FLawN-T5: An Empirical Examination of Effective Instruction-Tuning Data Mixtures for Legal Reasoning

Instruction tuning is an important step in making language models useful for direct user interaction. However, many legal tasks remain out of reach for most open LLMs and there do not yet exist any large scale instruction datasets for the domain. This critically limits research in this application area. In this work, we curate LawInstruct, a large legal instruction dataset, covering 17 jurisdictions, 24 languages and a total of 12M examples. We present evidence that domain-specific pretraining and instruction tuning improve performance on LegalBench, including improving Flan-T5 XL by 8 points or 16\% over the baseline. However, the effect does not generalize across all tasks, training regimes, model sizes, and other factors. LawInstruct is a resource for accelerating the development of models with stronger information processing and decision making capabilities in the legal domain.

Preuve de concept d'un bot vocal dialoguant en wolof

This paper presents the proof-of-concept of the first automatic voice assistant ever built in Wolof language, the main vehicular language spoken in Senegal. This voicebot is the result of a collaborative research project between Orange Innovation in France, Orange Senegal (aka Sonatel) and ADNCorp, a small IT company based in Dakar, Senegal. The purpose of the voicebot is to provide information to Orange customers about the Sargal loyalty program of Orange Senegal by using the most natural mean to communicate: speech. The voicebot receives in input the customer's oral request that is then processed by a SLU system to reply to the customer's request using audio recordings. The first results of this proof-of-concept are encouraging as we achieved 22\% of WER for the ASR task and 78\% of F1-score on the NLU task.

Observations on Building RAG Systems for Technical Documents

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) for technical documents creates challenges as embeddings do not often capture domain information. We review prior art for important factors affecting RAG and perform experiments to highlight best practices and potential challenges to build RAG systems for technical documents.

DUQGen: Effective Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Neural Rankers by Diversifying Synthetic Query Generation

State-of-the-art neural rankers pre-trained on large task-specific training data such as MS-MARCO, have been shown to exhibit strong performance on various ranking tasks without domain adaptation, also called zero-shot. However, zero-shot neural ranking may be sub-optimal, as it does not take advantage of the target domain information. Unfortunately, acquiring sufficiently large and high quality target training data to improve a modern neural ranker can be costly and time-consuming. To address this problem, we propose a new approach to unsupervised domain adaptation for ranking, DUQGen, which addresses a critical gap in prior literature, namely how to automatically generate both effective and diverse synthetic training data to fine tune a modern neural ranker for a new domain. Specifically, DUQGen produces a more effective representation of the target domain by identifying clusters of similar documents; and generates a more diverse training dataset by probabilistic sampling over the resulting document clusters. Our extensive experiments, over the standard BEIR collection, demonstrate that DUQGen consistently outperforms all zero-shot baselines and substantially outperforms the SOTA baselines on 16 out of 18 datasets, for an average of 4% relative improvement across all datasets. We complement our results with a thorough analysis for more in-depth understanding of the proposed method's performance and to identify promising areas for further improvements.

Towards Robust Event-guided Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Large-Scale Real-World Event-Image Dataset and Novel Approach

Event camera has recently received much attention for low-light image enhancement (LIE) thanks to their distinct advantages, such as high dynamic range. However, current research is prohibitively restricted by the lack of large-scale, real-world, and spatial-temporally aligned event-image datasets. To this end, we propose a real-world (indoor and outdoor) dataset comprising over 30K pairs of images and events under both low and normal illumination conditions. To achieve this, we utilize a robotic arm that traces a consistent non-linear trajectory to curate the dataset with spatial alignment precision under 0.03mm. We then introduce a matching alignment strategy, rendering 90% of our dataset with errors less than 0.01s. Based on the dataset, we propose a novel event-guided LIE approach, called EvLight, towards robust performance in real-world low-light scenes. Specifically, we first design the multi-scale holistic fusion branch to extract holistic structural and textural information from both events and images. To ensure robustness against variations in the regional illumination and noise, we then introduce a Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (SNR)-guided regional feature selection to selectively fuse features of images from regions with high SNR and enhance those with low SNR by extracting regional structure information from events. Extensive experiments on our dataset and the synthetic SDSD dataset demonstrate our EvLight significantly surpasses the frame-based methods. Code and datasets are available at https://vlislab22.github.io/eg-lowlight/.

Equivariant Local Reference Frames for Unsupervised Non-rigid Point Cloud Shape Correspondence

Unsupervised non-rigid point cloud shape correspondence underpins a multitude of 3D vision tasks, yet itself is non-trivial given the exponential complexity stemming from inter-point degree-of-freedom, i.e., pose transformations. Based on the assumption of local rigidity, one solution for reducing complexity is to decompose the overall shape into independent local regions using Local Reference Frames (LRFs) that are invariant to SE(3) transformations. However, the focus solely on local structure neglects global geometric contexts, resulting in less distinctive LRFs that lack crucial semantic information necessary for effective matching. Furthermore, such complexity introduces out-of-distribution geometric contexts during inference, thus complicating generalization. To this end, we introduce 1) EquiShape, a novel structure tailored to learn pair-wise LRFs with global structural cues for both spatial and semantic consistency, and 2) LRF-Refine, an optimization strategy generally applicable to LRF-based methods, aimed at addressing the generalization challenges. Specifically, for EquiShape, we employ cross-talk within separate equivariant graph neural networks (Cross-GVP) to build long-range dependencies to compensate for the lack of semantic information in local structure modeling, deducing pair-wise independent SE(3)-equivariant LRF vectors for each point. For LRF-Refine, the optimization adjusts LRFs within specific contexts and knowledge, enhancing the geometric and semantic generalizability of point features. Our overall framework surpasses the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on three benchmarks. Code and models will be publicly available.

Energy Allocation for Multi-User Cooperative Molecular Communication Systems in the Internet of Bio-Nano Things

Cooperative molecular communication (MC) is a promising technology for facilitating communication between nanomachines in the Internet of Bio-Nano Things (IoBNT) field. However, the performance of IoBNT is limited by the availability of energy for cooperative MC. This paper presents a novel transmitter design scheme that utilizes molecule movement between reservoirs, creating concentration differences through the consumption of free energy, and encoding information on molecule types. The performance of the transmitter is primarily influenced by energy costs, which directly impact the overall IoBNT system performance. To address this, the paper focuses on optimizing energy allocation in cooperative MC for enhanced transmitter performance. Theoretical analysis is conducted for two transmitters. For scenarios with more than two users, a genetic algorithm is employed in the energy allocation to minimize the total bit error rate (BER). Finally, numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed energy allocation strategies in the considered cooperative MC system.

WcDT: World-centric Diffusion Transformer for Traffic Scene Generation

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for autonomous driving trajectory generation by harnessing the complementary strengths of diffusion probabilistic models (a.k.a., diffusion models) and transformers. Our proposed framework, termed the "World-Centric Diffusion Transformer" (WcDT), optimizes the entire trajectory generation process, from feature extraction to model inference. To enhance the scene diversity and stochasticity, the historical trajectory data is first preprocessed and encoded into latent space using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM) enhanced with Diffusion with Transformer (DiT) blocks. Then, the latent features, historical trajectories, HD map features, and historical traffic signal information are fused with various transformer-based encoders. The encoded traffic scenes are then decoded by a trajectory decoder to generate multimodal future trajectories. Comprehensive experimental results show that the proposed approach exhibits superior performance in generating both realistic and diverse trajectories, showing its potential for integration into automatic driving simulation systems.

Noise Masking Attacks and Defenses for Pretrained Speech Models

Speech models are often trained on sensitive data in order to improve model performance, leading to potential privacy leakage. Our work considers noise masking attacks, introduced by Amid et al. 2022, which attack automatic speech recognition (ASR) models by requesting a transcript of an utterance which is partially replaced with noise. They show that when a record has been seen at training time, the model will transcribe the noisy record with its memorized sensitive transcript. In our work, we extend these attacks beyond ASR models, to attack pretrained speech encoders. Our method fine-tunes the encoder to produce an ASR model, and then performs noise masking on this model, which we find recovers private information from the pretraining data, despite the model never having seen transcripts at pretraining time! We show how to improve the precision of these attacks and investigate a number of countermeasures to our attacks.

Learning-Based Joint Beamforming and Antenna Movement Design for Movable Antenna Systems

In this paper, we investigate a multi-receiver communication system enabled by movable antennas (MAs). Specifically, the transmit beamforming and the double-side antenna movement at the transceiver are jointly designed to maximize the sum-rate of all receivers under imperfect channel state information (CSI). Since the formulated problem is non-convex with highly coupled variables, conventional optimization methods cannot solve it efficiently. To address these challenges, an effective learning-based algorithm is proposed, namely heterogeneous multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG), which incorporates two agents to learn policies for beamforming and movement of MAs, respectively. Based on the offline learning under numerous imperfect CSI, the proposed heterogeneous MADDPG can output the solutions for transmit beamforming and antenna movement in real time. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, and the MA can significantly improve the sum-rate performance of multiple receivers compared to other benchmark schemes.