FAT-HuBERT: Front-end Adaptive Training of Hidden-unit BERT for Distortion-Invariant Robust Speech Recognition

Advancements in monaural speech enhancement (SE) techniques have greatly improved the perceptual quality of speech. However, integrating these techniques into automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems has not yielded the expected performance gains, primarily due to the introduction of distortions during the SE process. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called FAT-HuBERT, which leverages distortion-invariant self-supervised learning (SSL) to enhance the robustness of ASR. To address the distortions introduced by the SE frontends, we introduce layer-wise fusion modules that incorporate features extracted from both observed noisy signals and enhanced signals. During training, the SE frontend is randomly selected from a pool of models. We evaluate the performance of FAT-HuBERT on simulated noisy speech generated from LibriSpeech as well as real-world noisy speech from the CHiME-4 1-channel dataset. The experimental results demonstrate a significant relative reduction in word error rate (WER).

YUAN 2.0: A Large Language Model with Localized Filtering-based Attention

In this work, the Localized Filtering-based Attention (LFA) is introduced to incorporate prior knowledge of local dependencies of natural language into Attention. Based on LFA, we develop and release Yuan 2.0, a large language model with parameters ranging from 2.1 billion to 102.6 billion. A data filtering and generation method is presented to build pretraining and fine-tuning dataset in high quality. A distributed training method with non-uniform pipeline parallel, data parallel, and optimizer parallel is proposed, which greatly reduces the bandwidth requirements of intra-node communication, and achieves good performance in large-scale distributed training. Yuan 2.0 models display impressive ability in code generation, math problem-solving, and chat compared with existing models. The latest version of YUAN 2.0, including model weights and source code, is accessible at Github.

Towards Vision Enhancing LLMs: Empowering Multimodal Knowledge Storage and Sharing in LLMs

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant multimodal generation capabilities, akin to GPT-4. These models predominantly map visual information into language representation space, leveraging the vast knowledge and powerful text generation abilities of LLMs to produce multimodal instruction-following responses. We could term this method as LLMs for Vision because of its employing LLMs for visual-language understanding, yet observe that these MLLMs neglect the potential of harnessing visual knowledge to enhance overall capabilities of LLMs, which could be regraded as Vision Enhancing LLMs. In this paper, we propose an approach called MKS2, aimed at enhancing LLMs through empowering Multimodal Knowledge Storage and Sharing in LLMs. Specifically, we introduce the Modular Visual Memory, a component integrated into the internal blocks of LLMs, designed to store open-world visual information efficiently. Additionally, we present a soft Mixtures-of-Multimodal Experts architecture in LLMs to invoke multimodal knowledge collaboration during generation. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MKS2 substantially augments the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in contexts necessitating physical or commonsense knowledge. It also delivers competitive results on multimodal benchmarks.

RankFeat&RankWeight: Rank-1 Feature/Weight Removal for Out-of-distribution Detection

The task of out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for deploying machine learning models in real-world settings. In this paper, we observe that the singular value distributions of the in-distribution (ID) and OOD features are quite different: the OOD feature matrix tends to have a larger dominant singular value than the ID feature, and the class predictions of OOD samples are largely determined by it. This observation motivates us to propose \texttt{RankFeat}, a simple yet effective \emph{post hoc} approach for OOD detection by removing the rank-1 matrix composed of the largest singular value and the associated singular vectors from the high-level feature. \texttt{RankFeat} achieves \emph{state-of-the-art} performance and reduces the average false positive rate (FPR95) by 17.90\% compared with the previous best method. The success of \texttt{RankFeat} motivates us to investigate whether a similar phenomenon would exist in the parameter matrices of neural networks. We thus propose \texttt{RankWeight} which removes the rank-1 weight from the parameter matrices of a single deep layer. Our \texttt{RankWeight}is also \emph{post hoc} and only requires computing the rank-1 matrix once. As a standalone approach, \texttt{RankWeight} has very competitive performance against other methods across various backbones. Moreover, \texttt{RankWeight} enjoys flexible compatibility with a wide range of OOD detection methods. The combination of \texttt{RankWeight} and \texttt{RankFeat} refreshes the new \emph{state-of-the-art} performance, achieving the FPR95 as low as 16.13\% on the ImageNet-1k benchmark. Extensive ablation studies and comprehensive theoretical analyses are presented to support the empirical results.

Learning with Complementary Labels Revisited: A Consistent Approach via Negative-Unlabeled Learning

Complementary-label learning is a weakly supervised learning problem in which each training example is associated with one or multiple complementary labels indicating the classes to which it does not belong. Existing consistent approaches have relied on the uniform distribution assumption to model the generation of complementary labels, or on an ordinary-label training set to estimate the transition matrix. However, both conditions may not be satisfied in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel complementary-label learning approach that does not rely on these conditions. We find that complementary-label learning can be expressed as a set of negative-unlabeled binary classification problems when using the one-versus-rest strategy. This observation allows us to propose a risk-consistent approach with theoretical guarantees. Furthermore, we introduce a risk correction approach to address overfitting problems when using complex models. We also prove the statistical consistency and convergence rate of the corrected risk estimator. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic and real-world benchmark datasets validate the superiority of our proposed approach over state-of-the-art methods.

Dynamic Analysis Method for Hidden Dangers in Substation Based on Knowledge Graph

To address the challenge of identifying and understanding hidden dangers in substations from unstructured text data, a novel dynamic analysis method is proposed. This approach begins by analyzing and extracting data from the unstructured text related to hidden dangers. It then leverages a flexible, distributed data search engine built on Elastic-Search to handle this information. Following this, the hidden Markov model is employed to train the data within the engine. The Viterbi algorithm is integrated to decipher the hidden state sequences, facilitating the segmentation and labeling of entities related to hidden dangers. The final step involves using the Neo4j graph database to dynamically create a knowledge map that visualizes hidden dangers in the substation. This method's effectiveness is demonstrated through an example analysis using data from a specific substation's hidden dangers.

Generating Valid and Natural Adversarial Examples with Large Language Models

Deep learning-based natural language processing (NLP) models, particularly pre-trained language models (PLMs), have been revealed to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. However, the adversarial examples generated by many mainstream word-level adversarial attack models are neither valid nor natural, leading to the loss of semantic maintenance, grammaticality, and human imperceptibility. Based on the exceptional capacity of language understanding and generation of large language models (LLMs), we propose LLM-Attack, which aims at generating both valid and natural adversarial examples with LLMs. The method consists of two stages: word importance ranking (which searches for the most vulnerable words) and word synonym replacement (which substitutes them with their synonyms obtained from LLMs). Experimental results on the Movie Review (MR), IMDB, and Yelp Review Polarity datasets against the baseline adversarial attack models illustrate the effectiveness of LLM-Attack, and it outperforms the baselines in human and GPT-4 evaluation by a significant margin. The model can generate adversarial examples that are typically valid and natural, with the preservation of semantic meaning, grammaticality, and human imperceptibility.

Joint Sensing and Communication Optimization in Target-Mounted STARS-Assisted Vehicular Networks: A MADRL Approach

The utilization of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technology has the potential to enhance the communication performance of road side units (RSUs) through the active sensing of target vehicles. Furthermore, installing a simultaneous transmitting and reflecting surface (STARS) on the target vehicle can provide an extra boost to the reflection of the echo signal, thereby improving the communication quality for in-vehicle users. However, the design of this target-mounted STARS system exhibits significant challenges, such as limited information sharing and distributed STARS control. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) framework to tackle the challenges of joint sensing and communication optimization in the considered target-mounted STARS assisted vehicle networks. By deploying agents on both RSU and vehicle, the MADRL framework enables RSU and vehicle to perform beam prediction and STARS pre-configuration using their respective local information. To ensure efficient and stable learning for continuous decision-making, we employ the multi-agent soft actor critic (MASAC) algorithm and the multi-agent proximal policy optimization (MAPPO) algorithm on the proposed MADRL framework. Extensive experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our proposed MADRL framework in improving both sensing and communication performance through the utilization of target-mounted STARS. Finally, we conduct a comparative analysis and comparison of the two proposed algorithms under various environmental conditions.

From Scroll to Misbelief: Modeling the Unobservable Susceptibility to Misinformation on Social Media

Susceptibility to misinformation describes the extent to believe unverifiable claims, which is hidden in people's mental process and infeasible to observe. Existing susceptibility studies heavily rely on the self-reported beliefs, making any downstream applications on susceptability hard to scale. To address these limitations, in this work, we propose a computational model to infer users' susceptibility levels given their activities. Since user's susceptibility is a key indicator for their reposting behavior, we utilize the supervision from the observable sharing behavior to infer the underlying susceptibility tendency. The evaluation shows that our model yields estimations that are highly aligned with human judgment on users' susceptibility level comparisons. Building upon such large-scale susceptibility labeling, we further conduct a comprehensive analysis of how different social factors relate to susceptibility. We find that political leanings and psychological factors are associated with susceptibility in varying degrees.

FollowBench: A Multi-level Fine-grained Constraints Following Benchmark for Large Language Models

The ability to follow instructions is crucial for Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle various real-world applications. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on evaluating pure response quality, rather than assessing whether the response follows constraints stated in the instruction. To fill this research gap, in this paper, we propose FollowBench, a Multi-level Fine-grained Constraints Following Benchmark for LLMs. FollowBench comprehensively includes five different types (i.e., Content, Situation, Style, Format, and Example) of fine-grained constraints. To enable a precise constraint following estimation on diverse difficulties, we introduce a Multi-level mechanism that incrementally adds a single constraint to the initial instruction at each increased level. To assess whether LLMs' outputs have satisfied every individual constraint, we propose to prompt strong LLMs with constraint-evolution paths to handle challenging open-ended instructions. By evaluating ten closed-source and open-source popular LLMs on FollowBench, we highlight the weaknesses of LLMs in instruction following and point towards potential avenues for future work. The data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/YJiangcm/FollowBench.