Yuzhe Zhang, Feiran Liu, Yi Shan, Xinyi Huang, Xin Yang, Yueqi Zhu, Xuxin Cheng, Cao Liu, Ke Zeng, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Wenyuan Jiang. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Existing studies explore the explainability of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) in a limited scenario, where they ignore the interaction between corrections and explanations and have not established a corresponding comprehensive benchmark. To bridge the gap, this paper first introduces the task of EXplainable GEC (EXGEC), which focuses on the integral role of correction and explanation tasks. To facilitate the task, we propose EXCGEC, a tailored benchmark for Chinese EXGEC consisting of 8,216 explanation-augmented samples featuring the design of hybrid edit-wise explanations. We then benchmark several series of LLMs in multi-task learning settings, including post-explaining and pre-explaining. To promote the development of the task, we also build a comprehensive evaluation suite by leveraging existing automatic metrics and conducting human evaluation experiments to demonstrate the human consistency of the automatic metrics for free-text explanations. Our experiments reveal the effectiveness of evaluating free-text explanations using traditional metrics like METEOR and ROUGE, and the inferior performance of multi-task models compared to the pipeline solution, indicating its challenges to establish positive effects in learning both tasks.

Repetitive action counting, which aims to count periodic movements in a video, is valuable for video analysis applications such as fitness monitoring. However, existing methods largely rely on regression networks with limited representational capacity, which hampers their ability to accurately capture variable periodic patterns. Additionally, their supervised learning on narrow, limited training sets leads to overfitting and restricts their ability to generalize across diverse scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose CountLLM, the first large language model (LLM)-based framework that takes video data and periodic text prompts as inputs and outputs the desired counting value. CountLLM leverages the rich clues from explicit textual instructions and the powerful representational capabilities of pre-trained LLMs for repetitive action counting. To effectively guide CountLLM, we develop a periodicity-based structured template for instructions that describes the properties of periodicity and implements a standardized answer format to ensure consistency. Additionally, we propose a progressive multimodal training paradigm to enhance the periodicity-awareness of the LLM. Empirical evaluations on widely recognized benchmarks demonstrate CountLLM’s superior performance and generalization, particularly in handling novel and out-of-domain actions that deviate significantly from the training data, offering a promising avenue for repetitive action counting.

Controllable human image animation aims to generate videos from reference images using driving videos. Due to the limited control signals provided by sparse guidance (e.g., skeleton pose), recent works have attempted to introduce additional dense conditions (e.g., depth map) to ensure motion alignment. However, such strict dense guidance impairs the quality of the generated video when the body shape of the reference character differs significantly from that of the driving video. In this paper, we present DisPose to mine more generalizable and effective control signals without additional dense input, which disentangles the sparse skeleton pose in human image animation into motion field guidance and keypoint correspondence. Specifically, we generate a dense motion field from a sparse motion field and the reference image, which provides region-level dense guidance while maintaining the generalization of the sparse pose control. We also extract diffusion features corresponding to pose keypoints from the reference image, and then these point features are transferred to the target pose to provide distinct identity information. To seamlessly integrate into existing models, we propose a plug-and-play hybrid ControlNet that improves the quality and consistency of generated videos while freezing the existing model parameters. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of DisPose compared to current methods. Project page: https://github.com/lihxxx/DisPose.

Chains of thought (CoTs) have achieved success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), while their effectiveness is predominantly observed in LLMs. Existing solutions methods adopt distillation to inject chain-of-thought capabilities into small models (SLMs). However, they: (1) can not guarantee the rationality of the generated explanation due to hallucinations; (2) ignore diverse structures of CoT during knowledge transfer. In this paper, we propose a unified CoT distillation framework termed UniCoTT for considering diverse structural CoTs (\emph{i.e.}, chain, tree, and graph). UniCoTT contains two core strategies: iterative construction for structured CoTs and the structural constraint strategy. Specifically, UniCoTT prompts LLMs to iteratively produce accurate explanations with answers and unifies structured explanations as UniCoT which is seen as a bridge for knowledge transfer. Furthermore, UniCoTT utilizes the proposed unified supervised learning and structural consistency learning strategies to transfer knowledge of structured CoT to SLMs. Experimental results show that UniCoTT can significantly improve the performance of SLMs on multiple datasets across different NLP tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/mengchuang123/UniCoTT.

Humanoid robots require both robust lower-body locomotion and precise upper-body manipulation. While recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches provide whole-body loco-manipulation policies, they lack precise manipulation with high DoF arms. In this paper, we propose decoupling upper-body control from locomotion, using inverse kinematics (IK) and motion retargeting for precise manipulation, while RL focuses on robust lower-body locomotion. We introduce PMP (Predictive Motion Priors), trained with Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) to effectively represent upper-body motions. The locomotion policy is trained conditioned on this upper-body motion representation, ensuring that the system re-mains robust with both manipulation and locomotion. We show that CVAE features are crucial for stability and robustness, and significantly outperforms RL-based whole-body control in precise manipulation. With precise upper-body motion and robust lower-body locomotion control, operators can remotely control the humanoid to walk around and explore different environments, while performing diverse manipulation tasks.

Learning-Based methods have achieved strong performance for quadrupedal locomotion. However, several challenges prevent quadrupeds from learning helpful indoor skills that require interaction with environments and humans: lack of end-effectors for manipulation, limited semantic under-standing using only simulation data, and low traversability and reachability in indoor environments. We present a system for quadrupedal mobile manipulation in indoor environments. It uses a front-mounted gripper for object manipulation, a low-level controller trained in simulation using egocentric depth for agile skills like climbing and whole-body tilting, and pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) with a third-person fisheye and an egocentric RGB camera for semantic understanding and command generation. We evaluate our system in two unseen environments without any real-world data collection or training. Our system can zero-shot generalize to these environments and complete tasks, like following user’s commands to fetch a randomly placed stuff toy after climbing over a queen-sized bed, with a 60% success rate.

Multi-Intent spoken language understanding (SLU) can handle complicated utterances expressing multiple intents, which has attracted increasing attention from researchers. Although existing models have achieved promising performance, most of them still suffer from two leading problems: (1) each intent has its specific scope and the semantic information outside the scope might potentially hinder accurate predictions, i.e. scope barrier; (2) only the guidance from intent to slot is modeled but the guidance from slot to intent is often neglected, i.e. unidirectional guidance. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Intent SLU framework termed HAOT, which utilizes hierarchical attention to divide the scopes of each intent and applies optimal transport to achieve the mutual guidance between slot and intent. Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two public Multi-Intent SLU datasets, obtaining the 3.4 improvement on MixATIS dataset compared to the previous best models in overall accuracy.

Video grounding aims to locate a moment of interest matching the given query sentence from an untrimmed video. Previous works ignore the sparsity dilemma in video annotations, which fails to provide the context information between potential events and query sentences in the dataset. In this paper, we contend that exploiting easily available captions which describe general actions, i.e., auxiliary captions defined in our paper, will significantly boost the performance. To this end, we propose an Auxiliary Caption Network (ACNet) for video grounding. Specifically, we first introduce dense video captioning to generate dense captions and then obtain auxiliary captions by Non-Auxiliary Caption Suppression (NACS). To capture the potential information in auxiliary captions, we propose Caption Guided Attention (CGA) project the semantic relations between auxiliary captions and query sentences into temporal space and fuse them into visual representations. Considering the gap between auxiliary captions and ground truth, we propose Asymmetric Cross-modal Contrastive Learning (ACCL) for constructing more negative pairs to maximize cross-modal mutual information. Extensive experiments on three public datasets (i.e., ActivityNet Captions, TACoS and ActivityNet-CG) demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

While vision-language pre-trained models (VL-PTMs) have advanced multimodal research in recent years, their mastery in a few languages like English restricts their applicability in broader communities. To this end, there is an increasing interest in developing multilingual VL models via a joint-learning setup, which, however, could be unrealistic due to expensive costs and data availability. In this work, we propose to extend VL-PTMs' language capacity by continual language learning (CLL), where a model needs to update its linguistic knowledge incrementally without suffering from catastrophic forgetting (CF). We begin our study by introducing a model dubbed CLL-CLIP, which builds upon CLIP, a prevailing VL-PTM that has acquired image-English text alignment. Specifically, CLL-CLIP contains an expandable token embedding layer to handle linguistic differences. It solely trains token embeddings to improve memory stability and is optimized under cross-modal and cross-lingual objectives to learn the alignment between images and multilingual texts. To alleviate CF raised by covariate shift and lexical overlap, we further propose a novel approach that ensures the identical distribution of all token embeddings during initialization and regularizes token embedding learning during training. We construct a CLL benchmark covering 36 languages based on MSCOCO and XM3600 datasets and then evaluate multilingual image-text retrieval performance. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of CLL-CLIP and show that our approach can boost CLL-CLIP, e.g., by 6.7% in text-to-image average Recall@1 on XM3600, and improve various state-of-the-art methods consistently. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/yangbang18/CLFM.

Multi-intent spoken language understanding (SLU) has garnered growing attention due to its ability to handle multiple intent utterances, which closely mirrors practical scenarios. Unlike traditional SLU, each intent in multi-intent SLU corresponds to its designated scope for slots, which occurs in certain fragments within the utterance. As a result, establishing precise scope alignment to mitigate noise impact emerges as a key challenge in multi-intent SLU. More seriously, they lack alignment between the predictions of the two sub-tasks due to task-independent decoding, resulting in a limitation on the overall performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework termed Aligner² for multi-intent SLU, which contains an Adjustive Cross-task Aligner (ACA) and a Forced Cross-task Aligner (FCA). ACA utilizes the information conveyed by joint label embeddings to accurately align the scope of intent and corresponding slots, before the interaction of the two subtasks. FCA introduces reinforcement learning, to enforce the alignment of the task-specific hidden states after the interaction, which is explicitly guided by the prediction. Extensive experiments on two public multi-intent SLU datasets demonstrate the superiority of our Aligner² over state-of-the-art methods. More encouragingly, the proposed method Aligner² can be easily integrated into existing multi-intent SLU frameworks, to further boost performance.

Recent joint models for multi-intent detection and slot filling have obtained promising results through modeling the unidirectional or bidirectional guidance between intent and slot. However, existing works design joint models heuristically and lack some theoretical exploration, including (1) theoretical measurement of the joint-interaction quality; (2) explainability of design and optimization methods of joint models, which may limit the performance and efficiency of designs. In this paper, we mathematically define the cross-task information gain (CIG) to measure the quality of joint processes from an information-theoretic perspective and discover an implicit optimization of CIG in previous models. Based on this, we propose a novel multi-stage iterative framework with theoretical effectiveness, explainability, and convergence, which can explicitly optimize information for cross-task interactions. Further, we devise an information-based joint model (InfoJoint) that conforms to this theoretical framework to gradually reduce the cross-task propagation of erroneous semantics through CIG iterative maximization. Extensive experiment results on two public datasets show that InfoJoint outperforms the state-of-the-art models by a large margin.

Multimodal machine translation (MMT) aims to improve the performance of machine translation with the help of visual information, which has received widespread attention recently.It has been verified that visual information brings greater performance gains when the textual information is limited.However, most previous works ignore to take advantage of the complete textual inputs and the limited textual inputs at the same time, which limits the overall performance.To solve this issue, we propose a mixup method termed Soul-Mix to enhance MMT by using visual information more effectively.We mix the predicted translations of complete textual input and the limited textual inputs.Experimental results on the Multi30K dataset of three translation directions show that our Soul-Mix significantly outperforms existing approaches and achieves new state-of-the-art performance with fewer parameters than some previous models.Besides, the strength of Soul-Mix is more obvious on more challenging MSCOCO dataset which includes more out-of-domain instances with lots of ambiguous verbs.

Dialogue State Tracking (DST) is designed to monitor the evolving dialogue state in the conversations and plays a pivotal role in developing task-oriented dialogue systems.However, obtaining the annotated data for the DST task is usually a costly endeavor.In this paper, we focus on employing LLMs to generate dialogue data to reduce dialogue collection and annotation costs.Specifically, GPT-4 is used to simulate the user and agent interaction, generating thousands of dialogues annotated with DST labels.Then a two-stage fine-tuning on LLaMA 2 is performed on the generated data and the real data for the DST prediction.Experimental results on two public DST benchmarks show that with the generated dialogue data, our model performs better than the baseline trained solely on real data.In addition, our approach is also capable of adapting to the dynamic demands in real-world scenarios, generating dialogues in new domains swiftly.After replacing dialogue segments in any domain with the corresponding generated ones, the model achieves comparable performance to the model trained on real data 1 .

Xianwei Zhuang, Xuxin Cheng, Liming Liang, Yuxin Xie, Zhichang Wang, Zhiqi Huang, Yuexian Zou. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Recent joint models for multi-intent detection and slot filling (a.k.a multi-intent SLU) have obtained promising results by leveraging the semantic similarities or co-occurrence relationships between intent and slot labels. However, a critical aspect frequently neglected by current models is the significant correlations between label co-occurrences and specific scenarios, such as watching a movie or booking a ticket, which is essential for understanding user utterances in multi-intent SLU. In this paper, we propose a new framework dubbed SALA (short for Scenario-aware Label graph interaction), which effectively captures the dynamic co-occurrence relationships among labels across various scenarios, employing a strategy akin to a divide-and-conquer approach. Concretely, SALA first autonomously classifies the scenario of utterances, and tracks the co-occurring labels by maintaining a unique co-occurrence matrix for each scenario during the training phase. These scenario-independent co-occurrence matrices are further employed to guide the interactions among label representations through graph propagation to conduct accurate prediction. Extensive experiments on two multi-intent SLU benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our SALA. More strikingly, SALA also attains competitive results on four extra single-intent and multi-domain SLU benchmark datasets, demonstrating its strong generalizability.

Dialogue-based relation extraction (DRE) aims to determine the semantic relation of a given pair of arguments from a piece of dialogue, which has received increasing attention. Due to the low information density of dialogue text, it is difficult for the model to focus on key information. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Knowledge-Enhanced Prompt-Tuning (KEPT) method to effectively enhance DRE model by exploiting trigger and label semantic. Specifically, we propose two beneficial tasks, masked trigger prediction, and verbalizer representation learning, to effectively inject trigger knowledge and label semantic knowledge respectively. Furthermore, we convert the DRE task to a masked language modeling task to unify the format of knowledge injection and utilization, aiming to better promote DRE performance. Experimental results on the DialogRE dataset show that our KEPT achieves state-of-the-art performance in F1 and F1c scores. Detailed analyses demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approach. Code is available at https://github.com/blackbookay/KEPT.

Zero-shot Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) aims to enable task-oriented dialogue systems to understand user needs without training data. Challenging but worthwhile, zero-shot SLU reduces the time and effort that data labeling takes. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), such as GPT3.5 and ChatGPT, have shown promising results in zero-shot settings, which motivates us to explore prompt-based methods. In this study, we investigate whether strong SLU models can be constructed by directly prompting LLMs. Specifically, we propose a simple yet effective two-stage framework dubbed GPT-SLU, which transforms the SLU task into a question-answering problem. Powered by multi-stage mutual guided prompts, GPT-SLU can leverage the correlations between two subtasks in SLU to achieve better predictions, which is greatly explored in the traditional fine-tuning paradigm. Experimental results on three SLU benchmark datasets demonstrate the significant potential of LLMs for zero-shot SLU. Comprehensive analyses validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework and also indicate that there is still room for further improvement of LLMs in SLU scenarios.

Multi-modal sarcasm detection aims to identify whether a given sample with multi-modal information (i.e., text and image) is sarcastic, which has received increasing attention due to the rapid growth of multi-modal posts on modern social media. However, mainstream models process the input of each modality in a holistic manner, resulting in redundant and unrefined information. Moreover, the representations of different modalities are entangled in one common latent space to perform complex cross-modal interactions, neglecting the heterogeneity and distribution gap of different modalities. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework DMMD (short for Disentangled Multi-grained Multi-modal Distilling) for multi-modal sarcasm detection, which conducts multi-grained knowledge distilling (i.e., intra-subspace and inter-subspace) based on the disentangled multi-modal representations. Concretely, the representations of each modality are disentangled explicitly into modality-agnostic/specific subspaces. Then we transfer cross-modal knowledge by conducting intra-subspace knowledge distilling in a self-adaptive pattern. We also apply mutual learning to regularize the underlying inter-subspace consistency. Extensive experiments on a commonly used benchmark demonstrate the efficacy of our DMMD over cutting-edge methods. More encouragingly, visualization results indicate the multi-modal representations display meaningful distributional patterns, and we hope it will be helpful for the community of multi-modal knowledge transfer.

The visual question localized-answering (VQLA) system has garnered increasing attention due to its potential as a knowledgeable assistant in surgical education. Apart from providing text-based answers, VQLA can also pinpoint the specific region of interest for better surgical scene understanding. Although recent Transformer-based models for VQLA have obtained promising results, they (1) conduct vanilla text-to-image cross attention, leading to unidirectional and coarse-grained alignment; (2) ignore exploiting the semantics of answers to further boost performance. In this paper, we propose a novel model termed OTAS, which first introduces optimal transport to achieve bidirectional and fine-grained alignment between images and questions, enabling more precise localization. Besides, OTAS incorporates a set of learnable candidate answer embeddings to query the probability of each answer class for a given image-question pair. Through Transformer attention, the candidate answer embeddings interact with the fused features of the image-question pair to make the answer decision. Extensive experiments on two widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model over state-of-the-art methods.

Fully end-to-end task-oriented dialogue (EToD) systems have shown excellent performance, which requires the ability to retrieve entities accurately for generation.Existing methods improve the accuracy of entity retrieval and construct data flows between retrieval results and response generator, achieving promising results.However, most of them suffer from the following issues: (i) The entity is retrieved by directly interacting with the context at a coarse-grained level, so the similarity score may be disturbed by irrelevant attributes; (ii) The generator pays equal attention to retrieved entities and the context and does not learn the generation preferences for the current turn.In this paper, we propose a framework called Regulating Preferences of Generator (RPG) based on retrieval results, which includes a generator preference extractor, an entity retriever, and a generator with the gate-controlled preference regulator.The generator preference extractor not only improves the entity retriever by filtering the interference of irrelevant attributes but also provides more focused guidance to the generator by performing inter-turn attribute prediction.Experiments and analyses on three standard benchmarks show that our framework outperforms existing methods and improves the quality of the dialogue.

Continuous learning requires adapting quickly to incoming tasks while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Typical solutions resort to a rehearsal buffer to replay old data, which is intractable to apply in real-world scenarios with limited memory and inaccessible privacy. Recently, with the emergence of large-scale pre-trained models, prompting methods have rapidly become a popular rehearsal-free alternative to rehearsal-based methods. The core of prmopting is to encode knowledge leveraging a set of parameters, however, knowledge decoupling and complementarity still remain some challenges. To tackle these challenges, this paper presents a KnowledgeComplementary Prompting approach, KC-Prompt, which end-to-end integrates and releases the task-invariant and task-specific knowledge for the ViT backbone. KC-Prompt designs knowledge maintenance and knowledge sharing mechanisms to form complementary prompt generators. In addition, we employ a components weighting method to instantiate prompt generators, making the training process fully differentiable. Sufficient experiments on CIFAR-100 and Split ImageNet-R benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of KC-Prompt in the challenging and realistic class-incremental learning setting.

Standard language models generate text by selecting tokens from a fixed, finite, and standalone vocabulary. We introduce a novel method that selects context-aware phrases from a collection of supporting documents. One of the most significant challenges for this paradigm shift is determining the training oracles, because a string of text can be segmented in various ways and each segment can be retrieved from numerous possible documents. To address this, we propose to initialize the training oracles using linguistic heuristics and, more importantly, bootstrap the oracles through iterative self-reinforcement. Extensive experiments show that our model not only outperforms standard language models on a variety of knowledge-intensive tasks but also demonstrates improved generation quality in open-ended text generation. For instance, compared to the standard language model counterpart, our model raises the accuracy from 23.47% to 36.27% on OpenbookQA, and improves the MAUVE score from 42.61% to 81.58% in open-ended text generation. Remarkably, our model also achieves the best performance and the lowest latency among several retrieval-augmented baselines. In conclusion, we assert that retrieval is more accurate generation and hope that our work will encourage further research on this new paradigm shift.

With the huge success of GPT models in natural language processing, there is a growing interest in applying language modeling approaches to speech tasks. Currently, the dominant architecture in speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) remains the encoder-decoder paradigm, creating a need to investigate the impact of language modeling approaches in this area. In this study, we introduce PolyVoice, a language model-based framework designed for S2ST systems. Our framework comprises three decoder-only language models: a translation language model, a duration language model, and a speech synthesis language model. These language models employ different types of prompts to extract learned information effectively. By utilizing unsupervised semantic units, our framework can transfer semantic information across these models, making it applicable even to unwritten languages. We evaluate our system on Chinese $\rightarrow$ English and English $\rightarrow$ Spanish language pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that \method outperforms the state-of-the-art encoder-decoder model, producing voice-cloned speech with high translation and audio quality. Speech samples are available at https://polyvoice.github.io.

Humans can perform parkour by traversing obstacles in a highly dynamic fashion requiring precise eye-muscle coordination and movement. Getting robots to do the same task requires overcoming similar challenges. Classically, this is done by independently engineering perception, actuation, and control systems to very low tolerances. This restricts them to tightly controlled settings such as a predetermined obstacle course in labs. In contrast, humans are able to learn parkour through practice without significantly changing their underlying biology. In this paper, we take a similar approach to developing robot parkour on a small low-cost robot with imprecise actuation and a single front-facing depth camera for perception which is low-frequency, jittery, and prone to artifacts. We show how a single neural net policy operating directly from a camera image, trained in simulation with large-scale RL, can overcome imprecise sensing and actuation to output highly precise control behavior end-to-end. We show our robot can perform a high jump on obstacles 2x its height, long jump across gaps 2x its length, do a handstand and run across tilted ramps, and generalize to novel obstacle courses with different physical properties. Parkour videos at https: //extreme-parkour.github.io/.

Talking head generation is a significant research topic that still faces numerous challenges. Previous works often adopt generative adversarial networks or regression models, which are plagued by generation quality and average facial shape problem. Although diffusion models show impressive generative ability, their exploration in talking head generation remains unsatisfactory. This is because they either solely use the diffusion model to obtain an intermediate representation and then employ another pre-trained renderer, or they overlook the feature decoupling of complex facial details, such as expressions, head poses and appearance textures. Therefore, we propose a Facial Decoupled Diffusion model for Talking head generation called FD2Talk, which fully leverages the advantages of diffusion models and decouples the complex facial details through multi-stages. Specifically, we separate facial details into motion and appearance. In the initial phase, we design the Diffusion Transformer to accurately predict motion coefficients from raw audio. These motions are highly decoupled from appearance, making them easier for the network to learn compared to high-dimensional RGB images. Subsequently, in the second phase, we encode the reference image to capture appearance textures. The predicted facial and head motions and encoded appearance then serve as the conditions for the Diffusion UNet, guiding the frame generation. Benefiting from decoupling facial details and fully leveraging diffusion models, extensive experiments substantiate that our approach excels in enhancing image quality and generating more accurate and diverse results compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.

Multi-modal intent detection (MID) aims to comprehend users' intentions through diverse modalities, which has received widespread attention in dialogue systems. Despite the promising advancements in complex fusion mechanisms or architecture designs, challenges remain due to: (1) various noise and redundancy in both visual and audio modalities and (2) long-tailed distributions of intent categories. In this paper, to tackle the above two issues, we propose InMu-Net, a simple yet effective framework for MID from the Information bottleneck and Multi-sensory processing perspective. Our contributions lie in three aspects. First, we devise a denoising bottleneck module to filter out the intent-irrelevant information in the fused feature; Second, we introduce a saliency preservation loss to prevent the dropping of intent-relevant information; Ultimately, kurtosis regulation is introduced to maintain representation smoothness during the filtering process, mitigating the adverse impact of the long tail distribution. Comprehensive experiments on two MID benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of InMu-Net and its vital components. Impressively, a series of analyses reveal our denoising potential and robustness in low-resource, modality corruption, cross-architecture and cross-task scenarios.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) that rely solely on textual corpus may present limitations in multimodal semantics comprehension. Existing studies attempt to alleviate this issue by incorporating additional modal information through image retrieval or generation. However, these methods: (1) inevitably encounter modality gaps and noise; (2) treat all modalities indiscriminately; and (3) ignore visual or acoustic semantics of key entities. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel principled iterative framework for multimodal-augmented PLMs termed MASE, which achieves efficient and balanced injection of multimodal semantics under the proposed Expectation Maximization (EM) based iterative algorithm. Initially, MASE utilizes multimodal proxies instead of explicit data to enhance PLMs, which avoids noise and modality gaps. In E-step, MASE adopts a novel information-driven self-balanced strategy to estimate allocation weights. Furthermore, MASE employs heterogeneous graph attention to capture entity-level fine-grained semantics on the proposed multimodal-semantic scene graph. In M-step, MASE injects global multimodal knowledge into PLMs through a cross-modal contrastive loss. Experimental results show that MASE consistently outperforms competitive baselines on multiple tasks across various architectures. More impressively, MASE is compatible with existing efficient parameter fine-tuning methods, such as prompt learning.

Xianwei Zhuang, Zhichang Wang, Xuxin Cheng, Yuxin Xie, Liming Liang, Yuexian Zou. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Multi-intent spoken language understanding (SLU) has garnered increasing attention since it can handle complex utterances expressing multiple intents in real-world scenarios. However, existing joint models are disturbed by label statistical frequencies, or adopt homogeneous graphs to capture interactions between the different types (e.g., intent and slot) of label nodes, thereby limiting the performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose Dual Heterogeneous Graph Label Interaction for multi-intent SLU, named DHLG. Concretely, we propose a global static heterogeneous label graph interaction layer to model both intra- and inter-label statistical dependencies across the entire training corpus. Based on this, we introduce a local dynamic heterogeneous label graph layer to further facilitate adaptive interactions between intents and slots for each utterance. Extensive experiments and analyses on two widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed DHLG over state-of-the-art methods.

Spoken language understanding (SLU) is a core task in task-oriented dialogue systems, which aims at understanding user's current goal through constructing semantic frames. SLU usually consists of two subtasks, including intent detection and slot filling. Although there are some SLU frameworks joint modeling the two subtasks and achieve the high performance, most of them still overlook the inherent relationships between intents and slots, and fail to achieve mutual guidance between the two subtasks. To solve the problem, we propose a multi-level multi-grained SLU framework MMCL to apply contrastive learning at three levels, including utterance level, slot level, and word level to enable intent and slot to mutually guide each other. For the utterance level, our framework implements coarse granularity contrastive learning and fine granularity contrastive learning simultaneously. Besides, we also apply the self-distillation method to improve the robustness of the model. Experimental results and further analysis demonstrate that our proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art results on two public multi-intent SLU datasets, obtaining a 2.6 overall accuracy improvement on MixATIS dataset compared to previous best models.

Multimodal machine translation (MMT) aims to exploit visual information to improve neural machine translation (NMT). It has been demonstrated that image captioning and object detection can further improve MMT. In this paper, to leverage image captioning and object detection more effectively, we propose a Dual-level ASymmetric Contrastive Learning (DAS-CL) framework. Specifically, we leverage image captioning and object detection to generate more pairs of visual inputs and textual inputs. At the utterance level, we introduce an image captioning model to generate more coarse-grained pairs. At the word level, we introduce an object detection model to generate more fine-grained pairs. To mitigate the negative impact of noise in generated pairs, we apply asymmetric contrastive learning at these two levels. Experiments on the Multi30K dataset of three translation directions demonstrate that DAS-CL significantly outperforms existing MMT frameworks and achieves new state-of-the-art performance. More encouragingly, further analysis displays that DAS-CL is more robust to irrelevant visual information.

Despite the success of spoken language understanding (SLU) in high-resource languages, achieving similar performance in low-resource settings, such as zero-shot scenarios, remains challenging due to limited labeled training data.To improve zero-shot cross-lingual SLU, recent studies have explored code-switched sentences containing tokens from multiple languages.However, vanilla code-switched sentences often lack semantic and grammatical coherence.We ascribe this lack to two issues: (1) randomly replacing code-switched tokens with equal probability and (2) disregarding token-level dependency within each language.To tackle these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel method termed SOGO, for zero-shot cross-lingual SLU.First, we use a saliency-based substitution approach to extract keywords as substitution options.Then, we introduce a novel token-level alignment strategy that considers the similarity between the context and the code-switched tokens, ensuring grammatical coherence in code-switched sentences.Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate the superior performance of SOGO across nine languages on MultiATIS++.

How to solve the data scarcity problem for end-to-end speech-to-text translation (ST)? It’s well known that data augmentation is an efficient method to improve performance for many tasks by enlarging the dataset. In this paper, we propose Mix at three levels for Speech Translation (M3ST) method to increase the diversity of the augmented training corpus. Specifically, we conduct two phases of fine-tuning based on a pre-trained model using external machine translation (MT) data. In the first stage of fine-tuning, we mix the training corpus at three levels, including word level, sentence level and frame level, and fine-tune the entire model with mixed data. At the second stage of fine-tuning, we take both original speech sequences and original text sequences in parallel into the model to fine-tune the network, and use Jensen-Shannon divergence to regularize their outputs. Experiments on MuST-C speech translation benchmark and analysis show M3ST outperforms current strong baselines and achieves state-of-the-art results on eight directions with an average BLEU of 29.9.

With the rise of short videos, the demand for selecting appropriate background music (BGM) for a video has increased significantly, video-music retrieval (VMR) task gradually draws much attention by research community. As other cross-modal learning tasks, existing VMR approaches usually attempt to measure the similarity between the video and music in the feature space. However, they (1) neglect the inevitable label noise; (2) neglect to enhance the ability to capture critical video clips. In this paper, we propose a novel saliency-based self-training framework, which is termed SSVMR. Specifically, we first explore to fully make use of the information containing in the training dataset by applying a semi-supervised method to suppress the adverse impact of label noise problem, where a self-training approach is adopted. In addition, we propose to capture the saliency of the video by mixing two videos at span level and preserving the locality of the two original videos. Inspired by back translation in NLP, we also conduct back retrieval to obtain more training data. Experimental results on MVD dataset show that our SSVMR achieves the state-of-the-art performance by a large margin, obtaining a relative improvement of 34.8% over the previous best model in terms of R@1.

Multi-intent detection and slot filling joint models are gaining increasing traction since they are closer to complicated real-world scenarios. However, existing approaches (1) focus on identifying implicit correlations between utterances and one-hot encoded labels in both tasks while ignoring explicit label characteristics; (2) directly incorporate multi-intent information for each token, which could lead to incorrect slot prediction due to the introduction of irrelevant intent. In this paper, we propose a framework termed DGIF, which first leverages the semantic information of labels to give the model additional signals and enriched priors. Then, a multi-grain interactive graph is constructed to model correlations between intents and slots. Specifically, we propose a novel approach to construct the interactive graph based on the injection of label semantics, which can automatically update the graph to better alleviate error propagation. Experimental results1show that our framework significantly outperforms existing approaches, obtaining a relative improvement of 6.5% over the previous best model on the MixATIS dataset in overall accuracy.

The recent video grounding works attempt to introduce vanilla contrastive learning into video grounding. However, we claim that this naive solution is suboptimal. Contrastive learning requires two key properties: (1) alignment of features of similar samples, and (2) uniformity of the induced distribution of the normalized features on the hypersphere. Due to two annoying issues in video grounding: (1) the coexistence of some visual entities in both ground truth and other moments, i.e. semantic overlapping; (2) only a few moments in the video are annotated, i.e. sparse annotation dilemma, vanilla contrastive learning is unable to model the correlations between temporally distant moments and learned inconsistent video representations. Both characteristics lead to vanilla contrastive learning being unsuitable for video grounding. In this paper, we introduce Geodesic and Game Localization (G2L), a semantically aligned and uniform video grounding framework via geodesic and game theory. We quantify the correlations among moments leveraging the geodesic distance that guides the model to learn the correct cross-modal representations. Furthermore, from the novel perspective of game theory, we propose semantic Shapley interaction based on geodesic distance sampling to learn fine-grained semantic alignment in similar moments. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Automatic radiology report generation has attracted enormous research interest due to its practical value in reducing the workload of radiologists. However, simultaneously establishing global correspondences between the image (e.g., Chest X-ray) and its related report and local alignments between image patches and keywords remains challenging. To this end, we propose an Unify, Align and then Refine (UAR) approach to learn multi-level cross-modal alignments and introduce three novel modules: Latent Space Unifier (LSU), Cross-modal Representation Aligner (CRA) and Text-to-Image Refiner (TIR). Specifically, LSU unifies multimodal data into discrete tokens, making it flexible to learn common knowledge among modalities with a shared network. The modality-agnostic CRA learns discriminative features via a set of orthonormal basis and a dual-gate mechanism first and then globally aligns visual and textual representations under a triplet contrastive loss. TIR boosts token-level local alignment via calibrating text-to-image attention with a learnable mask. Additionally, we design a two-stage training procedure to make UAR gradually grasp cross-modal alignments at different levels, which imitates radiologists’ workflow: writing sentence by sentence first and then checking word by word. Extensive experiments and analyses on IU-Xray and MIMIC-CXR benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our UAR against varied state-of-the-art methods.

Locomotion has seen dramatic progress for walking or running across challenging terrains. However, robotic quadrupeds are still far behind their biological counterparts, such as dogs, which display a variety of agile skills and can use the legs beyond locomotion to perform several basic manipulation tasks like interacting with objects and climbing. In this paper, we take a step towards bridging this gap by training quadruped robots not only to walk but also to use the front legs to climb walls, press buttons, and perform object interaction in the real world. To handle this challenging optimization, we decouple the skill learning broadly into locomotion, which involves anything that involves movement whether via walking or climbing a wall, and manipulation, which involves using one leg to interact while balancing on the other three legs. These skills are trained in simulation using curriculum and transferred to the real world using our proposed sim2real variant that builds upon recent locomotion success. Finally, we combine these skills into a robust long-term plan by learning a behavior tree that encodes a high-level task hierarchy from one clean expert demonstration. We evaluate our method in both simulation and real-world showing successful executions of both short as well as long-range tasks and how robustness helps confront external perturbations. Videos at https://robot-skills.github.io/.

Open-world Semi-Supervised Learning (OSSL) is a realistic and challenging task, aiming to classify unlabeled samples from both seen and novel classes using partially labeled samples from the seen classes. Previous works typically explore the relationship of samples as priors on the pre-defined single-granularity labels to help novel class recognition. In fact, classes follow a taxonomy and samples can be classified at multiple levels of granularity, which contains more underlying relationships for supervision. We thus argue that learning with single-granularity labels results in sub-optimal representation learning and inaccurate pseudo labels, especially with unknown classes. In this paper, we take the initiative to explore and propose a uniformed framework, called Taxonomic context prIors Discovering and Aligning (TIDA), which exploits the relationship of samples under various granularity. It allows us to discover multi-granularity semantic concepts as taxonomic context priors (i.e., sub-class, target-class, and super-class), and then collaboratively leverage them to enhance representation learning and improve the quality of pseudo labels. Specifically, TIDA comprises two components: i) A taxonomic context discovery module that constructs a set of hierarchical prototypes in the latent space to discover the underlying taxonomic context priors; ii) A taxonomic context-based prediction alignment module that enforces consistency across hierarchical predictions to build the reliable relationship between classes among various granularity and provide additions supervision. We demonstrate that these two components are mutually beneficial for an effective OSSL framework, which is theoretically explained from the perspective of the EM algorithm. Extensive experiments on seven commonly used datasets show that TIDA can significantly improve the performance and achieve a new state of the art. The source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/rain305f/TIDA.

Developing robust walking controllers for bipedal robots is a challenging endeavor. Traditional model-based locomotion controllers require simplifying assumptions and careful modelling; any small errors can result in unstable control. To address these challenges for bipedal locomotion, we present a model-free reinforcement learning framework for training robust locomotion policies in simulation, which can then be transferred to a real bipedal Cassie robot. To facilitate sim-to-real transfer, domain randomization is used to encourage the policies to learn behaviors that are robust across variations in system dynamics. The learned policies enable Cassie to perform a set of diverse and dynamic behaviors, while also being more robust than traditional controllers and prior learning-based methods that use residual control. We demonstrate this on versatile walking behaviors such as tracking a target walking velocity, walking height, and turning yaw. (Video1)

Lane-change maneuvers are commonly executed by drivers to follow a certain routing plan, overtake a slower vehicle, adapt to a merging lane ahead, etc. However, improper lane change behaviors can be a major cause of traffic flow disruptions and even crashes. While many rule-based methods have been proposed to solve lane change problems for autonomous driving, they tend to exhibit limited performance due to the uncertainty and complexity of the driving environment. Machine learning-based methods offer an alternative approach, as Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has shown promising success in many application domains including robotic manipulation, navigation, and playing video games. However, applying DRL to autonomous driving still faces many practical challenges in terms of slow learning rates, sample inefficiency, and safety concerns. In this study, we propose an automated lane change strategy using proximal policy optimization-based deep reinforcement learning, which shows great advantages in learning efficiency while still maintaining stable performance. The trained agent is able to learn a smooth, safe, and efficient driving policy to make lane-change decisions (i.e. when and how) in challenging situation such as dense traffic scenarios. The effectiveness of the proposed policy is validated by using metrics of task success rate and collision rate. The simulation results demonstrate the lane change maneuvers can be efficiently learned and executed in a safe, smooth and efficient manner.