OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
TransFace: Unit-Based Audio-Visual Speech Synthesizer for Talking Head Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Direct speech-to-speech translation achieves high-quality results through the introduction of discrete units obtained from self-supervised learning. This approach circumvents delays and cascading errors associated with model cascading. However, talking head translation, converting audio-visual speech (i.e., talking head video) from one language into another, still confronts several challenges compared to audio speech: (1) Existing methods invariably rely on cascading, synthesizing via both audio and text, resulting in delays and cascading errors. (2) Talking head translation has a limited set of reference frames. If the generated translation exceeds the length of the original speech, the video sequence needs to be supplemented by repeating frames, leading to jarring video transitions. In this work, we propose a model for talking head translation, \textbf{TransFace}, which can directly translate audio-visual speech into audio-visual speech in other languages. It consists of a speech-to-unit translation model to convert audio speech into discrete units and a unit-based audio-visual speech synthesizer, Unit2Lip, to re-synthesize synchronized audio-visual speech from discrete units in parallel. Furthermore, we introduce a Bounded Duration Predictor, ensuring isometric talking head translation and preventing duplicate reference frames. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed Unit2Lip model significantly improves synchronization (1.601 and 0.982 on LSE-C for the original and generated audio speech, respectively) and boosts inference speed by a factor of 4.35 on LRS2. Additionally, TransFace achieves impressive BLEU scores of 61.93 and 47.55 for Es-En and Fr-En on LRS3-T and 100% isochronous translations.
QoE modeling for Voice over IP: Simplified E-model Enhancement Utilizing the Subjective MOS Prediction Model
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2023
Year: 2023

This research proposes an enhanced measurement method for VoIP quality assessment which provides an improvement to accuracy and reliability. To improve the objective measurement tool called the simplified E-model for the selected codec, G.729, it has been enhanced by utilizing a subjective MOS prediction model based on native Thai users, who use the Thai-tonal language. Then, the different results from the simplified E-model and subjective MOS prediction model were used to create the Bias function, before adding to the simplified E-model. Finally, it has been found that the outputs from the enhanced simplified E-model for the G.729 codec shows better accuracy when compared to the original simplified E-model, specially, after the enhanced model has been evaluated with 4 test sets. The major contribution of this enhancement is that errors are reduced by 58.87 % when compared to the generic simplified E-model. That means the enhanced simplified E-model as proposed in this study can provide improvement beyond the original simplified one significantly.
VIOLET: Visual Analytics for Explainable Quantum Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

With the rapid development of Quantum Machine Learning, quantum neural networks (QNN) have experienced great advancement in the past few years, harnessing the advantages of quantum computing to significantly speed up classical machine learning tasks. Despite their increasing popularity, the quantum neural network is quite counter-intuitive and difficult to understand, due to their unique quantum-specific layers (e.g., data encoding and measurement) in their architecture. It prevents QNN users and researchers from effectively understanding its inner workings and exploring the model training status. To fill the research gap, we propose VIOLET, a novel visual analytics approach to improve the explainability of quantum neural networks. Guided by the design requirements distilled from the interviews with domain experts and the literature survey, we developed three visualization views: the Encoder View unveils the process of converting classical input data into quantum states, the Ansatz View reveals the temporal evolution of quantum states in the training process, and the Feature View displays the features a QNN has learned after the training process. Two novel visual designs, i.e., satellite chart and augmented heatmap, are proposed to visually explain the variational parameters and quantum circuit measurements respectively. We evaluate VIOLET through two case studies and in-depth interviews with 12 domain experts. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of VIOLET in helping QNN users and developers intuitively understand and explore quantum neural networks
Q-Boost: On Visual Quality Assessment Ability of Low-level Multi-Modality Foundation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recent advancements in Multi-modality Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex high-level vision tasks. However, the exploration of MLLM potential in visual quality assessment, a vital aspect of low-level vision, remains limited. To address this gap, we introduce Q-Boost, a novel strategy designed to enhance low-level MLLMs in image quality assessment (IQA) and video quality assessment (VQA) tasks, which is structured around two pivotal components: 1) Triadic-Tone Integration: Ordinary prompt design simply oscillates between the binary extremes of $positive$ and $negative$. Q-Boost innovates by incorporating a `middle ground' approach through $neutral$ prompts, allowing for a more balanced and detailed assessment. 2) Multi-Prompt Ensemble: Multiple quality-centric prompts are used to mitigate bias and acquire more accurate evaluation. The experimental results show that the low-level MLLMs exhibit outstanding zeros-shot performance on the IQA/VQA tasks equipped with the Q-Boost strategy.
Toward Rapid Bug Resolution for Android Apps
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Bug reports document unexpected behaviors in software, enabling developers to understand, validate, and fix bugs. Unfortunately, a significant portion of bug reports is of low quality, which poses challenges for developers in terms of addressing these issues. Prior research has delved into the information needed for documenting high-quality bug reports and expediting bug report management. Furthermore, researchers have explored the challenges associated with bug report management and proposed various automated techniques. Nevertheless, these techniques exhibit several limitations, including a lexical gap between developers and reporters, difficulties in bug reproduction, and identifying bug locations. Therefore, there is a pressing need for additional efforts to effectively manage bug reports and enhance the quality of both desktop and mobile applications. In this paper, we describe the existing limitations of bug reports and identify potential strategies for addressing them. Our vision encompasses a future where the alleviation of these limitations and successful execution of our proposed new research directions can benefit both reporters and developers, ultimately making the entire software maintenance faster.
Representing Outcome-driven Higher-order Dependencies in Graphs of Disease Trajectories
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The widespread application of machine learning techniques to biomedical data has produced many new insights into disease progression and improving clinical care. Inspired by the flexibility and interpretability of graphs (networks), as well as the potency of sequence models like transformers and higher-order networks (HONs), we propose a method that identifies combinations of risk factors for a given outcome and accurately encodes these higher-order relationships in a graph. Using historical data from 913,475 type 2 diabetes (T2D) patients, we found that, compared to other approaches, the proposed networks encode significantly more information about the progression of T2D toward a variety of outcomes. We additionally demonstrate how structural information from the proposed graph can be used to augment the performance of transformer-based models on predictive tasks, especially when the data are noisy. By increasing the order, or memory, of the graph, we show how the proposed method illuminates key risk factors while successfully ignoring noisy elements, which facilitates analysis that is simultaneously accurate and interpretable.
Fairness-Aware Structured Pruning in Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The increasing size of large language models (LLMs) has introduced challenges in their training and inference. Removing model components is perceived as a solution to tackle the large model sizes, however, existing pruning methods solely focus on performance, without considering an essential aspect for the responsible use of LLMs: model fairness. It is crucial to address the fairness of LLMs towards diverse groups, such as women, Black people, LGBTQ+, Jewish communities, among others, as they are being deployed and available to a wide audience. In this work, first, we investigate how attention heads impact fairness and performance in pre-trained transformer-based language models. We then propose a novel method to prune the attention heads that negatively impact fairness while retaining the heads critical for performance, i.e. language modeling capabilities. Our approach is practical in terms of time and resources, as it does not require fine-tuning the final pruned, and fairer, model. Our findings demonstrate a reduction in gender bias by 19%, 19.5%, 39.5%, 34.7%, 23%, and 8% for DistilGPT-2, GPT-2, GPT-Neo of two different sizes, GPT-J, and Llama 2 models, respectively, in comparison to the biased model, with only a slight decrease in performance.
Combinatorial music generation model with song structure graph analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

In this work, we propose a symbolic music generation model with the song structure graph analysis network. We construct a graph that uses information such as note sequence and instrument as node features, while the correlation between note sequences acts as the edge feature. We trained a Graph Neural Network to obtain node representation in the graph, then we use node representation as input of Unet to generate CONLON pianoroll image latent. The outcomes of our experimental results show that the proposed model can generate a comprehensive form of music. Our approach represents a promising and innovative method for symbolic music generation and holds potential applications in various fields in Music Information Retreival, including music composition, music classification, and music inpainting systems.
Evaluating Code Summarization Techniques: A New Metric and an Empirical Characterization
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Several code summarization techniques have been proposed in the literature to automatically document a code snippet or a function. Ideally, software developers should be involved in assessing the quality of the generated summaries. However, in most cases, researchers rely on automatic evaluation metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE, and METEOR. These metrics are all based on the same assumption: The higher the textual similarity between the generated summary and a reference summary written by developers, the higher its quality. However, there are two reasons for which this assumption falls short: (i) reference summaries, e.g., code comments collected by mining software repositories, may be of low quality or even outdated; (ii) generated summaries, while using a different wording than a reference one, could be semantically equivalent to it, thus still being suitable to document the code snippet. In this paper, we perform a thorough empirical investigation on the complementarity of different types of metrics in capturing the quality of a generated summary. Also, we propose to address the limitations of existing metrics by considering a new dimension, capturing the extent to which the generated summary aligns with the semantics of the documented code snippet, independently from the reference summary. To this end, we present a new metric based on contrastive learning to capture said aspect. We empirically show that the inclusion of this novel dimension enables a more effective representation of developers' evaluations regarding the quality of automatically generated summaries.
DRAMA: Commodity DRAM based Content Addressable Memory
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2023
Year: 2023

Fast parallel search capabilities on large datasets provided by content addressable memories (CAM) are required across multiple application domains. However compared to RAM, CAMs feature high area overhead and power consumption, and as a result, they scale poorly. The proposed solution, DRAMA, enables CAM, ternary CAM (TCAM) and approximate (similarity) search CAM functionalities in unmodified commodity DRAM. DRAMA performs compare operation in a bit-serial fashion, where the search pattern (query) is coded in DRAM addresses. A single bit compare (XNOR) in DRAMA is identical to a regular DRAM read. AND and OR operations required for NAND CAM and NOR CAM respectively are implemented using nonstandard DRAM timing. We evaluate DRAMA on bacterial DNA classification and show that DRAMA can achieve 3.6 times higher performance and 19.6 times lower power consumption compared to state-of-the-art CMOS CAM based genome classification accelerator.
Study of Iterative Detection and Decoding with Log-Likelihood Ratio Based Access Point Selection for Cell-Free Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

This paper proposes an iterative detection and decoding (IDD) scheme and an approach to improve the selection of access points (APs) in uplink cell-free massive multiple-antenna systems. A cost-effective scheme for selection of APs based on local log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) is developed that provides sufficient statistics to the central processing unit and selects which APs should be considered for each user. {Numerical results show that the proposed IDD scheme works very well and the proposed LLRs-based approach to select APs outperforms the existing techniques in terms of bit error rate and spectral efficiency while requiring a comparable fronthaul load.
A Split-and-Privatize Framework for Large Language Model Fine-Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Fine-tuning is a prominent technique to adapt a pre-trained language model to downstream scenarios. In parameter-efficient fine-tuning, only a small subset of modules are trained over the downstream datasets, while leaving the rest of the pre-trained model frozen to save computation resources. In recent years, a popular productization form arises as Model-as-a-Service (MaaS), in which vendors provide abundant pre-trained language models, server resources and core functions, and customers can fine-tune, deploy and invoke their customized model by accessing the one-stop MaaS with their own private dataset. In this paper, we identify the model and data privacy leakage risks in MaaS fine-tuning, and propose a Split-and-Privatize (SAP) framework, which manage to mitigate the privacy issues by adapting the existing split learning architecture. The proposed SAP framework is sufficiently investigated by experiments, and the results indicate that it can enhance the empirical privacy by 62% at the cost of 1% model performance degradation on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank dataset.
A Comprehensive Evaluation of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning on Software Engineering Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Pre-trained models (PTMs) have achieved great success in various Software Engineering (SE) downstream tasks following the ``pre-train then fine-tune'' paradigm. As fully fine-tuning all parameters of PTMs can be computationally expensive, a widely used solution is parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), which freezes PTMs while introducing extra parameters. Though work has been done to test PEFT methods in the SE field, a comprehensive evaluation is still lacking. This paper aims to fill in this gap by evaluating the effectiveness of five PEFT methods on eight PTMs and four SE downstream tasks. For different tasks and PEFT methods, we seek answers to the following research questions: 1) Is it more effective to use PTMs trained specifically on source code, or is it sufficient to use PTMs trained on natural language text? 2) What is the impact of varying model sizes? 3) How does the model architecture affect the performance? Besides effectiveness, we also discuss the efficiency of PEFT methods, concerning the costs of required training time and GPU resource consumption. We hope that our findings can provide a deeper understanding of PEFT methods on various PTMs and SE downstream tasks. All the codes and data are available at \url{https://github.com/zwtnju/PEFT.git}.
Mesh-LOAM: Real-time Mesh-Based LiDAR Odometry and Mapping
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Despite having achieved real-time performance in mesh construction, most of the current LiDAR odometry and meshing methods may struggle to deal with complex scenes due to relying on explicit meshing schemes. They are usually sensitive to noise. To overcome these limitations, we propose a real-time mesh-based LiDAR odometry and mapping approach for large-scale scenes via implicit reconstruction and a parallel spatial-hashing scheme. To efficiently reconstruct triangular meshes, we suggest an incremental voxel meshing method that updates every scan by traversing each point once and compresses space via a scalable partition module. By taking advantage of rapid accessing triangular meshes at any time, we design point-to-mesh odometry with location and feature-based data association to estimate the poses between the incoming point clouds and the recovered triangular meshes. The experimental results on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in generating accurate motion trajectories and environmental mesh maps.
UniRef++: Segment Every Reference Object in Spatial and Temporal Spaces
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The reference-based object segmentation tasks, namely referring image segmentation (RIS), few-shot image segmentation (FSS), referring video object segmentation (RVOS), and video object segmentation (VOS), aim to segment a specific object by utilizing either language or annotated masks as references. Despite significant progress in each respective field, current methods are task-specifically designed and developed in different directions, which hinders the activation of multi-task capabilities for these tasks. In this work, we end the current fragmented situation and propose UniRef++ to unify the four reference-based object segmentation tasks with a single architecture. At the heart of our approach is the proposed UniFusion module which performs multiway-fusion for handling different tasks with respect to their specified references. And a unified Transformer architecture is then adopted for achieving instance-level segmentation. With the unified designs, UniRef++ can be jointly trained on a broad range of benchmarks and can flexibly complete multiple tasks at run-time by specifying the corresponding references. We evaluate our unified models on various benchmarks. Extensive experimental results indicate that our proposed UniRef++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on RIS and RVOS, and performs competitively on FSS and VOS with a parameter-shared network. Moreover, we showcase that the proposed UniFusion module could be easily incorporated into the current advanced foundation model SAM and obtain satisfactory results with parameter-efficient finetuning. Codes and models are available at \url{https://github.com/FoundationVision/UniRef}.
Modality-Collaborative Transformer with Hybrid Feature Reconstruction for Robust Emotion Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

As a vital aspect of affective computing, Multimodal Emotion Recognition has been an active research area in the multimedia community. Despite recent progress, this field still confronts two major challenges in real-world applications: 1) improving the efficiency of constructing joint representations from unaligned multimodal features, and 2) relieving the performance decline caused by random modality feature missing. In this paper, we propose a unified framework, Modality-Collaborative Transformer with Hybrid Feature Reconstruction (MCT-HFR), to address these issues. The crucial component of MCT is a novel attention-based encoder which concurrently extracts and dynamically balances the intra- and inter-modality relations for all associated modalities. With additional modality-wise parameter sharing, a more compact representation can be encoded with less time and space complexity. To improve the robustness of MCT, we further introduce HFR which consists of two modules: Local Feature Imagination (LFI) and Global Feature Alignment (GFA). During model training, LFI leverages complete features as supervisory signals to recover local missing features, while GFA is designed to reduce the global semantic gap between pairwise complete and incomplete representations. Experimental evaluations on two popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms advanced baselines in both complete and incomplete data scenarios.
Curricular and Cyclical Loss for Time Series Learning Strategy
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Time series widely exists in real-world applications and many deep learning models have performed well on it. Current research has shown the importance of learning strategy for models, suggesting that the benefit is the order and size of learning samples. However, no effective strategy has been proposed for time series due to its abstract and dynamic construction. Meanwhile, the existing one-shot tasks and continuous tasks for time series necessitate distinct learning processes and mechanisms. No all-purpose approach has been suggested. In this work, we propose a novel Curricular and CyclicaL loss (CRUCIAL) to learn time series for the first time. It is model- and task-agnostic and can be plugged on top of the original loss with no extra procedure. CRUCIAL has two characteristics: It can arrange an easy-to-hard learning order by dynamically determining the sample contribution and modulating the loss amplitude; It can manage a cyclically changed dataset and achieve an adaptive cycle by correlating the loss distribution and the selection probability. We prove that compared with monotonous size, cyclical size can reduce expected error. Experiments on 3 kinds of tasks and 5 real-world datasets show the benefits of CRUCIAL for most deep learning models when learning time series.
PDiT: Interleaving Perception and Decision-making Transformers for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Designing better deep networks and better reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are both important for deep RL. This work studies the former. Specifically, the Perception and Decision-making Interleaving Transformer (PDiT) network is proposed, which cascades two Transformers in a very natural way: the perceiving one focuses on \emph{the environmental perception} by processing the observation at the patch level, whereas the deciding one pays attention to \emph{the decision-making} by conditioning on the history of the desired returns, the perceiver's outputs, and the actions. Such a network design is generally applicable to a lot of deep RL settings, e.g., both the online and offline RL algorithms under environments with either image observations, proprioception observations, or hybrid image-language observations. Extensive experiments show that PDiT can not only achieve superior performance than strong baselines in different settings but also extract explainable feature representations. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/maohangyu/PDiT}.