Developing Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems that can synthesize natural breath is essential for human-like voice agents but requires extensive manual annotation of breath positions in training data. To this end, we propose a self-training method for training a breath detection model that can automatically detect breath positions in speech. Our method trains the model using a large speech corpus and involves: 1) annotation of limited breath sounds utilizing a rule-based approach, and 2) iterative augmentation of these annotations through pseudo-labeling based on the model's predictions. Our detection model employs Conformer blocks with down-/up-sampling layers, enabling accurate frame-wise breath detection. We investigate its effectiveness in multi-speaker TTS using text transcripts with detected breath marks. The results indicate that using our proposed model for breath detection and breath mark insertion synthesizes breath-contained speech more naturally than a baseline model.
Text-to-image (TTI) models offer many innovative services but also raise ethical concerns due to their potential to generate unethical images. Most public TTI services employ safety filters to prevent unintended images. In this work, we introduce the Divide-and-Conquer Attack to circumvent the safety filters of state-of the-art TTI models, including DALL-E 3 and Midjourney. Our attack leverages LLMs as text transformation agents to create adversarial prompts. We design attack helper prompts that effectively guide LLMs to break down an unethical drawing intent into multiple benign descriptions of individual image elements, allowing them to bypass safety filters while still generating unethical images. Because the latent harmful meaning only becomes apparent when all individual elements are drawn together. Our evaluation demonstrates that our attack successfully circumvents multiple strong closed-box safety filters. The comprehensive success rate of DACA bypassing the safety filters of the state-of-the-art TTI engine DALL-E 3 is above 85%, while the success rate for bypassing Midjourney V6 exceeds 75%. Our findings have more severe security implications than methods of manual crafting or iterative TTI model querying due to lower attack barrier, enhanced interpretability , and better adaptation to defense. Our prototype is available at: //github.com/researchcode001/Divide-and-Conquer-Attack
Enabling home-assistant robots to perceive and manipulate a diverse range of 3D objects based on human language instructions is a pivotal challenge. Prior research has predominantly focused on simplistic and task-oriented instructions, i.e., "Slide the top drawer open". However, many real-world tasks demand intricate multi-step reasoning, and without human instructions, these will become extremely difficult for robot manipulation. To address these challenges, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark, NrVLM, comprising 15 distinct manipulation tasks, containing over 4500 episodes meticulously annotated with fine-grained language instructions. We split the long-term task process into several steps, with each step having a natural language instruction. Moreover, we propose a novel learning framework that completes the manipulation task step-by-step according to the fine-grained instructions. Specifically, we first identify the instruction to execute, taking into account visual observations and the end-effector's current state. Subsequently, our approach facilitates explicit learning through action-prompts and perception-prompts to promote manipulation-aware cross-modality alignment. Leveraging both visual observations and linguistic guidance, our model outputs a sequence of actionable predictions for manipulation, including contact points and end-effector poses. We evaluate our method and baselines using the proposed benchmark NrVLM. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. For additional details, please refer to //sites.google.com/view/naturalvlm.
Person or identity verification has been recently gaining a lot of attention using audio-visual fusion as faces and voices share close associations with each other. Conventional approaches based on audio-visual fusion rely on score-level or early feature-level fusion techniques. Though existing approaches showed improvement over unimodal systems, the potential of audio-visual fusion for person verification is not fully exploited. In this paper, we have investigated the prospect of effectively capturing both the intra- and inter-modal relationships across audio and visual modalities, which can play a crucial role in significantly improving the fusion performance over unimodal systems. In particular, we introduce a recursive fusion of a joint cross-attentional model, where a joint audio-visual feature representation is employed in the cross-attention framework in a recursive fashion to progressively refine the feature representations that can efficiently capture the intra-and inter-modal relationships. To further enhance the audio-visual feature representations, we have also explored BLSTMs to improve the temporal modeling of audio-visual feature representations. Extensive experiments are conducted on the Voxceleb1 dataset to evaluate the proposed model. Results indicate that the proposed model shows promising improvement in fusion performance by adeptly capturing the intra-and inter-modal relationships across audio and visual modalities.
Modelling musical structure is vital yet challenging for artificial intelligence systems that generate symbolic music compositions. This literature review dissects the evolution of techniques for incorporating coherent structure, from symbolic approaches to foundational and transformative deep learning methods that harness the power of computation and data across a wide variety of training paradigms. In the later stages, we review an emerging technique which we refer to as "sub-task decomposition" that involves decomposing music generation into separate high-level structural planning and content creation stages. Such systems incorporate some form of musical knowledge or neuro-symbolic methods by extracting melodic skeletons or structural templates to guide the generation. Progress is evident in capturing motifs and repetitions across all three eras reviewed, yet modelling the nuanced development of themes across extended compositions in the style of human composers remains difficult. We outline several key future directions to realize the synergistic benefits of combining approaches from all eras examined.
Humans no doubt use language to communicate about their emotional experiences, but does language in turn help humans understand emotions, or is language just a vehicle of communication? This study used a form of artificial intelligence (AI) known as large language models (LLMs) to assess whether language-based representations of emotion causally contribute to the AI's ability to generate inferences about the emotional meaning of novel situations. Fourteen attributes of human emotion concept representation were found to be represented by the LLM's distinct artificial neuron populations. By manipulating these attribute-related neurons, we in turn demonstrated the role of emotion concept knowledge in generative emotion inference. The attribute-specific performance deterioration was related to the importance of different attributes in human mental space. Our findings provide a proof-in-concept that even a LLM can learn about emotions in the absence of sensory-motor representations and highlight the contribution of language-derived emotion-concept knowledge for emotion inference.
Text-to-SQL, which involves translating natural language into Structured Query Language (SQL), is crucial for enabling broad access to structured databases without expert knowledge. However, designing models for such tasks is challenging due to numerous factors, including the presence of 'noise,' such as ambiguous questions and syntactical errors. This study provides an in-depth analysis of the distribution and types of noise in the widely used BIRD-Bench benchmark and the impact of noise on models. While BIRD-Bench was created to model dirty and noisy database values, it was not created to contain noise and errors in the questions and gold queries. We found that noise in questions and gold queries are prevalent in the dataset, with varying amounts across domains, and with an uneven distribution between noise types. The presence of incorrect gold SQL queries, which then generate incorrect gold answers, has a significant impact on the benchmark's reliability. Surprisingly, when evaluating models on corrected SQL queries, zero-shot baselines surpassed the performance of state-of-the-art prompting methods. We conclude that informative noise labels and reliable benchmarks are crucial to developing new Text-to-SQL methods that can handle varying types of noise.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) generate photorealistic faces that are often indistinguishable by humans from real faces. While biases in machine learning models are often assumed to be due to biases in training data, we find pathological internal color and luminance biases in the discriminator of a pre-trained StyleGAN3-r model that are not explicable by the training data. We also find that the discriminator systematically stratifies scores by both image- and face-level qualities and that this disproportionately affects images across gender, race, and other categories. We examine axes common in research on stereotyping in social psychology.
Foundation models, such as Large language Models (LLMs), have attracted significant amount of interest due to their large number of applications. Existing works show that appropriate prompt design, such as Chain-of-Thoughts, can unlock LLM's powerful capacity in diverse areas. However, when handling tasks involving repetitive sub-tasks and/or deceptive contents, such as arithmetic calculation and article-level fake news detection, existing prompting strategies either suffers from insufficient expressive power or intermediate errors triggered by hallucination. To make LLM more discerning to such intermediate errors, we propose to guide LLM with a Divide-and-Conquer program that simultaneously ensures superior expressive power and disentangles task decomposition, sub-task resolution, and resolution assembly process. Theoretic analysis reveals that our strategy can guide LLM to extend the expressive power of fixed-depth Transformer. Experiments indicate that our proposed method can achieve better performance than typical prompting strategies in tasks bothered by intermediate errors and deceptive contents, such as large integer multiplication, hallucination detection and misinformation detection.
Analysis of non-typical emotions, such as stress, depression and engagement is less common and more complex compared to that of frequently discussed emotions like happiness, sadness, fear, and anger. The importance of these non-typical emotions has been increasingly recognized due to their implications on mental health and well-being. Stress and depression impact the engagement in daily tasks, highlighting the need to understand their interplay. This survey is the first to simultaneously explore computational methods for analyzing stress, depression, and engagement. We discuss the most commonly used datasets, input modalities, data processing techniques, and information fusion methods used for the computational analysis of stress, depression and engagement. A timeline and taxonomy of non-typical emotion analysis approaches along with their generic pipeline and categories are presented. Subsequently, we describe state-of-the-art computational approaches for non-typical emotion analysis, including a performance summary on the most commonly used datasets. Following this, we explore the applications, along with the associated challenges, limitations, and future research directions.
Knowledge enhanced pre-trained language models (K-PLMs) are shown to be effective for many public tasks in the literature but few of them have been successfully applied in practice. To address this problem, we propose K-AID, a systematic approach that includes a low-cost knowledge acquisition process for acquiring domain knowledge, an effective knowledge infusion module for improving model performance, and a knowledge distillation component for reducing the model size and deploying K-PLMs on resource-restricted devices (e.g., CPU) for real-world application. Importantly, instead of capturing entity knowledge like the majority of existing K-PLMs, our approach captures relational knowledge, which contributes to better-improving sentence-level text classification and text matching tasks that play a key role in question answering (QA). We conducted a set of experiments on five text classification tasks and three text matching tasks from three domains, namely E-commerce, Government, and Film&TV, and performed online A/B tests in E-commerce. Experimental results show that our approach is able to achieve substantial improvement on sentence-level question answering tasks and bring beneficial business value in industrial settings.