DualSpeechLM: Towards Unified Speech Understanding and Generation via Dual Speech Token Modeling with Large Language Models

Extending pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs)'s speech understanding or generation abilities by introducing various effective speech tokens has attracted great attention in the speech community. However, building a unified speech understanding and generation model still faces the following challenges: (1) Due to the huge modality gap between speech tokens and text tokens, extending text LLMs to unified speech LLMs relies on large-scale paired data for fine-tuning, and (2) Generation and understanding tasks prefer information at different levels, e.g., generation benefits from detailed acoustic features, while understanding favors high-level semantics. This divergence leads to difficult performance optimization in one unified model. To solve these challenges, in this paper, we present two key insights in speech tokenization and speech language modeling. Specifically, we first propose an Understanding-driven Speech Tokenizer (USTokenizer), which extracts high-level semantic information essential for accomplishing understanding tasks using text LLMs. In this way, USToken enjoys better modality commonality with text, which reduces the difficulty of modality alignment in adapting text LLMs to speech LLMs. Secondly, we present DualSpeechLM, a dual-token modeling framework that concurrently models USToken as input and acoustic token as output within a unified, end-to-end framework, seamlessly integrating speech understanding and generation capabilities. Furthermore, we propose a novel semantic supervision loss and a Chain-of-Condition (CoC) strategy to stabilize model training and enhance speech generation performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach effectively fosters a complementary relationship between understanding and generation tasks, highlighting the promising strategy of mutually enhancing both tasks in one unified model.

Clinical semantics for lung cancer prediction

Background: Existing clinical prediction models often represent patient data using features that ignore the semantic relationships between clinical concepts. This study integrates domain-specific semantic information by mapping the SNOMED medical term hierarchy into a low-dimensional hyperbolic space using Poincar\'e embeddings, with the aim of improving lung cancer onset prediction. Methods: Using a retrospective cohort from the Optum EHR dataset, we derived a clinical knowledge graph from the SNOMED taxonomy and generated Poincar\'e embeddings via Riemannian stochastic gradient descent. These embeddings were then incorporated into two deep learning architectures, a ResNet and a Transformer model. Models were evaluated for discrimination (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) and calibration (average absolute difference between observed and predicted probabilities) performance. Results: Incorporating pre-trained Poincar\'e embeddings resulted in modest and consistent improvements in discrimination performance compared to baseline models using randomly initialized Euclidean embeddings. ResNet models, particularly those using a 10-dimensional Poincar\'e embedding, showed enhanced calibration, whereas Transformer models maintained stable calibration across configurations. Discussion: Embedding clinical knowledge graphs into hyperbolic space and integrating these representations into deep learning models can improve lung cancer onset prediction by preserving the hierarchical structure of clinical terminologies used for prediction. This approach demonstrates a feasible method for combining data-driven feature extraction with established clinical knowledge.

Hierarchical knowledge guided fault intensity diagnosis of complex industrial systems

Fault intensity diagnosis (FID) plays a pivotal role in monitoring and maintaining mechanical devices within complex industrial systems. As current FID methods are based on chain of thought without considering dependencies among target classes. To capture and explore dependencies, we propose a hierarchical knowledge guided fault intensity diagnosis framework (HKG) inspired by the tree of thought, which is amenable to any representation learning methods. The HKG uses graph convolutional networks to map the hierarchical topological graph of class representations into a set of interdependent global hierarchical classifiers, where each node is denoted by word embeddings of a class. These global hierarchical classifiers are applied to learned deep features extracted by representation learning, allowing the entire model to be end-to-end learnable. In addition, we develop a re-weighted hierarchical knowledge correlation matrix (Re-HKCM) scheme by embedding inter-class hierarchical knowledge into a data-driven statistical correlation matrix (SCM) which effectively guides the information sharing of nodes in graphical convolutional neural networks and avoids over-smoothing issues. The Re-HKCM is derived from the SCM through a series of mathematical transformations. Extensive experiments are performed on four real-world datasets from different industrial domains (three cavitation datasets from SAMSON AG and one existing publicly) for FID, all showing superior results and outperform recent state-of-the-art FID methods.

Knowledge Graph-Infused Fine-Tuning for Structured Reasoning in Large Language Models

This paper addresses the problems of missing reasoning chains and insufficient entity-level semantic understanding in large language models when dealing with tasks that require structured knowledge. It proposes a fine-tuning algorithm framework based on knowledge graph injection. The method builds on pretrained language models and introduces structured graph information for auxiliary learning. A graph neural network is used to encode entities and their relations, constructing a graph-based semantic representation. A fusion mechanism is then designed to jointly model the knowledge graph embeddings with the contextual representations from the language model. To enhance the robustness of knowledge integration, a gating mechanism is introduced to dynamically balance the contributions of linguistic semantics and structural knowledge. This effectively mitigates conflicts between different representational spaces. During training, a joint loss function is constructed to account for both task performance and structural alignment objectives. This helps improve the accuracy of entity prediction and semantic reasoning. The study also includes a series of systematic sensitivity experiments. It evaluates the effects of learning rate, graph coverage, and structural perturbations on model performance. The results further validate the effectiveness and stability of the proposed method across tasks such as entity recognition, question answering, and language generation. Experimental findings show that the proposed structure-aware fine-tuning framework significantly enhances the model's ability to represent complex semantic units. It demonstrates better semantic consistency and contextual logic modeling in scenarios involving structural reasoning and entity extraction.

Towards Spatially Consistent Image Generation: On Incorporating Intrinsic Scene Properties into Diffusion Models

Image generation models trained on large datasets can synthesize high-quality images but often produce spatially inconsistent and distorted images due to limited information about the underlying structures and spatial layouts. In this work, we leverage intrinsic scene properties (e.g., depth, segmentation maps) that provide rich information about the underlying scene, unlike prior approaches that solely rely on image-text pairs or use intrinsics as conditional inputs. Our approach aims to co-generate both images and their corresponding intrinsics, enabling the model to implicitly capture the underlying scene structure and generate more spatially consistent and realistic images. Specifically, we first extract rich intrinsic scene properties from a large image dataset with pre-trained estimators, eliminating the need for additional scene information or explicit 3D representations. We then aggregate various intrinsic scene properties into a single latent variable using an autoencoder. Building upon pre-trained large-scale Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs), our method simultaneously denoises the image and intrinsic domains by carefully sharing mutual information so that the image and intrinsic reflect each other without degrading image quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method corrects spatial inconsistencies and produces a more natural layout of scenes while maintaining the fidelity and textual alignment of the base model (e.g., Stable Diffusion).

A Joint Sparse Self-Representation Learning Method for Multiview Clustering

Multiview clustering (MC) aims to group samples using consistent and complementary information across various views. The subspace clustering, as a fundamental technique of MC, has attracted significant attention. In this paper, we propose a novel joint sparse self-representation learning model for MC, where a featured difference is the extraction of view-specific local information by introducing cardinality (i.e., $\ell_0$-norm) constraints instead of Graph-Laplacian regularization. Specifically, under each view, cardinality constraints directly restrict the samples used in the self-representation stage to extract reliable local and global structure information, while the low-rank constraint aids in revealing a global coherent structure in the consensus affinity matrix during merging. The attendant challenge is that Augmented Lagrange Method (ALM)-based alternating minimization algorithms cannot guarantee convergence when applied directly to our nonconvex, nonsmooth model, thus resulting in poor generalization ability. To address it, we develop an alternating quadratic penalty (AQP) method with global convergence, where two subproblems are iteratively solved by closed-form solutions. Empirical results on six standard datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model and AQP method, compared to eight state-of-the-art algorithms.

TRIDE: A Text-assisted Radar-Image weather-aware fusion network for Depth Estimation

Depth estimation, essential for autonomous driving, seeks to interpret the 3D environment surrounding vehicles. The development of radar sensors, known for their cost-efficiency and robustness, has spurred interest in radar-camera fusion-based solutions. However, existing algorithms fuse features from these modalities without accounting for weather conditions, despite radars being known to be more robust than cameras under adverse weather. Additionally, while Vision-Language models have seen rapid advancement, utilizing language descriptions alongside other modalities for depth estimation remains an open challenge. This paper first introduces a text-generation strategy along with feature extraction and fusion techniques that can assist monocular depth estimation pipelines, leading to improved accuracy across different algorithms on the KITTI dataset. Building on this, we propose TRIDE, a radar-camera fusion algorithm that enhances text feature extraction by incorporating radar point information. To address the impact of weather on sensor performance, we introduce a weather-aware fusion block that adaptively adjusts radar weighting based on current weather conditions. Our method, benchmarked on the nuScenes dataset, demonstrates performance gains over the state-of-the-art, achieving a 12.87% improvement in MAE and a 9.08% improvement in RMSE. Code: https://github.com/harborsarah/TRIDE

Text-conditioned State Space Model For Domain-generalized Change Detection Visual Question Answering

The Earth's surface is constantly changing, and detecting these changes provides valuable insights that benefit various aspects of human society. While traditional change detection methods have been employed to detect changes from bi-temporal images, these approaches typically require expert knowledge for accurate interpretation. To enable broader and more flexible access to change information by non-expert users, the task of Change Detection Visual Question Answering (CDVQA) has been introduced. However, existing CDVQA methods have been developed under the assumption that training and testing datasets share similar distributions. This assumption does not hold in real-world applications, where domain shifts often occur. In this paper, the CDVQA task is revisited with a focus on addressing domain shift. To this end, a new multi-modal and multi-domain dataset, BrightVQA, is introduced to facilitate domain generalization research in CDVQA. Furthermore, a novel state space model, termed Text-Conditioned State Space Model (TCSSM), is proposed. The TCSSM framework is designed to leverage both bi-temporal imagery and geo-disaster-related textual information in an unified manner to extract domain-invariant features across domains. Input-dependent parameters existing in TCSSM are dynamically predicted by using both bi-temporal images and geo-disaster-related description, thereby facilitating the alignment between bi-temporal visual data and the associated textual descriptions. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed method against state-of-the-art models, and superior performance is consistently demonstrated. The code and dataset will be made publicly available upon acceptance at https://github.com/Elman295/TCSSM.

MCP-Orchestrated Multi-Agent System for Automated Disinformation Detection

The large spread of disinformation across digital platforms creates significant challenges to information integrity. This paper presents a multi-agent system that uses relation extraction to detect disinformation in news articles, focusing on titles and short text snippets. The proposed Agentic AI system combines four agents: (i) a machine learning agent (logistic regression), (ii) a Wikipedia knowledge check agent (which relies on named entity recognition), (iii) a coherence detection agent (using LLM prompt engineering), and (iv) a web-scraped data analyzer that extracts relational triplets for fact checking. The system is orchestrated via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), offering shared context and live learning across components. Results demonstrate that the multi-agent ensemble achieves 95.3% accuracy with an F1 score of 0.964, significantly outperforming individual agents and traditional approaches. The weighted aggregation method, mathematically derived from individual agent misclassification rates, proves superior to algorithmic threshold optimization. The modular architecture makes the system easily scalable, while also maintaining details of the decision processes.

Optimization of Private Semantic Communication Performance: An Uncooperative Covert Communication Method

In this paper, a novel covert semantic communication framework is investigated. Within this framework, a server extracts and transmits the semantic information, i.e., the meaning of image data, to a user over several time slots. An attacker seeks to detect and eavesdrop the semantic transmission to acquire details of the original image. To avoid data meaning being eavesdropped by an attacker, a friendly jammer is deployed to transmit jamming signals to interfere the attacker so as to hide the transmitted semantic information. Meanwhile, the server will strategically select time slots for semantic information transmission. Due to limited energy, the jammer will not communicate with the server and hence the server does not know the transmit power of the jammer. Therefore, the server must jointly optimize the semantic information transmitted at each time slot and the corresponding transmit power to maximize the privacy and the semantic information transmission quality of the user. To solve this problem, we propose a prioritised sampling assisted twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm to jointly determine the transmitted semantic information and the transmit power per time slot without the communications between the server and the jammer. Compared to standard reinforcement learning methods, the propose method uses an additional Q network to estimate Q values such that the agent can select the action with a lower Q value from the two Q networks thus avoiding local optimal action selection and estimation bias of Q values. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the privacy and the semantic information transmission quality by up to 77.8% and 14.3% compared to the traditional reinforcement learning methods.