Virtual assistants have the potential to play an important role in helping users achieves different tasks. However, these systems face challenges in their real-world usability, characterized by inefficiency and struggles in grasping user intentions. Leveraging recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce GptVoiceTasker, a virtual assistant poised to enhance user experiences and task efficiency on mobile devices. GptVoiceTasker excels at intelligently deciphering user commands and executing relevant device interactions to streamline task completion. The system continually learns from historical user commands to automate subsequent usages, further enhancing execution efficiency. Our experiments affirm GptVoiceTasker's exceptional command interpretation abilities and the precision of its task automation module. In our user study, GptVoiceTasker boosted task efficiency in real-world scenarios by 34.85%, accompanied by positive participant feedback. We made GptVoiceTasker open-source, inviting further research into LLMs utilization for diverse tasks through prompt engineering and leveraging user usage data to improve efficiency.
Dictation enables efficient text input on mobile devices. However, writing with speech can produce disfluent, wordy, and incoherent text and thus requires heavy post-processing. This paper presents Rambler, an LLM-powered graphical user interface that supports gist-level manipulation of dictated text with two main sets of functions: gist extraction and macro revision. Gist extraction generates keywords and summaries as anchors to support the review and interaction with spoken text. LLM-assisted macro revisions allow users to respeak, split, merge and transform dictated text without specifying precise editing locations. Together they pave the way for interactive dictation and revision that help close gaps between spontaneous spoken words and well-structured writing. In a comparative study with 12 participants performing verbal composition tasks, Rambler outperformed the baseline of a speech-to-text editor + ChatGPT, as it better facilitates iterative revisions with enhanced user control over the content while supporting surprisingly diverse user strategies.
The emergence of LLMs has ignited a fresh surge of breakthroughs in NLP applications, particularly in domains such as question-answering systems and text generation. As the need for longer context grows, a significant bottleneck in model deployment emerges due to the linear expansion of the Key-Value (KV) cache with the context length. Existing methods primarily rely on various hypotheses, such as sorting the KV cache based on attention scores for replacement or eviction, to compress the KV cache and improve model throughput. However, heuristics used by these strategies may wrongly evict essential KV cache, which can significantly degrade model performance. In this paper, we propose QAQ, a Quality Adaptive Quantization scheme for the KV cache. We theoretically demonstrate that key cache and value cache exhibit distinct sensitivities to quantization, leading to the formulation of separate quantization strategies for their non-uniform quantization. Through the integration of dedicated outlier handling, as well as an improved attention-aware approach, QAQ achieves up to 10x the compression ratio of the KV cache size with a neglectable impact on model performance. QAQ significantly reduces the practical hurdles of deploying LLMs, opening up new possibilities for longer-context applications. The code is available at github.com/ClubieDong/KVCacheQuantization.
Traditional sequential recommendation methods assume that users' sequence data is clean enough to learn accurate sequence representations to reflect user preferences. In practice, users' sequences inevitably contain noise (e.g., accidental interactions), leading to incorrect reflections of user preferences. Consequently, some pioneer studies have explored modeling sequentiality and correlations in sequences to implicitly or explicitly reduce noise's influence. However, relying on only available intra-sequence information (i.e., sequentiality and correlations in a sequence) is insufficient and may result in over-denoising and under-denoising problems (OUPs), especially for short sequences. To improve reliability, we propose to augment sequences by inserting items before denoising. However, due to the data sparsity issue and computational costs, it is challenging to select proper items from the entire item universe to insert into proper positions in a target sequence. Motivated by the above observation, we propose a novel framework--Self-augmented Sequence Denoising for sequential Recommendation (SSDRec) with a three-stage learning paradigm to solve the above challenges. In the first stage, we empower SSDRec by a global relation encoder to learn multi-faceted inter-sequence relations in a data-driven manner. These relations serve as prior knowledge to guide subsequent stages. In the second stage, we devise a self-augmentation module to augment sequences to alleviate OUPs. Finally, we employ a hierarchical denoising module in the third stage to reduce the risk of false augmentations and pinpoint all noise in raw sequences. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of \model over state-of-the-art denoising methods and its flexible applications to mainstream sequential recommendation models. The source code is available at //github.com/zc-97/SSDRec.
Federated Learning (FL) plays a critical role in distributed systems. In these systems, data privacy and confidentiality hold paramount importance, particularly within edge-based data processing systems such as IoT devices deployed in smart homes. FL emerges as a privacy-enforcing sub-domain of machine learning that enables model training on client devices, eliminating the necessity to share private data with a central server. While existing research has predominantly addressed challenges pertaining to data heterogeneity, there remains a current gap in addressing issues such as varying device capabilities and efficient communication. These unaddressed issues raise a number of implications in resource-constrained environments. In particular, the practical implementation of FL-based IoT or edge systems is extremely inefficient. In this paper, we propose "Resource-Efficient Federated Training Framework for Heterogeneous and Resource-Constrained Environments (REFT)," a novel approach specifically devised to address these challenges in resource-limited devices. Our proposed method uses Variable Pruning to optimize resource utilization by adapting pruning strategies to the computational capabilities of each client. Furthermore, our proposed REFT technique employs knowledge distillation to minimize the need for continuous bidirectional client-server communication. This achieves a significant reduction in communication bandwidth, thereby enhancing the overall resource efficiency. We conduct experiments for an image classification task, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in resource-limited settings. Our technique not only preserves data privacy and performance standards but also accommodates heterogeneous model architectures, facilitating the participation of a broader array of diverse client devices in the training process, all while consuming minimal bandwidth.
Due to the widespread applications of conversations in human-computer interaction, Conversation Emotion Recognition (CER) has attracted increasing attention from researchers. In real-world scenarios, the emotional states of both participants in a conversation tend to maintain a relatively stable pattern within the local context, and often encountering issues with incomplete data patterns. Focusing on these two key challenges, we propose a novel framework for incomplete multimodal learning in CER, called "Inverted Teacher-studEnt seArch Conversation Network (ITEACNet)." ITEACNet comprises two novel components: the "Emotion Context Changing Encoder (ECCE)" and the "Inverted Teacher-Student framework (ITS)." ECCE considers context changes from both local and global perspectives, while the ITS allows a simple teacher model to learn complete data processing methods, enabling a complex student model to follow the performance of the teacher model using incomplete data. Furthermore, we employ a Neural Architecture Search algorithm to enhance the capabilities of student model , achieving superior model performance. Finally, to align with real-world scenarios, we introduce a novel evaluation method, testing the model's performance under different missing rate conditions without altering the model weights. We conduct experiments on three benchmark CER datasets, and the results demonstrate that our ITEACNet outperforms existing methods in incomplete multimodal CER.
Visualizations for scattered data are used to make users understand certain attributes of their data by solving different tasks, e.g. correlation estimation, outlier detection, cluster separation. In this paper, we focus on the later task, and develop a technique that is aligned to human perception, that can be used to understand how human subjects perceive clusterings in scattered data and possibly optimize for better understanding. Cluster separation in scatterplots is a task that is typically tackled by widely used clustering techniques, such as for instance k-means or DBSCAN. However, as these algorithms are based on non-perceptual metrics, we can show in our experiments, that their output do not reflect human cluster perception. We propose a learning strategy which directly operates on scattered data. To learn perceptual cluster separation on this data, we crowdsourced a large scale dataset, consisting of 7,320 point-wise cluster affiliations for bivariate data, which has been labeled by 384 human crowd workers. Based on this data, we were able to train ClusterNet, a point-based deep learning model, trained to reflect human perception of cluster separability. In order to train ClusterNet on human annotated data, we use a PointNet++ architecture enabling inference on point clouds directly. In this work, we provide details on how we collected our dataset, report statistics of the resulting annotations, and investigate perceptual agreement of cluster separation for real-world data. We further report the training and evaluation protocol of ClusterNet and introduce a novel metric, that measures the accuracy between a clustering technique and a group of human annotators. Finally, we compare our approach against existing state-of-the-art clustering techniques and can show, that ClusterNet is able to generalize to unseen and out of scope data.
We describe a class of tasks called decision-oriented dialogues, in which AI assistants must collaborate with one or more humans via natural language to help them make complex decisions. We formalize three domains in which users face everyday decisions: (1) choosing an assignment of reviewers to conference papers, (2) planning a multi-step itinerary in a city, and (3) negotiating travel plans for a group of friends. In each of these settings, AI assistants and users have disparate abilities that they must combine to arrive at the best decision: assistants can access and process large amounts of information, while users have preferences and constraints external to the system. For each task, we build a dialogue environment where agents receive a reward based on the quality of the final decision they reach. Using these environments, we collect human-human dialogues with humans playing the role of assistant. To compare how current AI assistants communicate in these settings, we present baselines using large language models in self-play. Finally, we highlight a number of challenges models face in decision-oriented dialogues, ranging from efficient communication to reasoning and optimization, and release our environments as a testbed for future modeling work.
Knowledge graphs are important resources for many artificial intelligence tasks but often suffer from incompleteness. In this work, we propose to use pre-trained language models for knowledge graph completion. We treat triples in knowledge graphs as textual sequences and propose a novel framework named Knowledge Graph Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (KG-BERT) to model these triples. Our method takes entity and relation descriptions of a triple as input and computes scoring function of the triple with the KG-BERT language model. Experimental results on multiple benchmark knowledge graphs show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance in triple classification, link prediction and relation prediction tasks.
Sentiment analysis is a widely studied NLP task where the goal is to determine opinions, emotions, and evaluations of users towards a product, an entity or a service that they are reviewing. One of the biggest challenges for sentiment analysis is that it is highly language dependent. Word embeddings, sentiment lexicons, and even annotated data are language specific. Further, optimizing models for each language is very time consuming and labor intensive especially for recurrent neural network models. From a resource perspective, it is very challenging to collect data for different languages. In this paper, we look for an answer to the following research question: can a sentiment analysis model trained on a language be reused for sentiment analysis in other languages, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Dutch, where the data is more limited? Our goal is to build a single model in the language with the largest dataset available for the task, and reuse it for languages that have limited resources. For this purpose, we train a sentiment analysis model using recurrent neural networks with reviews in English. We then translate reviews in other languages and reuse this model to evaluate the sentiments. Experimental results show that our robust approach of single model trained on English reviews statistically significantly outperforms the baselines in several different languages.
Recurrent neural nets (RNN) and convolutional neural nets (CNN) are widely used on NLP tasks to capture the long-term and local dependencies, respectively. Attention mechanisms have recently attracted enormous interest due to their highly parallelizable computation, significantly less training time, and flexibility in modeling dependencies. We propose a novel attention mechanism in which the attention between elements from input sequence(s) is directional and multi-dimensional (i.e., feature-wise). A light-weight neural net, "Directional Self-Attention Network (DiSAN)", is then proposed to learn sentence embedding, based solely on the proposed attention without any RNN/CNN structure. DiSAN is only composed of a directional self-attention with temporal order encoded, followed by a multi-dimensional attention that compresses the sequence into a vector representation. Despite its simple form, DiSAN outperforms complicated RNN models on both prediction quality and time efficiency. It achieves the best test accuracy among all sentence encoding methods and improves the most recent best result by 1.02% on the Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) dataset, and shows state-of-the-art test accuracy on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST), Multi-Genre natural language inference (MultiNLI), Sentences Involving Compositional Knowledge (SICK), Customer Review, MPQA, TREC question-type classification and Subjectivity (SUBJ) datasets.