Current speech-based LLMs are predominantly trained on extensive ASR and TTS datasets, excelling in tasks related to these domains. However, their ability to handle direct speech-to-speech conversations remains notably constrained. These models often rely on an ASR-to-TTS chain-of-thought pipeline, converting speech into text for processing before generating audio responses, which introduces latency and loses audio features. We propose a method that implicitly internalizes ASR chain of thought into a speech LLM, enhancing its native speech understanding capabilities. Our approach reduces latency and improves the model's native understanding of speech, paving the way for more efficient and natural real-time audio interactions. We also release a large-scale synthetic conversational dataset to facilitate further research.
Despite their remarkable success, large language models (LLMs) have shown limited ability on applied tasks such as vulnerability detection. We investigate various prompting strategies for vulnerability detection and, as part of this exploration, propose a prompting strategy that integrates natural language descriptions of vulnerabilities with a contrastive chain-of-thought reasoning approach, augmented using contrastive samples from a synthetic dataset. Our study highlights the potential of LLMs to detect vulnerabilities by integrating natural language descriptions, contrastive reasoning, and synthetic examples into a comprehensive prompting framework. Our results show that this approach can enhance LLM understanding of vulnerabilities. On a high-quality vulnerability detection dataset such as SVEN, our prompting strategies can improve accuracies, F1-scores, and pairwise accuracies by 23%, 11%, and 14%, respectively.
Existing work on large language model (LLM) personalization assigned different responding roles to LLM, but overlooked the diversity of questioners. In this work, we propose a new form of questioner-aware LLM personalization, generating different responses even for the same query from different questioners. We design a dual-tower model architecture with a cross-questioner general encoder and a questioner-specific encoder. We further apply contrastive learning with multi-view augmentation, pulling close the dialogue representations of the same questioner, while pulling apart those of different questioners. To mitigate the impact of question diversity on questioner-contrastive learning, we cluster the dialogues based on question similarity and restrict the scope of contrastive learning within each cluster. We also build a multi-questioner dataset from English and Chinese scripts and WeChat records, called MQDialog, containing 173 questioners and 12 responders. Extensive evaluation with different metrics shows a significant improvement in the quality of personalized response generation.
Deploying Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) on the Xylo neuromorphic chip via the Rockpool framework represents a significant advancement in achieving ultra-low-power consumption and high computational efficiency for edge applications. This paper details a novel deployment pipeline, emphasizing the integration of Rockpool's capabilities with Xylo's architecture, and evaluates the system's performance in terms of energy efficiency and accuracy. The unique advantages of the Xylo chip, including its digital spiking architecture and event-driven processing model, are highlighted to demonstrate its suitability for real-time, power-sensitive applications.
Active imaging systems sample the Transient Light Transport Matrix (TLTM) for a scene by sequentially illuminating various positions in this scene using a controllable light source, and then measuring the resulting spatiotemporal light transport with time of flight (ToF) sensors. Time-resolved Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging employs an active imaging system that measures part of the TLTM of an intermediary relay surface, and uses the indirect reflections of light encoded within this TLTM to "see around corners". Such imaging systems have applications in diverse areas such as disaster response, remote surveillance, and autonomous navigation. While existing NLOS imaging systems usually measure a subset of the full TLTM, development of customized gated Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) arrays \cite{riccardo_fast-gated_2022} has made it feasible to probe the full measurement space. In this work, we demonstrate that the full TLTM on the relay surface can be processed with efficient algorithms to computationally focus and detect our illumination in different parts of the hidden scene, turning the relay surface into a second-order active imaging system. These algorithms allow us to iterate on the measured, first-order TLTM, and extract a \textbf{second order TLTM for surfaces in the hidden scene}. We showcase three applications of TLTMs in NLOS imaging: (1) Scene Relighting with novel illumination, (2) Separation of direct and indirect components of light transport in the hidden scene, and (3) Dual Photography. Additionally, we empirically demonstrate that SPAD arrays enable parallel acquisition of photons, effectively mitigating long acquisition times.
Natural Language Inference (NLI) tasks require identifying the relationship between sentence pairs, typically classified as entailment, contradiction, or neutrality. While the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) model, Entailment Few-Shot Learning (EFL), achieves a 93.1% accuracy on the Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) dataset, further advancements are constrained by the dataset's limitations. To address this, we propose a novel approach leveraging synthetic data augmentation to enhance dataset diversity and complexity. We present UnitedSynT5, an advanced extension of EFL that leverages a T5-based generator to synthesize additional premise-hypothesis pairs, which are rigorously cleaned and integrated into the training data. These augmented examples are processed within the EFL framework, embedding labels directly into hypotheses for consistency. We train a GTR-T5-XL model on this expanded dataset, achieving a new benchmark of 94.7% accuracy on the SNLI dataset, 94.01% accuracy on the E-SNLI dataset, and 92.57% accuracy on the MultiNLI dataset, surpassing the previous SOTA models. This research demonstrates the potential of synthetic data augmentation in improving NLI models, offering a path forward for further advancements in natural language understanding tasks.
Context: The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly transformed Software Engineering (SE) by providing innovative methods for analyzing software repositories. Objectives: Our objective is to establish a practical framework for future SE researchers needing to enhance the data collection and dataset while conducting software repository mining studies using LLMs. Method: This experience report shares insights from two previous repository mining studies, focusing on the methodologies used for creating, refining, and validating prompts that enhance the output of LLMs, particularly in the context of data collection in empirical studies. Results: Our research packages a framework, coined Prompt Refinement and Insights for Mining Empirical Software repositories (PRIMES), consisting of a checklist that can improve LLM usage performance, enhance output quality, and minimize errors through iterative processes and comparisons among different LLMs. We also emphasize the significance of reproducibility by implementing mechanisms for tracking model results. Conclusion: Our findings indicate that standardizing prompt engineering and using PRIMES can enhance the reliability and reproducibility of studies utilizing LLMs. Ultimately, this work calls for further research to address challenges like hallucinations, model biases, and cost-effectiveness in integrating LLMs into workflows.
Reasoning with knowledge expressed in natural language and Knowledge Bases (KBs) is a major challenge for Artificial Intelligence, with applications in machine reading, dialogue, and question answering. General neural architectures that jointly learn representations and transformations of text are very data-inefficient, and it is hard to analyse their reasoning process. These issues are addressed by end-to-end differentiable reasoning systems such as Neural Theorem Provers (NTPs), although they can only be used with small-scale symbolic KBs. In this paper we first propose Greedy NTPs (GNTPs), an extension to NTPs addressing their complexity and scalability limitations, thus making them applicable to real-world datasets. This result is achieved by dynamically constructing the computation graph of NTPs and including only the most promising proof paths during inference, thus obtaining orders of magnitude more efficient models. Then, we propose a novel approach for jointly reasoning over KBs and textual mentions, by embedding logic facts and natural language sentences in a shared embedding space. We show that GNTPs perform on par with NTPs at a fraction of their cost while achieving competitive link prediction results on large datasets, providing explanations for predictions, and inducing interpretable models. Source code, datasets, and supplementary material are available online at //github.com/uclnlp/gntp.
Pre-trained deep neural network language models such as ELMo, GPT, BERT and XLNet have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, their size makes them impractical for a number of scenarios, especially on mobile and edge devices. In particular, the input word embedding matrix accounts for a significant proportion of the model's memory footprint, due to the large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Knowledge distillation techniques have had success at compressing large neural network models, but they are ineffective at yielding student models with vocabularies different from the original teacher models. We introduce a novel knowledge distillation technique for training a student model with a significantly smaller vocabulary as well as lower embedding and hidden state dimensions. Specifically, we employ a dual-training mechanism that trains the teacher and student models simultaneously to obtain optimal word embeddings for the student vocabulary. We combine this approach with learning shared projection matrices that transfer layer-wise knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Our method is able to compress the BERT_BASE model by more than 60x, with only a minor drop in downstream task metrics, resulting in a language model with a footprint of under 7MB. Experimental results also demonstrate higher compression efficiency and accuracy when compared with other state-of-the-art compression techniques.
Named entity recognition (NER) is the task to identify text spans that mention named entities, and to classify them into predefined categories such as person, location, organization etc. NER serves as the basis for a variety of natural language applications such as question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Although early NER systems are successful in producing decent recognition accuracy, they often require much human effort in carefully designing rules or features. In recent years, deep learning, empowered by continuous real-valued vector representations and semantic composition through nonlinear processing, has been employed in NER systems, yielding stat-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review on existing deep learning techniques for NER. We first introduce NER resources, including tagged NER corpora and off-the-shelf NER tools. Then, we systematically categorize existing works based on a taxonomy along three axes: distributed representations for input, context encoder, and tag decoder. Next, we survey the most representative methods for recent applied techniques of deep learning in new NER problem settings and applications. Finally, we present readers with the challenges faced by NER systems and outline future directions in this area.
Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have struggled with counting objects in natural images so far. We identify a fundamental problem due to soft attention in these models as a cause. To circumvent this problem, we propose a neural network component that allows robust counting from object proposals. Experiments on a toy task show the effectiveness of this component and we obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on the number category of the VQA v2 dataset without negatively affecting other categories, even outperforming ensemble models with our single model. On a difficult balanced pair metric, the component gives a substantial improvement in counting over a strong baseline by 6.6%.