VoiceBench: Benchmarking LLM-Based Voice Assistants

Building on the success of large language models (LLMs), recent advancements such as GPT-4o have enabled real-time speech interactions through LLM-based voice assistants, offering a significantly improved user experience compared to traditional text-based interactions. However, the absence of benchmarks designed to evaluate these speech interaction capabilities has hindered progress of LLM-based voice assistants development. Current evaluations focus primarily on automatic speech recognition (ASR) or general knowledge evaluation with clean speeches, neglecting the more intricate, real-world scenarios that involve diverse speaker characteristics, environmental and content factors. To address this, we introduce VoiceBench, the first benchmark designed to provide a multi-faceted evaluation of LLM-based voice assistants. VoiceBench also includes both real and synthetic spoken instructions that incorporate the above three key real-world variations. Extensive experiments reveal the limitations of current LLM-based voice assistant models and offer valuable insights for future research and development in this field.

Representation Learning of Structured Data for Medical Foundation Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various domains, including healthcare. However, their ability to effectively represent structured non-textual data, such as the alphanumeric medical codes used in records like ICD-10 or SNOMED-CT, is limited and has been particularly exposed in recent research. This paper examines the challenges LLMs face in processing medical codes due to the shortcomings of current tokenization methods. As a result, we introduce the UniStruct architecture to design a multimodal medical foundation model of unstructured text and structured data, which addresses these challenges by adapting subword tokenization techniques specifically for the structured medical codes. Our approach is validated through model pre-training on both an extensive internal medical database and a public repository of structured medical records. Trained on over 1 billion tokens on the internal medical database, the proposed model achieves up to a 23% improvement in evaluation metrics, with around 2% gain attributed to our proposed tokenization. Additionally, when evaluated on the EHRSHOT public benchmark with a 1/1000 fraction of the pre-training data, the UniStruct model improves performance on over 42% of the downstream tasks. Our approach not only enhances the representation and generalization capabilities of patient-centric models but also bridges a critical gap in representation learning models' ability to handle complex structured medical data, alongside unstructured text.

Beyond Single-Audio: Advancing Multi-Audio Processing in Audio Large Language Models

Various audio-LLMs (ALLMs) have been explored recently for tackling different audio tasks simultaneously using a single, unified model. While existing evaluations of ALLMs primarily focus on single-audio tasks, real-world applications often involve processing multiple audio streams simultaneously. To bridge this gap, we propose the first multi-audio evaluation (MAE) benchmark that consists of 20 datasets from 11 multi-audio tasks encompassing both speech and sound scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on MAE demonstrate that the existing ALLMs, while being powerful in comprehending primary audio elements in individual audio inputs, struggling to handle multi-audio scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel multi-audio-LLM (MALLM) to capture audio context among multiple similar audios using discriminative learning on our proposed synthetic data. The results demonstrate that the proposed MALLM outperforms all baselines and achieves high data efficiency using synthetic data without requiring human annotations. The proposed MALLM opens the door for ALLMs towards multi-audio processing era and brings us closer to replicating human auditory capabilities in machines.

uMedSum: A Unified Framework for Advancing Medical Abstractive Summarization

Medical abstractive summarization faces the challenge of balancing faithfulness and informativeness. Current methods often sacrifice key information for faithfulness or introduce confabulations when prioritizing informativeness. While recent advancements in techniques like in-context learning (ICL) and fine-tuning have improved medical summarization, they often overlook crucial aspects such as faithfulness and informativeness without considering advanced methods like model reasoning and self-improvement. Moreover, the field lacks a unified benchmark, hindering systematic evaluation due to varied metrics and datasets. This paper addresses these gaps by presenting a comprehensive benchmark of six advanced abstractive summarization methods across three diverse datasets using five standardized metrics. Building on these findings, we propose uMedSum, a modular hybrid summarization framework that introduces novel approaches for sequential confabulation removal followed by key missing information addition, ensuring both faithfulness and informativeness. Our work improves upon previous GPT-4-based state-of-the-art (SOTA) medical summarization methods, significantly outperforming them in both quantitative metrics and qualitative domain expert evaluations. Notably, we achieve an average relative performance improvement of 11.8% in reference-free metrics over the previous SOTA. Doctors prefer uMedSum's summaries 6 times more than previous SOTA in difficult cases where there are chances of confabulations or missing information. These results highlight uMedSum's effectiveness and generalizability across various datasets and metrics, marking a significant advancement in medical summarization.

SSNeRF: Sparse View Semi-supervised Neural Radiance Fields with Augmentation

Sparse view NeRF is challenging because limited input images lead to an under constrained optimization problem for volume rendering. Existing methods address this issue by relying on supplementary information, such as depth maps. However, generating this supplementary information accurately remains problematic and often leads to NeRF producing images with undesired artifacts. To address these artifacts and enhance robustness, we propose SSNeRF, a sparse view semi supervised NeRF method based on a teacher student framework. Our key idea is to challenge the NeRF module with progressively severe sparse view degradation while providing high confidence pseudo labels. This approach helps the NeRF model become aware of noise and incomplete information associated with sparse views, thus improving its robustness. The novelty of SSNeRF lies in its sparse view specific augmentations and semi supervised learning mechanism. In this approach, the teacher NeRF generates novel views along with confidence scores, while the student NeRF, perturbed by the augmented input, learns from the high confidence pseudo labels. Our sparse view degradation augmentation progressively injects noise into volume rendering weights, perturbs feature maps in vulnerable layers, and simulates sparse view blurriness. These augmentation strategies force the student NeRF to recognize degradation and produce clearer rendered views. By transferring the student's parameters to the teacher, the teacher gains increased robustness in subsequent training iterations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our SSNeRF in generating novel views with less sparse view degradation. We will release code upon acceptance.

Domain-Adaptive 2D Human Pose Estimation via Dual Teachers in Extremely Low-Light Conditions

Existing 2D human pose estimation research predominantly concentrates on well-lit scenarios, with limited exploration of poor lighting conditions, which are a prevalent aspect of daily life. Recent studies on low-light pose estimation require the use of paired well-lit and low-light images with ground truths for training, which are impractical due to the inherent challenges associated with annotation on low-light images. To this end, we introduce a novel approach that eliminates the need for low-light ground truths. Our primary novelty lies in leveraging two complementary-teacher networks to generate more reliable pseudo labels, enabling our model achieves competitive performance on extremely low-light images without the need for training with low-light ground truths. Our framework consists of two stages. In the first stage, our model is trained on well-lit data with low-light augmentations. In the second stage, we propose a dual-teacher framework to utilize the unlabeled low-light data, where a center-based main teacher produces the pseudo labels for relatively visible cases, while a keypoints-based complementary teacher focuses on producing the pseudo labels for the missed persons of the main teacher. With the pseudo labels from both teachers, we propose a person-specific low-light augmentation to challenge a student model in training to outperform the teachers. Experimental results on real low-light dataset (ExLPose-OCN) show, our method achieves 6.8% (2.4 AP) improvement over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) method, despite no low-light ground-truth data is used in our approach, in contrast to the SOTA method. Our code will be available at:https://github.com/ayh015-dev/DA-LLPose.

Unveiling the Achilles' Heel of NLG Evaluators: A Unified Adversarial Framework Driven by Large Language Models

The automatic evaluation of natural language generation (NLG) systems presents a long-lasting challenge. Recent studies have highlighted various neural metrics that align well with human evaluations. Yet, the robustness of these evaluators against adversarial perturbations remains largely under-explored due to the unique challenges in obtaining adversarial data for different NLG evaluation tasks. To address the problem, we introduce AdvEval, a novel black-box adversarial framework against NLG evaluators. AdvEval is specially tailored to generate data that yield strong disagreements between human and victim evaluators. Specifically, inspired by the recent success of large language models (LLMs) in text generation and evaluation, we adopt strong LLMs as both the data generator and gold evaluator. Adversarial data are automatically optimized with feedback from the gold and victim evaluator. We conduct experiments on 12 victim evaluators and 11 NLG datasets, spanning tasks including dialogue, summarization, and question evaluation. The results show that AdvEval can lead to significant performance degradation of various victim metrics, thereby validating its efficacy.

CAT: Exploiting Inter-Class Dynamics for Domain Adaptive Object Detection

Domain adaptive object detection aims to adapt detection models to domains where annotated data is unavailable. Existing methods have been proposed to address the domain gap using the semi-supervised student-teacher framework. However, a fundamental issue arises from the class imbalance in the labelled training set, which can result in inaccurate pseudo-labels. The relationship between classes, especially where one class is a majority and the other minority, has a large impact on class bias. We propose Class-Aware Teacher (CAT) to address the class bias issue in the domain adaptation setting. In our work, we approximate the class relationships with our Inter-Class Relation module (ICRm) and exploit it to reduce the bias within the model. In this way, we are able to apply augmentations to highly related classes, both inter- and intra-domain, to boost the performance of minority classes while having minimal impact on majority classes. We further reduce the bias by implementing a class-relation weight to our classification loss. Experiments conducted on various datasets and ablation studies show that our method is able to address the class bias in the domain adaptation setting. On the Cityscapes to Foggy Cityscapes dataset, we attained a 52.5 mAP, a substantial improvement over the 51.2 mAP achieved by the state-of-the-art method.

NightHaze: Nighttime Image Dehazing via Self-Prior Learning

Masked autoencoder (MAE) shows that severe augmentation during training produces robust representations for high-level tasks. This paper brings the MAE-like framework to nighttime image enhancement, demonstrating that severe augmentation during training produces strong network priors that are resilient to real-world night haze degradations. We propose a novel nighttime image dehazing method with self-prior learning. Our main novelty lies in the design of severe augmentation, which allows our model to learn robust priors. Unlike MAE that uses masking, we leverage two key challenging factors of nighttime images as augmentation: light effects and noise. During training, we intentionally degrade clear images by blending them with light effects as well as by adding noise, and subsequently restore the clear images. This enables our model to learn clear background priors. By increasing the noise values to approach as high as the pixel intensity values of the glow and light effect blended images, our augmentation becomes severe, resulting in stronger priors. While our self-prior learning is considerably effective in suppressing glow and revealing details of background scenes, in some cases, there are still some undesired artifacts that remain, particularly in the forms of over-suppression. To address these artifacts, we propose a self-refinement module based on the semi-supervised teacher-student framework. Our NightHaze, especially our MAE-like self-prior learning, shows that models trained with severe augmentation effectively improve the visibility of input haze images, approaching the clarity of clear nighttime images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our NightHaze achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing nighttime image dehazing methods by a substantial margin of 15.5% for MUSIQ and 23.5% for ClipIQA.

Semantic Segmentation in Multiple Adverse Weather Conditions with Domain Knowledge Retention

Semantic segmentation's performance is often compromised when applied to unlabeled adverse weather conditions. Unsupervised domain adaptation is a potential approach to enhancing the model's adaptability and robustness to adverse weather. However, existing methods encounter difficulties when sequentially adapting the model to multiple unlabeled adverse weather conditions. They struggle to acquire new knowledge while also retaining previously learned knowledge.To address these problems, we propose a semantic segmentation method for multiple adverse weather conditions that incorporates adaptive knowledge acquisition, pseudolabel blending, and weather composition replay. Our adaptive knowledge acquisition enables the model to avoid learning from extreme images that could potentially cause the model to forget. In our approach of blending pseudo-labels, we not only utilize the current model but also integrate the previously learned model into the ongoing learning process. This collaboration between the current teacher and the previous model enhances the robustness of the pseudo-labels for the current target. Our weather composition replay mechanism allows the model to continuously refine its previously learned weather information while simultaneously learning from the new target domain. Our method consistently outperforms the stateof-the-art methods, and obtains the best performance with averaged mIoU (%) of 65.7 and the lowest forgetting (%) of 3.6 against 60.1 and 11.3, on the ACDC datasets for a four-target continual multi-target domain adaptation.