Towards Robust Online Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation under Adverse Weather Conditions

Online Domain Adaptation (OnDA) is designed to handle unforeseeable domain changes at minimal cost that occur during the deployment of the model, lacking clear boundaries between the domain, such as sudden weather events. However, existing OnDA methods that rely solely on the model itself to adapt to the current domain often misidentify ambiguous classes amidst continuous domain shifts and pass on this erroneous knowledge to the next domain. To tackle this, we propose \textbf{RODASS}, a \textbf{R}obust \textbf{O}nline \textbf{D}omain \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{S}emantic \textbf{S}egmentation framework, which dynamically detects domain shifts and adjusts hyper-parameters to minimize training costs and error propagation. Specifically, we introduce the \textbf{D}ynamic \textbf{A}mbiguous \textbf{P}atch \textbf{Mask} (\textbf{DAP Mask}) strategy, which dynamically selects highly disturbed regions and masks these regions, mitigating error accumulation in ambiguous classes and enhancing the model's robustness against external noise in dynamic natural environments. Additionally, we present the \textbf{D}ynamic \textbf{S}ource \textbf{C}lass \textbf{Mix} (\textbf{DSC Mix}), a domain-aware mix method that augments target domain scenes with class-level source buffers, reducing the high uncertainty and noisy labels, thereby accelerating adaptation and offering a more efficient solution for online domain adaptation. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on widely used OnDA benchmarks while maintaining approximately 40 frames per second (FPS).

Multi-periodicity dependency Transformer based on spectrum offset for radio frequency fingerprint identification

Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification (RFFI) has emerged as a pivotal task for reliable device authentication. Despite advancements in RFFI methods, background noise and intentional modulation features result in weak energy and subtle differences in the RFF features. These challenges diminish the capability of RFFI methods in feature representation, complicating the effective identification of device identities. This paper proposes a novel Multi-Periodicity Dependency Transformer (MPDFormer) to address these challenges. The MPDFormer employs a spectrum offset-based periodic embedding representation to augment the discrepency of intrinsic features. We delve into the intricacies of the periodicity-dependency attention mechanism, integrating both inter-period and intra-period attention mechanisms. This mechanism facilitates the extraction of both long and short-range periodicity-dependency features , accentuating the feature distinction whilst concurrently attenuating the perturbations caused by background noise and weak-periodicity features. Empirical results demonstrate MPDFormer's superiority over established baseline methods, achieving a 0.07s inference time on NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX.

Planning with Large Language Models for Conversational Agents

Controllability and proactivity are crucial properties of autonomous conversational agents (CAs). Controllability requires the CAs to follow the standard operating procedures (SOPs), such as verifying identity before activating credit cards. Proactivity requires the CAs to guide the conversation towards the goal during user uncooperation, such as persuasive dialogue. Existing research cannot be unified with controllability, proactivity, and low manual annotation. To bridge this gap, we propose a new framework for planning-based conversational agents (PCA) powered by large language models (LLMs), which only requires humans to define tasks and goals for the LLMs. Before conversation, LLM plans the core and necessary SOP for dialogue offline. During the conversation, LLM plans the best action path online referring to the SOP, and generates responses to achieve process controllability. Subsequently, we propose a semi-automatic dialogue data creation framework and curate a high-quality dialogue dataset (PCA-D). Meanwhile, we develop multiple variants and evaluation metrics for PCA, e.g., planning with Monte Carlo Tree Search (PCA-M), which searches for the optimal dialogue action while satisfying SOP constraints and achieving the proactive of the dialogue. Experiment results show that LLMs finetuned on PCA-D can significantly improve the performance and generalize to unseen domains. PCA-M outperforms other CoT and ToT baselines in terms of conversation controllability, proactivity, task success rate, and overall logical coherence, and is applicable in industry dialogue scenarios. The dataset and codes are available at XXXX.

Deep Learning Segmentation of Ascites on Abdominal CT Scans for Automatic Volume Quantification

Purpose: To evaluate the performance of an automated deep learning method in detecting ascites and subsequently quantifying its volume in patients with liver cirrhosis and ovarian cancer. Materials and Methods: This retrospective study included contrast-enhanced and non-contrast abdominal-pelvic CT scans of patients with cirrhotic ascites and patients with ovarian cancer from two institutions, National Institutes of Health (NIH) and University of Wisconsin (UofW). The model, trained on The Cancer Genome Atlas Ovarian Cancer dataset (mean age, 60 years +/- 11 [s.d.]; 143 female), was tested on two internal (NIH-LC and NIH-OV) and one external dataset (UofW-LC). Its performance was measured by the Dice coefficient, standard deviations, and 95% confidence intervals, focusing on ascites volume in the peritoneal cavity. Results: On NIH-LC (25 patients; mean age, 59 years +/- 14 [s.d.]; 14 male) and NIH-OV (166 patients; mean age, 65 years +/- 9 [s.d.]; all female), the model achieved Dice scores of 0.855 +/- 0.061 (CI: 0.831-0.878) and 0.826 +/- 0.153 (CI: 0.764-0.887), with median volume estimation errors of 19.6% (IQR: 13.2-29.0) and 5.3% (IQR: 2.4-9.7) respectively. On UofW-LC (124 patients; mean age, 46 years +/- 12 [s.d.]; 73 female), the model had a Dice score of 0.830 +/- 0.107 (CI: 0.798-0.863) and median volume estimation error of 9.7% (IQR: 4.5-15.1). The model showed strong agreement with expert assessments, with r^2 values of 0.79, 0.98, and 0.97 across the test sets. Conclusion: The proposed deep learning method performed well in segmenting and quantifying the volume of ascites in concordance with expert radiologist assessments.

PFID: Privacy First Inference Delegation Framework for LLMs

This paper introduces a novel privacy-preservation framework named PFID for LLMs that addresses critical privacy concerns by localizing user data through model sharding and singular value decomposition. When users are interacting with LLM systems, their prompts could be subject to being exposed to eavesdroppers within or outside LLM system providers who are interested in collecting users' input. In this work, we proposed a framework to camouflage user input, so as to alleviate privacy issues. Our framework proposes to place model shards on the client and the public server, we sent compressed hidden states instead of prompts to and from servers. Clients have held back information that can re-privatized the hidden states so that overall system performance is comparable to traditional LLMs services. Our framework was designed to be communication efficient, computation can be delegated to the local client so that the server's computation burden can be lightened. We conduct extensive experiments on machine translation tasks to verify our framework's performance.

A Single-Step Non-Autoregressive Automatic Speech Recognition Architecture with High Accuracy and Inference Speed

Non-autoregressive (NAR) automatic speech recognition (ASR) models predict tokens independently and simultaneously, bringing high inference speed. However, there is still a gap in the accuracy of the NAR models compared to the autoregressive (AR) models. To further narrow the gap between the NAR and AR models, we propose a single-step NAR ASR architecture with high accuracy and inference speed, called EfficientASR. It uses an Index Mapping Vector (IMV) based alignment generator to generate alignments during training, and an alignment predictor to learn the alignments for inference. It can be trained end-to-end (E2E) with cross-entropy loss combined with alignment loss. The proposed EfficientASR achieves competitive results on the AISHELL-1 and AISHELL-2 benchmarks compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. Specifically, it achieves character error rates (CER) of 4.26%/4.62% on the AISHELL-1 dev/test dataset, which outperforms the SOTA AR Conformer with about 30x inference speedup.

RREH: Reconstruction Relations Embedded Hashing for Semi-Paired Cross-Modal Retrieval

Known for efficient computation and easy storage, hashing has been extensively explored in cross-modal retrieval. The majority of current hashing models are predicated on the premise of a direct one-to-one mapping between data points. However, in real practice, data correspondence across modalities may be partially provided. In this research, we introduce an innovative unsupervised hashing technique designed for semi-paired cross-modal retrieval tasks, named Reconstruction Relations Embedded Hashing (RREH). RREH assumes that multi-modal data share a common subspace. For paired data, RREH explores the latent consistent information of heterogeneous modalities by seeking a shared representation. For unpaired data, to effectively capture the latent discriminative features, the high-order relationships between unpaired data and anchors are embedded into the latent subspace, which are computed by efficient linear reconstruction. The anchors are sampled from paired data, which improves the efficiency of hash learning. The RREH trains the underlying features and the binary encodings in a unified framework with high-order reconstruction relations preserved. With the well devised objective function and discrete optimization algorithm, RREH is designed to be scalable, making it suitable for large-scale datasets and facilitating efficient cross-modal retrieval. In the evaluation process, the proposed is tested with partially paired data to establish its superiority over several existing methods.

Enhancing Emotion Recognition in Conversation through Emotional Cross-Modal Fusion and Inter-class Contrastive Learning

The purpose of emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is to identify the emotion category of an utterance based on contextual information. Previous ERC methods relied on simple connections for cross-modal fusion and ignored the information differences between modalities, resulting in the model being unable to focus on modality-specific emotional information. At the same time, the shared information between modalities was not processed to generate emotions. Information redundancy problem. To overcome these limitations, we propose a cross-modal fusion emotion prediction network based on vector connections. The network mainly includes two stages: the multi-modal feature fusion stage based on connection vectors and the emotion classification stage based on fused features. Furthermore, we design a supervised inter-class contrastive learning module based on emotion labels. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, demonstrating excellent performance on the IEMOCAP and MELD datasets.

RSET: Remapping-based Sorting Method for Emotion Transfer Speech Synthesis

Although current Text-To-Speech (TTS) models are able to generate high-quality speech samples, there are still challenges in developing emotion intensity controllable TTS. Most existing TTS models achieve emotion intensity control by extracting intensity information from reference speeches. Unfortunately, limited by the lack of modeling for intra-class emotion intensity and the model's information decoupling capability, the generated speech cannot achieve fine-grained emotion intensity control and suffers from information leakage issues. In this paper, we propose an emotion transfer TTS model, which defines a remapping-based sorting method to model intra-class relative intensity information, combined with Mutual Information (MI) to decouple speaker and emotion information, and synthesizes expressive speeches with perceptible intensity differences. Experiments show that our model achieves fine-grained emotion control while preserving speaker information.

Task-agnostic Decision Transformer for Multi-type Agent Control with Federated Split Training

With the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, the development of knowledgeable and personalized agents has become increasingly prevalent. However, the inherent variability in state variables and action spaces among personalized agents poses significant aggregation challenges for traditional federated learning algorithms. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Federated Split Decision Transformer (FSDT), an innovative framework designed explicitly for AI agent decision tasks. The FSDT framework excels at navigating the intricacies of personalized agents by harnessing distributed data for training while preserving data privacy. It employs a two-stage training process, with local embedding and prediction models on client agents and a global transformer decoder model on the server. Our comprehensive evaluation using the benchmark D4RL dataset highlights the superior performance of our algorithm in federated split learning for personalized agents, coupled with significant reductions in communication and computational overhead compared to traditional centralized training approaches. The FSDT framework demonstrates strong potential for enabling efficient and privacy-preserving collaborative learning in applications such as autonomous driving decision systems. Our findings underscore the efficacy of the FSDT framework in effectively leveraging distributed offline reinforcement learning data to enable powerful multi-type agent decision systems.