FedCAda: Adaptive Client-Side Optimization for Accelerated and Stable Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a prominent approach for collaborative training of machine learning models across distributed clients while preserving data privacy. However, the quest to balance acceleration and stability becomes a significant challenge in FL, especially on the client-side. In this paper, we introduce FedCAda, an innovative federated client adaptive algorithm designed to tackle this challenge. FedCAda leverages the Adam algorithm to adjust the correction process of the first moment estimate $m$ and the second moment estimate $v$ on the client-side and aggregate adaptive algorithm parameters on the server-side, aiming to accelerate convergence speed and communication efficiency while ensuring stability and performance. Additionally, we investigate several algorithms incorporating different adjustment functions. This comparative analysis revealed that due to the limited information contained within client models from other clients during the initial stages of federated learning, more substantial constraints need to be imposed on the parameters of the adaptive algorithm. As federated learning progresses and clients gather more global information, FedCAda gradually diminishes the impact on adaptive parameters. These findings provide insights for enhancing the robustness and efficiency of algorithmic improvements. Through extensive experiments on computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP) datasets, we demonstrate that FedCAda outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of adaptability, convergence, stability, and overall performance. This work contributes to adaptive algorithms for federated learning, encouraging further exploration.

StoryTTS: A Highly Expressive Text-to-Speech Dataset with Rich Textual Expressiveness Annotations

While acoustic expressiveness has long been studied in expressive text-to-speech (ETTS), the inherent expressiveness in text lacks sufficient attention, especially for ETTS of artistic works. In this paper, we introduce StoryTTS, a highly ETTS dataset that contains rich expressiveness both in acoustic and textual perspective, from the recording of a Mandarin storytelling show. A systematic and comprehensive labeling framework is proposed for textual expressiveness. We analyze and define speech-related textual expressiveness in StoryTTS to include five distinct dimensions through linguistics, rhetoric, etc. Then we employ large language models and prompt them with a few manual annotation examples for batch annotation. The resulting corpus contains 61 hours of consecutive and highly prosodic speech equipped with accurate text transcriptions and rich textual expressiveness annotations. Therefore, StoryTTS can aid future ETTS research to fully mine the abundant intrinsic textual and acoustic features. Experiments are conducted to validate that TTS models can generate speech with improved expressiveness when integrating with the annotated textual labels in StoryTTS.

SilverSight: A Multi-Task Chinese Financial Large Language Model Based on Adaptive Semantic Space Learning

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being applied across various specialized fields, leveraging their extensive knowledge to empower a multitude of scenarios within these domains. However, each field encompasses a variety of specific tasks that require learning, and the diverse, heterogeneous data across these domains can lead to conflicts during model task transfer. In response to this challenge, our study introduces an Adaptive Semantic Space Learning (ASSL) framework, which utilizes the adaptive reorganization of data distributions within the semantic space to enhance the performance and selection efficacy of multi-expert models. Utilizing this framework, we trained a financial multi-task LLM named "SilverSight". Our research findings demonstrate that our framework can achieve results close to those obtained with full data training using only 10% of the data, while also exhibiting strong generalization capabilities.

Are Large Language Models Rational Investors?

Large Language Models (LLMs) are progressively being adopted in financial analysis to harness their extensive knowledge base for interpreting complex market data and trends. However, their application in the financial domain is challenged by intrinsic biases (i.e., risk-preference bias) and a superficial grasp of market intricacies, underscoring the need for a thorough assessment of their financial insight. This study introduces a novel framework, Financial Bias Indicators (FBI), to critically evaluate the financial rationality of LLMs, focusing on their ability to discern and navigate the subtleties of financial information and to identify any irrational biases that might skew market analysis. Our research adopts an innovative methodology to measure financial rationality, integrating principles of behavioral finance to scrutinize the biases and decision-making patterns of LLMs. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 19 leading LLMs, considering factors such as model scale, training datasets, input strategies, etc. The findings reveal varying degrees of financial irrationality among the models, influenced by their design and training. Models trained specifically on financial datasets might exhibit greater irrationality, and it's possible that even larger financial language models (FinLLMs) could display more biases than smaller, more generalized models. This outcomes provide profound insights into how these elements affect the financial rationality of LLMs, indicating that targeted training and structured input methods could improve model performance. This work enriches our understanding of LLMs' strengths and weaknesses in financial applications, laying the groundwork for the development of more dependable and rational financial analysis tools.

$R^3$-NL2GQL: A Hybrid Models Approach for for Accuracy Enhancing and Hallucinations Mitigation

While current NL2SQL tasks constructed using Foundation Models have achieved commendable results, their direct application to Natural Language to Graph Query Language (NL2GQL) tasks poses challenges due to the significant differences between GQL and SQL expressions, as well as the numerous types of GQL. Our extensive experiments reveal that in NL2GQL tasks, larger Foundation Models demonstrate superior cross-schema generalization abilities, while smaller Foundation Models struggle to improve their GQL generation capabilities through fine-tuning. However, after fine-tuning, smaller models exhibit better intent comprehension and higher grammatical accuracy. Diverging from rule-based and slot-filling techniques, we introduce R3-NL2GQL, which employs both smaller and larger Foundation Models as reranker, rewriter and refiner. The approach harnesses the comprehension ability of smaller models for information reranker and rewriter, and the exceptional generalization and generation capabilities of larger models to transform input natural language queries and code structure schema into any form of GQLs. Recognizing the lack of established datasets in this nascent domain, we have created a bilingual dataset derived from graph database documentation and some open-source Knowledge Graphs (KGs). We tested our approach on this dataset and the experimental results showed that delivers promising performance and robustness.Our code and dataset is available at https://github.com/zhiqix/NL2GQL

Expressive TTS Driven by Natural Language Prompts Using Few Human Annotations

Expressive text-to-speech (TTS) aims to synthesize speeches with human-like tones, moods, or even artistic attributes. Recent advancements in expressive TTS empower users with the ability to directly control synthesis style through natural language prompts. However, these methods often require excessive training with a significant amount of style-annotated data, which can be challenging to acquire. Moreover, they may have limited adaptability due to fixed style annotations. In this work, we present FreeStyleTTS (FS-TTS), a controllable expressive TTS model with minimal human annotations. Our approach utilizes a large language model (LLM) to transform expressive TTS into a style retrieval task. The LLM selects the best-matching style references from annotated utterances based on external style prompts, which can be raw input text or natural language style descriptions. The selected reference guides the TTS pipeline to synthesize speeches with the intended style. This innovative approach provides flexible, versatile, and precise style control with minimal human workload. Experiments on a Mandarin storytelling corpus demonstrate FS-TTS's proficiency in leveraging LLM's semantic inference ability to retrieve desired styles from either input text or user-defined descriptions. This results in synthetic speeches that are closely aligned with the specified styles.

OSP: Boosting Distributed Model Training with 2-stage Synchronization

Distributed deep learning (DDL) is a promising research area, which aims to increase the efficiency of training deep learning tasks with large size of datasets and models. As the computation capability of DDL nodes continues to increase, the network connection between nodes is becoming a major bottleneck. Various methods of gradient compression and improved model synchronization have been proposed to address this bottleneck in Parameter-Server-based DDL. However, these two types of methods can result in accuracy loss due to discarded gradients and have limited enhancement on the throughput of model synchronization, respectively. To address these challenges, we propose a new model synchronization method named Overlapped Synchronization Parallel (OSP), which achieves efficient communication with a 2-stage synchronization approach and uses Local-Gradient-based Parameter correction (LGP) to avoid accuracy loss caused by stale parameters. The prototype of OSP has been implemented using PyTorch and evaluated on commonly used deep learning models and datasets with a 9-node testbed. Evaluation results show that OSP can achieve up to 50\% improvement in throughput without accuracy loss compared to popular synchronization models.

DSE-TTS: Dual Speaker Embedding for Cross-Lingual Text-to-Speech

Although high-fidelity speech can be obtained for intralingual speech synthesis, cross-lingual text-to-speech (CTTS) is still far from satisfactory as it is difficult to accurately retain the speaker timbres(i.e. speaker similarity) and eliminate the accents from their first language(i.e. nativeness). In this paper, we demonstrated that vector-quantized(VQ) acoustic feature contains less speaker information than mel-spectrogram. Based on this finding, we propose a novel dual speaker embedding TTS (DSE-TTS) framework for CTTS with authentic speaking style. Here, one embedding is fed to the acoustic model to learn the linguistic speaking style, while the other one is integrated into the vocoder to mimic the target speaker's timbre. Experiments show that by combining both embeddings, DSE-TTS significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art SANE-TTS in cross-lingual synthesis, especially in terms of nativeness.

HST: Hierarchical Swin Transformer for Compressed Image Super-resolution

Compressed Image Super-resolution has achieved great attention in recent years, where images are degraded with compression artifacts and low-resolution artifacts. Since the complex hybrid distortions, it is hard to restore the distorted image with the simple cooperation of super-resolution and compression artifacts removing. In this paper, we take a step forward to propose the Hierarchical Swin Transformer (HST) network to restore the low-resolution compressed image, which jointly captures the hierarchical feature representations and enhances each-scale representation with Swin transformer, respectively. Moreover, we find that the pretraining with Super-resolution (SR) task is vital in compressed image super-resolution. To explore the effects of different SR pretraining, we take the commonly-used SR tasks (e.g., bicubic and different real super-resolution simulations) as our pretraining tasks, and reveal that SR plays an irreplaceable role in the compressed image super-resolution. With the cooperation of HST and pre-training, our HST achieves the fifth place in AIM 2022 challenge on the low-quality compressed image super-resolution track, with the PSNR of 23.51dB. Extensive experiments and ablation studies have validated the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

RTN: Reinforced Transformer Network for Coronary CT Angiography Vessel-level Image Quality Assessment

Coronary CT Angiography (CCTA) is susceptible to various distortions (e.g., artifacts and noise), which severely compromise the exact diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. The appropriate CCTA Vessel-level Image Quality Assessment (CCTA VIQA) algorithm can be used to reduce the risk of error diagnosis. The primary challenges of CCTA VIQA are that the local part of coronary that determines final quality is hard to locate. To tackle the challenge, we formulate CCTA VIQA as a multiple-instance learning (MIL) problem, and exploit Transformer-based MIL backbone (termed as T-MIL) to aggregate the multiple instances along the coronary centerline into the final quality. However, not all instances are informative for final quality. There are some quality-irrelevant/negative instances intervening the exact quality assessment(e.g., instances covering only background or the coronary in instances is not identifiable). Therefore, we propose a Progressive Reinforcement learning based Instance Discarding module (termed as PRID) to progressively remove quality-irrelevant/negative instances for CCTA VIQA. Based on the above two modules, we propose a Reinforced Transformer Network (RTN) for automatic CCTA VIQA based on end-to-end optimization. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the real-world CCTA dataset, exceeding previous MIL methods by a large margin.