Pre-training speech models on large volumes of data has achieved remarkable success. OpenAI Whisper is a multilingual multitask model trained on 680k hours of supervised speech data. It generalizes well to various speech recognition and translation benchmarks even in a zero-shot setup. However, the full pipeline for developing such models (from data collection to training) is not publicly accessible, which makes it difficult for researchers to further improve its performance and address training-related issues such as efficiency, robustness, fairness, and bias. This work presents an Open Whisper-style Speech Model (OWSM), which reproduces Whisper-style training using an open-source toolkit and publicly available data. OWSM even supports more translation directions and can be more efficient to train. We will publicly release all scripts used for data preparation, training, inference, and scoring as well as pre-trained models and training logs to promote open science.
Diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion, have shown incredible performance on text-to-image generation. Since text-to-image generation often requires models to generate visual concepts with fine-grained details and attributes specified in text prompts, can we leverage the powerful representations learned by pre-trained diffusion models for discriminative tasks such as image-text matching? To answer this question, we propose a novel approach, Discriminative Stable Diffusion (DSD), which turns pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models into few-shot discriminative learners. Our approach mainly uses the cross-attention score of a Stable Diffusion model to capture the mutual influence between visual and textual information and fine-tune the model via efficient attention-based prompt learning to perform image-text matching. By comparing DSD with state-of-the-art methods on several benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the potential of using pre-trained diffusion models for discriminative tasks with superior results on few-shot image-text matching.
Personalization of automatic speech recognition (ASR) models is a widely studied topic because of its many practical applications. Most recently, attention-based contextual biasing techniques are used to improve the recognition of rare words and domain specific entities. However, due to performance constraints, the biasing is often limited to a few thousand entities, restricting real-world usability. To address this, we first propose a "Retrieve and Copy" mechanism to improve latency while retaining the accuracy even when scaled to a large catalog. We also propose a training strategy to overcome the degradation in recall at such scale due to an increased number of confusing entities. Overall, our approach achieves up to 6% more Word Error Rate reduction (WERR) and 3.6% absolute improvement in F1 when compared to a strong baseline. Our method also allows for large catalog sizes of up to 20K without significantly affecting WER and F1-scores, while achieving at least 20% inference speedup per acoustic frame.
We propose the on-the-fly ensembling of a machine translation model with an LLM, prompted on the same task and input. We perform experiments on 4 language pairs (both directions) with varying data amounts. We find that a slightly weaker-at-translation LLM can improve translations of a NMT model, and ensembling with an LLM can produce better translations than ensembling two stronger MT models. We combine our method with various techniques from LLM prompting, such as in context learning and translation context.
Influence Maximization (IM) is a crucial problem in data science. The goal is to find a fixed-size set of highly-influential seed vertices on a network to maximize the influence spread along the edges. While IM is NP-hard on commonly-used diffusion models, a greedy algorithm can achieve $(1-1/e)$-approximation, repeatedly selecting the vertex with the highest marginal gain in influence as the seed. Due to theoretical guarantees, rich literature focuses on improving the performance of the greedy algorithm. To estimate the marginal gain, existing work either runs Monte Carlo (MC) simulations of influence spread or pre-stores hundreds of sketches (usually per-vertex information). However, these approaches can be inefficient in time (MC simulation) or space (storing sketches), preventing the ideas from scaling to today's large-scale graphs. This paper significantly improves the scalability of IM using two key techniques. The first is a sketch-compression technique for the independent cascading model on undirected graphs. It allows combining the simulation and sketching approaches to achieve a time-space tradeoff. The second technique includes new data structures for parallel seed selection. Using our new approaches, we implemented PaC-IM: Parallel and Compressed IM. We compare PaC-IM with state-of-the-art parallel IM systems on a 96-core machine with 1.5TB memory. PaC-IM can process large-scale graphs with up to 900M vertices and 74B edges in about 2 hours. On average across all tested graphs, our uncompressed version is 5--18$\times$ faster and about 1.4$\times$ more space-efficient than existing parallel IM systems. Using compression further saves 3.8$\times$ space with only 70% overhead in time on average.
Most prognostic methods require a decent amount of data for model training. In reality, however, the amount of historical data owned by a single organization might be small or not large enough to train a reliable prognostic model. To address this challenge, this article proposes a federated prognostic model that allows multiple users to jointly construct a failure time prediction model using their multi-stream, high-dimensional, and incomplete data while keeping each user's data local and confidential. The prognostic model first employs multivariate functional principal component analysis to fuse the multi-stream degradation signals. Then, the fused features coupled with the times-to-failure are utilized to build a (log)-location-scale regression model for failure prediction. To estimate parameters using distributed datasets and keep the data privacy of all participants, we propose a new federated algorithm for feature extraction. Numerical studies indicate that the performance of the proposed model is the same as that of classic non-federated prognostic models and is better than that of the models constructed by each user itself.
Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training while preserving the privacy of raw data. A challenge in this framework is the fair and efficient valuation of data, which is crucial for incentivizing clients to contribute high-quality data in the FL task. In scenarios involving numerous data clients within FL, it is often the case that only a subset of clients and datasets are pertinent to a specific learning task, while others might have either a negative or negligible impact on the model training process. This paper introduces a novel privacy-preserving method for evaluating client contributions and selecting relevant datasets without a pre-specified training algorithm in an FL task. Our proposed approach FedBary, utilizes Wasserstein distance within the federated context, offering a new solution for data valuation in the FL framework. This method ensures transparent data valuation and efficient computation of the Wasserstein barycenter and reduces the dependence on validation datasets. Through extensive empirical experiments and theoretical analyses, we demonstrate the potential of this data valuation method as a promising avenue for FL research.
Large pre-trained sequence models, such as transformer-based architectures, have been recently shown to have the capacity to carry out in-context learning (ICL). In ICL, a decision on a new input is made via a direct mapping of the input and of a few examples from the given task, serving as the task's context, to the output variable. No explicit updates of model parameters are needed to tailor the decision to a new task. Pre-training, which amounts to a form of meta-learning, is based on the observation of examples from several related tasks. Prior work has shown ICL capabilities for linear regression. In this study, we leverage ICL to address the inverse problem of multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) equalization based on a context given by pilot symbols. A task is defined by the unknown fading channel and by the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) level, which may be known. To highlight the practical potential of the approach, we allow for the presence of quantization of the received signals. We demonstrate via numerical results that transformer-based ICL has a threshold behavior, whereby, as the number of pre-training tasks grows, the performance switches from that of a minimum mean squared error (MMSE) equalizer with a prior determined by the pre-trained tasks to that of an MMSE equalizer with the true data-generating prior.
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is important for reliability assessment and enhancement of machine learning models. In deep learning, uncertainties arise not only from data, but also from the training procedure that often injects substantial noises and biases. These hinder the attainment of statistical guarantees and, moreover, impose computational challenges on UQ due to the need for repeated network retraining. Building upon the recent neural tangent kernel theory, we create statistically guaranteed schemes to principally \emph{characterize}, and \emph{remove}, the uncertainty of over-parameterized neural networks with very low computation effort. In particular, our approach, based on what we call a procedural-noise-correcting (PNC) predictor, removes the procedural uncertainty by using only \emph{one} auxiliary network that is trained on a suitably labeled dataset, instead of many retrained networks employed in deep ensembles. Moreover, by combining our PNC predictor with suitable light-computation resampling methods, we build several approaches to construct asymptotically exact-coverage confidence intervals using as low as four trained networks without additional overheads.
Existing knowledge graph (KG) embedding models have primarily focused on static KGs. However, real-world KGs do not remain static, but rather evolve and grow in tandem with the development of KG applications. Consequently, new facts and previously unseen entities and relations continually emerge, necessitating an embedding model that can quickly learn and transfer new knowledge through growth. Motivated by this, we delve into an expanding field of KG embedding in this paper, i.e., lifelong KG embedding. We consider knowledge transfer and retention of the learning on growing snapshots of a KG without having to learn embeddings from scratch. The proposed model includes a masked KG autoencoder for embedding learning and update, with an embedding transfer strategy to inject the learned knowledge into the new entity and relation embeddings, and an embedding regularization method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. To investigate the impacts of different aspects of KG growth, we construct four datasets to evaluate the performance of lifelong KG embedding. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art inductive and lifelong embedding baselines.
Conventional methods for object detection typically require a substantial amount of training data and preparing such high-quality training data is very labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot object detection network that aims at detecting objects of unseen categories with only a few annotated examples. Central to our method are our Attention-RPN, Multi-Relation Detector and Contrastive Training strategy, which exploit the similarity between the few shot support set and query set to detect novel objects while suppressing false detection in the background. To train our network, we contribute a new dataset that contains 1000 categories of various objects with high-quality annotations. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first datasets specifically designed for few-shot object detection. Once our few-shot network is trained, it can detect objects of unseen categories without further training or fine-tuning. Our method is general and has a wide range of potential applications. We produce a new state-of-the-art performance on different datasets in the few-shot setting. The dataset link is //github.com/fanq15/Few-Shot-Object-Detection-Dataset.