Ultra Dual-Path Compression For Joint Echo Cancellation And Noise Suppression

Echo cancellation and noise reduction are essential for full-duplex communication, yet most existing neural networks have high computational costs and are inflexible in tuning model complexity. In this paper, we introduce time-frequency dual-path compression to achieve a wide range of compression ratios on computational cost. Specifically, for frequency compression, trainable filters are used to replace manually designed filters for dimension reduction. For time compression, only using frame skipped prediction causes large performance degradation, which can be alleviated by a post-processing network with full sequence modeling. We have found that under fixed compression ratios, dual-path compression combining both the time and frequency methods will give further performance improvement, covering compression ratios from 4x to 32x with little model size change. Moreover, the proposed models show competitive performance compared with fast FullSubNet and DeepFilterNet. A demo page can be found at hangtingchen.github.io/ultra_dual_path_compression.github.io/.

BHEISR: Nudging from Bias to Balance -- Promoting Belief Harmony by Eliminating Ideological Segregation in Knowledge-based Recommendations

In the realm of personalized recommendation systems, the increasing concern is the amplification of belief imbalance and user biases, a phenomenon primarily attributed to the filter bubble. Addressing this critical issue, we introduce an innovative intermediate agency (BHEISR) between users and existing recommendation systems to attenuate the negative repercussions of the filter bubble effect in extant recommendation systems. The main objective is to strike a belief balance for users while minimizing the detrimental influence caused by filter bubbles. The BHEISR model amalgamates principles from nudge theory while upholding democratic and transparent principles. It harnesses user-specific category information to stimulate curiosity, even in areas users might initially deem uninteresting. By progressively stimulating interest in novel categories, the model encourages users to broaden their belief horizons and explore the information they typically overlook. Our model is time-sensitive and operates on a user feedback loop. It utilizes the existing recommendation algorithm of the model and incorporates user feedback from the prior time frame. This approach endeavors to transcend the constraints of the filter bubble, enrich recommendation diversity, and strike a belief balance among users while also catering to user preferences and system-specific business requirements. To validate the effectiveness and reliability of the BHEISR model, we conducted a series of comprehensive experiments with real-world datasets. These experiments compared the performance of the BHEISR model against several baseline models using nearly 200 filter bubble-impacted users as test subjects. Our experimental results conclusively illustrate the superior performance of the BHEISR model in mitigating filter bubbles and balancing user perspectives.

AaKOS: Aspect-adaptive Knowledge-based Opinion Summarization

The rapid growth of information on the Internet has led to an overwhelming amount of opinions and comments on various activities, products, and services. This makes it difficult and time-consuming for users to process all the available information when making decisions. Text summarization, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) task, has been widely explored to help users quickly retrieve relevant information by generating short and salient content from long or multiple documents. Recent advances in pre-trained language models, such as ChatGPT, have demonstrated the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in text generation. However, LLMs require massive amounts of data and resources and are challenging to implement as offline applications. Furthermore, existing text summarization approaches often lack the ``adaptive" nature required to capture diverse aspects in opinion summarization, which is particularly detrimental to users with specific requirements or preferences. In this paper, we propose an Aspect-adaptive Knowledge-based Opinion Summarization model for product reviews, which effectively captures the adaptive nature required for opinion summarization. The model generates aspect-oriented summaries given a set of reviews for a particular product, efficiently providing users with useful information on specific aspects they are interested in, ensuring the generated summaries are more personalized and informative. Extensive experiments have been conducted using real-world datasets to evaluate the proposed model. The results demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches and is adaptive and efficient in generating summaries that focus on particular aspects, enabling users to make well-informed decisions and catering to their diverse interests and preferences.

Soft Prompt Guided Joint Learning for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis

Aspect term extraction is a fundamental task in fine-grained sentiment analysis, which aims at detecting customer's opinion targets from reviews on product or service. The traditional supervised models can achieve promising results with annotated datasets, however, the performance dramatically decreases when they are applied to the task of cross-domain aspect term extraction. Existing cross-domain transfer learning methods either directly inject linguistic features into Language models, making it difficult to transfer linguistic knowledge to target domain, or rely on the fixed predefined prompts, which is time-consuming to construct the prompts over all potential aspect term spans. To resolve the limitations, we propose a soft prompt-based joint learning method for cross domain aspect term extraction in this paper. Specifically, by incorporating external linguistic features, the proposed method learn domain-invariant representations between source and target domains via multiple objectives, which bridges the gap between domains with varied distributions of aspect terms. Further, the proposed method interpolates a set of transferable soft prompts consisted of multiple learnable vectors that are beneficial to detect aspect terms in target domain. Extensive experiments are conducted on the benchmark datasets and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for cross-domain aspect terms extraction.

Simple and Scalable Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation

$k$NN-MT is a straightforward yet powerful approach for fast domain adaptation, which directly plugs pre-trained neural machine translation (NMT) models with domain-specific token-level $k$-nearest-neighbor ($k$NN) retrieval to achieve domain adaptation without retraining. Despite being conceptually attractive, $k$NN-MT is burdened with massive storage requirements and high computational complexity since it conducts nearest neighbor searches over the entire reference corpus. In this paper, we propose a simple and scalable nearest neighbor machine translation framework to drastically promote the decoding and storage efficiency of $k$NN-based models while maintaining the translation performance. To this end, we dynamically construct an extremely small datastore for each input via sentence-level retrieval to avoid searching the entire datastore in vanilla $k$NN-MT, based on which we further introduce a distance-aware adapter to adaptively incorporate the $k$NN retrieval results into the pre-trained NMT models. Experiments on machine translation in two general settings, static domain adaptation and online learning, demonstrate that our proposed approach not only achieves almost 90% speed as the NMT model without performance degradation, but also significantly reduces the storage requirements of $k$NN-MT.

DOR: A Novel Dual-Observation-Based Approach for News Recommendation Systems

Online social media platforms offer access to a vast amount of information, but sifting through the abundance of news can be overwhelming and tiring for readers. personalised recommendation algorithms can help users find information that interests them. However, most existing models rely solely on observations of user behaviour, such as viewing history, ignoring the connections between the news and a user's prior knowledge. This can result in a lack of diverse recommendations for individuals. In this paper, we propose a novel method to address the complex problem of news recommendation. Our approach is based on the idea of dual observation, which involves using a deep neural network with observation mechanisms to identify the main focus of a news article as well as the focus of the user on the article. This is achieved by taking into account the user's belief network, which reflects their personal interests and biases. By considering both the content of the news and the user's perspective, our approach is able to provide more personalised and accurate recommendations. We evaluate the performance of our model on real-world datasets and show that our proposed method outperforms several popular baselines.

Analyzing and Improving the Pyramidal Predictive Network for Future Video Frame Prediction

The pyramidal predictive network (PPNV1) proposes an interesting temporal pyramid architecture and yields promising results on the task of future video-frame prediction. We expose and analyze its signal dissemination and characteristic artifacts, and propose corresponding improvements in model architecture and training strategies to address them. Although the PPNV1 theoretically mimics the workings of human brain, its careless signal processing leads to aliasing in the network. We redesign the network architecture to solve the problems. In addition to improving the unreasonable information dissemination, the new architecture also aims to solve the aliasing in neural networks. Different inputs are no longer simply concatenated, and the downsampling and upsampling components have also been redesigned to ensure that the network can more easily construct images from Fourier features of low-frequency inputs. Finally, we further improve the training strategies, to alleviate the problem of input inconsistency during training and testing. Overall, the improved model is more interpretable, stronger, and the quality of its predictions is better. Code is available at https://github.com/Ling-CF/PPNV2.

Predictive Coding Based Multiscale Network with Encoder-Decoder LSTM for Video Prediction

We are introducing a multi-scale predictive model for video prediction here, whose design is inspired by the "Predictive Coding" theories and "Coarse to Fine" approach. As a predictive coding model, it is updated by a combination of bottom-up and top-down information flows, which is different from traditional bottom-up training style. Its advantage is to reduce the dependence on input information and improve its ability to predict and generate images. Importantly, we achieve with a multi-scale approach -- higher level neurons generate coarser predictions (lower resolution), while the lower level generate finer predictions (higher resolution). This is different from the traditional predictive coding framework in which higher level predict the activity of neurons in lower level. To improve the predictive ability, we integrate an encoder-decoder network in the LSTM architecture and share the final encoded high-level semantic information between different levels. Additionally, since the output of each network level is an RGB image, a smaller LSTM hidden state can be used to retain and update the only necessary hidden information, avoiding being mapped to an overly discrete and complex space. In this way, we can reduce the difficulty of prediction and the computational overhead. Finally, we further explore the training strategies, to address the instability in adversarial training and mismatch between training and testing in long-term prediction. Code is available at https://github.com/Ling-CF/MSPN.

KATSum: Knowledge-aware Abstractive Text Summarization

Text Summarization is recognised as one of the NLP downstream tasks and it has been extensively investigated in recent years. It can assist people with perceiving the information rapidly from the Internet, including news articles, social posts, videos, etc. Most existing research works attempt to develop summarization models to produce a better output. However, advent limitations of most existing models emerge, including unfaithfulness and factual errors. In this paper, we propose a novel model, named as Knowledge-aware Abstractive Text Summarization, which leverages the advantages offered by Knowledge Graph to enhance the standard Seq2Seq model. On top of that, the Knowledge Graph triplets are extracted from the source text and utilised to provide keywords with relational information, producing coherent and factually errorless summaries. We conduct extensive experiments by using real-world data sets. The results reveal that the proposed framework can effectively utilise the information from Knowledge Graph and significantly reduce the factual errors in the summary.