Collecting sufficient labeled data for spoken language understanding (SLU) is expensive and time-consuming. Recent studies achieved promising results by using pre-trained models in low-resource scenarios. Inspired by this, we aim to ask: which (if any) pre-training strategies can improve performance across SLU benchmarks? To answer this question, we employ four types of pre-trained models and their combinations for SLU. We leverage self-supervised speech and language models (LM) pre-trained on large quantities of unpaired data to extract strong speech and text representations. We also explore using supervised models pre-trained on larger external automatic speech recognition (ASR) or SLU corpora. We conduct extensive experiments on the SLU Evaluation (SLUE) benchmark and observe self-supervised pre-trained models to be more powerful, with pre-trained LM and speech models being most beneficial for the Sentiment Analysis and Named Entity Recognition task, respectively.

随着自动语音处理（ASR）系统越来越好，使用ASR输出越来越令于进行下游自然语言处理（NLP）任务。但是，很少的开源工具包可用于在不同口语理解（SLU）基准上生成可重复的结果。因此，需要建立一个开源标准，可以用于具有更快的开始进入SLU研究。我们展示了Espnet-SLU，它旨在在一个框架中快速发展口语语言理解。 Espnet-SLU是一个项目内部到结束语音处理工具包，ESPNET，它是一个广泛使用的开源标准，用于各种语音处理任务，如ASR，文本到语音（TTS）和语音转换（ST）。我们增强了工具包，为各种SLU基准提供实现，使研究人员能够无缝混合和匹配不同的ASR和NLU模型。我们还提供预磨损的模型，具有集中调谐的超参数，可以匹配或甚至优于最新的最先进的性能。该工具包在https://github.com/espnet/espnet上公开提供。

Quadruped robots are currently used in industrial robotics as mechanical aid to automate several routine tasks. However, presently, the usage of such a robot in a domestic setting is still very much a part of the research. This paper discusses the understanding and virtual simulation of such a robot capable of detecting and understanding human emotions, generating its gait, and responding via sounds and expression on a screen. To this end, we use a combination of reinforcement learning and software engineering concepts to simulate a quadruped robot that can understand emotions, navigate through various terrains and detect sound sources, and respond to emotions using audio-visual feedback. This paper aims to establish the framework of simulating a quadruped robot that is emotionally intelligent and can primarily respond to audio-visual stimuli using motor or audio response. The emotion detection from the speech was not as performant as ERANNs or Zeta Policy learning, still managing an accuracy of 63.5%. The video emotion detection system produced results that are almost at par with the state of the art, with an accuracy of 99.66%. Due to its "on-policy" learning process, the PPO algorithm was extremely rapid to learn, allowing the simulated dog to demonstrate a remarkably seamless gait across the different cadences and variations. This enabled the quadruped robot to respond to generated stimuli, allowing us to conclude that it functions as predicted and satisfies the aim of this work.

Text-to-text generation models have increasingly become the go-to solution for a wide variety of sequence labeling tasks (e.g., entity extraction and dialog slot filling). While most research has focused on the labeling accuracy, a key aspect -- of vital practical importance -- has slipped through the cracks: understanding model confidence. More specifically, we lack a principled understanding of how to reliably gauge the confidence of a model in its predictions for each labeled span. This paper aims to provide some empirical insights on estimating model confidence for generative sequence labeling. Most notably, we find that simply using the decoder's output probabilities is not the best in realizing well-calibrated confidence estimates. As verified over six public datasets of different tasks, we show that our proposed approach -- which leverages statistics from top-$k$ predictions by a beam search -- significantly reduces calibration errors of the predictions of a generative sequence labeling model.

We consider the task of text generation in language models with constraints specified in natural language. To this end, we first create a challenging benchmark Cognac that provides as input to the model a topic with example text, along with a constraint on text to be avoided. Unlike prior work, our benchmark contains knowledge-intensive constraints sourced from databases like Wordnet and Wikidata, which allows for straightforward evaluation while striking a balance between broad attribute-level and narrow lexical-level controls. We find that even state-of-the-art language models like GPT-3 fail often on this task, and propose a solution to leverage a language model's own internal knowledge to guide generation. Our method, called CognacGen, first queries the language model to generate guidance terms for a specified topic or constraint, and uses the guidance to modify the model's token generation probabilities. We propose three forms of guidance (binary verifier, top-k tokens, textual example), and employ prefix-tuning approaches to distill the guidance to tackle diverse natural language constraints. Through extensive empirical evaluations, we demonstrate that CognacGen can successfully generalize to unseen instructions and outperform competitive baselines in generating constraint conforming text.

Language models have been shown to perform better with an increase in scale on a wide variety of tasks via the in-context learning paradigm. In this paper, we investigate the hypothesis that the ability of a large language model to in-context learn-perform a task is not uniformly spread across all of its underlying components. Using a 66 billion parameter language model (OPT-66B) across a diverse set of 14 downstream tasks, we find this is indeed the case: $\sim$70% of attention heads and $\sim$20% of feed forward networks can be removed with minimal decline in task performance. We find substantial overlap in the set of attention heads (un)important for in-context learning across tasks and number of in-context examples. We also address our hypothesis through a task-agnostic lens, finding that a small set of attention heads in OPT-66B score highly on their ability to perform primitive induction operations associated with in-context learning, namely, prefix matching and copying. These induction heads overlap with task-specific important heads, suggesting that induction heads are among the heads capable of more sophisticated behaviors associated with in-context learning. Overall, our study provides several insights that indicate large language models may be under-trained to perform in-context learning and opens up questions on how to pre-train language models to more effectively perform in-context learning.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

End-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) systems have been developed for European languages like English and Spanish with state-of-the-art speech quality, prosody, and naturalness. However, development of end-to-end TTS for Indian languages is lagging behind in terms of quality. The challenges involved in such a task are: 1) scarcity of quality training data; 2) low efficiency during training and inference; 3) slow convergence in the case of large vocabulary size. In our work reported in this paper, we have investigated the use of fine-tuning the English-pretrained Tacotron2 model with limited Sanskrit data to synthesize natural sounding speech in Sanskrit in low resource settings. Our experiments show encouraging results, achieving an overall MOS of 3.38 from 37 evaluators with good Sanskrit spoken knowledge. This is really a very good result, considering the fact that the speech data we have used is of duration 2.5 hours only.

Entity matching in Customer 360 is the task of determining if multiple records represent the same real world entity. Entities are typically people, organizations, locations, and events represented as attributed nodes in a graph, though they can also be represented as records in relational data. While probabilistic matching engines and artificial neural network models exist for this task, explaining entity matching has received less attention. In this demo, we present our Explainable Entity Matching (xEM) system and discuss the different AI/ML considerations that went into its implementation.

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs) achieves impressive performance on a range of downstream tasks, and their sizes have consequently been getting bigger. Since a different copy of the model is required for each task, this paradigm is infeasible for storage-constrained edge devices like mobile phones. In this paper, we propose SPARTAN, a parameter efficient (PE) and computationally fast architecture for edge devices that adds hierarchically organized sparse memory after each Transformer layer. SPARTAN freezes the PLM parameters and fine-tunes only its memory, thus significantly reducing storage costs by re-using the PLM backbone for different tasks. SPARTAN contains two levels of memory, with only a sparse subset of parents being chosen in the first level for each input, and children cells corresponding to those parents being used to compute an output representation. This sparsity combined with other architecture optimizations improves SPARTAN's throughput by over 90% during inference on a Raspberry Pi 4 when compared to PE baselines (adapters) while also outperforming the latter by 0.1 points on the GLUE benchmark. Further, it can be trained 34% faster in a few-shot setting, while performing within 0.9 points of adapters. Qualitative analysis shows that different parent cells in SPARTAN specialize in different topics, thus dividing responsibility efficiently.