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Recent advances in generative models that iteratively synthesize audio clips sparked great success to text-to-audio synthesis (TTA), but with the cost of slow synthesis speed and heavy computation. Although there have been attempts to accelerate the iterative procedure, high-quality TTA systems remain inefficient due to hundreds of iterations required in the inference phase and large amount of model parameters. To address the challenges, we propose SpecMaskGIT, a light-weighted, efficient yet effective TTA model based on the masked generative modeling of spectrograms. First, SpecMaskGIT synthesizes a realistic 10s audio clip by less than 16 iterations, an order-of-magnitude less than previous iterative TTA methods. As a discrete model, SpecMaskGIT outperforms larger VQ-Diffusion and auto-regressive models in the TTA benchmark, while being real-time with only 4 CPU cores or even 30x faster with a GPU. Next, built upon a latent space of Mel-spectrogram, SpecMaskGIT has a wider range of applications (e.g., the zero-shot bandwidth extension) than similar methods built on the latent wave domain. Moreover, we interpret SpecMaskGIT as a generative extension to previous discriminative audio masked Transformers, and shed light on its audio representation learning potential. We hope our work inspires the exploration of masked audio modeling toward further diverse scenarios., Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, 8 tables. Audio samples: https://zzaudio.github.io/SpecMaskGIT/index.html

We propose a new benchmark, ComperDial, which facilitates the training and evaluation of evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue systems. ComperDial consists of human-scored responses for 10,395 dialogue turns in 1,485 conversations collected from 99 dialogue agents submitted to the Commonsense Persona-grounded Dialogue (CPD) challenge. As a result, for any dialogue, our benchmark includes multiple diverse responses with variety of characteristics to ensure more robust evaluation of learned dialogue metrics. In addition to single-turn response scores, ComperDial also contains dialogue-level human-annotated scores, enabling joint assessment of multi-turn model responses throughout a dialogue. Finally, building off ComperDial, we devise a new automatic evaluation metric to measure the general similarity of model-generated dialogues to human conversations. Our experimental results demonstrate that our novel metric, CPDScore is more correlated with human judgments than existing metrics. We release both ComperDial and CPDScore to the community to accelerate development of automatic evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue systems.

In recent years, with the realistic generation results and a wide range of personalized applications, diffusion-based generative models gain huge attention in both visual and audio generation areas. Compared to the considerable advancements of text2image or text2audio generation, research in audio2visual or visual2audio generation has been relatively slow. The recent audio-visual generation methods usually resort to huge large language model or composable diffusion models. Instead of designing another giant model for audio-visual generation, in this paper we take a step back showing a simple and lightweight generative transformer, which is not fully investigated in multi-modal generation, can achieve excellent results on image2audio generation. The transformer operates in the discrete audio and visual Vector-Quantized GAN space, and is trained in the mask denoising manner. After training, the classifier-free guidance could be deployed off-the-shelf achieving better performance, without any extra training or modification. Since the transformer model is modality symmetrical, it could also be directly deployed for audio2image generation and co-generation. In the experiments, we show that our simple method surpasses recent image2audio generation methods. Generated audio samples can be found at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZtC0SeblKkut4XJcRaDsSTuCRIXB3ypxmSi7HTY3IyQ/, Comment: 10 pages

Accurate bearing load monitoring is essential for their Prognostics and Health Management (PHM), enabling damage assessment, wear prediction, and proactive maintenance. While bearing sensors are typically placed on the bearing housing, direct load monitoring requires sensors inside the bearing itself. Recently introduced sensor rollers enable direct bearing load monitoring but are constrained by their battery life. Data-driven virtual sensors can learn from sensor roller data collected during a batterys lifetime to map operating conditions to bearing loads. Although spatially distributed bearing sensors offer insights into load distribution (e.g., correlating temperature with load), traditional machine learning algorithms struggle to fully exploit these spatial-temporal dependencies. To address this gap, we introduce a graph-based virtual sensor that leverages Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to analyze spatial-temporal dependencies among sensor signals, mapping existing measurements (temperature, vibration) to bearing loads. Since temperature and vibration signals exhibit vastly different dynamics, we propose Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Networks (HTGNN), which explicitly models these signal types and their interactions for effective load prediction. Our results demonstrate that HTGNN outperforms Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which struggle to capture both spatial and heterogeneous signal characteristics. These findings highlight the importance of capturing the complex spatial interactions between temperature, vibration, and load., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures

We consider the task of building a dialogue system that can motivate users to adopt positive lifestyle changes: Motivational Interviewing. Addressing such a task requires a system that can infer \textit{how} to motivate a user effectively. We propose DIIT, a framework that is capable of learning and applying conversation strategies in the form of natural language inductive rules from expert demonstrations. Automatic and human evaluation on instruction-following large language models show natural language strategy descriptions discovered by DIIR can improve active listening skills, reduce unsolicited advice, and promote more collaborative and less authoritative responses, outperforming various demonstration utilization methods.

Inferring contextually-relevant and diverse commonsense to understand narratives remains challenging for knowledge models. In this work, we develop a series of knowledge models, DiffuCOMET, that leverage diffusion to learn to reconstruct the implicit semantic connections between narrative contexts and relevant commonsense knowledge. Across multiple diffusion steps, our method progressively refines a representation of commonsense facts that is anchored to a narrative, producing contextually-relevant and diverse commonsense inferences for an input context. To evaluate DiffuCOMET, we introduce new metrics for commonsense inference that more closely measure knowledge diversity and contextual relevance. Our results on two different benchmarks, ComFact and WebNLG+, show that knowledge generated by DiffuCOMET achieves a better trade-off between commonsense diversity, contextual relevance and alignment to known gold references, compared to baseline knowledge models.

This paper is concerned with an inverse wavenumber/frequency-dependent source problem for the Helmholtz equation. In two and three dimensions, the unknown source term is supposed to be compactly supported in spatial variables but independent on one spatial variable. The dependence of the source function on wavenumber/frequency is supposed to be unknown. Based on the Dirichlet-Laplacian and Fourier-Transform methods, we develop two effcient non-iterative numerical algorithms to recover the wavenumber-dependent source. Uniqueness proof and increasing stability analysis are carried out in terms of the boundary measurement data of Dirichlet kind. Numerical experiments are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods., Comment: 26 pages, 35 figures

While valuable datasets such as PersonaChat provide a foundation for training persona-grounded dialogue agents, they lack diversity in conversational and narrative settings, primarily existing in the "real" world. To develop dialogue agents with unique personas, models are trained to converse given a specific persona, but hand-crafting these persona can be time-consuming, thus methods exist to automatically extract persona information from existing character-specific dialogue. However, these persona-extraction models are also trained on datasets derived from PersonaChat and struggle to provide high-quality persona information from conversational settings that do not take place in the real world, such as the fantasy-focused dataset, LIGHT. Creating new data to train models on a specific setting is human-intensive, thus prohibitively expensive. To address both these issues, we introduce a natural language inference method for post-hoc adapting a trained persona extraction model to a new setting. We draw inspiration from the literature of dialog natural language inference (NLI), and devise NLI-reranking methods to extract structured persona information from dialogue. Compared to existing persona extraction models, our method returns higher-quality extracted persona and requires less human annotation., Comment: Code and models will be released upon publication

Contrastive cross-modal models such as CLIP and CLAP aid various vision-language (VL) and audio-language (AL) tasks. However, there has been limited investigation of and improvement in their language encoder, which is the central component of encoding natural language descriptions of image/audio into vector representations. We extensively evaluate how unsupervised and supervised sentence embedding training affect language encoder quality and cross-modal task performance. In VL pretraining, we found that sentence embedding training language encoder quality and aids in cross-modal tasks, improving contrastive VL models such as CyCLIP. In contrast, AL pretraining benefits less from sentence embedding training, which may result from the limited amount of pretraining data. We analyze the representation spaces to understand the strengths of sentence embedding training, and find that it improves text-space uniformity, at the cost of decreased cross-modal alignment.

Reporting bias arises when people assume that some knowledge is universally understood and hence, do not necessitate explicit elaboration. In this paper, we focus on the wide existence of reporting bias in visual-language datasets, embodied as the object-attribute association, which can subsequentially degrade models trained on them. To mitigate this bias, we propose a bimodal augmentation (BiAug) approach through object-attribute decoupling to flexibly synthesize visual-language examples with a rich array of object-attribute pairing and construct cross-modal hard negatives. We employ large language models (LLMs) in conjunction with a grounding object detector to extract target objects. Subsequently, the LLM generates a detailed attribute description for each object and produces a corresponding hard negative counterpart. An inpainting model is then used to create images based on these detailed object descriptions. By doing so, the synthesized examples explicitly complement omitted objects and attributes to learn, and the hard negative pairs steer the model to distinguish object attributes. Our experiments demonstrated that BiAug is superior in object-attribute understanding. In addition, BiAug also improves the performance on zero-shot retrieval tasks on general benchmarks like MSCOCO and Flickr30K. BiAug refines the way of collecting text-image datasets. Mitigating the reporting bias helps models achieve a deeper understanding of visual-language phenomena, expanding beyond mere frequent patterns to encompass the richness and diversity of real-world scenarios.

The use of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors for air pollution monitoring has significantly increased, resulting in the deployment of low-cost sensors. Despite this advancement, accurately calibrating these sensors in uncontrolled environmental conditions remains a challenge. To address this, we propose a novel approach that leverages graph neural networks, specifically the graph attention network module, to enhance the calibration process by fusing data from sensor arrays. Through our experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in significantly improving the calibration accuracy of sensors in IoT air pollution monitoring platforms.

In the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), condition monitoring sensor signals from complex systems often exhibit nonlinear and stochastic spatial-temporal dynamics under varying conditions. These complex dynamics make fault detection particularly challenging. While previous methods effectively model these dynamics, they often neglect the evolution of relationships between sensor signals. Undetected shifts in these relationships can lead to significant system failures. Furthermore, these methods frequently misidentify novel operating conditions as faults. Addressing these limitations, we propose DyEdgeGAT (Dynamic Edge via Graph Attention), a novel approach for early-stage fault detection in IIoT systems. DyEdgeGAT's primary innovation lies in a novel graph inference scheme for multivariate time series that tracks the evolution of relationships between time series, enabled by dynamic edge construction. Another key innovation of DyEdgeGAT is its ability to incorporate operating condition contexts into node dynamics modeling, enhancing its accuracy and robustness. We rigorously evaluated DyEdgeGAT using both a synthetic dataset, simulating varying levels of fault severity, and a real-world industrial-scale multiphase flow facility benchmark with diverse fault types under varying operating conditions and detection complexities. The results show that DyEdgeGAT significantly outperforms other baseline methods in fault detection, particularly in the early stages with low severity, and exhibits robust performance under novel operating conditions., Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures

Effective Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) relies on accurate prediction of the Remaining Useful Life (RUL). Data-driven RUL prediction techniques rely heavily on the representativeness of the available time-to-failure trajectories. Therefore, these methods may not perform well when applied to data from new units of a fleet that follow different operating conditions than those they were trained on. This is also known as domain shifts. Domain adaptation (DA) methods aim to address the domain shift problem by extracting domain invariant features. However, DA methods do not distinguish between the different phases of operation, such as steady states or transient phases. This can result in misalignment due to under- or over-representation of different operation phases. This paper proposes two novel DA approaches for RUL prediction based on an adversarial domain adaptation framework that considers the different phases of the operation profiles separately. The proposed methodologies align the marginal distributions of each phase of the operation profile in the source domain with its counterpart in the target domain. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is evaluated using the New Commercial Modular Aero-Propulsion System (N-CMAPSS) dataset, where sub-fleets of turbofan engines operating in one of the three different flight classes (short, medium, and long) are treated as separate domains. The experimental results show that the proposed methods improve the accuracy of RUL predictions compared to current state-of-the-art DA methods., Comment: 18 pages,11 figures

Past research has examined how well these models grasp code syntax, yet their understanding of code semantics still needs to be explored. We extensively analyze seven code models to investigate how code models represent code syntax and semantics. This includes four prominent code pre-trained models (CodeBERT, GraphCodeBERT, CodeT5, and UnixCoder) and three large language models (StarCoder, CodeLlama, and CodeT5+). We have developed four probing tasks to evaluate the models' abilities to learn code syntax and semantics. These tasks focus on reconstructing code syntax and semantic structures-such as AST, CFG, CDG, and DDG - within the models' representation spaces. These structures are fundamental to understanding code. Additionally, we explore the role of syntax tokens in each token representation and the extended dependencies among code tokens. Furthermore, we examine the distribution of attention weights concerning code semantic structures. Through detailed analysis, our results emphasize the strengths and weaknesses of various code models in mastering code syntax and semantics. The findings reveal that these models are proficient in grasping code syntax, effectively capturing the relationships and roles of syntax tokens. However, their ability to encode code semantics shows more variability. This study enriches our understanding of the capabilities of code models in analyzing syntax and semantics. Our findings offer valuable insights for future code model enhancements, helping optimize their application across a range of code-related tasks.

This paper is concerned with a direct sampling method for imaging the support of a frequency-dependent source term embedded in a homogeneous and isotropic medium. The source term is given by the Fourier transform of a time-dependent source whose radiating period in the time domain is known. The time-dependent source is supposed to be stationary in the sense that its compact support does not vary along the time variable. Via a multi-frequency direct sampling method, we show that the smallest strip containing the source support and perpendicular to the observation direction can be recovered from far-field patterns at a fixed observation angle. With multiple but sparse observation directions, the shape of the convex hull of the source support can be recovered. The frequency-domain analysis performed here can be used to handle inverse time-dependent source problems. Our algorithm has low computational overhead and is robust against noise. Numerical experiments in both two and three dimensions have proved our theoretical findings.

Humor is a magnetic component in everyday human interactions and communications. Computationally modeling humor enables NLP systems to entertain and engage with users. We investigate the effectiveness of prompting, a new transfer learning paradigm for NLP, for humor recognition. We show that prompting performs similarly to finetuning when numerous annotations are available, but gives stellar performance in low-resource humor recognition. The relationship between humor and offense is also inspected by applying influence functions to prompting; we show that models could rely on offense to determine humor during transfer., Comment: Transfer Learning for Natural Language Processing Workshop at NeurIPS 2022

Recent research has made impressive progress in large-scale multimodal pre-training. In the context of the rapid growth of model size, it is necessary to seek efficient and flexible methods other than finetuning. In this paper, we propose to use prompt vectors to align the modalities. Our method achieves comparable performance to several other multimodal fusion methods in low-resource settings. We further show that our method is modular and parameter-efficient for processing tasks involving two or more data modalities., Comment: Accepted to Findings of ACL 2022

Vast efforts have been devoted to creating high-performance few-shot learners, i.e., large-scale pretrained language models (PLMs) that perform well with little downstream task training data. Training PLMs has incurred significant cost, but utilizing the few-shot learners is still challenging due to their enormous size. This work focuses on a crucial question: How to make effective use of these few-shot learners? We propose LMTurk, a novel approach that treats few-shot learners as crowdsourcing workers. The rationale is that crowdsourcing workers are in fact few-shot learners: They are shown a few illustrative examples to learn about a task and then start annotating. LMTurk employs few-shot learners built upon PLMs as workers. We show that the resulting annotations can be utilized to train models that solve the task well and are small enough to be deployable in practical scenarios. Active learning is integrated into LMTurk to reduce the amount of queries made to PLMs, minimizing the computational cost of running PLM inference passes. Altogether, LMTurk is an important step towards making effective use of current PLMs., Comment: Findings of ACL: NAACL 2022

Code embedding is a keystone in the application of machine learning on several Software Engineering (SE) tasks. To effectively support a plethora of SE tasks, the embedding needs to capture program syntax and semantics in a way that is generic. To this end, we propose the first self-supervised pre-training approach (called GraphCode2Vec) which produces task-agnostic embedding of lexical and program dependence features. GraphCode2Vec achieves this via a synergistic combination of code analysis and Graph Neural Networks. GraphCode2Vec is generic, it allows pre-training, and it is applicable to several SE downstream tasks. We evaluate the effectiveness of GraphCode2Vec on four (4) tasks (method name prediction, solution classification, mutation testing and overfitted patch classification), and compare it with four (4) similarly generic code embedding baselines (Code2Seq, Code2Vec, CodeBERT, GraphCodeBERT) and 7 task-specific, learning-based methods. In particular, GraphCode2Vec is more effective than both generic and task-specific learning-based baselines. It is also complementary and comparable to GraphCodeBERT (a larger and more complex model). We also demonstrate through a probing and ablation study that GraphCode2Vec learns lexical and program dependence features and that self-supervised pre-training improves effectiveness.

It has been shown for English that discrete and soft prompting perform strongly in few-shot learning with pretrained language models (PLMs). In this paper, we show that discrete and soft prompting perform better than finetuning in multilingual cases: Crosslingual transfer and in-language training of multilingual natural language inference. For example, with 48 English training examples, finetuning obtains 33.74% accuracy in crosslingual transfer, barely surpassing the majority baseline (33.33%). In contrast, discrete and soft prompting outperform finetuning, achieving 36.43% and 38.79%. We also demonstrate good performance of prompting with training data in multiple languages other than English., Comment: EMNLP 2021

Few-shot crosslingual transfer has been shown to outperform its zero-shot counterpart with pretrained encoders like multilingual BERT. Despite its growing popularity, little to no attention has been paid to standardizing and analyzing the design of few-shot experiments. In this work, we highlight a fundamental risk posed by this shortcoming, illustrating that the model exhibits a high degree of sensitivity to the selection of few shots. We conduct a large-scale experimental study on 40 sets of sampled few shots for six diverse NLP tasks across up to 40 languages. We provide an analysis of success and failure cases of few-shot transfer, which highlights the role of lexical features. Additionally, we show that a straightforward full model finetuning approach is quite effective for few-shot transfer, outperforming several state-of-the-art few-shot approaches. As a step towards standardizing few-shot crosslingual experimental designs, we make our sampled few shots publicly available., Comment: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Natural language generation (NLG) is an essential component of task-oriented dialog systems. Despite the recent success of neural approaches for NLG, they are typically developed in an offline manner for particular domains. To better fit real-life applications where new data come in a stream, we study NLG in a "continual learning" setting to expand its knowledge to new domains or functionalities incrementally. The major challenge towards this goal is catastrophic forgetting, meaning that a continually trained model tends to forget the knowledge it has learned before. To this end, we propose a method called ARPER (Adaptively Regularized Prioritized Exemplar Replay) by replaying prioritized historical exemplars, together with an adaptive regularization technique based on ElasticWeight Consolidation. Extensive experiments to continually learn new domains and intents are conducted on MultiWoZ-2.0 to benchmark ARPER with a wide range of techniques. Empirical results demonstrate that ARPER significantly outperforms other methods by effectively mitigating the detrimental catastrophic forgetting issue., Comment: Accepted as Long Paper at "Findgins of EMNLP, 2020"

We present an efficient method of utilizing pretrained language models, where we learn selective binary masks for pretrained weights in lieu of modifying them through finetuning. Extensive evaluations of masking BERT and RoBERTa on a series of NLP tasks show that our masking scheme yields performance comparable to finetuning, yet has a much smaller memory footprint when several tasks need to be inferred simultaneously. Through intrinsic evaluations, we show that representations computed by masked language models encode information necessary for solving downstream tasks. Analyzing the loss landscape, we show that masking and finetuning produce models that reside in minima that can be connected by a line segment with nearly constant test accuracy. This confirms that masking can be utilized as an efficient alternative to finetuning., Comment: EMNLP 2020; MZ and TL contribute equally

Pretrained language models have achieved a new state of the art on many NLP tasks, but there are still many open questions about how and why they work so well. We investigate the contextualization of words in BERT. We quantify the amount of contextualization, i.e., how well words are interpreted in context, by studying the extent to which semantic classes of a word can be inferred from its contextualized embeddings. Quantifying contextualization helps in understanding and utilizing pretrained language models. We show that top layer representations achieve high accuracy inferring semantic classes; that the strongest contextualization effects occur in the lower layers; that local context is mostly sufficient for semantic class inference; and that top layer representations are more task-specific after finetuning while lower layer representations are more transferable. Finetuning uncovers task related features, but pretrained knowledge is still largely preserved., Comment: EMNLP Findings 2020