The network architecture of end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) can be classified into several models, including connectionist temporal classification (CTC), recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T), attention mechanism, and non-autoregressive mask-predict models. Since each of these network architectures has pros and cons, a typical use case is to switch these separate models depending on the application requirement, resulting in the increased overhead of maintaining all models. Several methods for integrating two of these complementary models to mitigate the overhead issue have been proposed; however, if we integrate more models, we will further benefit from these complementary models and realize broader applications with a single system. This paper proposes four-decoder joint modeling (4D) of CTC, attention, RNN-T, and mask-predict, which has the following three advantages: 1) The four decoders are jointly trained so that they can be easily switched depending on the application scenarios. 2) Joint training may bring model regularization and improve the model robustness thanks to their complementary properties. 3) Novel one-pass joint decoding methods using CTC, attention, and RNN-T further improves the performance. The experimental results showed that the proposed model consistently reduced the WER.

This paper describes the ESPnet Unsupervised ASR Open-source Toolkit (EURO), an end-to-end open-source toolkit for unsupervised automatic speech recognition (UASR). EURO adopts the state-of-the-art UASR learning method introduced by the Wav2vec-U, originally implemented at FAIRSEQ, which leverages self-supervised speech representations and adversarial training. In addition to wav2vec2, EURO extends the functionality and promotes reproducibility for UASR tasks by integrating S3PRL and k2, resulting in flexible frontends from 27 self-supervised models and various graph-based decoding strategies. EURO is implemented in ESPnet and follows its unified pipeline to provide UASR recipes with a complete setup. This improves the pipeline's efficiency and allows EURO to be easily applied to existing datasets in ESPnet. Extensive experiments on three mainstream self-supervised models demonstrate the toolkit's effectiveness and achieve state-of-the-art UASR performance on TIMIT and LibriSpeech datasets. EURO will be publicly available at https://github.com/espnet/espnet, aiming to promote this exciting and emerging research area based on UASR through open-source activity.

Spoken language understanding (SLU) is a task aiming to extract high-level semantics from spoken utterances. Previous works have investigated the use of speech self-supervised models and textual pre-trained models, which have shown reasonable improvements to various SLU tasks. However, because of the mismatched modalities between speech signals and text tokens, previous methods usually need complex designs of the frameworks. This work proposes a simple yet efficient unsupervised paradigm that connects speech and textual pre-trained models, resulting in an unsupervised speech-to-semantic pre-trained model for various tasks in SLU. To be specific, we propose to use unsupervised automatic speech recognition (ASR) as a connector that bridges different modalities used in speech and textual pre-trained models. Our experiments show that unsupervised ASR itself can improve the representations from speech self-supervised models. More importantly, it is shown as an efficient connector between speech and textual pre-trained models, improving the performances of five different SLU tasks. Notably, on spoken question answering, we reach the state-of-the-art result over the challenging NMSQA benchmark.

梁搜索是端到端模型的主要ASR解码算法，生成树结构化假设。但是，最近的研究表明，通过假设合并进行解码可以通过可比或更好的性能实现更有效的搜索。但是，复发网络中的完整上下文与假设合并不兼容。我们建议在RNN传感器的预测网络中使用矢量定量的长期记忆单元（VQ-LSTM）。通过与ASR网络共同培训离散表示形式，可以积极合并假设以生成晶格。我们在总机语料库上进行的实验表明，提出的VQ RNN传感器改善了具有常规预测网络的换能器的ASR性能，同时还产生了具有相同光束尺寸的Oracle Word错误率（WER）的密集晶格。其他语言模型撤退实验还证明了拟议的晶格生成方案的有效性。

与常规的基于统计参数的方法相比，已经证明了基于深度学习的歌声综合（SVS）系统可以灵活地产生更好的质量唱歌。但是，神经系统通常是渴望数据的，并且很难通过有限的公共可用培训数据来达到合理的歌唱质量。在这项工作中，我们探索了不同的数据增强方法，以促进SVS系统的培训，包括基于沥青增强和混合增强为SVS定制的几种策略。为了进一步稳定培训，我们介绍了循环一致的培训策略。在两个公开唱歌数据库上进行的广泛实验表明，我们提出的增强方法和稳定训练策略可以显着改善客观和主观评估的绩效。

语音处理系统目前不支持绝大多数语言，部分原因是低资源语言中的数据缺乏。交叉语言传输提供了一种引人注目的方法来帮助通过将高资源数据纳入低资源系统来帮助桥接这种数字鸿沟。目前的交叉算法在一些基于文本的任务和与一些低资源语言中的语音相关任务中表现出了成功。但是，缩放语音系统以支持数百个低资源语言仍未解决。为了帮助桥接这种差距，我们提出了一种语言相似性方法，可以有效地识别数百种语言的声学交叉传输对。我们展示了我们在语言家庭分类，语音识别和语音综合任务中的方法的有效性。

The development of social media user stance detection and bot detection methods rely heavily on large-scale and high-quality benchmarks. However, in addition to low annotation quality, existing benchmarks generally have incomplete user relationships, suppressing graph-based account detection research. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Relational Graph-Based Twitter Account Detection Benchmark (MGTAB), the first standardized graph-based benchmark for account detection. To our knowledge, MGTAB was built based on the largest original data in the field, with over 1.55 million users and 130 million tweets. MGTAB contains 10,199 expert-annotated users and 7 types of relationships, ensuring high-quality annotation and diversified relations. In MGTAB, we extracted the 20 user property features with the greatest information gain and user tweet features as the user features. In addition, we performed a thorough evaluation of MGTAB and other public datasets. Our experiments found that graph-based approaches are generally more effective than feature-based approaches and perform better when introducing multiple relations. By analyzing experiment results, we identify effective approaches for account detection and provide potential future research directions in this field. Our benchmark and standardized evaluation procedures are freely available at: https://github.com/GraphDetec/MGTAB.

Image Virtual try-on aims at replacing the cloth on a personal image with a garment image (in-shop clothes), which has attracted increasing attention from the multimedia and computer vision communities. Prior methods successfully preserve the character of clothing images, however, occlusion remains a pernicious effect for realistic virtual try-on. In this work, we first present a comprehensive analysis of the occlusions and categorize them into two aspects: i) Inherent-Occlusion: the ghost of the former cloth still exists in the try-on image; ii) Acquired-Occlusion: the target cloth warps to the unreasonable body part. Based on the in-depth analysis, we find that the occlusions can be simulated by a novel semantically-guided mixup module, which can generate semantic-specific occluded images that work together with the try-on images to facilitate training a de-occlusion try-on (DOC-VTON) framework. Specifically, DOC-VTON first conducts a sharpened semantic parsing on the try-on person. Aided by semantics guidance and pose prior, various complexities of texture are selectively blending with human parts in a copy-and-paste manner. Then, the Generative Module (GM) is utilized to take charge of synthesizing the final try-on image and learning to de-occlusion jointly. In comparison to the state-of-the-art methods, DOC-VTON achieves better perceptual quality by reducing occlusion effects.

Dynamic treatment regimes assign personalized treatments to patients sequentially over time based on their baseline information and time-varying covariates. In mobile health applications, these covariates are typically collected at different frequencies over a long time horizon. In this paper, we propose a deep spectral Q-learning algorithm, which integrates principal component analysis (PCA) with deep Q-learning to handle the mixed frequency data. In theory, we prove that the mean return under the estimated optimal policy converges to that under the optimal one and establish its rate of convergence. The usefulness of our proposal is further illustrated via simulations and an application to a diabetes dataset.

As natural language processing (NLP) for gender bias becomes a significant interdisciplinary topic, the prevalent data-driven techniques such as large-scale language models suffer from data inadequacy and biased corpus, especially for languages with insufficient resources such as Chinese. To this end, we propose a Chinese cOrpus foR Gender bIas Probing and Mitigation CORGI-PM, which contains 32.9k sentences with high-quality labels derived by following an annotation scheme specifically developed for gender bias in the Chinese context. Moreover, we address three challenges for automatic textual gender bias mitigation, which requires the models to detect, classify, and mitigate textual gender bias. We also conduct experiments with state-of-the-art language models to provide baselines. To our best knowledge, CORGI-PM is the first sentence-level Chinese corpus for gender bias probing and mitigation.