arXiv subjects

Yifan Peng

Publications and source records attributed to Yifan Peng.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Improving Multilingual Speech Models on ML-SUPERB 2.0: Fine-tuning with Data Augmentation and LID-Aware CTC

Multilingual speech processing with self-supervised or supervised pre-trained Speech Foundation Models (SFM) has achieved strong performance on tasks like Language Identification (LID) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, these models struggle with limited resources during fine-tuning. This paper enhances multilingual LID and ASR on ML-SUPERB 2.0 by exploring multiple strategies for adapting SFMs, including frozen upstream training, partial fine-tuning, and low-rank adaptation. Furthermore, we employ data augmentation to mitigate performance gaps in few-shot settings and introduce LID Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss for regularization. Our approach achieves a 14% relative improvement in LID accuracy and a 30% relative reduction in ASR CER over the baseline on ML-SUPERB 2.0, securing second place in the Interspeech 2025 ML-SUPERB 2.0 Challenge.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

EvidenceOutcomes: a Dataset of Clinical Trial Publications with Clinically Meaningful Outcomes

The fundamental process of evidence extraction and synthesis in evidence-based medicine involves extracting PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcome) elements from biomedical literature. However, Outcomes, being the most complex elements, are often neglected or oversimplified in existing benchmarks. To address this issue, we present EvidenceOutcomes, a novel, large, annotated corpus of clinically meaningful outcomes extracted from biomedical literature. We first developed a robust annotation guideline for extracting clinically meaningful outcomes from text through iteration and discussion with clinicians and Natural Language Processing experts. Then, three independent annotators annotated the Results and Conclusions sections of a randomly selected sample of 500 PubMed abstracts and 140 PubMed abstracts from the existing EBM-NLP corpus. This resulted in EvidenceOutcomes with high-quality annotations of an inter-rater agreement of 0.76. Additionally, our fine-tuned PubMedBERT model, applied to these 500 PubMed abstracts, achieved an F1-score of 0.69 at the entity level and 0.76 at the token level on the subset of 140 PubMed abstracts from the EBM-NLP corpus. EvidenceOutcomes can serve as a shared benchmark to develop and test future machine learning algorithms to extract clinically meaningful outcomes from biomedical abstracts.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

OWSM v4: Improving Open Whisper-Style Speech Models via Data Scaling and Cleaning

The Open Whisper-style Speech Models (OWSM) project has developed a series of fully open speech foundation models using academic-scale resources, but their training data remains insufficient. This work enhances OWSM by integrating YODAS, a large-scale web-crawled dataset with a Creative Commons license. However, incorporating YODAS is nontrivial due to its wild nature, which introduces challenges such as incorrect language labels and audio-text misalignments. To address this, we develop a scalable data-cleaning pipeline using public toolkits, yielding a dataset with 166,000 hours of speech across 75 languages. Our new series of OWSM v4 models, trained on this curated dataset alongside existing OWSM data, significantly outperform previous versions on multilingual benchmarks. Our models even match or surpass frontier industrial models like Whisper and MMS in multiple scenarios. We will publicly release the cleaned YODAS data, pre-trained models, and all associated scripts via the ESPnet toolkit.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

DYNAC: Dynamic Vocabulary based Non-Autoregressive Contextualization for Speech Recognition

Contextual biasing (CB) improves automatic speech recognition for rare and unseen phrases. Recent studies have introduced dynamic vocabulary, which represents context phrases as expandable tokens in autoregressive (AR) models. This method improves CB accuracy but with slow inference speed. While dynamic vocabulary can be applied to non-autoregressive (NAR) models, such as connectionist temporal classification (CTC), the conditional independence assumption fails to capture dependencies between static and dynamic tokens. This paper proposes DYNAC (Dynamic Vocabulary-based NAR Contextualization), a self-conditioned CTC method that integrates dynamic vocabulary into intermediate layers. Conditioning the encoder on dynamic vocabulary, DYNAC effectively captures dependencies between static and dynamic tokens while reducing the real-time factor (RTF). Experimental results show that DYNAC reduces RTF by 81% with a 0.1-point degradation in word error rate on the LibriSpeech 960 test-clean set.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Natural Language Processing in Support of Evidence-based Medicine: A Scoping Review

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is at the forefront of modern healthcare, emphasizing the use of the best available scientific evidence to guide clinical decisions. Due to the sheer volume and rapid growth of medical literature and the high cost of curation, there is a critical need to investigate Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to identify, appraise, synthesize, summarize, and disseminate evidence in EBM. This survey presents an in-depth review of 129 research studies on leveraging NLP for EBM, illustrating its pivotal role in enhancing clinical decision-making processes. The paper systematically explores how NLP supports the five fundamental steps of EBM -- Ask, Acquire, Appraise, Apply, and Assess. The review not only identifies current limitations within the field but also proposes directions for future research, emphasizing the potential for NLP to revolutionize EBM by refining evidence extraction, evidence synthesis, appraisal, summarization, enhancing data comprehensibility, and facilitating a more efficient clinical workflow.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Granary: Speech Recognition and Translation Dataset in 25 European Languages

Multi-task and multilingual approaches benefit large models, yet speech processing for low-resource languages remains underexplored due to data scarcity. To address this, we present Granary, a large-scale collection of speech datasets for recognition and translation across 25 European languages. This is the first open-source effort at this scale for both transcription and translation. We enhance data quality using a pseudo-labeling pipeline with segmentation, two-pass inference, hallucination filtering, and punctuation restoration. We further generate translation pairs from pseudo-labeled transcriptions using EuroLLM, followed by a data filtration pipeline. Designed for efficiency, our pipeline processes vast amount of data within hours. We assess models trained on processed data by comparing their performance on previously curated datasets for both high- and low-resource languages. Our findings show that these models achieve similar performance using approx. 50% less data. Dataset will be made available at https://hf.co/datasets/nvidia/Granary

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Machine Learning Applications Related to Suicide in Military and Veterans: A Scoping Literature Review

Suicide remains one of the main preventable causes of death among active service members and veterans. Early detection and prediction are crucial in suicide prevention. Machine learning techniques have yielded promising results in this area recently. This study aims to assess and summarize current research and provides a comprehensive review regarding the application of machine learning techniques in assessing and predicting suicidal ideation, attempts, and mortality among members of military and veteran populations. A keyword search using PubMed, IEEE, ACM, and Google Scholar was conducted, and the PRISMA protocol was adopted for relevant study selection. Thirty-two articles met the inclusion criteria. These studies consistently identified risk factors relevant to mental health issues such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suicidal ideation, prior attempts, physical health problems, and demographic characteristics. Machine learning models applied in this area have demonstrated reasonable predictive accuracy. However, additional research gaps still exist. First, many studies have overlooked metrics that distinguish between false positives and negatives, such as positive predictive value and negative predictive value, which are crucial in the context of suicide prevention policies. Second, more dedicated approaches to handling survival and longitudinal data should be explored. Lastly, most studies focused on machine learning methods, with limited discussion of their connection to clinical rationales. In summary, machine learning analyses have identified a wide range of risk factors associated with suicide in military populations. The diversity and complexity of these factors also demonstrates that effective prevention strategies must be comprehensive and flexible.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Multivariate Density Estimation via Variance-Reduced Sketching

Multivariate density estimation is of great interest in various scientific and engineering disciplines. In this work, we introduce a new framework called Variance-Reduced Sketching (VRS), specifically designed to estimate multivariate density functions with a reduced curse of dimensionality. Our VRS framework conceptualizes multivariate functions as infinite-size matrices/tensors, and facilitates a new sketching technique motivated by the numerical linear algebra literature to reduce the variance in density estimation problems. We demonstrate the robust numerical performance of VRS through a series of simulated experiments and real-world data applications. Notably, VRS shows remarkable improvement over existing neural network density estimators and classical kernel methods in numerous distribution models. Additionally, we offer theoretical justifications for VRS to support its ability to deliver density estimation with a reduced curse of dimensionality.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2025

Glossy Object Reconstruction with Cost-effective Polarized Acquisition

The challenge of image-based 3D reconstruction for glossy objects lies in separating diffuse and specular components on glossy surfaces from captured images, a task complicated by the ambiguity in discerning lighting conditions and material properties using RGB data alone. While state-of-the-art methods rely on tailored and/or high-end equipment for data acquisition, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming, this work introduces a scalable polarization-aided approach that employs cost-effective acquisition tools. By attaching a linear polarizer to readily available RGB cameras, multi-view polarization images can be captured without the need for advance calibration or precise measurements of the polarizer angle, substantially reducing system construction costs. The proposed approach represents polarimetric BRDF, Stokes vectors, and polarization states of object surfaces as neural implicit fields. These fields, combined with the polarizer angle, are retrieved by optimizing the rendering loss of input polarized images. By leveraging fundamental physical principles for the implicit representation of polarization rendering, our method demonstrates superiority over existing techniques through experiments in public datasets and real captured images on both reconstruction and novel view synthesis.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Generative Large Language Models Trained for Detecting Errors in Radiology Reports

In this retrospective study, a dataset was constructed with two parts. The first part included 1,656 synthetic chest radiology reports generated by GPT-4 using specified prompts, with 828 being error-free synthetic reports and 828 containing errors. The second part included 614 reports: 307 error-free reports between 2011 and 2016 from the MIMIC-CXR database and 307 corresponding synthetic reports with errors generated by GPT-4 on the basis of these MIMIC-CXR reports and specified prompts. All errors were categorized into four types: negation, left/right, interval change, and transcription errors. Then, several models, including Llama-3, GPT-4, and BiomedBERT, were refined using zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, or fine-tuning strategies. Finally, the performance of these models was evaluated using the F1 score, 95\% confidence interval (CI) and paired-sample t-tests on our constructed dataset, with the prediction results further assessed by radiologists. Using zero-shot prompting, the fine-tuned Llama-3-70B-Instruct model achieved the best performance with the following F1 scores: 0.769 for negation errors, 0.772 for left/right errors, 0.750 for interval change errors, 0.828 for transcription errors, and 0.780 overall. In the real-world evaluation phase, two radiologists reviewed 200 randomly selected reports output by the model. Of these, 99 were confirmed to contain errors detected by the models by both radiologists, and 163 were confirmed to contain model-detected errors by at least one radiologist. Generative LLMs, fine-tuned on synthetic and MIMIC-CXR radiology reports, greatly enhanced error detection in radiology reports.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

MedReason: Eliciting Factual Medical Reasoning Steps in LLMs via Knowledge Graphs

Medical tasks such as diagnosis and treatment planning require precise and complex reasoning, particularly in life-critical domains. Unlike mathematical reasoning, medical reasoning demands meticulous, verifiable thought processes to ensure reliability and accuracy. However, there is a notable lack of datasets that provide transparent, step-by-step reasoning to validate and enhance the medical reasoning ability of AI models. To bridge this gap, we introduce MedReason, a large-scale high-quality medical reasoning dataset designed to enable faithful and explainable medical problem-solving in large language models (LLMs). We utilize a structured medical knowledge graph (KG) to convert clinical QA pairs into logical chains of reasoning, or ``thinking paths'', which trace connections from question elements to answers via relevant KG entities. Each path is validated for consistency with clinical logic and evidence-based medicine. Our pipeline generates detailed reasoning for various medical questions from 7 medical datasets, resulting in a dataset of 32,682 question-answer pairs, each with detailed, step-by-step explanations. Experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning with our dataset consistently boosts medical problem-solving capabilities, achieving significant gains of up to 7.7% for DeepSeek-Ditill-8B. Our top-performing model, MedReason-8B, outperforms the Huatuo-o1-8B, a state-of-the-art medical reasoning model, by up to 4.2% on the clinical benchmark MedBullets. We also engage medical professionals from diverse specialties to assess our dataset's quality, ensuring MedReason offers accurate and coherent medical reasoning. Our data, models, and code is available at https://github.com/UCSC-VLAA/MedReason.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

ESPnet-SDS: Unified Toolkit and Demo for Spoken Dialogue Systems

Advancements in audio foundation models (FMs) have fueled interest in end-to-end (E2E) spoken dialogue systems, but different web interfaces for each system makes it challenging to compare and contrast them effectively. Motivated by this, we introduce an open-source, user-friendly toolkit designed to build unified web interfaces for various cascaded and E2E spoken dialogue systems. Our demo further provides users with the option to get on-the-fly automated evaluation metrics such as (1) latency, (2) ability to understand user input, (3) coherence, diversity, and relevance of system response, and (4) intelligibility and audio quality of system output. Using the evaluation metrics, we compare various cascaded and E2E spoken dialogue systems with a human-human conversation dataset as a proxy. Our analysis demonstrates that the toolkit allows researchers to effortlessly compare and contrast different technologies, providing valuable insights such as current E2E systems having poorer audio quality and less diverse responses. An example demo produced using our toolkit is publicly available here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Siddhant/Voice_Assistant_Demo.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

ESPnet-SpeechLM: An Open Speech Language Model Toolkit

We present ESPnet-SpeechLM, an open toolkit designed to democratize the development of speech language models (SpeechLMs) and voice-driven agentic applications. The toolkit standardizes speech processing tasks by framing them as universal sequential modeling problems, encompassing a cohesive workflow of data preprocessing, pre-training, inference, and task evaluation. With ESPnet-SpeechLM, users can easily define task templates and configure key settings, enabling seamless and streamlined SpeechLM development. The toolkit ensures flexibility, efficiency, and scalability by offering highly configurable modules for every stage of the workflow. To illustrate its capabilities, we provide multiple use cases demonstrating how competitive SpeechLMs can be constructed with ESPnet-SpeechLM, including a 1.7B-parameter model pre-trained on both text and speech tasks, across diverse benchmarks. The toolkit and its recipes are fully transparent and reproducible at: https://github.com/espnet/espnet/tree/speechlm.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

OWLS: Scaling Laws for Multilingual Speech Recognition and Translation Models

Neural scaling laws offer valuable insights for designing robust sequence processing architectures. While these laws have been extensively characterized in other modalities, their behavior in speech remains comparatively underexplored. In this work, we introduce OWLS, an open-access, reproducible suite of multilingual speech recognition and translation models spanning 0.25B to 18B parameters, with the 18B version being the largest speech model, to the best of our knowledge. OWLS leverages up to 360K hours of public speech data across 150 languages, enabling a systematic investigation into how data, model, and compute scaling each influence performance in multilingual speech tasks. We use OWLS to derive neural scaling laws, showing how final performance can be reliably predicted when scaling. One of our key findings is that scaling enhances performance on low-resource languages/dialects, helping to mitigate bias and improve the accessibility of speech technologies. Finally, we show how OWLS can be used to power new research directions by discovering emergent abilities in large-scale speech models. Model checkpoints will be released on https://huggingface.co/collections/espnet/owls-scaling-laws-for-speech-recognition-and-translation-67ab7f991c194065f057ce8d for future studies.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

WatchGuardian: Enabling User-Defined Personalized Just-in-Time Intervention on Smartwatch

While just-in-time interventions (JITIs) have effectively targeted common health behaviors, individuals often have unique needs to intervene in personal undesirable actions that can negatively affect physical, mental, and social well-being. We present WatchGuardian, a smartwatch-based JITI system that empowers users to define custom interventions for these personal actions with a small number of samples. For the model to detect new actions based on limited new data samples, we developed a few-shot learning pipeline that finetuned a pre-trained inertial measurement unit (IMU) model on public hand-gesture datasets. We then designed a data augmentation and synthesis process to train additional classification layers for customization. Our offline evaluation with 26 participants showed that with three, five, and ten examples, our approach achieved an average accuracy of 76.8%, 84.7%, and 87.7%, and an F1 score of 74.8%, 84.2%, and 87.2% We then conducted a four-hour intervention study to compare WatchGuardian against a rule-based intervention. Our results demonstrated that our system led to a significant reduction by 64.0 +- 22.6% in undesirable actions, substantially outperforming the baseline by 29.0%. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of a customizable, AI-driven JITI system for individuals in need of behavioral intervention in personal undesirable actions. We envision that our work can inspire broader applications of user-defined personalized intervention with advanced AI solutions.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

VoiceTextBlender: Augmenting Large Language Models with Speech Capabilities via Single-Stage Joint Speech-Text Supervised Fine-Tuning

Recent studies have augmented large language models (LLMs) with speech capabilities, leading to the development of speech language models (SpeechLMs). Earlier SpeechLMs focused on single-turn speech-based question answering (QA), where user input comprised a speech context and a text question. More recent studies have extended this to multi-turn conversations, though they often require complex, multi-stage supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with diverse data. Another critical challenge with SpeechLMs is catastrophic forgetting, where models optimized for speech tasks suffer significant degradation in text-only performance. To mitigate these issues, we propose a novel single-stage joint speech-text SFT approach on the low-rank adaptation (LoRA) of the LLM backbone. Our joint SFT combines text-only SFT data with three types of speech-related data: speech recognition and translation, speech-based QA, and mixed-modal SFT. Compared to previous SpeechLMs with 7B or 13B parameters, our 3B model demonstrates superior performance across various speech benchmarks while preserving the original capabilities on text-only tasks. Furthermore, our model shows emergent abilities of effectively handling previously unseen prompts and tasks, including multi-turn, mixed-modal inputs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

A foundation model for human-AI collaboration in medical literature mining

Systematic literature review is essential for evidence-based medicine, requiring comprehensive analysis of clinical trial publications. However, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) models for medical literature mining has been limited by insufficient training and evaluation across broad therapeutic areas and diverse tasks. Here, we present LEADS, an AI foundation model for study search, screening, and data extraction from medical literature. The model is trained on 633,759 instruction data points in LEADSInstruct, curated from 21,335 systematic reviews, 453,625 clinical trial publications, and 27,015 clinical trial registries. We showed that LEADS demonstrates consistent improvements over four cutting-edge generic large language models (LLMs) on six tasks. Furthermore, LEADS enhances expert workflows by providing supportive references following expert requests, streamlining processes while maintaining high-quality results. A study with 16 clinicians and medical researchers from 14 different institutions revealed that experts collaborating with LEADS achieved a recall of 0.81 compared to 0.77 experts working alone in study selection, with a time savings of 22.6%. In data extraction tasks, experts using LEADS achieved an accuracy of 0.85 versus 0.80 without using LEADS, alongside a 26.9% time savings. These findings highlight the potential of specialized medical literature foundation models to outperform generic models, delivering significant quality and efficiency benefits when integrated into expert workflows for medical literature mining.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Joint Beam Search Integrating CTC, Attention, and Transducer Decoders

End-to-end automatic speech recognition (E2E-ASR) can be classified by its decoder architectures, such as connectionist temporal classification (CTC), recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T), attention-based encoder-decoder, and Mask-CTC models. Each decoder architecture has advantages and disadvantages, leading practitioners to switch between these different models depending on application requirements. Instead of building separate models, we propose a joint modeling scheme where four decoders (CTC, RNN-T, attention, and Mask-CTC) share the same encoder -- we refer to this as 4D modeling. The 4D model is trained jointly, which will bring model regularization and maximize the model robustness thanks to their complementary properties. To efficiently train the 4D model, we introduce a two-stage training strategy that stabilizes the joint training. In addition, we propose three novel joint beam search algorithms by combining three decoders (CTC, RNN-T, and attention) to further improve performance. These three beam search algorithms differ in which decoder is used as the primary decoder. We carefully evaluate the performance and computational tradeoffs associated with each algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the jointly trained 4D model outperforms the E2E-ASR models trained with only one individual decoder. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed joint beam search algorithm outperforms the previously proposed CTC/attention decoding.

eess.AS↗