arXiv subjects

Mark A. Hasegawa-Johnson

Publications and source records attributed to Mark A. Hasegawa-Johnson.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

BeatGraph: Self-Supervised Heartbeat Graphs for Infant ECG Representations from the Home Environment

Electrocardiogram (ECG) foundation models typically tokenize the signal into fixed-length patches that ignore cardiac structure, so a patch may split a heartbeat and the number of beats in each patch shifts with heart rate. This matters most for infants, whose heart rates are higher and whose ECG differs from the adult, clinic-recorded 12-lead data these models are built on. A model for infant ECG should therefore reason about heartbeats directly rather than recover them from arbitrary patches. We propose BeatGraph, which makes the heartbeat its unit of representation, modeling each 30-second window as a graph of beats. A shared beat encoder embeds each heartbeat from its waveform and inter-beat intervals, a Transformer with positional encoding orders the beats in time, and residual graph attention layers relate every beat to every other before attention pooling yields a window embedding. We pretrain BeatGraph on our new corpus of unlabeled infant recordings by predicting masked-beat embeddings, then fine-tune it for each task. One backbone supports sleep-wake detection, infant-state classification, activity-source identification (infant- or caregiver-initiated movement), and affect recognition, improving macro-F1 over the strongest baseline on each task by 0.076 to 0.158. It also transfers across age groups, reaching 0.892 AUROC on the ZZU-pECG pediatric benchmark (ages 0 to 14), within 0.001 of the best published self-supervised ECG model, and matching that model under linear evaluation on the adult PTB-XL benchmark despite infant-only pretraining. Finally, to our knowledge, we release the first public infant ECG corpus collected in homes, classrooms, and laboratory settings with state and affect labels. It contains 3,408 hours of single-channel ECG from 143 infants aged 3 to 11 months, with unlabeled pretraining data, benchmark tasks, and subject-level splits.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

CHILDES-Aligned: A Curated Children's Speech Dataset via Multi-Model Timestamp Ensembling

CHILDES is a large-scale child speech corpus containing long-form recordings of naturalistic child-adult interactions, making it a valuable resource for studying child speech and language development. However, utterance-level timestamps provided in this corpus are often noisy, incomplete, or misaligned with the audio. As a result, utterances cannot always be reliably localized within long recordings, which limits the direct use of these data for training and evaluating speech models. In this work, we propose BEACON (Boundary Estimation via Alignment CONsensus), an ensemble timestamp-curation framework that refines utterance-level timestamps by aggregating knowledge from multiple off-the-shelf ASR models. Specifically, each model's word-level timestamp predictions are first aligned to provided human transcripts, and the final utterance time boundaries are determined by a consensus voting strategy. The framework is corpus-agnostic and applies to any long-form recording paired with a trusted transcript whose timestamps are unreliable or missing, offering a general recipe for timestamp curation. Leveraging this pipeline, we curate and release a 413-hour general-purpose child-speech dataset with corrected utterance-level timestamps, together with a 283-hour quality-controlled subset for ASR training. Fine-tuning on this subset yields up to an average 19.5% relative WER reduction on four out-of-domain child-speech benchmarks.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2026

Learning New Words from Unlabeled Test Data in Automatic Speech Recognition

New words are invented every day. A human listener can learn a new word by hearing it clearly once and inferring its usage from sentence context. This paper proposes granting ASR a similar ability to learn the contextual representations and spellings of new words from unlabeled test data at test time. A frozen CTC acoustic model provides spellings, a frozen language model provides contextual evidence for out-of-vocabulary (OOV) word detection, and an adaptation module expands the vocabulary by learning the lexical token representations with distributions over CTC-generated candidates. The spelling model of each token is optimized by minimizing a Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) objective. We demonstrate that the CTC-weighted language model log likelihood ratio can be interpreted as the KLD between the unknown correct ASR and the unsupervised learned ASR, and that, using a Pinsker bound, the square root of KLD can be interpreted as an upper bound on the total variation distance between the true and estimated spelling of the unknown word. Experiments show relative OOV character-error-rate reductions of up to 14.97% on LibriSpeech and 6.67% on dysarthric Speech Accessibility Project data for recurring OOV words, relative to the corresponding rescoring system.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2026

Token-level Response-visual Attention Guidance for Multimodal LLMs Knowledge Distillation

While knowledge distillation (KD) is widely adopted for training lightweight models by leveraging supervision from larger teacher models, relying solely on output token distributions has proven insufficient for compressing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Since output tokens are a byproduct of the model attending to visual inputs, prior works have explored explicitly distilling attention to provide a direct supervisory signal. While promising, the precise utility of which attention signals to distill remains under-explored. In this work, we challenge the conventional reliance on prompt-to-vision attention by revealing that downstream performance correlates strongly with response-to-vision attention similarity to the teacher, but negligibly with that of prompt-conditioned attention. Furthermore, we observe that attention distributions exhibit significant variance across individual tokens, indicating that a uniform distillation objective is suboptimal. To this end, we introduce Token-level Response-visual Attention Guidance (TRAG), a distillation objective that 1) shifts the focus to response-to-vision signals and 2) employs token-specific objectives by adaptively weighting the Kullback-Leibler divergence based on attention entropy, effectively guiding the student to mirror the teacher's precise visual focus. Extensive experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that TRAG significantly outperforms prior distillation baselines.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Query-based Cross-Modal Projector Bolstering Mamba Multimodal LLM

The Transformer's quadratic complexity with input length imposes an unsustainable computational load on large language models (LLMs). In contrast, the Selective Scan Structured State-Space Model, or Mamba, addresses this computational challenge effectively. This paper explores a query-based cross-modal projector designed to bolster Mamba's efficiency for vision-language modeling by compressing visual tokens based on input through the cross-attention mechanism. This innovative projector also removes the need for manually designing the 2D scan order of original image features when converting them into an input sequence for Mamba LLM. Experimental results across various vision-language understanding benchmarks show that the proposed cross-modal projector enhances Mamba-based multimodal LLMs, boosting both performance and throughput.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

SALSA: Speech Aware LLM Adaptation via Learned Steering Activation Vectors

Speech-aware large language models often generalize poorly to out-of-domain settings. We propose SALSA (Speech-Aware LLM Adaptation via Learned Steering Activations), a lightweight adaptation method that learns layer-wise steering vectors. Unlike commonly used steering approaches that rely on contrastive activation differences, SALSA directly optimizes steering vectors using a supervised objective. Across children's speech, multilingual speech, and Mandarin-English code-switching benchmarks, SALSA substantially improves performance over zero-shot inference and speech in-context learning baselines, achieving up to 46.8% relative improvements over zero-shot. Analysis further demonstrates that steering the encoder, particularly the later layers, is more effective than steering the LLM backbone. These findings suggest that steering improves downstream ASR performance by adapting higher-level acoustic and phonetic representations to better align with the pretrained language model representation space, rather than by modifying the decoder itself.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

PACR: Progressively Ascending Confidence Reward for LLM Reasoning

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly improved LLM reasoning, but its sparse, outcome-based reward provides no guidance for intermediate steps, slowing exploration. We propose Progressively Ascending Confidence Reward (PACR), a dense, model-intrinsic reward computed directly from the model's evolving belief in the correct answer. PACR encodes the inductive bias that, along a well-formed reasoning trajectory, the probability of the ground-truth answer should have a generally ascending trend. We provide empirical and theoretical analysis validating that such an inductive bias constrains the exploration search space to regions richer in logically sound reasoning. We demonstrate that PACR accelerates exploration, reaches reward saturation with fewer trajectories, and yields improvements on multiple benchmarks. Our results suggest that dense, model-intrinsic shaping signals can make RLVR training more effective and reliable.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Can Video LLMs Refuse to Answer? Alignment for Answerability in Video Large Language Models

In the broader context of deep learning, Multimodal Large Language Models have achieved significant breakthroughs by leveraging powerful Large Language Models as a backbone to align different modalities into the language space. A prime exemplification is the development of Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs). While numerous advancements have been proposed to enhance the video understanding capabilities of these models, they are predominantly trained on questions generated directly from video content. However, in real-world scenarios, users often pose questions that extend beyond the informational scope of the video, highlighting the need for Video-LLMs to assess the relevance of the question. We demonstrate that even the best-performing Video-LLMs fail to reject unfit questions-not necessarily due to a lack of video understanding, but because they have not been trained to identify and refuse such questions. To address this limitation, we propose alignment for answerability, a framework that equips Video-LLMs with the ability to evaluate the relevance of a question based on the input video and appropriately decline to answer when the question exceeds the scope of the video, as well as an evaluation framework with a comprehensive set of metrics designed to measure model behavior before and after alignment. Furthermore, we present a pipeline for creating a dataset specifically tailored for alignment for answerability, leveraging existing video-description paired datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

TLCR: Token-Level Continuous Reward for Fine-grained Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) leverages human preference data to train language models to align more closely with human essence. These human preference data, however, are labeled at the sequence level, creating a mismatch between sequence-level preference labels and tokens, which are autoregressively generated from the language model. Although several recent approaches have tried to provide token-level (i.e., dense) rewards for each individual token, these typically rely on predefined discrete reward values (e.g., positive: +1, negative: -1, neutral: 0), failing to account for varying degrees of preference inherent to each token. To address this limitation, we introduce TLCR (Token-Level Continuous Reward) for RLHF, which incorporates a discriminator trained to distinguish positive and negative tokens, and the confidence of the discriminator is used to assign continuous rewards to each token considering the context. Extensive experiments show that our proposed TLCR leads to consistent performance improvements over previous sequence-level or token-level discrete rewards on open-ended generation benchmarks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2017

Fast Generation for Convolutional Autoregressive Models

Convolutional autoregressive models have recently demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on a number of generation tasks. While fast, parallel training methods have been crucial for their success, generation is typically implemented in a naïve fashion where redundant computations are unnecessarily repeated. This results in slow generation, making such models infeasible for production environments. In this work, we describe a method to speed up generation in convolutional autoregressive models. The key idea is to cache hidden states to avoid redundant computation. We apply our fast generation method to the Wavenet and PixelCNN++ models and achieve up to $21\times$ and $183\times$ speedups respectively.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2016

Fast Wavenet Generation Algorithm

This paper presents an efficient implementation of the Wavenet generation process called Fast Wavenet. Compared to a naive implementation that has complexity O(2^L) (L denotes the number of layers in the network), our proposed approach removes redundant convolution operations by caching previous calculations, thereby reducing the complexity to O(L) time. Timing experiments show significant advantages of our fast implementation over a naive one. While this method is presented for Wavenet, the same scheme can be applied anytime one wants to perform autoregressive generation or online prediction using a model with dilated convolution layers. The code for our method is publicly available.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2016

Streaming Recommender Systems

The increasing popularity of real-world recommender systems produces data continuously and rapidly, and it becomes more realistic to study recommender systems under streaming scenarios. Data streams present distinct properties such as temporally ordered, continuous and high-velocity, which poses tremendous challenges to traditional recommender systems. In this paper, we investigate the problem of recommendation with stream inputs. In particular, we provide a principled framework termed sRec, which provides explicit continuous-time random process models of the creation of users and topics, and of the evolution of their interests. A variational Bayesian approach called recursive meanfield approximation is proposed, which permits computationally efficient instantaneous on-line inference. Experimental results on several real-world datasets demonstrate the advantages of our sRec over other state-of-the-arts.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2011

Open-loop multi-channel inversion of room impulse response

This paper considers methods for audio display in a CAVE-type virtual reality theater, a 3 m cube with displays covering all six rigid faces. Headphones are possible since the user's headgear continuously measures ear positions, but loudspeakers are preferable since they enhance the sense of total immersion. The proposed solution consists of open-loop acoustic point control. The transfer function, a matrix of room frequency responses from the loudspeakers to the ears of the user, is inverted using multi-channel inversion methods, to create exactly the desired sound field at the user's ears. The inverse transfer function is constructed from impulse responses simulated by the image source method. This technique is validated by measuring a 2x2 matrix transfer function, simulating a transfer function with the same geometry, and filtering the measured transfer function through the inverse of the simulation. Since accuracy of the image source method decreases with time, inversion performance is improved by windowing the simulated response prior to inversion. Parameters of the simulation and inversion are adjusted to minimize residual reverberant energy; the best-case dereverberation ratio is 10 dB.

cs.SD↗