WavRx: a Disease-Agnostic, Generalizable, and Privacy-Preserving Speech Health Diagnostic Model

Speech is known to carry health-related attributes, which has emerged as a novel venue for remote and long-term health monitoring. However, existing models are usually tailored for a specific type of disease, and have been shown to lack generalizability across datasets. Furthermore, concerns have been raised recently towards the leakage of speaker identity from health embeddings. To mitigate these limitations, we propose WavRx, a speech health diagnostics model that captures the respiration and articulation related dynamics from a universal speech representation. Our in-domain and cross-domain experiments on six pathological speech datasets demonstrate WavRx as a new state-of-the-art health diagnostic model. Furthermore, we show that the amount of speaker identity entailed in the WavRx health embeddings is significantly reduced without extra guidance during training. An in-depth analysis of the model was performed, thus providing physiological interpretation of its improved generalizability and privacy-preserving ability.

A First Physical-World Trajectory Prediction Attack via LiDAR-induced Deceptions in Autonomous Driving

Trajectory prediction forecasts nearby agents' moves based on their historical trajectories. Accurate trajectory prediction is crucial for autonomous vehicles. Existing attacks compromise the prediction model of a victim AV by directly manipulating the historical trajectory of an attacker AV, which has limited real-world applicability. This paper, for the first time, explores an indirect attack approach that induces prediction errors via attacks against the perception module of a victim AV. Although it has been shown that physically realizable attacks against LiDAR-based perception are possible by placing a few objects at strategic locations, it is still an open challenge to find an object location from the vast search space in order to launch effective attacks against prediction under varying victim AV velocities. Through analysis, we observe that a prediction model is prone to an attack focusing on a single point in the scene. Consequently, we propose a novel two-stage attack framework to realize the single-point attack. The first stage of prediction-side attack efficiently identifies, guided by the distribution of detection results under object-based attacks against perception, the state perturbations for the prediction model that are effective and velocity-insensitive. In the second stage of location matching, we match the feasible object locations with the found state perturbations. Our evaluation using a public autonomous driving dataset shows that our attack causes a collision rate of up to 63% and various hazardous responses of the victim AV. The effectiveness of our attack is also demonstrated on a real testbed car. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first security analysis spanning from LiDAR-based perception to prediction in autonomous driving, leading to a realistic attack on prediction. To counteract the proposed attack, potential defenses are discussed.

UrBAN: Urban Beehive Acoustics and PheNotyping Dataset

In this paper, we present a multimodal dataset obtained from a honey bee colony in Montr\'eal, Quebec, Canada, spanning the years of 2021 to 2022. This apiary comprised 10 beehives, with microphones recording more than 2000 hours of high quality raw audio, and also sensors capturing temperature, and humidity. Periodic hive inspections involved monitoring colony honey bee population changes, assessing queen-related conditions, and documenting overall hive health. Additionally, health metrics, such as Varroa mite infestation rates and winter mortality assessments were recorded, offering valuable insights into factors affecting hive health status and resilience. In this study, we first outline the data collection process, sensor data description, and dataset structure. Furthermore, we demonstrate a practical application of this dataset by extracting various features from the raw audio to predict colony population using the number of frames of bees as a proxy.

Correctable Landmark Discovery via Large Models for Vision-Language Navigation

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) requires the agent to follow language instructions to reach a target position. A key factor for successful navigation is to align the landmarks implied in the instruction with diverse visual observations. However, previous VLN agents fail to perform accurate modality alignment especially in unexplored scenes, since they learn from limited navigation data and lack sufficient open-world alignment knowledge. In this work, we propose a new VLN paradigm, called COrrectable LaNdmark DiScOvery via Large ModEls (CONSOLE). In CONSOLE, we cast VLN as an open-world sequential landmark discovery problem, by introducing a novel correctable landmark discovery scheme based on two large models ChatGPT and CLIP. Specifically, we use ChatGPT to provide rich open-world landmark cooccurrence commonsense, and conduct CLIP-driven landmark discovery based on these commonsense priors. To mitigate the noise in the priors due to the lack of visual constraints, we introduce a learnable cooccurrence scoring module, which corrects the importance of each cooccurrence according to actual observations for accurate landmark discovery. We further design an observation enhancement strategy for an elegant combination of our framework with different VLN agents, where we utilize the corrected landmark features to obtain enhanced observation features for action decision. Extensive experimental results on multiple popular VLN benchmarks (R2R, REVERIE, R4R, RxR) show the significant superiority of CONSOLE over strong baselines. Especially, our CONSOLE establishes the new state-of-the-art results on R2R and R4R in unseen scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/expectorlin/CONSOLE.

Efficient Navigation of a Robotic Fish Swimming Across the Vortical Flow Field

Navigating efficiently across vortical flow fields presents a significant challenge in various robotic applications. The dynamic and unsteady nature of vortical flows often disturbs the control of underwater robots, complicating their operation in hydrodynamic environments. Conventional control methods, which depend on accurate modeling, fail in these settings due to the complexity of fluid-structure interactions (FSI) caused by unsteady hydrodynamics. This study proposes a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm, trained in a data-driven manner, to enable efficient navigation of a robotic fish swimming across vortical flows. Our proposed algorithm incorporates the LSTM architecture and uses several recent consecutive observations as the state to address the issue of partial observation, often due to sensor limitations. We present a numerical study of navigation within a Karman vortex street, created by placing a stationary cylinder in a uniform flow, utilizing the immersed boundary-lattice Boltzmann method (IB-LBM). The aim is to train the robotic fish to discover efficient navigation policies, enabling it to reach a designated target point across the Karman vortex street from various initial positions. After training, the fish demonstrates the ability to rapidly reach the target from different initial positions, showcasing the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed algorithm. Analysis of the results reveals that the robotic fish can leverage velocity gains and pressure differences induced by the vortices to reach the target, underscoring the potential of our proposed algorithm in enhancing navigation in complex hydrodynamic environments.

You Only Cache Once: Decoder-Decoder Architectures for Language Models

We introduce a decoder-decoder architecture, YOCO, for large language models, which only caches key-value pairs once. It consists of two components, i.e., a cross-decoder stacked upon a self-decoder. The self-decoder efficiently encodes global key-value (KV) caches that are reused by the cross-decoder via cross-attention. The overall model behaves like a decoder-only Transformer, although YOCO only caches once. The design substantially reduces GPU memory demands, yet retains global attention capability. Additionally, the computation flow enables prefilling to early exit without changing the final output, thereby significantly speeding up the prefill stage. Experimental results demonstrate that YOCO achieves favorable performance compared to Transformer in various settings of scaling up model size and number of training tokens. We also extend YOCO to 1M context length with near-perfect needle retrieval accuracy. The profiling results show that YOCO improves inference memory, prefill latency, and throughput by orders of magnitude across context lengths and model sizes. Code is available at https://aka.ms/YOCO.

Prompt-tuning for Clickbait Detection via Text Summarization

Clickbaits are surprising social posts or deceptive news headlines that attempt to lure users for more clicks, which have posted at unprecedented rates for more profit or commercial revenue. The spread of clickbait has significant negative impacts on the users, which brings users misleading or even click-jacking attacks. Different from fake news, the crucial problem in clickbait detection is determining whether the headline matches the corresponding content. Most existing methods compute the semantic similarity between the headlines and contents for detecting clickbait. However, due to significant differences in length and semantic features between headlines and contents, directly calculating semantic similarity is often difficult to summarize the relationship between them. To address this problem, we propose a prompt-tuning method for clickbait detection via text summarization in this paper, text summarization is introduced to summarize the contents, and clickbait detection is performed based on the similarity between the generated summary and the contents. Specifically, we first introduce a two-stage text summarization model to produce high-quality news summaries based on pre-trained language models, and then both the headlines and new generated summaries are incorporated as the inputs for prompt-tuning. Additionally, a variety of strategies are conducted to incorporate external knowledge for improving the performance of clickbait detection. The extensive experiments on well-known clickbait detection datasets demonstrate that our method achieved state-of-the-art performance.

Weak Collocation Regression for Inferring Stochastic Dynamics with Lévy Noise

With the rapid increase of observational, experimental and simulated data for stochastic systems, tremendous efforts have been devoted to identifying governing laws underlying the evolution of these systems. Despite the broad applications of non-Gaussian fluctuations in numerous physical phenomena, the data-driven approaches to extracting stochastic dynamics with L\'{e}vy noise are relatively few. In this work, we propose a Weak Collocation Regression (WCR) to explicitly reveal unknown stochastic dynamical systems, i.e., the Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) with both $\alpha$-stable L\'{e}vy noise and Gaussian noise, from discrete aggregate data. This method utilizes the evolution equation of the probability distribution function, i.e., the Fokker-Planck (FP) equation. With the weak form of the FP equation, the WCR constructs a linear system of unknown parameters where all integrals are evaluated by Monte Carlo method with the observations. Then, the unknown parameters are obtained by a sparse linear regression. For a SDE with L\'{e}vy noise, the corresponding FP equation is a partial integro-differential equation (PIDE), which contains nonlocal terms, and is difficult to deal with. The weak form can avoid complicated multiple integrals. Our approach can simultaneously distinguish mixed noise types, even in multi-dimensional problems. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our method is accurate and computationally efficient.

Language-Driven Visual Consensus for Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation

The pre-trained vision-language model, exemplified by CLIP, advances zero-shot semantic segmentation by aligning visual features with class embeddings through a transformer decoder to generate semantic masks. Despite its effectiveness, prevailing methods within this paradigm encounter challenges, including overfitting on seen classes and small fragmentation in masks. To mitigate these issues, we propose a Language-Driven Visual Consensus (LDVC) approach, fostering improved alignment of semantic and visual information.Specifically, we leverage class embeddings as anchors due to their discrete and abstract nature, steering vision features toward class embeddings. Moreover, to circumvent noisy alignments from the vision part due to its redundant nature, we introduce route attention into self-attention for finding visual consensus, thereby enhancing semantic consistency within the same object. Equipped with a vision-language prompting strategy, our approach significantly boosts the generalization capacity of segmentation models for unseen classes. Experimental results underscore the effectiveness of our approach, showcasing mIoU gains of 4.5 on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and 3.6 on the COCO-Stuff 164k for unseen classes compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Towards Deviation-Robust Agent Navigation via Perturbation-Aware Contrastive Learning

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) asks an agent to follow a given language instruction to navigate through a real 3D environment. Despite significant advances, conventional VLN agents are trained typically under disturbance-free environments and may easily fail in real-world scenarios, since they are unaware of how to deal with various possible disturbances, such as sudden obstacles or human interruptions, which widely exist and may usually cause an unexpected route deviation. In this paper, we present a model-agnostic training paradigm, called Progressive Perturbation-aware Contrastive Learning (PROPER) to enhance the generalization ability of existing VLN agents, by requiring them to learn towards deviation-robust navigation. Specifically, a simple yet effective path perturbation scheme is introduced to implement the route deviation, with which the agent is required to still navigate successfully following the original instruction. Since directly enforcing the agent to learn perturbed trajectories may lead to inefficient training, a progressively perturbed trajectory augmentation strategy is designed, where the agent can self-adaptively learn to navigate under perturbation with the improvement of its navigation performance for each specific trajectory. For encouraging the agent to well capture the difference brought by perturbation, a perturbation-aware contrastive learning mechanism is further developed by contrasting perturbation-free trajectory encodings and perturbation-based counterparts. Extensive experiments on R2R show that PROPER can benefit multiple VLN baselines in perturbation-free scenarios. We further collect the perturbed path data to construct an introspection subset based on the R2R, called Path-Perturbed R2R (PP-R2R). The results on PP-R2R show unsatisfying robustness of popular VLN agents and the capability of PROPER in improving the navigation robustness.