Diversify and Conquer: Open-set Disagreement for Robust Semi-supervised Learning with Outliers

Conventional semi-supervised learning (SSL) ideally assumes that labeled and unlabeled data share an identical class distribution, however in practice, this assumption is easily violated, as unlabeled data often includes unknown class data, i.e., outliers. The outliers are treated as noise, considerably degrading the performance of SSL models. To address this drawback, we propose a novel framework, Diversify and Conquer (DAC), to enhance SSL robustness in the context of open-set semi-supervised learning. In particular, we note that existing open-set SSL methods rely on prediction discrepancies between inliers and outliers from a single model trained on labeled data. This approach can be easily failed when the labeled data is insufficient, leading to performance degradation that is worse than naive SSL that do not account for outliers. In contrast, our approach exploits prediction disagreements among multiple models that are differently biased towards the unlabeled distribution. By leveraging the discrepancies arising from training on unlabeled data, our method enables robust outlier detection even when the labeled data is underspecified. Our key contribution is constructing a collection of differently biased models through a single training process. By encouraging divergent heads to be differently biased towards outliers while making consistent predictions for inliers, we exploit the disagreement among these heads as a measure to identify unknown concepts. Our code is available at https://github.com/heejokong/DivCon.

VibE-SVC: Vibrato Extraction with High-frequency F0 Contour for Singing Voice Conversion

Controlling singing style is crucial for achieving an expressive and natural singing voice. Among the various style factors, vibrato plays a key role in conveying emotions and enhancing musical depth. However, modeling vibrato remains challenging due to its dynamic nature, making it difficult to control in singing voice conversion. To address this, we propose VibESVC, a controllable singing voice conversion model that explicitly extracts and manipulates vibrato using discrete wavelet transform. Unlike previous methods that model vibrato implicitly, our approach decomposes the F0 contour into frequency components, enabling precise transfer. This allows vibrato control for enhanced flexibility. Experimental results show that VibE-SVC effectively transforms singing styles while preserving speaker similarity. Both subjective and objective evaluations confirm high-quality conversion.

Spotlight-TTS: Spotlighting the Style via Voiced-Aware Style Extraction and Style Direction Adjustment for Expressive Text-to-Speech

Recent advances in expressive text-to-speech (TTS) have introduced diverse methods based on style embedding extracted from reference speech. However, synthesizing high-quality expressive speech remains challenging. We propose Spotlight-TTS, which exclusively emphasizes style via voiced-aware style extraction and style direction adjustment. Voiced-aware style extraction focuses on voiced regions highly related to style while maintaining continuity across different speech regions to improve expressiveness. We adjust the direction of the extracted style for optimal integration into the TTS model, which improves speech quality. Experimental results demonstrate that Spotlight-TTS achieves superior performance compared to baseline models in terms of expressiveness, overall speech quality, and style transfer capability. Our audio samples are publicly available.

DiEmo-TTS: Disentangled Emotion Representations via Self-Supervised Distillation for Cross-Speaker Emotion Transfer in Text-to-Speech

Cross-speaker emotion transfer in speech synthesis relies on extracting speaker-independent emotion embeddings for accurate emotion modeling without retaining speaker traits. However, existing timbre compression methods fail to fully separate speaker and emotion characteristics, causing speaker leakage and degraded synthesis quality. To address this, we propose DiEmo-TTS, a self-supervised distillation method to minimize emotional information loss and preserve speaker identity. We introduce cluster-driven sampling and information perturbation to preserve emotion while removing irrelevant factors. To facilitate this process, we propose an emotion clustering and matching approach using emotional attribute prediction and speaker embeddings, enabling generalization to unlabeled data. Additionally, we designed a dual conditioning transformer to integrate style features better. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our method in learning speaker-irrelevant emotion embeddings.

EmoSphere-SER: Enhancing Speech Emotion Recognition Through Spherical Representation with Auxiliary Classification

Speech emotion recognition predicts a speaker's emotional state from speech signals using discrete labels or continuous dimensions such as arousal, valence, and dominance (VAD). We propose EmoSphere-SER, a joint model that integrates spherical VAD region classification to guide VAD regression for improved emotion prediction. In our framework, VAD values are transformed into spherical coordinates that are divided into multiple spherical regions, and an auxiliary classification task predicts which spherical region each point belongs to, guiding the regression process. Additionally, we incorporate a dynamic weighting scheme and a style pooling layer with multi-head self-attention to capture spectral and temporal dynamics, further boosting performance. This combined training strategy reinforces structured learning and improves prediction consistency. Experimental results show that our approach exceeds baseline methods, confirming the validity of the proposed framework.

DiGIT: Multi-Dilated Gated Encoder and Central-Adjacent Region Integrated Decoder for Temporal Action Detection Transformer

In this paper, we examine a key limitation in query-based detectors for temporal action detection (TAD), which arises from their direct adaptation of originally designed architectures for object detection. Despite the effectiveness of the existing models, they struggle to fully address the unique challenges of TAD, such as the redundancy in multi-scale features and the limited ability to capture sufficient temporal context. To address these issues, we propose a multi-dilated gated encoder and central-adjacent region integrated decoder for temporal action detection transformer (DiGIT). Our approach replaces the existing encoder that consists of multi-scale deformable attention and feedforward network with our multi-dilated gated encoder. Our proposed encoder reduces the redundant information caused by multi-level features while maintaining the ability to capture fine-grained and long-range temporal information. Furthermore, we introduce a central-adjacent region integrated decoder that leverages a more comprehensive sampling strategy for deformable cross-attention to capture the essential information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiGIT achieves state-of-the-art performance on THUMOS14, ActivityNet v1.3, and HACS-Segment. Code is available at: https://github.com/Dotori-HJ/DiGIT

Integrating Locality-Aware Attention with Transformers for General Geometry PDEs

Neural operators have emerged as promising frameworks for learning mappings governed by partial differential equations (PDEs), serving as data-driven alternatives to traditional numerical methods. While methods such as the Fourier neural operator (FNO) have demonstrated notable performance, their reliance on uniform grids restricts their applicability to complex geometries and irregular meshes. Recently, Transformer-based neural operators with linear attention mechanisms have shown potential in overcoming these limitations for large-scale PDE simulations. However, these approaches predominantly emphasize global feature aggregation, often overlooking fine-scale dynamics and localized PDE behaviors essential for accurate solutions. To address these challenges, we propose the Locality-Aware Attention Transformer (LA2Former), which leverages K-nearest neighbors for dynamic patchifying and integrates global-local attention for enhanced PDE modeling. By combining linear attention for efficient global context encoding with pairwise attention for capturing intricate local interactions, LA2Former achieves an optimal balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. Extensive evaluations across six benchmark datasets demonstrate that LA2Former improves predictive accuracy by over 50% relative to existing linear attention methods, while also outperforming full pairwise attention under optimal conditions. This work underscores the critical importance of localized feature learning in advancing Transformer-based neural operators for solving PDEs on complex and irregular domains.

GRAIL: Gradient-Based Adaptive Unlearning for Privacy and Copyright in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on extensive datasets often learn sensitive information, which raises significant social and legal concerns under principles such as the "Right to be forgotten." Retraining entire models from scratch to remove undesired information is both costly and impractical. Furthermore, existing single-domain unlearning methods fail to address multi-domain scenarios, where knowledge is interwoven across domains such as privacy and copyright, creating overlapping representations that lead to excessive knowledge removal or degraded performance. To tackle these issues, we propose GRAIL (GRadient-based AdaptIve unLearning), a novel multi-domain unlearning framework. GRAIL leverages gradient information from multiple domains to precisely distinguish the unlearning scope from the retention scope, and applies an adaptive parameter-wise localization strategy to selectively remove targeted knowledge while preserving critical parameters for each domain. Experimental results on unlearning benchmarks show that GRAIL achieves unlearning success on par with the existing approaches, while also demonstrating up to 17% stronger knowledge retention success compared to the previous state-of-art method. Our findings establish a new paradigm for effectively managing and regulating sensitive information in large-scale pre-trained language models.

ACoRN: Noise-Robust Abstractive Compression in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models

Abstractive compression utilizes smaller langauge models to condense query-relevant context, reducing computational costs in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). However,retrieved documents often include information that is either irrelevant to answering the query or misleading due to factual incorrect content, despite having high relevance scores. This behavior indicates that abstractive compressors are more likely to omit important information essential for the correct answer, especially in long contexts where attention dispersion occurs. To address this issue, we categorize retrieved documents in a more fine-grained manner and propose Abstractive Compression Robust against Noise (ACoRN), which introduces two novel training steps. First, we use offline data augmentation on the training dataset to enhance compressor robustness against two distinct types of retrieval noise. Second, since the language modelbased compressor cannot fully utilize information from multiple retrieved documents and exhibits positional bias, we perform finetuning to generate summaries centered around key information that directly supports the correct answer. Our experiments demonstrate that T5-large, trained with ACoRN as a compressor, improves EM and F1 scores while preserving the answer string, which could serve as direct evidence. ACoRN excels on datasets with many accuracy-reducing documents, making it highly useful in real-world scenarios.

SUGAR: Leveraging Contextual Confidence for Smarter Retrieval

Bearing in mind the limited parametric knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) which supplies them with the relevant external knowledge has served as an approach to mitigate the issue of hallucinations to a certain extent. However, uniformly retrieving supporting context makes response generation source-inefficient, as triggering the retriever is not always necessary, or even inaccurate, when a model gets distracted by noisy retrieved content and produces an unhelpful answer. Motivated by these issues, we introduce Semantic Uncertainty Guided Adaptive Retrieval (SUGAR), where we leverage context-based entropy to actively decide whether to retrieve and to further determine between single-step and multi-step retrieval. Our empirical results show that selective retrieval guided by semantic uncertainty estimation improves the performance across diverse question answering tasks, as well as achieves a more efficient inference.