Sound Event Detection (SED) often employs pre-trained models to address data scarcity issues. However, existing systems usually treat the pretrained models as frozen feature extractors, resulting in suboptimal efficiency, or fully fine-tune the pretrained models, which requires substantial computational resources. To fully leverage the knowledge from pretrained models, we propose a novel Global Enhanced Frame Prompt Tuning (GE-FPT) framework, providing global and local insights tailored for SED tasks. Additionally, Frame Prompt Tuning (FPT) is proposed in our GE-FPT to effectively explore local temporal information, i.e., temporal details and context, which is essential for SED tasks, and in particular, for precise event boundary detection. Extensive experiments claim that our approach significantly outperforms full fine-tuning methods while substantially reducing computational costs. Our system achieves new state-of-the-art results, with PSDS1/PSDS2 scores of 0.628/0.845 on the DCASE2023 Challenge Task4 dataset. The source code is publicly available1.

Numerical vector aggregation plays a crucial role in privacy-sensitive applications, such as distributed gradient estimation in federated learning and statistical analysis of key-value data. In the context of local differential privacy, this study provides a tight minimax error bound of$O(\frac{ds}{n\epsilon ^{2}})$, where$d$represents the dimension of the numerical vector and$s$denotes the number of non-zero entries. By converting the conditional/unconditional numerical mean estimation problem into a frequency estimation problem, we develop an optimal and efficient mechanism called Collision. In contrast, existing methods exhibit sub-optimal error rates of$O(\frac{d^{2}}{n\epsilon ^{2}})$or$O(\frac{ds^{2}}{n\epsilon ^{2}})$. Specifically, for unconditional mean estimation, we leverage the negative correlation between two frequencies in each dimension and propose the CoCo mechanism, which further reduces estimation errors for mean values compared to Collision. Moreover, to surpass the error barrier in local privacy, we examine privacy amplification in the shuffle model for the proposed mechanisms and derive precisely tight amplification bounds. Our experiments validate and compare our mechanisms with existing approaches, demonstrating significant error reductions for frequency estimation and mean estimation on numerical vectors.

Large Language Models (LLM) based agents have shown promise in autonomously completing tasks across various domains, e.g., robotics, games, and web navigation. However, these agents typically require elaborate design and expert prompts to solve tasks in specific domains, which limits their adaptability. We introduce AutoManual, a framework enabling LLM agents to autonomously build their understanding through interaction and adapt to new environments. AutoManual categorizes environmental knowledge into diverse rules and optimizes them in an online fashion by two agents: 1) The Planner codes actionable plans based on current rules for interacting with the environment. 2) The Builder updates the rules through a well-structured rule system that facilitates online rule management and essential detail retention. To mitigate hallucinations in managing rules, we introduce a *case-conditioned prompting* strategy for the Builder. Finally, the Formulator agent compiles these rules into a comprehensive manual. The self-generated manual can not only improve the adaptability but also guide the planning of smaller LLMs while being human-readable. Given only one simple demonstration, AutoManual significantly improves task success rates, achieving 97.4\% with GPT-4-turbo and 86.2\% with GPT-3.5-turbo on ALFWorld benchmark tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/minghchen/automanual.

The shuffle model of differential privacy provides promising privacy-utility balances in decentralized, privacy-preserving data analysis. However, the current analyses of privacy amplification via shuffling lack both tightness and generality. To address this issue, we propose the variation-ratio reduction as a comprehensive framework for privacy amplification in both single-message and multi-message shuffle protocols. It leverages two new parameterizations: the total variation bounds of local messages and the probability ratio bounds of blanket messages, to determine indistinguishability levels. Our theoretical results demonstrate that our framework provides tighter bounds, especially for local randomizers with extremal probability design, where our bounds are exactly tight. Additionally, variation-ratio reduction complements parallel composition in the shuffle model, yielding enhanced privacy accounting for popular sampling-based randomizers employed in statistical queries (e.g., range queries, marginal queries, and frequent itemset mining). Empirical findings demonstrate that our numerical amplification bounds surpass existing ones, conserving up to 30% of the budget for single-message protocols, 75% for multi-message ones, and a striking 75%-95% for parallel composition. Our bounds also result in a remarkably efficient Õ ( n ) algorithm that numerically amplifies privacy in less than 10 seconds for n = 10 8 users.