Current Multilingual ASR models only support a fraction of the world's languages. Continual Learning (CL) aims to tackle this problem by adding new languages to pre-trained models while avoiding the loss of performance on existing languages, also known as Catastrophic Forgetting (CF). However, existing CL methods overlook the adaptation of the token embedding lookup table at the decoder, despite its significant contribution to CF. We propose Embedding Layer Surgery where separate copies of the token embeddings are created for each new languages, and one of the copies is selected to replace the old languages embeddings when transcribing the corresponding new language. Unfortunately, this approach means LID errors also cause incorrect ASR embedding selection. Our Task-wise Beam Search allows self-correction for such mistakes. By adapting Whisper to 10 hours of data for each of 10 unseen languages from Common Voice, results show that our method reduces the Average WER (AWER) of pre-trained languages from 14.2% to 11.9% compared with Experience Replay, without compromising the AWER of the unseen languages.
Among parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, freezing has emerged as a popular strategy for speeding up training, reducing catastrophic forgetting, and improving downstream performance. We investigate the impact of freezing the decoder in a multi-task setup comprising diverse natural language tasks, aiming to reduce deployment overhead and enhance portability to novel tasks. Our experiments, conducted by fine-tuning both individual and multi-task setups on the AlexaTM model, reveal that freezing decoders is highly effective for tasks with natural language outputs and mitigates catastrophic forgetting in multilingual tasks. However, we find that pairing frozen decoders with a larger model can effectively maintain or even enhance performance in structured and QA tasks, making it a viable strategy for a broader range of task types.
Remote sensing image semantic change detection is a method used to analyze remote sensing images, aiming to identify areas of change as well as categorize these changes within images of the same location taken at different times. Traditional change detection methods often face challenges in generalizing across semantic categories in practical scenarios. To address this issue, we introduce a novel approach called Semantic-CD, specifically designed for semantic change detection in remote sensing images. This method incorporates the open vocabulary semantics from the vision-language foundation model, CLIP. By utilizing CLIP's extensive vocabulary knowledge, our model enhances its ability to generalize across categories and improves segmentation through fully decoupled multi-task learning, which includes both binary change detection and semantic change detection tasks. Semantic-CD consists of four main components: a bi-temporal CLIP visual encoder for extracting features from bi-temporal images, an open semantic prompter for creating semantic cost volume maps with open vocabulary, a binary change detection decoder for generating binary change detection masks, and a semantic change detection decoder for producing semantic labels. Experimental results on the SECOND dataset demonstrate that Semantic-CD achieves more accurate masks and reduces semantic classification errors, illustrating its effectiveness in applying semantic priors from vision-language foundation models to SCD tasks.
Prompt compression is a promising approach to speeding up language model inference without altering the generative model. Prior works compress prompts into smaller sequences of learned tokens using an encoder that is trained as a LowRank Adaptation (LoRA) of the inference language model. However, we show that the encoder does not need to keep the original language model's architecture to achieve useful compression. We introduce the Attention-Only Compressor (AOC), which learns a prompt compression encoder after removing the multilayer perceptron (MLP) layers in the Transformer blocks of a language model, resulting in an encoder with roughly 67% less parameters compared to the original model. Intriguingly we find that, across a range of compression ratios up to 480x, AOC can better regenerate prompts and outperform a baseline compression encoder that is a LoRA of the inference language model without removing MLP layers. These results demonstrate that the architecture of prompt compression encoders does not need to be identical to that of the original decoder language model, paving the way for further research into architectures and approaches for prompt compression.
Most of the current salient object detection approaches use deeper networks with large backbones to produce more accurate predictions, which results in a significant increase in computational complexity. A great number of network designs follow the pure UNet and Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) architecture which has limited feature extraction and aggregation ability which motivated us to design a lightweight post-decoder refinement module, the crossed post-decoder refinement (CPDR) to enhance the feature representation of a standard FPN or U-Net framework. Specifically, we introduce the Attention Down Sample Fusion (ADF), which employs channel attention mechanisms with attention maps generated by high-level representation to refine the low-level features, and Attention Up Sample Fusion (AUF), leveraging the low-level information to guide the high-level features through spatial attention. Additionally, we proposed the Dual Attention Cross Fusion (DACF) upon ADFs and AUFs, which reduces the number of parameters while maintaining the performance. Experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches.
Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) encapsulate large amounts of knowledge and take enormous amounts of compute to train. We make use of this resource, together with the observation that LLMs are able to transfer knowledge and performance from one domain or even modality to another seemingly-unrelated area, to help with multivariate demand time series forecasting. Attention in transformer-based methods requires something worth attending to -- more than just samples of a time-series. We explore different methods to map multivariate input time series into the LLM token embedding space. In particular, our novel multivariate patching strategy to embed time series features into decoder-only pre-trained Transformers produces results competitive with state-of-the-art time series forecasting models. We also use recently-developed weight-based diagnostics to validate our findings.
Brain decoding has emerged as a rapidly advancing and extensively utilized technique within neuroscience. This paper centers on the application of raw electroencephalogram (EEG) signals for decoding human brain activity, offering a more expedited and efficient methodology for enhancing our understanding of the human brain. The investigation specifically scrutinizes the efficacy of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) in deciphering neural signals associated with speech production, with particular emphasis on the impact of vocabulary size, electrode density, and training data on the framework's performance. The study reveals the competitive word error rates (WERs) achievable on the Librispeech benchmark through pre-training on unlabelled data for speech processing. Furthermore, the study evaluates the efficacy of voice recognition under configurations with limited labeled data, surpassing previous state-of-the-art techniques while utilizing significantly fewer labels. Additionally, the research provides a comprehensive analysis of error patterns in voice recognition and the influence of model size and unlabelled training data. It underscores the significance of factors such as vocabulary size and electrode density in enhancing BCI performance, advocating for an increase in microelectrodes and refinement of language models.
Semantic segmentation plays a crucial role in remote sensing applications, where the accurate extraction and representation of features are essential for high-quality results. Despite the widespread use of encoder-decoder architectures, existing methods often struggle with fully utilizing the high-dimensional features extracted by the encoder and efficiently recovering detailed information during decoding. To address these problems, we propose a novel semantic segmentation network, namely DeepKANSeg, including two key innovations based on the emerging Kolmogorov Arnold Network (KAN). Notably, the advantage of KAN lies in its ability to decompose high-dimensional complex functions into univariate transformations, enabling efficient and flexible representation of intricate relationships in data. First, we introduce a KAN-based deep feature refinement module, namely DeepKAN to effectively capture complex spatial and rich semantic relationships from high-dimensional features. Second, we replace the traditional multi-layer perceptron (MLP) layers in the global-local combined decoder with KAN-based linear layers, namely GLKAN. This module enhances the decoder's ability to capture fine-grained details during decoding. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments are conducted on two well-known fine-resolution remote sensing benchmark datasets, namely ISPRS Vaihingen and ISPRS Potsdam. The results demonstrate that the KAN-enhanced segmentation model achieves superior performance in terms of accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods. They highlight the potential of KANs as a powerful alternative to traditional architectures in semantic segmentation tasks. Moreover, the explicit univariate decomposition provides improved interpretability, which is particularly beneficial for applications requiring explainable learning in remote sensing.
Ultrasound imaging frequently encounters challenges, such as those related to elevated noise levels, diminished spatiotemporal resolution, and the complexity of anatomical structures. These factors significantly hinder the model's ability to accurately capture and analyze structural relationships and dynamic patterns across various regions of the heart. Mamba, an emerging model, is one of the most cutting-edge approaches that is widely applied to diverse vision and language tasks. To this end, this paper introduces a U-shaped deep learning model incorporating a large-window Mamba scale (LMS) module and a hierarchical feature fusion approach for echocardiographic segmentation. First, a cascaded residual block serves as an encoder and is employed to incrementally extract multiscale detailed features. Second, a large-window multiscale mamba module is integrated into the decoder to capture global dependencies across regions and enhance the segmentation capability for complex anatomical structures. Furthermore, our model introduces auxiliary losses at each decoder layer and employs a dual attention mechanism to fuse multilayer features both spatially and across channels. This approach enhances segmentation performance and accuracy in delineating complex anatomical structures. Finally, the experimental results using the EchoNet-Dynamic and CAMUS datasets demonstrate that the model outperforms other methods in terms of both accuracy and robustness. For the segmentation of the left ventricular endocardium (${LV}_{endo}$), the model achieved optimal values of 95.01 and 93.36, respectively, while for the left ventricular epicardium (${LV}_{epi}$), values of 87.35 and 87.80, respectively, were achieved. This represents an improvement ranging between 0.54 and 1.11 compared with the best-performing model.
Generative AI, powered by large language models (LLMs), has revolutionized applications across text, audio, images, and video. This study focuses on developing and evaluating encoder-decoder architectures for the American Sign Language (ASL) image dataset, consisting of 87,000 images across 29 hand sign classes. Three approaches were compared: Feedforward Autoencoders, Convolutional Autoencoders, and Diffusion Autoencoders. The Diffusion Autoencoder outperformed the others, achieving the lowest mean squared error (MSE) and highest Mean Opinion Score (MOS) due to its probabilistic noise modeling and iterative denoising capabilities. The Convolutional Autoencoder demonstrated effective spatial feature extraction but lacked the robustness of the diffusion process, while the Feedforward Autoencoder served as a baseline with limitations in handling complex image data. Objective and subjective evaluations confirmed the superiority of the Diffusion Autoencoder for high-fidelity image reconstruction, emphasizing its potential in multimodal AI applications such as sign language recognition and generation. This work provides critical insights into designing robust encoder-decoder systems to advance multimodal AI capabilities.
This paper addresses the domain adaptation challenge for semantic segmentation in medical imaging. Despite the impressive performance of recent foundational segmentation models like SAM on natural images, they struggle with medical domain images. Beyond this, recent approaches that perform end-to-end fine-tuning of models are simply not computationally tractable. To address this, we propose a novel SAM adapter approach that minimizes the number of trainable parameters while achieving comparable performances to full fine-tuning. The proposed SAM adapter is strategically placed in the mask decoder, offering excellent and broad generalization capabilities and improved segmentation across both fully supervised and test-time domain adaptation tasks. Extensive validation on four datasets showcases the adapter's efficacy, outperforming existing methods while training less than 1% of SAM's total parameters.
In recent years, point cloud upsampling has been widely applied in fields such as 3D reconstruction. Our study investigates the factors influencing point cloud upsampling on both global and local levels through representation learning. Specifically, the paper inputs global and local information of the same point cloud model object into two encoders to extract these features, fuses them, and then feeds the combined features into an upsampling decoder. The goal is to address issues of sparsity and noise in point clouds by leveraging prior knowledge from both global and local inputs. And the proposed framework can be applied to any state-of-the-art point cloud upsampling neural network. Experiments were conducted on a series of autoencoder-based models utilizing deep learning, yielding interpretability for both global and local inputs, and it has been proven in the results that our proposed framework can further improve the upsampling effect in previous SOTA works. At the same time, the Saliency Map reflects the differences between global and local feature inputs, as well as the effectiveness of training with both inputs in parallel.
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) underscore the necessity of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to leverage external information. However, LLMs are sensitive to the position of relevant information within contexts and tend to generate incorrect responses when such information is placed in the middle, known as `Lost in the Middle' phenomenon. In this paper, we introduce a framework that generates consistent outputs for decoder-only models, irrespective of the input context order. Experimental results for three open domain question answering tasks demonstrate position invariance, where the model is not sensitive to input context order, and superior robustness to irrelevent passages compared to prevailing approaches for RAG pipelines.
Intra-sentential code-switching (CS) refers to the alternation between languages that happens within a single utterance and is a significant challenge for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. For example, when a Vietnamese speaker uses foreign proper names or specialized terms within their speech. ASR systems often struggle to accurately transcribe intra-sentential CS due to their training on monolingual data and the unpredictable nature of CS. This issue is even more pronounced for low-resource languages, where limited data availability hinders the development of robust models. In this study, we propose AdaCS, a normalization model integrates an adaptive bias attention module (BAM) into encoder-decoder network. This novel approach provides a robust solution to CS ASR in unseen domains, thereby significantly enhancing our contribution to the field. By utilizing BAM to both identify and normalize CS phrases, AdaCS enhances its adaptive capabilities with a biased list of words provided during inference. Our method demonstrates impressive performance and the ability to handle unseen CS phrases across various domains. Experiments show that AdaCS outperforms previous state-of-the-art method on Vietnamese CS ASR normalization by considerable WER reduction of 56.2% and 36.8% on the two proposed test sets.
Codec-based text-to-speech (TTS) models have shown impressive quality with zero-shot voice cloning abilities. However, they often struggle with more expressive references or complex text inputs. We present MARS6, a robust encoder-decoder transformer for rapid, expressive TTS. MARS6 is built on recent improvements in spoken language modelling. Utilizing a hierarchical setup for its decoder, new speech tokens are processed at a rate of only 12 Hz, enabling efficient modelling of long-form text while retaining reconstruction quality. We combine several recent training and inference techniques to reduce repetitive generation and improve output stability and quality. This enables the 70M-parameter MARS6 to achieve similar performance to models many times larger. We show this in objective and subjective evaluations, comparing TTS output quality and reference speaker cloning ability. Project page: https://camb-ai.github.io/mars6-turbo/
Scene Graph Generation(SGG) is a scene understanding task that aims at identifying object entities and reasoning their relationships within a given image. In contrast to prevailing two-stage methods based on a large object detector (e.g., Faster R-CNN), one-stage methods integrate a fixed-size set of learnable queries to jointly reason relational triplets <subject, predicate, object>. This paradigm demonstrates robust performance with significantly reduced parameters and computational overhead. However, the challenge in one-stage methods stems from the issue of weak entanglement, wherein entities involved in relationships require both coupled features shared within triplets and decoupled visual features. Previous methods either adopt a single decoder for coupled triplet feature modeling or multiple decoders for separate visual feature extraction but fail to consider both. In this paper, we introduce UniQ, a Unified decoder with task-specific Queries architecture, where task-specific queries generate decoupled visual features for subjects, objects, and predicates respectively, and unified decoder enables coupled feature modeling within relational triplets. Experimental results on the Visual Genome dataset demonstrate that UniQ has superior performance to both one-stage and two-stage methods.
In this work, we present EndoDINO, a foundation model for GI endoscopy tasks that achieves strong generalizability by pre-training on a well-curated image dataset sampled from the largest known GI endoscopy video dataset in the literature. Specifically, we pre-trained ViT models with 1B, 307M, and 86M parameters using datasets ranging from 100K to 10M curated images. Using EndoDINO as a frozen feature encoder, we achieved state-of-the-art performance in anatomical landmark classification, polyp segmentation, and Mayo endoscopic scoring (MES) for ulcerative colitis with only simple decoder heads.
The conversion from 2D X-ray to 3D shape holds significant potential for improving diagnostic efficiency and safety. However, existing reconstruction methods often rely on hand-crafted features, manual intervention, and prior knowledge, resulting in unstable shape errors and additional processing costs. In this paper, we introduce Swin-X2S, an end-to-end deep learning method for directly reconstructing 3D segmentation and labeling from 2D biplanar orthogonal X-ray images. Swin-X2S employs an encoder-decoder architecture: the encoder leverages 2D Swin Transformer for X-ray information extraction, while the decoder employs 3D convolution with cross-attention to integrate structural features from orthogonal views. A dimension-expanding module is introduced to bridge the encoder and decoder, ensuring a smooth conversion from 2D pixels to 3D voxels. We evaluate proposed method through extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments across nine publicly available datasets covering four anatomies (femur, hip, spine, and rib), with a total of 54 categories. Significant improvements over previous methods have been observed not only in the segmentation and labeling metrics but also in the clinically relevant parameters that are of primary concern in practical applications, which demonstrates the promise of Swin-X2S to provide an effective option for anatomical shape reconstruction in clinical scenarios. Code implementation is available at: \url{https://github.com/liukuan5625/Swin-X2S}.
We present STAT: a simple algorithm to prune transformer models without any fine-tuning. STAT eliminates both attention heads and neurons from the network, while preserving accuracy by calculating a correction to the weights of the next layer. Each layer block in the network is compressed using a series of principled matrix factorizations that preserve the network structure. Our entire algorithm takes minutes to compress BERT, and less than three hours to compress models with 7B parameters using a single GPU. Using only several hundred data examples, STAT preserves the output of the network and improves upon existing gradient-free pruning methods. It is even competitive with methods that include significant fine-tuning. We demonstrate our method on both encoder and decoder architectures, including BERT, DistilBERT, and Llama-2 using benchmarks such as GLUE, Squad, WikiText2.
Radio map, or pathloss map prediction, is a crucial method for wireless network modeling and management. By leveraging deep learning to construct pathloss patterns from geographical maps, an accurate digital replica of the transmission environment could be established with less computational overhead and lower prediction error compared to traditional model-driven techniques. While existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods predominantly rely on convolutional architectures, this paper introduces a hybrid transformer-convolution model, termed RMTransformer, to enhance the accuracy of radio map prediction. The proposed model features a multi-scale transformer-based encoder for efficient feature extraction and a convolution-based decoder for precise pixel-level image reconstruction. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly improves prediction accuracy, and over a 30% reduction in root mean square error (RMSE) is achieved compared to typical SOTA approaches.