Generative retrieval, which is a new advanced paradigm for document retrieval, has recently attracted research interests, since it encodes all documents into the model and directly generates the retrieved documents. However, its power is still underutilized since it heavily relies on the "preprocessed" document identifiers (docids), thus limiting its retrieval performance and ability to retrieve new documents. In this paper, we propose a novel fully end-to-end retrieval paradigm. It can not only end-to-end learn the best docids for existing and new documents automatically via a semantic indexing module, but also perform end-to-end document retrieval via an encoder-decoder-based generative model, namely Auto Search Indexer (ASI). Besides, we design a reparameterization mechanism to combine the above two modules into a joint optimization framework. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our model over advanced baselines on both public and industrial datasets and also verify the ability to deal with new documents.
In text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis, diffusion models have achieved promising generation quality. However, because of the pre-defined data-to-noise diffusion process, their prior distribution is restricted to a noisy representation, which provides little information of the generation target. In this work, we present a novel TTS system, Bridge-TTS, making the first attempt to substitute the noisy Gaussian prior in established diffusion-based TTS methods with a clean and deterministic one, which provides strong structural information of the target. Specifically, we leverage the latent representation obtained from text input as our prior, and build a fully tractable Schrodinger bridge between it and the ground-truth mel-spectrogram, leading to a data-to-data process. Moreover, the tractability and flexibility of our formulation allow us to empirically study the design spaces such as noise schedules, as well as to develop stochastic and deterministic samplers. Experimental results on the LJ-Speech dataset illustrate the effectiveness of our method in terms of both synthesis quality and sampling efficiency, significantly outperforming our diffusion counterpart Grad-TTS in 50-step/1000-step synthesis and strong fast TTS models in few-step scenarios. Project page: //bridge-tts.github.io/
Dense retrieval methods have been mostly focused on unstructured text and less attention has been drawn to structured data with various aspects, e.g., products with aspects such as category and brand. Recent work has proposed two approaches to incorporate the aspect information into item representations for effective retrieval by predicting the values associated with the item aspects. Despite their efficacy, they treat the values as isolated classes (e.g., "Smart Homes", "Home, Garden & Tools", and "Beauty & Health") and ignore their fine-grained semantic relation. Furthermore, they either enforce the learning of aspects into the CLS token, which could confuse it from its designated use for representing the entire content semantics, or learn extra aspect embeddings only with the value prediction objective, which could be insufficient especially when there are no annotated values for an item aspect. Aware of these limitations, we propose a MUlti-granulaRity-aware Aspect Learning model (MURAL) for multi-aspect dense retrieval. It leverages aspect information across various granularities to capture both coarse and fine-grained semantic relations between values. Moreover, MURAL incorporates separate aspect embeddings as input to transformer encoders so that the masked language model objective can assist implicit aspect learning even without aspect-value annotations. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets of products and mini-programs show that MURAL outperforms state-of-the-art baselines significantly.
Recently, studies on machine learning have focused on methods that use symmetry implicit in a specific manifold as an inductive bias. Grassmann manifolds provide the ability to handle fundamental shapes represented as shape spaces, enabling stable shape analysis. In this paper, we present a novel approach in which we establish the theoretical foundations for learning distributions on the Grassmann manifold via continuous normalization flows, with the explicit goal of generating stable shapes. Our approach facilitates more robust generation by effectively eliminating the influence of extraneous transformations, such as rotations and inversions, through learning and generating within a Grassmann manifold designed to accommodate the essential shape information of the object. The experimental results indicated that the proposed method could generate high-quality samples by capturing the data structure. Furthermore, the proposed method significantly outperformed state-of-the-art methods in terms of the log-likelihood or evidence lower bound. The results obtained are expected to stimulate further research in this field, leading to advances for stable shape generation and analysis.
Algorithmic paradigms such as divide-and-conquer (D&C) are proposed to guide developers in designing efficient algorithms, but it can still be difficult to apply algorithmic paradigms to practical tasks. To ease the usage of paradigms, many research efforts have been devoted to the automatic application of algorithmic paradigms. However, most existing approaches to this problem rely on syntax-based program transformations and thus put significant restrictions on the original program. In this paper, we study the automatic application of D&C and several similar paradigms, denoted as D&C-like algorithmic paradigms, and aim to remove the restrictions from syntax-based transformations. To achieve this goal, we propose an efficient synthesizer, named AutoLifter, which does not depend on syntax-based transformations. Specifically, the main challenge of applying algorithmic paradigms is from the large scale of the synthesized programs, and AutoLifter addresses this challenge by applying two novel decomposition methods that do not depend on the syntax of the input program, component elimination and variable elimination, to soundly divide the whole problem into simpler subtasks, each synthesizing a sub-program of the final program and being tractable with existing synthesizers. We evaluate AutoLifter on 96 programming tasks related to 6 different algorithmic paradigms. AutoLifter solves 82/96 tasks with an average time cost of 20.17 seconds, significantly outperforming existing approaches.
We propose and demonstrate a compositional framework for training and verifying reinforcement learning (RL) systems within a multifidelity sim-to-real pipeline, in order to deploy reliable and adaptable RL policies on physical hardware. By decomposing complex robotic tasks into component subtasks and defining mathematical interfaces between them, the framework allows for the independent training and testing of the corresponding subtask policies, while simultaneously providing guarantees on the overall behavior that results from their composition. By verifying the performance of these subtask policies using a multifidelity simulation pipeline, the framework not only allows for efficient RL training, but also for a refinement of the subtasks and their interfaces in response to challenges arising from discrepancies between simulation and reality. In an experimental case study we apply the framework to train and deploy a compositional RL system that successfully pilots a Warthog unmanned ground robot.
Semantic communication, recognized as a promising technology for future intelligent applications, has received widespread research attention. Despite the potential of semantic communication to enhance transmission reliability, especially in low signal-to-noise (SNR) environments, the critical issue of resource allocation and compatibility in the dynamic wireless environment remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose an adaptive semantic resource allocation paradigm with semantic-bit quantization (SBQ) compatibly for existing wireless communications, where the inaccurate environment perception introduced by the additional mapping relationship between semantic metrics and transmission metrics is solved. In order to investigate the performance of semantic communication networks, the quality of service for semantic communication (SC-QoS), including the semantic quantization efficiency (SQE) and transmission latency, is proposed for the first time. A problem of maximizing the overall effective SC-QoS is formulated by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming of the base station, the bits for semantic representation, the subchannel assignment, and the bandwidth resource allocation. To address the non-convex formulated problem, an intelligent resource allocation scheme is proposed based on a hybrid deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm, where the intelligent agent can perceive both semantic tasks and dynamic wireless environments. Simulation results demonstrate that our design can effectively combat semantic noise and achieve superior performance in wireless communications compared to several benchmark schemes. Furthermore, compared to mapping-guided paradigm based resource allocation schemes, our proposed adaptive scheme can achieve up to 13% performance improvement in terms of SC-QoS.
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used for document classification. However, most existing methods are based on static word co-occurrence graphs without sentence-level information, which poses three challenges:(1) word ambiguity, (2) word synonymity, and (3) dynamic contextual dependency. To address these challenges, we propose a novel GNN-based sparse structure learning model for inductive document classification. Specifically, a document-level graph is initially generated by a disjoint union of sentence-level word co-occurrence graphs. Our model collects a set of trainable edges connecting disjoint words between sentences and employs structure learning to sparsely select edges with dynamic contextual dependencies. Graphs with sparse structures can jointly exploit local and global contextual information in documents through GNNs. For inductive learning, the refined document graph is further fed into a general readout function for graph-level classification and optimization in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms most state-of-the-art results, and reveal the necessity to learn sparse structures for each document.
To retrieve more relevant, appropriate and useful documents given a query, finding clues about that query through the text is crucial. Recent deep learning models regard the task as a term-level matching problem, which seeks exact or similar query patterns in the document. However, we argue that they are inherently based on local interactions and do not generalise to ubiquitous, non-consecutive contextual relationships.In this work, we propose a novel relevance matching model based on graph neural networks to leverage the document-level word relationships for ad-hoc retrieval. In addition to the local interactions, we explicitly incorporate all contexts of a term through the graph-of-word text format. Matching patterns can be revealed accordingly to provide a more accurate relevance score. Our approach significantly outperforms strong baselines on two ad-hoc benchmarks. We also experimentally compare our model with BERT and show our ad-vantages on long documents.
Knowledge graph embedding, which aims to represent entities and relations as low dimensional vectors (or matrices, tensors, etc.), has been shown to be a powerful technique for predicting missing links in knowledge graphs. Existing knowledge graph embedding models mainly focus on modeling relation patterns such as symmetry/antisymmetry, inversion, and composition. However, many existing approaches fail to model semantic hierarchies, which are common in real-world applications. To address this challenge, we propose a novel knowledge graph embedding model---namely, Hierarchy-Aware Knowledge Graph Embedding (HAKE)---which maps entities into the polar coordinate system. HAKE is inspired by the fact that concentric circles in the polar coordinate system can naturally reflect the hierarchy. Specifically, the radial coordinate aims to model entities at different levels of the hierarchy, and entities with smaller radii are expected to be at higher levels; the angular coordinate aims to distinguish entities at the same level of the hierarchy, and these entities are expected to have roughly the same radii but different angles. Experiments demonstrate that HAKE can effectively model the semantic hierarchies in knowledge graphs, and significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets for the link prediction task.
Benefit from the quick development of deep learning techniques, salient object detection has achieved remarkable progresses recently. However, there still exists following two major challenges that hinder its application in embedded devices, low resolution output and heavy model weight. To this end, this paper presents an accurate yet compact deep network for efficient salient object detection. More specifically, given a coarse saliency prediction in the deepest layer, we first employ residual learning to learn side-output residual features for saliency refinement, which can be achieved with very limited convolutional parameters while keep accuracy. Secondly, we further propose reverse attention to guide such side-output residual learning in a top-down manner. By erasing the current predicted salient regions from side-output features, the network can eventually explore the missing object parts and details which results in high resolution and accuracy. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods, and with advantages in terms of simplicity, efficiency (45 FPS) and model size (81 MB).