AutoStyle-TTS: Retrieval-Augmented Generation based Automatic Style Matching Text-to-Speech Synthesis

With the advancement of speech synthesis technology, users have higher expectations for the naturalness and expressiveness of synthesized speech. But previous research ignores the importance of prompt selection. This study proposes a text-to-speech (TTS) framework based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology, which can dynamically adjust the speech style according to the text content to achieve more natural and vivid communication effects. We have constructed a speech style knowledge database containing high-quality speech samples in various contexts and developed a style matching scheme. This scheme uses embeddings, extracted by Llama, PER-LLM-Embedder,and Moka, to match with samples in the knowledge database, selecting the most appropriate speech style for synthesis. Furthermore, our empirical research validates the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our demo can be viewed at: https://thuhcsi.github.io/icme2025-AutoStyle-TTS

Assessing Markov Property in Driving Behaviors: Insights from Statistical Tests

The Markov property serves as a foundational assumption in most existing work on vehicle driving behavior, positing that future states depend solely on the current state, not the series of preceding states. This study validates the Markov properties of vehicle trajectories for both Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and Human-driven Vehicles (HVs). A statistical method used to test whether time series data exhibits Markov properties is applied to examine whether the trajectory data possesses Markov characteristics. t test and F test are additionally introduced to characterize the differences in Markov properties between AVs and HVs. Based on two public trajectory datasets, we investigate the presence and order of the Markov property of different types of vehicles through rigorous statistical tests. Our findings reveal that AV trajectories generally exhibit stronger Markov properties compared to HV trajectories, with a higher percentage conforming to the Markov property and lower Markov orders. In contrast, HV trajectories display greater variability and heterogeneity in decision-making processes, reflecting the complex perception and information processing involved in human driving. These results have significant implications for the development of driving behavior models, AV controllers, and traffic simulation systems. Our study also demonstrates the feasibility of using statistical methods to test the presence of Markov properties in driving trajectory data.

Position-Aware Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning Approach for Reducing Positional Bias in LLMs

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enhanced their ability to process long input contexts. This development is particularly crucial for tasks that involve retrieving knowledge from an external datastore, which can result in long inputs. However, recent studies show a positional bias in LLMs, demonstrating varying performance depending on the location of useful information within the input sequence. In this study, we conduct extensive experiments to investigate the root causes of positional bias. Our findings indicate that the primary contributor to LLM positional bias stems from the inherent positional preferences of different models. We demonstrate that merely employing prompt-based solutions is inadequate for overcoming the positional preferences. To address this positional bias issue of a pre-trained LLM, we developed a Position-Aware Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PAPEFT) approach which is composed of a data augmentation technique and a parameter efficient adapter, enhancing a uniform attention distribution across the input context. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively reduces positional bias, improving LLMs' effectiveness in handling long context sequences for various tasks that require externally retrieved knowledge.

Human as AI Mentor: Enhanced Human-in-the-loop Reinforcement Learning for Safe and Efficient Autonomous Driving

Despite significant progress in autonomous vehicles (AVs), the development of driving policies that ensure both the safety of AVs and traffic flow efficiency has not yet been fully explored. In this paper, we propose an enhanced human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning method, termed the Human as AI mentor-based deep reinforcement learning (HAIM-DRL) framework, which facilitates safe and efficient autonomous driving in mixed traffic platoon. Drawing inspiration from the human learning process, we first introduce an innovative learning paradigm that effectively injects human intelligence into AI, termed Human as AI mentor (HAIM). In this paradigm, the human expert serves as a mentor to the AI agent. While allowing the agent to sufficiently explore uncertain environments, the human expert can take control in dangerous situations and demonstrate correct actions to avoid potential accidents. On the other hand, the agent could be guided to minimize traffic flow disturbance, thereby optimizing traffic flow efficiency. In detail, HAIM-DRL leverages data collected from free exploration and partial human demonstrations as its two training sources. Remarkably, we circumvent the intricate process of manually designing reward functions; instead, we directly derive proxy state-action values from partial human demonstrations to guide the agents' policy learning. Additionally, we employ a minimal intervention technique to reduce the human mentor's cognitive load. Comparative results show that HAIM-DRL outperforms traditional methods in driving safety, sampling efficiency, mitigation of traffic flow disturbance, and generalizability to unseen traffic scenarios. The code and demo videos for this paper can be accessed at: https://zilin-huang.github.io/HAIM-DRL-website/

Language Control in Robotics

For robots performing a assistive tasks for the humans, it is crucial to synchronize their speech with their motions, in order to achieve natural and effective human-robot interaction. When a robot's speech is out of sync with their motions, it can cause confusion, frustration, and misinterpretation of the robot's intended meaning. Humans are accustomed to using both verbal and nonverbal cues to understand and coordinate with each other, and robots that can align their speech with their actions can tap into this natural mode of communication. In this research, we propose a language controller for robots to control the pace, tone, and pauses of their speech along with it's motion in the trajectory. The robot's speed is adjusted using an admittance controller based on the force input from the user, and the robot's speech speed is modulated using phase-vocoders.

KEPLET: Knowledge-Enhanced Pretrained Language Model with Topic Entity Awareness

In recent years, Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have shown their superiority by pre-training on unstructured text corpus and then fine-tuning on downstream tasks. On entity-rich textual resources like Wikipedia, Knowledge-Enhanced PLMs (KEPLMs) incorporate the interactions between tokens and mentioned entities in pre-training, and are thus more effective on entity-centric tasks such as entity linking and relation classification. Although exploiting Wikipedia's rich structures to some extent, conventional KEPLMs still neglect a unique layout of the corpus where each Wikipedia page is around a topic entity (identified by the page URL and shown in the page title). In this paper, we demonstrate that KEPLMs without incorporating the topic entities will lead to insufficient entity interaction and biased (relation) word semantics. We thus propose KEPLET, a novel Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained LanguagE model with Topic entity awareness. In an end-to-end manner, KEPLET identifies where to add the topic entity's information in a Wikipedia sentence, fuses such information into token and mentioned entities representations, and supervises the network learning, through which it takes topic entities back into consideration. Experiments demonstrated the generality and superiority of KEPLET which was applied to two representative KEPLMs, achieving significant improvements on four entity-centric tasks.

An Avatar Robot Overlaid with the 3D Human Model of a Remote Operator

Although telepresence assistive robots have made significant progress, they still lack the sense of realism and physical presence of the remote operator. This results in a lack of trust and adoption of such robots. In this paper, we introduce an Avatar Robot System which is a mixed real/virtual robotic system that physically interacts with a person in proximity of the robot. The robot structure is overlaid with the 3D model of the remote caregiver and visualized through Augmented Reality (AR). In this way, the person receives haptic feedback as the robot touches him/her. We further present an Optimal Non-Iterative Alignment solver that solves for the optimally aligned pose of 3D Human model to the robot (shoulder to the wrist non-iteratively). The proposed alignment solver is stateless, achieves optimal alignment and faster than the baseline solvers (demonstrated in our evaluations). We also propose an evaluation framework that quantifies the alignment quality of the solvers through multifaceted metrics. We show that our solver can consistently produce poses with similar or superior alignments as IK-based baselines without their potential drawbacks.

CLICKER: Attention-Based Cross-Lingual Commonsense Knowledge Transfer

Recent advances in cross-lingual commonsense reasoning (CSR) are facilitated by the development of multilingual pre-trained models (mPTMs). While mPTMs show the potential to encode commonsense knowledge for different languages, transferring commonsense knowledge learned in large-scale English corpus to other languages is challenging. To address this problem, we propose the attention-based Cross-LIngual Commonsense Knowledge transfER (CLICKER) framework, which minimizes the performance gaps between English and non-English languages in commonsense question-answering tasks. CLICKER effectively improves commonsense reasoning for non-English languages by differentiating non-commonsense knowledge from commonsense knowledge. Experimental results on public benchmarks demonstrate that CLICKER achieves remarkable improvements in the cross-lingual CSR task for languages other than English.

Self-Aware Feedback-Based Self-Learning in Large-Scale Conversational AI

Self-learning paradigms in large-scale conversational AI agents tend to leverage user feedback in bridging between what they say and what they mean. However, such learning, particularly in Markov-based query rewriting systems have far from addressed the impact of these models on future training where successive feedback is inevitably contingent on the rewrite itself, especially in a continually updating environment. In this paper, we explore the consequences of this inherent lack of self-awareness towards impairing the model performance, ultimately resulting in both Type I and II errors over time. To that end, we propose augmenting the Markov Graph construction with a superposition-based adjacency matrix. Here, our method leverages an induced stochasticity to reactively learn a locally-adaptive decision boundary based on the performance of the individual rewrites in a bi-variate beta setting. We also surface a data augmentation strategy that leverages template-based generation in abridging complex conversation hierarchies of dialogs so as to simplify the learning process. All in all, we demonstrate that our self-aware model improves the overall PR-AUC by 27.45%, achieves a relative defect reduction of up to 31.22%, and is able to adapt quicker to changes in global preferences across a large number of customers.

A Vocabulary-Free Multilingual Neural Tokenizer for End-to-End Task Learning

Subword tokenization is a commonly used input pre-processing step in most recent NLP models. However, it limits the models' ability to leverage end-to-end task learning. Its frequency-based vocabulary creation compromises tokenization in low-resource languages, leading models to produce suboptimal representations. Additionally, the dependency on a fixed vocabulary limits the subword models' adaptability across languages and domains. In this work, we propose a vocabulary-free neural tokenizer by distilling segmentation information from heuristic-based subword tokenization. We pre-train our character-based tokenizer by processing unique words from multilingual corpus, thereby extensively increasing word diversity across languages. Unlike the predefined and fixed vocabularies in subword methods, our tokenizer allows end-to-end task learning, resulting in optimal task-specific tokenization. The experimental results show that replacing the subword tokenizer with our neural tokenizer consistently improves performance on multilingual (NLI) and code-switching (sentiment analysis) tasks, with larger gains in low-resource languages. Additionally, our neural tokenizer exhibits a robust performance on downstream tasks when adversarial noise is present (typos and misspelling), further increasing the initial improvements over statistical subword tokenizers.