As text-based speech editing becomes increasingly prevalent, the demand for unrestricted free-text editing continues to grow. However, existing speech editing techniques encounter significant challenges, particularly in maintaining intelligibility and acoustic consistency when dealing with out-of-domain (OOD) text. In this paper, we introduce, DiffEditor, a novel speech editing model designed to enhance performance in OOD text scenarios through semantic enrichment and acoustic consistency. To improve the intelligibility of the edited speech, we enrich the semantic information of phoneme embeddings by integrating word embeddings extracted from a pretrained language model. Furthermore, we emphasize that interframe smoothing properties are critical for modeling acoustic consistency, and thus we propose a first-order loss function to promote smoother transitions at editing boundaries and enhance the overall fluency of the edited speech. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in both in-domain and OOD text scenarios.
Scaling the input context length of a large language model (LLM) incurs a significant increase in computation cost and memory footprint to maintain the attention key-value (KV) cache. Existing KV cache compression methods suffer from inefficient compression strategies and limited memory reduction effects, making it difficult for LLMs to conduct long-context inference on consumer-grade devices, especially when inferring long-context stream input. Such obstacles prevent consumer-grade devices from supporting more complex applications, creating challenges for the democratization of LLMs. To overcome this, we propose Locret, the first framework to create an eviction policy compatible with chunked prefill. By evaluating the causal importance of KV cache units by learnable retaining heads, Locret enables precise eviction of cache units, facilitating efficient long-context inference. In our extensive empirical studies, Locret outperforms the recent popular and competitive approaches in terms of memory efficiency and generation quality -- Locret achieves up to 20x of KV cache compression ratio within less than 10% performance loss. Furthermore, Locret achieves 128K+ long-context inference on a single NVIDIA 4090 GPU without compromising generation quality and only costs <1 GPU hour of additional training.
Deductive coding is a common discourse analysis method widely used by learning science and learning analytics researchers for understanding teaching and learning interactions. It often requires researchers to manually label all discourses to be analyzed according to a theoretically guided coding scheme, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. The emergence of large language models such as GPT has opened a new avenue for automatic deductive coding to overcome the limitations of traditional deductive coding. To evaluate the usefulness of large language models in automatic deductive coding, we employed three different classification methods driven by different artificial intelligence technologies, including the traditional text classification method with text feature engineering, BERT-like pretrained language model and GPT-like pretrained large language model (LLM). We applied these methods to two different datasets and explored the potential of GPT and prompt engineering in automatic deductive coding. By analyzing and comparing the accuracy and Kappa values of these three classification methods, we found that GPT with prompt engineering outperformed the other two methods on both datasets with limited number of training samples. By providing detailed prompt structures, the reported work demonstrated how large language models can be used in the implementation of automatic deductive coding.
The field of privacy-preserving Natural Language Processing has risen in popularity, particularly at a time when concerns about privacy grow with the proliferation of Large Language Models. One solution consistently appearing in recent literature has been the integration of Differential Privacy (DP) into NLP techniques. In this paper, we take these approaches into critical view, discussing the restrictions that DP integration imposes, as well as bring to light the challenges that such restrictions entail. To accomplish this, we focus on $\textbf{DP-Prompt}$, a recent method for text privatization leveraging language models to rewrite texts. In particular, we explore this rewriting task in multiple scenarios, both with DP and without DP. To drive the discussion on the merits of DP in NLP, we conduct empirical utility and privacy experiments. Our results demonstrate the need for more discussion on the usability of DP in NLP and its benefits over non-DP approaches.
Disclaimer: Samples in this paper may be harmful and cause discomfort! Patronizing and condescending language (PCL) is a form of speech directed at vulnerable groups. As an essential branch of toxic language, this type of language exacerbates conflicts and confrontations among Internet communities and detrimentally impacts disadvantaged groups. Traditional pre-trained language models (PLMs) perform poorly in detecting PCL due to its implicit toxicity traits like hypocrisy and false sympathy. With the rise of large language models (LLMs), we can harness their rich emotional semantics to establish a paradigm for exploring implicit toxicity. In this paper, we introduce PclGPT, a comprehensive LLM benchmark designed specifically for PCL. We collect, annotate, and integrate the Pcl-PT/SFT dataset, and then develop a bilingual PclGPT-EN/CN model group through a comprehensive pre-training and supervised fine-tuning staircase process to facilitate implicit toxic detection. Group detection results and fine-grained detection from PclGPT and other models reveal significant variations in the degree of bias in PCL towards different vulnerable groups, necessitating increased societal attention to protect them.
In the endeavor to make autonomous robots take actions, task planning is a major challenge that requires translating high-level task descriptions to long-horizon action sequences. Despite recent advances in language model agents, they remain prone to planning errors and limited in their ability to plan ahead. To address these limitations in robotic planning, we advocate a self-refining scheme that iteratively refines a draft plan until an equilibrium is reached. Remarkably, this process can be optimized end-to-end from an analytical perspective without the need to curate additional verifiers or reward models, allowing us to train self-refining planners in a simple supervised learning fashion. Meanwhile, a nested equilibrium sequence modeling procedure is devised for efficient closed-loop planning that incorporates useful feedback from the environment (or an internal world model). Our method is evaluated on the VirtualHome-Env benchmark, showing advanced performance with improved scaling w.r.t. inference-time computation. Code is available at https://github.com/Singularity0104/equilibrium-planner.
Data augmentation is crucial to make machine learning models more robust and safe. However, augmenting data can be challenging as it requires generating diverse data points to rigorously evaluate model behavior on edge cases and mitigate potential harms. Creating high-quality augmentations that cover these "unknown unknowns" is a time- and creativity-intensive task. In this work, we introduce Amplio, an interactive tool to help practitioners navigate "unknown unknowns" in unstructured text datasets and improve data diversity by systematically identifying empty data spaces to explore. Amplio includes three human-in-the-loop data augmentation techniques: Augment With Concepts, Augment by Interpolation, and Augment with Large Language Model. In a user study with 18 professional red teamers, we demonstrate the utility of our augmentation methods in helping generate high-quality, diverse, and relevant model safety prompts. We find that Amplio enabled red teamers to augment data quickly and creatively, highlighting the transformative potential of interactive augmentation workflows.
In this paper, I introduce RisingBALLER, the first publicly available approach that leverages a transformer model trained on football match data to learn match-specific player representations. Drawing inspiration from advances in language modeling, RisingBALLER treats each football match as a unique sequence in which players serve as tokens, with their embeddings shaped by the specific context of the match. Through the use of masked player prediction (MPP) as a pre-training task, RisingBALLER learns foundational features for football player representations, similar to how language models learn semantic features for text representations. As a downstream task, I introduce next match statistics prediction (NMSP) to showcase the effectiveness of the learned player embeddings. The NMSP model surpasses a strong baseline commonly used for performance forecasting within the community. Furthermore, I conduct an in-depth analysis to demonstrate how the learned embeddings by RisingBALLER can be used in various football analytics tasks, such as producing meaningful positional features that capture the essence and variety of player roles beyond rigid x,y coordinates, team cohesion estimation, and similar player retrieval for more effective data-driven scouting. More than a simple machine learning model, RisingBALLER is a comprehensive framework designed to transform football data analytics by learning high-level foundational features for players, taking into account the context of each match. It offers a deeper understanding of football players beyond individual statistics.
Accurately identifying, understanding and describing traffic safety-critical events (SCEs), including crashes, tire strikes, and near-crashes, is crucial for advanced driver assistance systems, automated driving systems, and traffic safety. As SCEs are rare events, most general vision-language models (VLMs) have not been trained sufficiently to link SCE videos and narratives, which could lead to hallucinations and missing key safety characteristics. Here, we introduce ScVLM, a novel hybrid methodology that integrates supervised and contrastive learning techniques to classify the severity and types of SCEs, as well as to generate narrative descriptions of SCEs. This approach utilizes classification to enhance VLMs' comprehension of driving videos and improve the rationality of event descriptions. The proposed approach is trained on and evaluated by more than 8,600 SCEs from the Second Strategic Highway Research Program Naturalistic Driving Study dataset, the largest publicly accessible driving dataset with videos and SCE annotations. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach in generating contextually accurate event descriptions and mitigating VLM hallucinations. The code will be available at https://github.com/datadrivenwheels/ScVLM.
In recent years, the rapid increase in online video content has underscored the limitations of static Video Question Answering (VideoQA) models trained on fixed datasets, as they struggle to adapt to new questions or tasks posed by newly available content. In this paper, we explore the novel challenge of VideoQA within a continual learning framework, and empirically identify a critical issue: fine-tuning a large language model (LLM) for a sequence of tasks often results in catastrophic forgetting. To address this, we propose Collaborative Prompting (ColPro), which integrates specific question constraint prompting, knowledge acquisition prompting, and visual temporal awareness prompting. These prompts aim to capture textual question context, visual content, and video temporal dynamics in VideoQA, a perspective underexplored in prior research. Experimental results on the NExT-QA and DramaQA datasets show that ColPro achieves superior performance compared to existing approaches, achieving 55.14\% accuracy on NExT-QA and 71.24\% accuracy on DramaQA, highlighting its practical relevance and effectiveness.
Text-rich images, where text serves as the central visual element guiding the overall understanding, are prevalent in real-world applications, such as presentation slides, scanned documents, and webpage snapshots. Tasks involving multiple text-rich images are especially challenging, as they require not only understanding the content of individual images but reasoning about inter-relationships and logical flows across multiple visual inputs. Despite the importance of these scenarios, current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle to handle such tasks due to two key challenges: (1) the scarcity of high-quality instruction tuning datasets for text-rich multi-image scenarios, and (2) the difficulty in balancing image resolution with visual feature sequence length. To address these challenges, we propose Leopard, a MLLM designed specifically for handling vision-language tasks involving multiple text-rich images. First, we curated about one million high-quality multimodal instruction-tuning data, tailored to text-rich, multi-image scenarios. Second, we developed an adaptive high-resolution multi-image encoding module to dynamically optimize the allocation of visual sequence length based on the original aspect ratios and resolutions of the input images. Experiments across a wide range of benchmarks demonstrate our model's superior capabilities in text-rich, multi-image evaluations and competitive performance in general domain evaluations.
Recent advancements in 3D Large Language Models (3DLLMs) have highlighted their potential in building general-purpose agents in the 3D real world, yet challenges remain due to the lack of high-quality robust instruction-following data, leading to limited discriminative power and generalization of 3DLLMs. In this paper, we introduce Robin3D, a powerful 3DLLM trained on large-scale instruction-following data generated by our novel data engine, Robust Instruction Generation (RIG) engine. RIG generates two key instruction data: 1) the Adversarial Instruction-following data, which features mixed negative and positive samples to enhance the model's discriminative understanding. 2) the Diverse Instruction-following data, which contains various instruction styles to enhance model's generalization. As a result, we construct 1 million instruction-following data, consisting of 344K Adversarial samples, 508K Diverse samples, and 165K benchmark training set samples. To better handle these complex instructions, Robin3D first incorporates Relation-Augmented Projector to enhance spatial understanding, and then strengthens the object referring and grounding ability through ID-Feature Bonding. Robin3D consistently outperforms previous methods across five widely-used 3D multimodal learning benchmarks, without the need for task-specific fine-tuning. Notably, we achieve a 7.8\% improvement in the grounding task (Multi3DRefer) and a 6.9\% improvement in the captioning task (Scan2Cap).
This paper presents the Language Aided Subset Sampling Based Motion Planner (LASMP), a system that helps mobile robots plan their movements by using natural language instructions. LASMP uses a modified version of the Rapidly Exploring Random Tree (RRT) method, which is guided by user-provided commands processed through a language model (RoBERTa). The system improves efficiency by focusing on specific areas of the robot's workspace based on these instructions, making it faster and less resource-intensive. Compared to traditional RRT methods, LASMP reduces the number of nodes needed by 55% and cuts random sample queries by 80%, while still generating safe, collision-free paths. Tested in both simulated and real-world environments, LASMP has shown better performance in handling complex indoor scenarios. The results highlight the potential of combining language processing with motion planning to make robot navigation more efficient.
Few-shot Continual Relations Extraction (FCRE) is an emerging and dynamic area of study where models can sequentially integrate knowledge from new relations with limited labeled data while circumventing catastrophic forgetting and preserving prior knowledge from pre-trained backbones. In this work, we introduce a novel method that leverages often-discarded language model heads. By employing these components via a mutual information maximization strategy, our approach helps maintain prior knowledge from the pre-trained backbone and strategically aligns the primary classification head, thereby enhancing model performance. Furthermore, we explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs), renowned for their wealth of knowledge, in addressing FCRE challenges. Our comprehensive experimental results underscore the efficacy of the proposed method and offer valuable insights for future work.
Research into the external behaviors and internal mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) has shown promise in addressing complex tasks in the physical world. Studies suggest that powerful LLMs, like GPT-4, are beginning to exhibit human-like cognitive abilities, including planning, reasoning, and reflection. In this paper, we introduce a research line and methodology called LLM Psychology, leveraging human psychology experiments to investigate the cognitive behaviors and mechanisms of LLMs. We migrate the Typoglycemia phenomenon from psychology to explore the "mind" of LLMs. Unlike human brains, which rely on context and word patterns to comprehend scrambled text, LLMs use distinct encoding and decoding processes. Through Typoglycemia experiments at the character, word, and sentence levels, we observe: (I) LLMs demonstrate human-like behaviors on a macro scale, such as lower task accuracy and higher token/time consumption; (II) LLMs exhibit varying robustness to scrambled input, making Typoglycemia a benchmark for model evaluation without new datasets; (III) Different task types have varying impacts, with complex logical tasks (e.g., math) being more challenging in scrambled form; (IV) Each LLM has a unique and consistent "cognitive pattern" across tasks, revealing general mechanisms in its psychology process. We provide an in-depth analysis of hidden layers to explain these phenomena, paving the way for future research in LLM Psychology and deeper interpretability.
In Query-driven Travel Recommender Systems (RSs), it is crucial to understand the user intent behind challenging natural language(NL) destination queries such as the broadly worded "youth-friendly activities" or the indirect description "a high school graduation trip". Such queries are challenging due to the wide scope and subtlety of potential user intents that confound the ability of retrieval methods to infer relevant destinations from available textual descriptions such as WikiVoyage. While query reformulation (QR) has proven effective in enhancing retrieval by addressing user intent, existing QR methods tend to focus only on expanding the range of potentially matching query subtopics (breadth) or elaborating on the potential meaning of a query (depth), but not both. In this paper, we introduce Elaborative Subtopic Query Reformulation (EQR), a large language model-based QR method that combines both breadth and depth by generating potential query subtopics with information-rich elaborations. We also release TravelDest, a novel dataset for query-driven travel destination RSs. Experiments on TravelDest show that EQR achieves significant improvements in recall and precision over existing state-of-the-art QR methods.
In this work, we investigate how a model's tendency to broadly integrate its parametric knowledge evolves throughout pretraining, and how this behavior affects overall performance, particularly in terms of knowledge acquisition and forgetting. We introduce the concept of knowledge entropy, which quantifies the range of memory sources the model engages with; high knowledge entropy indicates that the model utilizes a wide range of memory sources, while low knowledge entropy suggests reliance on specific sources with greater certainty. Our analysis reveals a consistent decline in knowledge entropy as pretraining advances. We also find that the decline is closely associated with a reduction in the model's ability to acquire and retain knowledge, leading us to conclude that diminishing knowledge entropy (smaller number of active memory sources) impairs the model's knowledge acquisition and retention capabilities. We find further support for this by demonstrating that increasing the activity of inactive memory sources enhances the model's capacity for knowledge acquisition and retention.
Circuit discovery with edge-level ablation has become a foundational framework for mechanism interpretability of language models. However, its focus on individual edges often overlooks the sequential, path-level causal relationships that underpin complex behaviors, thus potentially leading to misleading or incomplete circuit discoveries. To address this issue, we propose a novel path-level circuit discovery framework capturing how behaviors emerge through interconnected linear chain and build towards complex behaviors. Our framework is constructed upon a fully-disentangled linear combinations of ``memory circuits'' decomposed from the original model. To discover functional circuit paths, we leverage a 2-step pruning strategy by first reducing the computational graph to a faithful and minimal subgraph and then applying causal mediation to identify common paths of a specific skill, termed as skill paths. In contrast to circuit graph from existing works, we focus on the complete paths of a generic skill rather than on the fine-grained responses to individual components of the input. To demonstrate this, we explore three generic language skills, namely Previous Token Skill, Induction Skill and In-Context Learning Skill using our framework and provide more compelling evidence to substantiate stratification and inclusiveness of these skills.
We introduce Moshi, a speech-text foundation model and full-duplex spoken dialogue framework. Current systems for spoken dialogue rely on pipelines of independent components, namely voice activity detection, speech recognition, textual dialogue and text-to-speech. Such frameworks cannot emulate the experience of real conversations. First, their complexity induces a latency of several seconds between interactions. Second, text being the intermediate modality for dialogue, non-linguistic information that modifies meaning -- such as emotion or non-speech sounds -- is lost in the interaction. Finally, they rely on a segmentation into speaker turns, which does not take into account overlapping speech, interruptions and interjections. Moshi solves these independent issues altogether by casting spoken dialogue as speech-to-speech generation. Starting from a text language model backbone, Moshi generates speech as tokens from the residual quantizer of a neural audio codec, while modeling separately its own speech and that of the user into parallel streams. This allows for the removal of explicit speaker turns, and the modeling of arbitrary conversational dynamics. We moreover extend the hierarchical semantic-to-acoustic token generation of previous work to first predict time-aligned text tokens as a prefix to audio tokens. Not only this "Inner Monologue" method significantly improves the linguistic quality of generated speech, but we also illustrate how it can provide streaming speech recognition and text-to-speech. Our resulting model is the first real-time full-duplex spoken large language model, with a theoretical latency of 160ms, 200ms in practice, and is available at https://github.com/kyutai-labs/moshi.
The retrieval augmented generation (RAG) system such as Retro has been shown to improve language modeling capabilities and reduce toxicity and hallucinations by retrieving from a database of non-parametric memory containing trillions of entries. We introduce Retro-li that shows retrieval can also help using a small-scale database, but it demands more accurate and better neighbors when searching in a smaller hence sparser non-parametric memory. This can be met by using a proper semantic similarity search. We further propose adding a regularization to the non-parametric memory for the first time: it significantly reduces perplexity when the neighbor search operations are noisy during inference, and it improves generalization when a domain shift occurs. We also show that Retro-li's non-parametric memory can potentially be implemented on analog in-memory computing hardware, exhibiting O(1) search time while causing noise in retrieving neighbors, with minimal (<1%) performance loss. Our code is available at: https://github.com/IBM/Retrieval-Enhanced-Transformer-Little.