WangchanLion and WangchanX MRC Eval

This technical report describes the development of WangchanLion, an instruction fine-tuned model focusing on Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) in the Thai language. Our model is based on SEA-LION and a collection of instruction following datasets. To promote open research and reproducibility, we publically release all training data, code, and the final model weights under the Apache-2 license. To assess the contextual understanding capability, we conducted extensive experimental studies using two Thai MRC datasets, XQuAD and Iapp_wiki_qa_squad. Experimental results demonstrate the model's ability to comprehend the context and produce an answer faithful to the reference one in 0-shot and 1-shot settings. In addition, our evaluation goes beyond the traditional MRC. We propose a new evaluation scheme assessing the answer's correctness, helpfulness, conciseness, and contextuality. Evaluation results provide insight into how we can improve our model in the future. Our code is public at https://github.com/vistec-AI/WangchanLion.

An Efficient Self-Supervised Cross-View Training For Sentence Embedding

Self-supervised sentence representation learning is the task of constructing an embedding space for sentences without relying on human annotation efforts. One straightforward approach is to finetune a pretrained language model (PLM) with a representation learning method such as contrastive learning. While this approach achieves impressive performance on larger PLMs, the performance rapidly degrades as the number of parameters decreases. In this paper, we propose a framework called Self-supervised Cross-View Training (SCT) to narrow the performance gap between large and small PLMs. To evaluate the effectiveness of SCT, we compare it to 5 baseline and state-of-the-art competitors on seven Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) benchmarks using 5 PLMs with the number of parameters ranging from 4M to 340M. The experimental results show that STC outperforms the competitors for PLMs with less than 100M parameters in 18 of 21 cases.

Typo-Robust Representation Learning for Dense Retrieval

Dense retrieval is a basic building block of information retrieval applications. One of the main challenges of dense retrieval in real-world settings is the handling of queries containing misspelled words. A popular approach for handling misspelled queries is minimizing the representations discrepancy between misspelled queries and their pristine ones. Unlike the existing approaches, which only focus on the alignment between misspelled and pristine queries, our method also improves the contrast between each misspelled query and its surrounding queries. To assess the effectiveness of our proposed method, we compare it against the existing competitors using two benchmark datasets and two base encoders. Our method outperforms the competitors in all cases with misspelled queries. Our code and models are available at https://github. com/panuthept/DST-DenseRetrieval.

Zero-guidance Segmentation Using Zero Segment Labels

CLIP has enabled new and exciting joint vision-language applications, one of which is open-vocabulary segmentation, which can locate any segment given an arbitrary text query. In our research, we ask whether it is possible to discover semantic segments without any user guidance in the form of text queries or predefined classes, and label them using natural language automatically? We propose a novel problem zero-guidance segmentation and the first baseline that leverages two pre-trained generalist models, DINO and CLIP, to solve this problem without any fine-tuning or segmentation dataset. The general idea is to first segment an image into small over-segments, encode them into CLIP's visual-language space, translate them into text labels, and merge semantically similar segments together. The key challenge, however, is how to encode a visual segment into a segment-specific embedding that balances global and local context information, both useful for recognition. Our main contribution is a novel attention-masking technique that balances the two contexts by analyzing the attention layers inside CLIP. We also introduce several metrics for the evaluation of this new task. With CLIP's innate knowledge, our method can precisely locate the Mona Lisa painting among a museum crowd. Project page: https://zero-guide-seg.github.io/.

Thai Wav2Vec2.0 with CommonVoice V8

Recently, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), a system that converts audio into text, has caught a lot of attention in the machine learning community. Thus, a lot of publicly available models were released in HuggingFace. However, most of these ASR models are available in English; only a minority of the models are available in Thai. Additionally, most of the Thai ASR models are closed-sourced, and the performance of existing open-sourced models lacks robustness. To address this problem, we train a new ASR model on a pre-trained XLSR-Wav2Vec model with the Thai CommonVoice corpus V8 and train a trigram language model to boost the performance of our ASR model. We hope that our models will be beneficial to individuals and the ASR community in Thailand.

ReCasNet: Improving consistency within the two-stage mitosis detection framework

Mitotic count (MC) is an important histological parameter for cancer diagnosis and grading, but the manual process for obtaining MC from whole-slide histopathological images is very time-consuming and prone to error. Therefore, deep learning models have been proposed to facilitate this process. Existing approaches utilize a two-stage pipeline: the detection stage for identifying the locations of potential mitotic cells and the classification stage for refining prediction confidences. However, this pipeline formulation can lead to inconsistencies in the classification stage due to the poor prediction quality of the detection stage and the mismatches in training data distributions between the two stages. In this study, we propose a Refine Cascade Network (ReCasNet), an enhanced deep learning pipeline that mitigates the aforementioned problems with three improvements. First, window relocation was used to reduce the number of poor quality false positives generated during the detection stage. Second, object re-cropping was performed with another deep learning model to adjust poorly centered objects. Third, improved data selection strategies were introduced during the classification stage to reduce the mismatches in training data distributions. ReCasNet was evaluated on two large-scale mitotic figure recognition datasets, canine cutaneous mast cell tumor (CCMCT) and canine mammary carcinoma (CMC), which resulted in up to 4.8% percentage point improvements in the F1 scores for mitotic cell detection and 44.1% reductions in mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) for MC prediction. Techniques that underlie ReCasNet can be generalized to other two-stage object detection networks and should contribute to improving the performances of deep learning models in broad digital pathology applications.

High resolution weakly supervised localization architectures for medical images

In medical imaging, Class-Activation Map (CAM) serves as the main explainability tool by pointing to the region of interest. Since the localization accuracy from CAM is constrained by the resolution of the model's feature map, one may expect that segmentation models, which generally have large feature maps, would produce more accurate CAMs. However, we have found that this is not the case due to task mismatch. While segmentation models are developed for datasets with pixel-level annotation, only image-level annotation is available in most medical imaging datasets. Our experiments suggest that Global Average Pooling (GAP) and Group Normalization are the main culprits that worsen the localization accuracy of CAM. To address this issue, we propose Pyramid Localization Network (PYLON), a model for high-accuracy weakly-supervised localization that achieved 0.62 average point localization accuracy on NIH's Chest X-Ray 14 dataset, compared to 0.45 for a traditional CAM model. Source code and extended results are available at https://github.com/cmb-chula/pylon.

Reducing Spelling Inconsistencies in Code-Switching ASR using Contextualized CTC Loss

Code-Switching (CS) remains a challenge for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), especially character-based models. With the combined choice of characters from multiple languages, the outcome from character-based models suffers from phoneme duplication, resulting in language-inconsistent spellings. We propose Contextualized Connectionist Temporal Classification (CCTC) loss to encourage spelling consistencies of a character-based non-autoregressive ASR which allows for faster inference. The CCTC loss conditions the main prediction on the predicted contexts to ensure language consistency in the spellings. In contrast to existing CTC-based approaches, CCTC loss does not require frame-level alignments, since the context ground truth is obtained from the model's estimated path. Compared to the same model trained with regular CTC loss, our method consistently improved the ASR performance on both CS and monolingual corpora.

MetaSleepLearner: Fast Adaptation of Bio-signals-Based Sleep Stage Classifier to New Individual Subject Using Meta-Learning

Objective: Identifying bio-signals based-sleep stages requires time-consuming and tedious labor of skilled clinicians. Deep learning approaches have been introduced in order to challenge the automatic sleep stage classification conundrum. However, disadvantages can be posed in replacing the clinicians with the automatic system. Thus, we aim to develop a framework, capable of assisting the clinicians and lessening the workload. Methods: We proposed the transfer learning framework entitled MetaSleepLearner, using a Model Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML), in order to transfer the acquired sleep staging knowledge from a large dataset to new individual subject. The capability of MAML was elicited for this task by allowing clinicians to label for a few samples and let the rest be handled by the system. Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) was also applied to understand the learning course of our approach. Results: In all acquired datasets, in comparison to the conventional approach, MetaSleepLearner achieved a range of 6.15 % to 12.12 % improvement with statistical difference in the mean of both approaches. The illustration of the model interpretation after the adaptation to each subject also confirmed that the performance was directed towards reasonable learning. Conclusion: MetaSleepLearner outperformed the conventional approach as a result from the fine-tuning using the recordings of both healthy subjects and patients. Significance: This is the first paper that investigated a non-conventional pre-training method, MAML, in this task, resulting in a framework for human-machine collaboration in sleep stage classification, easing the burden of the clinicians in labelling the sleep stages through only several epochs rather than an entire recording.