alleviate these defects. In implementations, we employ a bi-directional self-attention based network as our language model for achieving inference speedup, based on which we decompose the captioning procedure into two stages, where the model has different focuses. Specifically, given that visual words determine the semantic correctness of captions, we design a mechanism of generating visual words to not only promote the training of scene-related words but also capture relevant details from videos to construct a coarse-grained sentence “template”. Thereafter, we devise dedicated decoding algorithms that fill in the “template” with suitable words and modify inappropriate phrasing via iterative refinement to obtain a fine-grained description. Extensive experiments on two mainstream video captioning benchmarks, i. e. , MSVD and MSR-VTT, demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, generates diverse descriptions, and obtains high inference efficiency.

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