Medical Speech Symptoms Classification via Disentangled Representation

Intent is defined for understanding spoken language in existing works. Both textual features and acoustic features involved in medical speech contain intent, which is important for symptomatic diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a medical speech classification model named DRSC that automatically learns to disentangle intent and content representations from textual-acoustic data for classification. The intent representations of the text domain and the Mel-spectrogram domain are extracted via intent encoders, and then the reconstructed text feature and the Mel-spectrogram feature are obtained through two exchanges. After combining the intent from two domains into a joint representation, the integrated intent representation is fed into a decision layer for classification. Experimental results show that our model obtains an average accuracy rate of 95% in detecting 25 different medical symptoms.

Bidirectional Autoregressive Diffusion Model for Dance Generation

Dance serves as a powerful medium for expressing human emotions, but the lifelike generation of dance is still a considerable challenge. Recently, diffusion models have showcased remarkable generative abilities across various domains. They hold promise for human motion generation due to their adaptable many-to-many nature. Nonetheless, current diffusion-based motion generation models often create entire motion sequences directly and unidirectionally, lacking focus on the motion with local and bidirectional enhancement. When choreographing high-quality dance movements, people need to take into account not only the musical context but also the nearby music-aligned dance motions. To authentically capture human behavior, we propose a Bidirectional Autoregressive Diffusion Model (BADM) for music-to-dance generation, where a bidirectional encoder is built to enforce that the generated dance is harmonious in both the forward and backward directions. To make the generated dance motion smoother, a local information decoder is built for local motion enhancement. The proposed framework is able to generate new motions based on the input conditions and nearby motions, which foresees individual motion slices iteratively and consolidates all predictions. To further refine the synchronicity between the generated dance and the beat, the beat information is incorporated as an input to generate better music-aligned dance movements. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing unidirectional approaches on the prominent benchmark for music-to-dance generation.

Value-Driven Mixed-Precision Quantization for Patch-Based Inference on Microcontrollers

Deploying neural networks on microcontroller units (MCUs) presents substantial challenges due to their constrained computation and memory resources. Previous researches have explored patch-based inference as a strategy to conserve memory without sacrificing model accuracy. However, this technique suffers from severe redundant computation overhead, leading to a substantial increase in execution latency. A feasible solution to address this issue is mixed-precision quantization, but it faces the challenges of accuracy degradation and a time-consuming search time. In this paper, we propose QuantMCU, a novel patch-based inference method that utilizes value-driven mixed-precision quantization to reduce redundant computation. We first utilize value-driven patch classification (VDPC) to maintain the model accuracy. VDPC classifies patches into two classes based on whether they contain outlier values. For patches containing outlier values, we apply 8-bit quantization to the feature maps on the dataflow branches that follow. In addition, for patches without outlier values, we utilize value-driven quantization search (VDQS) on the feature maps of their following dataflow branches to reduce search time. Specifically, VDQS introduces a novel quantization search metric that takes into account both computation and accuracy, and it employs entropy as an accuracy representation to avoid additional training. VDQS also adopts an iterative approach to determine the bitwidth of each feature map to further accelerate the search process. Experimental results on real-world MCU devices show that QuantMCU can reduce computation by 2.2x on average while maintaining comparable model accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art patch-based inference methods.

INCPrompt: Task-Aware incremental Prompting for Rehearsal-Free Class-incremental Learning

This paper introduces INCPrompt, an innovative continual learning solution that effectively addresses catastrophic forgetting. INCPrompt's key innovation lies in its use of adaptive key-learner and task-aware prompts that capture task-relevant information. This unique combination encapsulates general knowledge across tasks and encodes task-specific knowledge. Our comprehensive evaluation across multiple continual learning benchmarks demonstrates INCPrompt's superiority over existing algorithms, showing its effectiveness in mitigating catastrophic forgetting while maintaining high performance. These results highlight the significant impact of task-aware incremental prompting on continual learning performance.

P2DT: Mitigating Forgetting in task-incremental Learning with progressive prompt Decision Transformer

Catastrophic forgetting poses a substantial challenge for managing intelligent agents controlled by a large model, causing performance degradation when these agents face new tasks. In our work, we propose a novel solution - the Progressive Prompt Decision Transformer (P2DT). This method enhances a transformer-based model by dynamically appending decision tokens during new task training, thus fostering task-specific policies. Our approach mitigates forgetting in continual and offline reinforcement learning scenarios. Moreover, P2DT leverages trajectories collected via traditional reinforcement learning from all tasks and generates new task-specific tokens during training, thereby retaining knowledge from previous studies. Preliminary results demonstrate that our model effectively alleviates catastrophic forgetting and scales well with increasing task environments.

Leveraging Biases in Large Language Models: "bias-kNN'' for Effective Few-Shot Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant promise in various applications, including zero-shot and few-shot learning. However, their performance can be hampered by inherent biases. Instead of traditionally sought methods that aim to minimize or correct these biases, this study introduces a novel methodology named ``bias-kNN''. This approach capitalizes on the biased outputs, harnessing them as primary features for kNN and supplementing with gold labels. Our comprehensive evaluations, spanning diverse domain text classification datasets and different GPT-2 model sizes, indicate the adaptability and efficacy of the ``bias-kNN'' method. Remarkably, this approach not only outperforms conventional in-context learning in few-shot scenarios but also demonstrates robustness across a spectrum of samples, templates and verbalizers. This study, therefore, presents a unique perspective on harnessing biases, transforming them into assets for enhanced model performance.

Learning Disentangled Speech Representations with Contrastive Learning and Time-Invariant Retrieval

Voice conversion refers to transferring speaker identity with well-preserved content. Better disentanglement of speech representations leads to better voice conversion. Recent studies have found that phonetic information from input audio has the potential ability to well represent content. Besides, the speaker-style modeling with pre-trained models making the process more complex. To tackle these issues, we introduce a new method named "CTVC" which utilizes disentangled speech representations with contrastive learning and time-invariant retrieval. Specifically, a similarity-based compression module is used to facilitate a more intimate connection between the frame-level hidden features and linguistic information at phoneme-level. Additionally, a time-invariant retrieval is proposed for timbre extraction based on multiple segmentations and mutual information. Experimental results demonstrate that "CTVC" outperforms previous studies and improves the sound quality and similarity of converted results.

ED-TTS: Multi-Scale Emotion Modeling using Cross-Domain Emotion Diarization for Emotional Speech Synthesis

Existing emotional speech synthesis methods often utilize an utterance-level style embedding extracted from reference audio, neglecting the inherent multi-scale property of speech prosody. We introduce ED-TTS, a multi-scale emotional speech synthesis model that leverages Speech Emotion Diarization (SED) and Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) to model emotions at different levels. Specifically, our proposed approach integrates the utterance-level emotion embedding extracted by SER with fine-grained frame-level emotion embedding obtained from SED. These embeddings are used to condition the reverse process of the denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM). Additionally, we employ cross-domain SED to accurately predict soft labels, addressing the challenge of a scarcity of fine-grained emotion-annotated datasets for supervising emotional TTS training.

EmoTalker: Emotionally Editable Talking Face Generation via Diffusion Model

In recent years, the field of talking faces generation has attracted considerable attention, with certain methods adept at generating virtual faces that convincingly imitate human expressions. However, existing methods face challenges related to limited generalization, particularly when dealing with challenging identities. Furthermore, methods for editing expressions are often confined to a singular emotion, failing to adapt to intricate emotions. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes EmoTalker, an emotionally editable portraits animation approach based on the diffusion model. EmoTalker modifies the denoising process to ensure preservation of the original portrait's identity during inference. To enhance emotion comprehension from text input, Emotion Intensity Block is introduced to analyze fine-grained emotions and strengths derived from prompts. Additionally, a crafted dataset is harnessed to enhance emotion comprehension within prompts. Experiments show the effectiveness of EmoTalker in generating high-quality, emotionally customizable facial expressions.