Teach me with a Whisper: Enhancing Large Language Models for Analyzing Spoken Transcripts using Speech Embeddings

Speech data has rich acoustic and paralinguistic information with important cues for understanding a speaker's tone, emotion, and intent, yet traditional large language models such as BERT do not incorporate this information. There has been an increased interest in multi-modal language models leveraging audio and/or visual information and text. However, current multi-modal language models require both text and audio/visual data streams during inference/test time. In this work, we propose a methodology for training language models leveraging spoken language audio data but without requiring the audio stream during prediction time. This leads to an improved language model for analyzing spoken transcripts while avoiding an audio processing overhead at test time. We achieve this via an audio-language knowledge distillation framework, where we transfer acoustic and paralinguistic information from a pre-trained speech embedding (OpenAI Whisper) teacher model to help train a student language model on an audio-text dataset. In our experiments, the student model achieves consistent improvement over traditional language models on tasks analyzing spoken transcripts.

General Part Assembly Planning

Most successes in autonomous robotic assembly have been restricted to single target or category. We propose to investigate general part assembly, the task of creating novel target assemblies with unseen part shapes. To tackle the planning of general part assembly, we present General Part Assembly Transformer (GPAT), a transformer based model architecture that accurately predicts part poses by inferring how each part shape corresponds to the target shape. Our experiments on both 3D CAD models and real-world scans demonstrate GPAT's generalization abilities to novel and diverse target and part shapes. Project website: https://general-part-assembly.github.io/

Shared and Private Information Learning in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Deep Modal Alignment and Self-supervised Multi-Task Learning

Designing an effective representation learning method for multimodal sentiment analysis tasks is a crucial research direction. The challenge lies in learning both shared and private information in a complete modal representation, which is difficult with uniform multimodal labels and a raw feature fusion approach. In this work, we propose a deep modal shared information learning module based on the covariance matrix to capture the shared information between modalities. Additionally, we use a label generation module based on a self-supervised learning strategy to capture the private information of the modalities. Our module is plug-and-play in multimodal tasks, and by changing the parameterization, it can adjust the information exchange relationship between the modes and learn the private or shared information between the specified modes. We also employ a multi-task learning strategy to help the model focus its attention on the modal differentiation training data. We provide a detailed formulation derivation and feasibility proof for the design of the deep modal shared information learning module. We conduct extensive experiments on three common multimodal sentiment analysis baseline datasets, and the experimental results validate the reliability of our model. Furthermore, we explore more combinatorial techniques for the use of the module. Our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on most of the metrics of the three public datasets.

CornerFormer: Boosting Corner Representation for Fine-Grained Structured Reconstruction

Structured reconstruction is a non-trivial dense prediction problem, which extracts structural information (\eg, building corners and edges) from a raster image, then reconstructs it to a 2D planar graph accordingly. Compared with common segmentation or detection problems, it significantly relays on the capability that leveraging holistic geometric information for structural reasoning. Current transformer-based approaches tackle this challenging problem in a two-stage manner, which detect corners in the first model and classify the proposed edges (corner-pairs) in the second model. However, they separate two-stage into different models and only share the backbone encoder. Unlike the existing modeling strategies, we present an enhanced corner representation method: 1) It fuses knowledge between the corner detection and edge prediction by sharing feature in different granularity; 2) Corner candidates are proposed in four heatmap channels w.r.t its direction. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our proposed method can better reconstruct fine-grained structures, such as adjacent corners and tiny edges. Consequently, it outperforms the state-of-the-art model by +1.9\%@F-1 on Corner and +3.0\%@F-1 on Edge.

Semi-Supervised 2D Human Pose Estimation Driven by Position Inconsistency Pseudo Label Correction Module

In this paper, we delve into semi-supervised 2D human pose estimation. The previous method ignored two problems: (i) When conducting interactive training between large model and lightweight model, the pseudo label of lightweight model will be used to guide large models. (ii) The negative impact of noise pseudo labels on training. Moreover, the labels used for 2D human pose estimation are relatively complex: keypoint category and keypoint position. To solve the problems mentioned above, we propose a semi-supervised 2D human pose estimation framework driven by a position inconsistency pseudo label correction module (SSPCM). We introduce an additional auxiliary teacher and use the pseudo labels generated by the two teacher model in different periods to calculate the inconsistency score and remove outliers. Then, the two teacher models are updated through interactive training, and the student model is updated using the pseudo labels generated by two teachers. To further improve the performance of the student model, we use the semi-supervised Cut-Occlude based on pseudo keypoint perception to generate more hard and effective samples. In addition, we also proposed a new indoor overhead fisheye human keypoint dataset WEPDTOF-Pose. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the previous best semi-supervised 2D human pose estimation method. We will release the code and dataset at https://github.com/hlz0606/SSPCM.

PrimeQA: The Prime Repository for State-of-the-Art Multilingual Question Answering Research and Development

The field of Question Answering (QA) has made remarkable progress in recent years, thanks to the advent of large pre-trained language models, newer realistic benchmark datasets with leaderboards, and novel algorithms for key components such as retrievers and readers. In this paper, we introduce PRIMEQA: a one-stop and open-source QA repository with an aim to democratize QA re-search and facilitate easy replication of state-of-the-art (SOTA) QA methods. PRIMEQA supports core QA functionalities like retrieval and reading comprehension as well as auxiliary capabilities such as question generation.It has been designed as an end-to-end toolkit for various use cases: building front-end applications, replicating SOTA methods on pub-lic benchmarks, and expanding pre-existing methods. PRIMEQA is available at : https://github.com/primeqa.

Learning Cross-Lingual IR from an English Retriever

We present a new cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) model trained using multi-stage knowledge distillation (KD). The teacher and the student are heterogeneous systems-the former is a pipeline that relies on machine translation and monolingual IR, while the latter executes a single CLIR operation. We show that the student can learn both multilingual representations and CLIR by optimizing two corresponding KD objectives. Learning multilingual representations from an English-only retriever is accomplished using a novel cross-lingual alignment algorithm that greedily re-positions the teacher tokens for alignment. Evaluation on the XOR-TyDi benchmark shows that the proposed model is far more effective than the existing approach of fine-tuning with cross-lingual labeled IR data, with a gain in accuracy of 25.4 Recall@5kt.

Scene Editing as Teleoperation: A Case Study in 6DoF Kit Assembly

Studies in robot teleoperation have been centered around action specifications -- from continuous joint control to discrete end-effector pose control. However, these robot-centric interfaces often require skilled operators with extensive robotics expertise. To make teleoperation accessible to non-expert users, we propose the framework "Scene Editing as Teleoperation" (SEaT), where the key idea is to transform the traditional "robot-centric" interface into a "scene-centric" interface -- instead of controlling the robot, users focus on specifying the task's goal by manipulating digital twins of the real-world objects. As a result, a user can perform teleoperation without any expert knowledge of the robot hardware. To achieve this goal, we utilize a category-agnostic scene-completion algorithm that translates the real-world workspace (with unknown objects) into a manipulable virtual scene representation and an action-snapping algorithm that refines the user input before generating the robot's action plan. To train the algorithms, we procedurally generated a large-scale, diverse kit-assembly dataset that contains object-kit pairs that mimic real-world object-kitting tasks. Our experiments in simulation and on a real-world system demonstrate that our framework improves both the efficiency and success rate for 6DoF kit-assembly tasks. A user study demonstrates that SEaT framework participants achieve a higher task success rate and report a lower subjective workload compared to an alternative robot-centric interface. Video can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NdR3mkPbQQ .