The massive growth of self-supervised learning (SSL) has been witnessed in language, vision, speech, and audio domains over the past few years. While discrete label prediction is widely adopted for other modalities, the state-of-the-art audio SSL models still employ reconstruction loss for pre-training. Compared with reconstruction loss, semantic-rich discrete label prediction encourages the SSL model to abstract the high-level audio semantics and discard the redundant details as in human perception. However, a semantic-rich acoustic tokenizer for general audio pre-training is usually not straightforward to obtain, due to the continuous property of audio and unavailable phoneme sequences like speech. To tackle this challenge, we propose BEATs, an iterative audio pre-training framework to learn Bidirectional Encoder representation from Audio Transformers, where an acoustic tokenizer and an audio SSL model are optimized by iterations. In the first iteration, we use random projection as the acoustic tokenizer to train an audio SSL model in a mask and label prediction manner. Then, we train an acoustic tokenizer for the next iteration by distilling the semantic knowledge from the pre-trained or fine-tuned audio SSL model. The iteration is repeated with the hope of mutual promotion of the acoustic tokenizer and audio SSL model. The experimental results demonstrate our acoustic tokenizers can generate discrete labels with rich audio semantics and our audio SSL models achieve state-of-the-art results across various audio classification benchmarks, even outperforming previous models that use more training data and model parameters significantly. Specifically, we set a new state-of-the-art mAP 50.6% on AudioSet-2M for audio-only models without using any external data, and 98.1% accuracy on ESC-50. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://aka.ms/beats.

Attention-based neural networks, such as Transformers, have become ubiquitous in numerous applications, including computer vision, natural language processing, and time-series analysis. In all kinds of attention networks, the attention maps are crucial as they encode semantic dependencies between input tokens. However, most existing attention networks perform modeling or reasoning based on representations, wherein the attention maps of different layers are learned separately without explicit interactions. In this paper, we propose a novel and generic evolving attention mechanism, which directly models the evolution of inter-token relationships through a chain of residual convolutional modules. The major motivations are twofold. On the one hand, the attention maps in different layers share transferable knowledge, thus adding a residual connection can facilitate the information flow of inter-token relationships across layers. On the other hand, there is naturally an evolutionary trend among attention maps at different abstraction levels, so it is beneficial to exploit a dedicated convolution-based module to capture this process. Equipped with the proposed mechanism, the convolution-enhanced evolving attention networks achieve superior performance in various applications, including time-series representation, natural language understanding, machine translation, and image classification. Especially on time-series representation tasks, Evolving Attention-enhanced Dilated Convolutional (EA-DC-) Transformer outperforms state-of-the-art models significantly, achieving an average of 17% improvement compared to the best SOTA. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that explicitly models the layer-wise evolution of attention maps. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/pkuyym/EvolvingAttention

The rapid adoption of residential solar photovoltaics (PV) has resulted in regular overvoltage events, due to correlated reverse power flows. Currently, PV inverters prevent damage to electronics by curtailing energy production in response to overvoltage. However, this disproportionately affects households at the far end of the feeder, leading to an unfair allocation of the potential value of energy produced. Globally optimizing for fair curtailment requires accurate feeder parameters, which are often unknown. This paper investigates reinforcement learning, which gradually optimizes a fair PV curtailment strategy by interacting with the system. We evaluate six fairness metrics on how well they can be learned compared to an optimal solution oracle. We show that all definitions permit efficient learning, suggesting that reinforcement learning is a promising approach to achieving both safe and fair PV coordination.

We conduct a systematic study of backdoor vulnerabilities in normally trained Deep Learning models. They are as dangerous as backdoors injected by data poisoning because both can be equally exploited. We leverage 20 different types of injected backdoor attacks in the literature as the guidance and study their correspondences in normally trained models, which we call natural backdoor vulnerabilities. We find that natural backdoors are widely existing, with most injected backdoor attacks having natural correspondences. We categorize these natural backdoors and propose a general detection framework. It finds 315 natural backdoors in the 56 normally trained models downloaded from the Internet, covering all the different categories, while existing scanners designed for injected backdoors can at most detect 65 backdoors. We also study the root causes and defense of natural backdoors.

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to identify semantic labels among entities within a single document. One major challenge of DocRE is to dig decisive details regarding a specific entity pair from long text. However, in many cases, only a fraction of text carries required information, even in the manually labeled supporting evidence. To better capture and exploit instructive information, we propose a novel expLicit syntAx Refinement and Subsentence mOdeliNg based framework (LARSON). By introducing extra syntactic information, LARSON can model subsentences of arbitrary granularity and efficiently screen instructive ones. Moreover, we incorporate refined syntax into text representations which further improves the performance of LARSON. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets (DocRED, CDR, and GDA) demonstrate that LARSON significantly outperforms existing methods.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods such as WavLM have shown promising speech separation (SS) results in small-scale simulation-based experiments. In this work, we extend the exploration of the SSL-based SS by massively scaling up both the pre-training data (more than 300K hours) and fine-tuning data (10K hours). We also investigate various techniques to efficiently integrate the pre-trained model with the SS network under a limited computation budget, including a low frame rate SSL model training setup and a fine-tuning scheme using only the part of the pre-trained model. Compared with a supervised baseline and the WavLM-based SS model using feature embeddings obtained with the previously released 94K hours trained WavLM, our proposed model obtains 15.9% and 11.2% of relative word error rate (WER) reductions, respectively, for a simulated far-field speech mixture test set. For conversation transcription on real meeting recordings using continuous speech separation, the proposed model achieves 6.8% and 10.6% of relative WER reductions over the purely supervised baseline on AMI and ICSI evaluation sets, respectively, while reducing the computational cost by 38%.

尽管变形金刚及其变体构象体在语音识别方面表现出了有希望的表现，但参数化的属性在训练和推理过程中导致了很大的记忆成本。一些作品使用跨层重量分享来减少模型的参数。但是，不可避免的能力损失会损害模型性能。为了解决这个问题，本文提出了通过共享稀疏门控专家的参数效率构象异构体。具体而言，我们使用稀疏门控的专家（MOE）来扩展构型块的容量而不增加计算。然后，共享分组构象块的参数，以减少参数的数量。接下来，为了确保具有不同级别适应表示的灵活性的共享块，我们会单独设计MOE路由器和标准化。此外，我们使用知识蒸馏来进一步提高性能。实验结果表明，与全参数模型相比，所提出的模型用编码器的1/3来实现竞争性能。

本文介绍了一个新型的流媒体自动语音识别（ASR）框架，用于由带有任意几何形状的遥远麦克风阵列捕获的多对话者重叠语音。我们的名为T-Sot-VA的框架在独立开发了两种最近的技术上。基于令牌级别的序列化输出训练（T-SOT），数量几何形状 - 反应连续的语音分离或VARARRARY和流媒体多对话者ASR。为了结合两种技术的最佳，我们新设计了一个基于T-SOT的ASR模型，该模型基于Vararray的两个分离的语音信号生成序列化的多对话者转录。我们还为这种ASR模型提出了一种预训练方案，我们基于单膜单键式ASR训练数据来模拟Vararray的输出信号。使用AMI会议语料库的对话转录实验表明，基于提议的框架的系统大大优于常规的框架。我们的系统分别在保留流媒体推理能力的同时，在多远离微米频道设置中分别实现了AMI开发和评估集的最新单词错误率为13.7％和15.5％。

如今，基础模型已成为人工智能中的基本基础设施之一，铺平了通往通用情报的方式。但是，现实提出了两个紧急挑战：现有的基础模型由英语社区主导；用户通常会获得有限的资源，因此不能总是使用基础模型。为了支持中文社区的发展，我们介绍了一个名为Fengshenbang的开源项目，该项目由认知计算与自然语言研究中心（CCNL）领导。我们的项目具有全面的功能，包括大型预培训模型，用户友好的API，基准，数据集等。我们将所有这些都包装在三个子项目中：风水次模型，风水框架和狂热基准。 Fengshenbang的开源路线图旨在重新评估中国预培训的大型大型模型的开源社区，促使整个中国大型模型社区的发展。我们还希望构建一个以用户为中心的开源生态系统，以允许个人访问所需的模型以匹配其计算资源。此外，我们邀请公司，大学和研究机构与我们合作建立大型开源模型的生态系统。我们希望这个项目将成为中国认知情报的基础。

时间动作本地化在视频分析中起着重要作用，该视频分析旨在将动作定位和分类在未修剪视频中。先前的方法通常可以预测单个时间尺度的特征空间上的动作。但是，低级量表的时间特征缺乏足够的语义来进行动作分类，而高级尺度则无法提供动作边界的丰富细节。为了解决这个问题，我们建议预测多个颞尺度特征空间的动作。具体而言，我们使用不同尺度的精致特征金字塔将语义从高级尺度传递到低级尺度。此外，为了建立整个视频的长时间尺度，我们使用时空变压器编码器来捕获视频帧的远程依赖性。然后，具有远距离依赖性的精制特征被送入分类器以进行粗糙的动作预测。最后，为了进一步提高预测准确性，我们建议使用框架级别的自我注意模块来完善每个动作实例的分类和边界。广泛的实验表明，所提出的方法可以超越Thumos14数据集上的最先进方法，并在ActivityNet1.3数据集上实现可比性的性能。与A2NET（tip20，avg \ {0.3：0.7 \}），sub-action（csvt2022，avg \ {0.1：0.5 \}）和afsd（cvpr21，avg \ {0.3：0.7 \}） ，提出的方法分别可以提高12.6 \％，17.4 \％和2.2 \％