Cross-corpus speech emotion recognition (SER) aims to transfer emotional knowledge from a labeled source corpus to an unlabeled corpus. However, prior methods require access to source data during adaptation, which is unattainable in real-life scenarios due to data privacy protection concerns. This paper tackles a more practical task, namely source-free cross-corpus SER, where a pre-trained source model is adapted to the target domain without access to source data. To address the problem, we propose a novel method called emotion-aware contrastive adaptation network (ECAN). The core idea is to capture local neighborhood information between samples while considering the global class-level adaptation. Specifically, we propose a nearest neighbor contrastive learning to promote local emotion consistency among features of highly similar samples. Furthermore, relying solely on nearest neighborhoods may lead to ambiguous boundaries between clusters. Thus, we incorporate supervised contrastive learning to encourage greater separation between clusters representing different emotions, thereby facilitating improved class-level adaptation. Extensive experiments indicate that our proposed ECAN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods under the source-free cross-corpus SER setting on several speech emotion corpora.
Interpretability tools that offer explanations in the form of a dialogue have demonstrated their efficacy in enhancing users' understanding, as one-off explanations may occasionally fall short in providing sufficient information to the user. Current solutions for dialogue-based explanations, however, require many dependencies and are not easily transferable to tasks they were not designed for. With LLMCheckup, we present an easily accessible tool that allows users to chat with any state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) about its behavior. We enable LLMs to generate all explanations by themselves and take care of intent recognition without fine-tuning, by connecting them with a broad spectrum of Explainable AI (XAI) tools, e.g. feature attributions, embedding-based similarity, and prompting strategies for counterfactual and rationale generation. LLM (self-)explanations are presented as an interactive dialogue that supports follow-up questions and generates suggestions. LLMCheckup provides tutorials for operations available in the system, catering to individuals with varying levels of expertise in XAI and supports multiple input modalities. We introduce a new parsing strategy called multi-prompt parsing substantially enhancing the parsing accuracy of LLMs. Finally, we showcase the tasks of fact checking and commonsense question answering.
Playing Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) in 2023 is trendy among the AI community. However, the relatively large number of parameters (more than 7B) of popular LVLMs makes it difficult to train and deploy on consumer GPUs, discouraging many researchers with limited resources. Imagine how cool it would be to experience all the features of current LVLMs on an old GTX1080ti (our only game card). Accordingly, we present Vary-toy in this report, a small-size Vary along with Qwen-1.8B as the base ``large'' language model. In Vary-toy, we introduce an improved vision vocabulary, allowing the model to not only possess all features of Vary but also gather more generality. Specifically, we replace negative samples of natural images with positive sample data driven by object detection in the procedure of generating vision vocabulary, more sufficiently utilizing the capacity of the vocabulary network and enabling it to efficiently encode visual information corresponding to natural objects. For experiments, Vary-toy can achieve 65.6% ANLS on DocVQA, 59.1% accuracy on ChartQA, 88.1% accuracy on RefCOCO, and 29% on MMVet. The code will be publicly available on the homepage.
Content creation and image editing can benefit from flexible user controls. A common intermediate representation for conditional image generation is a semantic map, that has information of objects present in the image. When compared to raw RGB pixels, the modification of semantic map is much easier. One can take a semantic map and easily modify the map to selectively insert, remove, or replace objects in the map. The method proposed in this paper takes in the modified semantic map and alter the original image in accordance to the modified map. The method leverages traditional pre-trained image-to-image translation GANs, such as CycleGAN or Pix2Pix GAN, that are fine-tuned on a limited dataset of reference images associated with the semantic maps. We discuss the qualitative and quantitative performance of our technique to illustrate its capacity and possible applications in the fields of image forgery and image editing. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed image forgery technique in thwarting the numerous deep learning-based image forensic techniques, highlighting the urgent need to develop robust and generalizable image forensic tools in the fight against the spread of fake media.
Automated fact-checking has drawn considerable attention over the past few decades due to the increase in the diffusion of misinformation on online platforms. This is often carried out as a sequence of tasks comprising (i) the detection of sentences circulating in online platforms which constitute claims needing verification, followed by (ii) the verification process of those claims. This survey focuses on the former, by discussing existing efforts towards detecting claims needing fact-checking, with a particular focus on multilingual data and methods. This is a challenging and fertile direction where existing methods are yet far from matching human performance due to the profoundly challenging nature of the issue. Especially, the dissemination of information across multiple social platforms, articulated in multiple languages and modalities demands more generalized solutions for combating misinformation. Focusing on multilingual misinformation, we present a comprehensive survey of existing multilingual claim detection research. We present state-of-the-art multilingual claim detection research categorized into three key factors of the problem, verifiability, priority, and similarity. Further, we present a detailed overview of the existing multilingual datasets along with the challenges and suggest possible future advancements.
The MagNet Challenge 2023 calls upon competitors to develop data-driven models for the material-specific, waveform-agnostic estimation of steady-state power losses in toroidal ferrite cores. The following HARDCORE (H-field and power loss estimation for Arbitrary waveforms with Residual, Dilated convolutional neural networks in ferrite COREs) approach shows that a residual convolutional neural network with physics-informed extensions can serve this task efficiently when trained on observational data beforehand. One key solution element is an intermediate model layer which first reconstructs the bh curve and then estimates the power losses based on the curve's area rendering the proposed topology physically interpretable. In addition, emphasis was placed on expert-based feature engineering and information-rich inputs in order to enable a lean model architecture. A model is trained from scratch for each material, while the topology remains the same. A Pareto-style trade-off between model size and estimation accuracy is demonstrated, which yields an optimum at as low as 1755 parameters and down to below 8\,\% for the 95-th percentile of the relative error for the worst-case material with sufficient samples.
Traffic prediction, a critical component for intelligent transportation systems, endeavors to foresee future traffic at specific locations using historical data. Although existing traffic prediction models often emphasize developing complex neural network structures, their accuracy has not seen improvements accordingly. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown outstanding capabilities in time series analysis. Differing from existing models, LLMs progress mainly through parameter expansion and extensive pre-training while maintaining their fundamental structures. In this paper, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Large Language Model (ST-LLM) for traffic prediction. Specifically, ST-LLM redefines the timesteps at each location as tokens and incorporates a spatial-temporal embedding module to learn the spatial location and global temporal representations of tokens. Then these representations are fused to provide each token with unified spatial and temporal information. Furthermore, we propose a novel partially frozen attention strategy of the LLM, which is designed to capture spatial-temporal dependencies for traffic prediction. Comprehensive experiments on real traffic datasets offer evidence that ST-LLM outperforms state-of-the-art models. Notably, the ST-LLM also exhibits robust performance in both few-shot and zero-shot prediction scenarios.
Lately, instruction-based techniques have made significant strides in improving performance in few-shot learning scenarios. They achieve this by bridging the gap between pre-trained language models and fine-tuning for specific downstream tasks. Despite these advancements, the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in information extraction tasks like Named Entity Recognition (NER), using prompts or instructions, still falls short of supervised baselines. The reason for this performance gap can be attributed to the fundamental disparity between NER and LLMs. NER is inherently a sequence labeling task, where the model must assign entity-type labels to individual tokens within a sentence. In contrast, LLMs are designed as a text generation task. This distinction between semantic labeling and text generation leads to subpar performance. In this paper, we transform the NER task into a text-generation task that can be readily adapted by LLMs. This involves enhancing source sentences with task-specific instructions and answer choices, allowing for the identification of entities and their types within natural language. We harness the strength of LLMs by integrating supervised learning within them. The goal of this combined strategy is to boost the performance of LLMs in extraction tasks like NER while simultaneously addressing hallucination issues often observed in LLM-generated content. A novel corpus Contract NER comprising seven frequently observed contract categories, encompassing named entities associated with 18 distinct legal entity types is released along with our baseline models. Our models and dataset are available to the community for future research * .
Objective: Question answering (QA) systems have the potential to improve the quality of clinical care by providing health professionals with the latest and most relevant evidence. However, QA systems have not been widely adopted. This systematic review aims to characterize current medical QA systems, assess their suitability for healthcare, and identify areas of improvement. Materials and methods: We searched PubMed, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, ACL Anthology and forward and backward citations on 7th February 2023. We included peer-reviewed journal and conference papers describing the design and evaluation of biomedical QA systems. Two reviewers screened titles, abstracts, and full-text articles. We conducted a narrative synthesis and risk of bias assessment for each study. We assessed the utility of biomedical QA systems. Results: We included 79 studies and identified themes, including question realism, answer reliability, answer utility, clinical specialism, systems, usability, and evaluation methods. Clinicians' questions used to train and evaluate QA systems were restricted to certain sources, types and complexity levels. No system communicated confidence levels in the answers or sources. Many studies suffered from high risks of bias and applicability concerns. Only 8 studies completely satisfied any criterion for clinical utility, and only 7 reported user evaluations. Most systems were built with limited input from clinicians. Discussion: While machine learning methods have led to increased accuracy, most studies imperfectly reflected real-world healthcare information needs. Key research priorities include developing more realistic healthcare QA datasets and considering the reliability of answer sources, rather than merely focusing on accuracy.
Cooking recipes are one of the most readily available kinds of procedural text. They consist of natural language instructions that can be challenging to interpret. In this paper, we propose a model to identify relevant information from recipes and generate a graph to represent the sequence of actions in the recipe. In contrast with other approaches, we use an unsupervised approach. We iteratively learn the graph structure and the parameters of a $\mathsf{GNN}$ encoding the texts (text-to-graph) one sequence at a time while providing the supervision by decoding the graph into text (graph-to-text) and comparing the generated text to the input. We evaluate the approach by comparing the identified entities with annotated datasets, comparing the difference between the input and output texts, and comparing our generated graphs with those generated by state of the art methods.