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Yu Wu

Publications and source records attributed to Yu Wu.

At least 163 records · Page 9Linked to original sources

On decoder-only architecture for speech-to-text and large language model integration

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in the field of natural language processing, enabling better human-computer interaction using natural language. However, the seamless integration of speech signals into LLMs has not been explored well. The "decoder-only" architecture has also not been well studied for speech processing tasks. In this research, we introduce Speech-LLaMA, a novel approach that effectively incorporates acoustic information into text-based large language models. Our method leverages Connectionist Temporal Classification and a simple audio encoder to map the compressed acoustic features to the continuous semantic space of the LLM. In addition, we further probe the decoder-only architecture for speech-to-text tasks by training a smaller scale randomly initialized speech-LLaMA model from speech-text paired data alone. We conduct experiments on multilingual speech-to-text translation tasks and demonstrate a significant improvement over strong baselines, highlighting the potential advantages of decoder-only models for speech-to-text conversion.

eess.AS↗

1st Place Solution for the 5th LSVOS Challenge: Video Instance Segmentation

Video instance segmentation is a challenging task that serves as the cornerstone of numerous downstream applications, including video editing and autonomous driving. In this report, we present further improvements to the SOTA VIS method, DVIS. First, we introduce a denoising training strategy for the trainable tracker, allowing it to achieve more stable and accurate object tracking in complex and long videos. Additionally, we explore the role of visual foundation models in video instance segmentation. By utilizing a frozen VIT-L model pre-trained by DINO v2, DVIS demonstrates remarkable performance improvements. With these enhancements, our method achieves 57.9 AP and 56.0 AP in the development and test phases, respectively, and ultimately ranked 1st in the VIS track of the 5th LSVOS Challenge. The code will be available at https://github.com/zhang-tao-whu/DVIS.

cs.CV↗

Vision-Based Human Pose Estimation via Deep Learning: A Survey

Human pose estimation (HPE) has attracted a significant amount of attention from the computer vision community in the past decades. Moreover, HPE has been applied to various domains, such as human-computer interaction, sports analysis, and human tracking via images and videos. Recently, deep learning-based approaches have shown state-of-the-art performance in HPE-based applications. Although deep learning-based approaches have achieved remarkable performance in HPE, a comprehensive review of deep learning-based HPE methods remains lacking in the literature. In this article, we provide an up-to-date and in-depth overview of the deep learning approaches in vision-based HPE. We summarize these methods of 2-D and 3-D HPE, and their applications, discuss the challenges and the research trends through bibliometrics, and provide insightful recommendations for future research. This article provides a meaningful overview as introductory material for beginners to deep learning-based HPE, as well as supplementary material for advanced researchers.

cs.CV↗

Visually-Prompted Language Model for Fine-Grained Scene Graph Generation in an Open World

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) aims to extract relationships in images for vision understanding. Although recent works have made steady progress on SGG, they still suffer long-tail distribution issues that tail-predicates are more costly to train and hard to distinguish due to a small amount of annotated data compared to frequent predicates. Existing re-balancing strategies try to handle it via prior rules but are still confined to pre-defined conditions, which are not scalable for various models and datasets. In this paper, we propose a Cross-modal prediCate boosting (CaCao) framework, where a visually-prompted language model is learned to generate diverse fine-grained predicates in a low-resource way. The proposed CaCao can be applied in a plug-and-play fashion and automatically strengthen existing SGG to tackle the long-tailed problem. Based on that, we further introduce a novel Entangled cross-modal prompt approach for open-world predicate scene graph generation (Epic), where models can generalize to unseen predicates in a zero-shot manner. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that CaCao consistently boosts the performance of multiple scene graph generation models in a model-agnostic way. Moreover, our Epic achieves competitive performance on open-world predicate prediction. The data and code for this paper are publicly available.

cs.CV↗

Grounded Image Text Matching with Mismatched Relation Reasoning

This paper introduces Grounded Image Text Matching with Mismatched Relation (GITM-MR), a novel visual-linguistic joint task that evaluates the relation understanding capabilities of transformer-based pre-trained models. GITM-MR requires a model to first determine if an expression describes an image, then localize referred objects or ground the mismatched parts of the text. We provide a benchmark for evaluating pre-trained models on this task, with a focus on the challenging settings of limited data and out-of-distribution sentence lengths. Our evaluation demonstrates that pre-trained models lack data efficiency and length generalization ability. To address this, we propose the Relation-sensitive Correspondence Reasoning Network (RCRN), which incorporates relation-aware reasoning via bi-directional message propagation guided by language structure. RCRN can be interpreted as a modular program and delivers strong performance in both length generalization and data efficiency.

cs.CV↗

UDAMA: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation through Multi-discriminator Adversarial Training with Noisy Labels Improves Cardio-fitness Prediction

Deep learning models have shown great promise in various healthcare monitoring applications. However, most healthcare datasets with high-quality (gold-standard) labels are small-scale, as directly collecting ground truth is often costly and time-consuming. As a result, models developed and validated on small-scale datasets often suffer from overfitting and do not generalize well to unseen scenarios. At the same time, large amounts of imprecise (silver-standard) labeled data, annotated by approximate methods with the help of modern wearables and in the absence of ground truth validation, are starting to emerge. However, due to measurement differences, this data displays significant label distribution shifts, which motivates the use of domain adaptation. To this end, we introduce UDAMA, a method with two key components: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation and Multidiscriminator Adversarial Training, where we pre-train on the silver-standard data and employ adversarial adaptation with the gold-standard data along with two domain discriminators. In particular, we showcase the practical potential of UDAMA by applying it to Cardio-respiratory fitness (CRF) prediction. CRF is a crucial determinant of metabolic disease and mortality, and it presents labels with various levels of noise (goldand silver-standard), making it challenging to establish an accurate prediction model. Our results show promising performance by alleviating distribution shifts in various label shift settings. Additionally, by using data from two free-living cohort studies (Fenland and BBVS), we show that UDAMA consistently outperforms up to 12% compared to competitive transfer learning and state-of-the-art domain adaptation models, paving the way for leveraging noisy labeled data to improve fitness estimation at scale.

cs.LG↗

DVIS: Decoupled Video Instance Segmentation Framework

Video instance segmentation (VIS) is a critical task with diverse applications, including autonomous driving and video editing. Existing methods often underperform on complex and long videos in real world, primarily due to two factors. Firstly, offline methods are limited by the tightly-coupled modeling paradigm, which treats all frames equally and disregards the interdependencies between adjacent frames. Consequently, this leads to the introduction of excessive noise during long-term temporal alignment. Secondly, online methods suffer from inadequate utilization of temporal information. To tackle these challenges, we propose a decoupling strategy for VIS by dividing it into three independent sub-tasks: segmentation, tracking, and refinement. The efficacy of the decoupling strategy relies on two crucial elements: 1) attaining precise long-term alignment outcomes via frame-by-frame association during tracking, and 2) the effective utilization of temporal information predicated on the aforementioned accurate alignment outcomes during refinement. We introduce a novel referring tracker and temporal refiner to construct the \textbf{D}ecoupled \textbf{VIS} framework (\textbf{DVIS}). DVIS achieves new SOTA performance in both VIS and VPS, surpassing the current SOTA methods by 7.3 AP and 9.6 VPQ on the OVIS and VIPSeg datasets, which are the most challenging and realistic benchmarks. Moreover, thanks to the decoupling strategy, the referring tracker and temporal refiner are super light-weight (only 1.69\% of the segmenter FLOPs), allowing for efficient training and inference on a single GPU with 11G memory. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/zhang-tao-whu/DVIS}{https://github.com/zhang-tao-whu/DVIS}.

cs.CV↗

Prompting Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Domain Adaptation in Speech Recognition

The integration of Language Models (LMs) has proven to be an effective way to address domain shifts in speech recognition. However, these approaches usually require a significant amount of target domain text data for the training of LMs. Different from these methods, in this work, with only a domain-specific text prompt, we propose two zero-shot ASR domain adaptation methods using LLaMA, a 7-billion-parameter large language model (LLM). LLM is used in two ways: 1) second-pass rescoring: reranking N-best hypotheses of a given ASR system with LLaMA; 2) deep LLM-fusion: incorporating LLM into the decoder of an encoder-decoder based ASR system. Experiments show that, with only one domain prompt, both methods can effectively reduce word error rates (WER) on out-of-domain TedLium-2 and SPGISpeech datasets. Especially, the deep LLM-fusion has the advantage of better recall of entity and out-of-vocabulary words.

cs.CL↗

Accelerating Transducers through Adjacent Token Merging

Recent end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often utilize a Transformer-based acoustic encoder that generates embedding at a high frame rate. However, this design is inefficient, particularly for long speech signals due to the quadratic computation of self-attention. To address this, we propose a new method, Adjacent Token Merging (A-ToMe), which gradually combines adjacent tokens with high similarity scores between their key values. In this way, the total time step could be reduced, and the inference of both the encoder and joint network is accelerated. Experiments on LibriSpeech show that our method can reduce 57% of tokens and improve the inference speed on GPU by 70% without any notable loss of accuracy. Additionally, we demonstrate that A-ToMe is also an effective solution to reduce tokens in long-form ASR, where the input speech consists of multiple utterances.

cs.CL↗

SpeechLM: Enhanced Speech Pre-Training with Unpaired Textual Data

How to boost speech pre-training with textual data is an unsolved problem due to the fact that speech and text are very different modalities with distinct characteristics. In this paper, we propose a cross-modal Speech and Language Model (SpeechLM) to explicitly align speech and text pre-training with a pre-defined unified discrete representation. Specifically, we introduce two alternative discrete tokenizers to bridge the speech and text modalities, including phoneme-unit and hidden-unit tokenizers, which can be trained using a small amount of paired speech-text data. Based on the trained tokenizers, we convert the unlabeled speech and text data into tokens of phoneme units or hidden units. The pre-training objective is designed to unify the speech and the text into the same discrete semantic space with a unified Transformer network. We evaluate SpeechLM on various spoken language processing tasks including speech recognition, speech translation, and universal representation evaluation framework SUPERB, demonstrating significant improvements on content-related tasks. Code and models are available at https://aka.ms/SpeechLM.

cs.CL↗

1st Place Solution for PVUW Challenge 2023: Video Panoptic Segmentation

Video panoptic segmentation is a challenging task that serves as the cornerstone of numerous downstream applications, including video editing and autonomous driving. We believe that the decoupling strategy proposed by DVIS enables more effective utilization of temporal information for both "thing" and "stuff" objects. In this report, we successfully validated the effectiveness of the decoupling strategy in video panoptic segmentation. Finally, our method achieved a VPQ score of 51.4 and 53.7 in the development and test phases, respectively, and ultimately ranked 1st in the VPS track of the 2nd PVUW Challenge. The code is available at https://github.com/zhang-tao-whu/DVIS

cs.CV↗

Accurate and Structured Pruning for Efficient Automatic Speech Recognition

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has seen remarkable advancements with deep neural networks, such as Transformer and Conformer. However, these models typically have large model sizes and high inference costs, posing a challenge to deploy on resource-limited devices. In this paper, we propose a novel compression strategy that leverages structured pruning and knowledge distillation to reduce the model size and inference cost of the Conformer model while preserving high recognition performance. Our approach utilizes a set of binary masks to indicate whether to retain or prune each Conformer module, and employs L0 regularization to learn the optimal mask values. To further enhance pruning performance, we use a layerwise distillation strategy to transfer knowledge from unpruned to pruned models. Our method outperforms all pruning baselines on the widely used LibriSpeech benchmark, achieving a 50% reduction in model size and a 28% reduction in inference cost with minimal performance loss.

cs.CL↗

VioLA: Unified Codec Language Models for Speech Recognition, Synthesis, and Translation

Recent research shows a big convergence in model architecture, training objectives, and inference methods across various tasks for different modalities. In this paper, we propose VioLA, a single auto-regressive Transformer decoder-only network that unifies various cross-modal tasks involving speech and text, such as speech-to-text, text-to-text, text-to-speech, and speech-to-speech tasks, as a conditional codec language model task via multi-task learning framework. To accomplish this, we first convert all the speech utterances to discrete tokens (similar to the textual data) using an offline neural codec encoder. In such a way, all these tasks are converted to token-based sequence conversion problems, which can be naturally handled with one conditional language model. We further integrate task IDs (TID) and language IDs (LID) into the proposed model to enhance the modeling capability of handling different languages and tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed VioLA model can support both single-modal and cross-modal tasks well, and the decoder-only model achieves a comparable and even better performance than the strong baselines.

cs.CL↗

Click-Feedback Retrieval

Retrieving target information based on input query is of fundamental importance in many real-world applications. In practice, it is not uncommon for the initial search to fail, where additional feedback information is needed to guide the searching process. In this work, we study a setting where the feedback is provided through users clicking liked and disliked searching results. We believe this form of feedback is of great practical interests for its convenience and efficiency. To facilitate future work in this direction, we construct a new benchmark termed click-feedback retrieval based on a large-scale dataset in fashion domain. We demonstrate that incorporating click-feedback can drastically improve the retrieval performance, which validates the value of the proposed setting. We also introduce several methods to utilize click-feedback during training, and show that click-feedback-guided training can significantly enhance the retrieval quality. We hope further exploration in this direction can bring new insights on building more efficient and user-friendly search engines.

cs.CV↗

Two-Stream Network for Sign Language Recognition and Translation

Sign languages are visual languages using manual articulations and non-manual elements to convey information. For sign language recognition and translation, the majority of existing approaches directly encode RGB videos into hidden representations. RGB videos, however, are raw signals with substantial visual redundancy, leading the encoder to overlook the key information for sign language understanding. To mitigate this problem and better incorporate domain knowledge, such as handshape and body movement, we introduce a dual visual encoder containing two separate streams to model both the raw videos and the keypoint sequences generated by an off-the-shelf keypoint estimator. To make the two streams interact with each other, we explore a variety of techniques, including bidirectional lateral connection, sign pyramid network with auxiliary supervision, and frame-level self-distillation. The resulting model is called TwoStream-SLR, which is competent for sign language recognition (SLR). TwoStream-SLR is extended to a sign language translation (SLT) model, TwoStream-SLT, by simply attaching an extra translation network. Experimentally, our TwoStream-SLR and TwoStream-SLT achieve state-of-the-art performance on SLR and SLT tasks across a series of datasets including Phoenix-2014, Phoenix-2014T, and CSL-Daily. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/FangyunWei/SLRT.

cs.CV↗

Speak Foreign Languages with Your Own Voice: Cross-Lingual Neural Codec Language Modeling

We propose a cross-lingual neural codec language model, VALL-E X, for cross-lingual speech synthesis. Specifically, we extend VALL-E and train a multi-lingual conditional codec language model to predict the acoustic token sequences of the target language speech by using both the source language speech and the target language text as prompts. VALL-E X inherits strong in-context learning capabilities and can be applied for zero-shot cross-lingual text-to-speech synthesis and zero-shot speech-to-speech translation tasks. Experimental results show that it can generate high-quality speech in the target language via just one speech utterance in the source language as a prompt while preserving the unseen speaker's voice, emotion, and acoustic environment. Moreover, VALL-E X effectively alleviates the foreign accent problems, which can be controlled by a language ID. Audio samples are available at \url{https://aka.ms/vallex}.

cs.CL↗

Discrete Contrastive Diffusion for Cross-Modal Music and Image Generation

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have become a popular approach to conditional generation, due to their promising results and support for cross-modal synthesis. A key desideratum in conditional synthesis is to achieve high correspondence between the conditioning input and generated output. Most existing methods learn such relationships implicitly, by incorporating the prior into the variational lower bound. In this work, we take a different route -- we explicitly enhance input-output connections by maximizing their mutual information. To this end, we introduce a Conditional Discrete Contrastive Diffusion (CDCD) loss and design two contrastive diffusion mechanisms to effectively incorporate it into the denoising process, combining the diffusion training and contrastive learning for the first time by connecting it with the conventional variational objectives. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in evaluations with diverse multimodal conditional synthesis tasks: dance-to-music generation, text-to-image synthesis, as well as class-conditioned image synthesis. On each, we enhance the input-output correspondence and achieve higher or competitive general synthesis quality. Furthermore, the proposed approach improves the convergence of diffusion models, reducing the number of required diffusion steps by more than 35% on two benchmarks, significantly increasing the inference speed.

cs.CV↗

RF Injection Locking of THz Metasurface Quantum-Cascade VECSEL

RF injection locking and spectral broadening of a terahertz (THz) quantum-cascade vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting laser (QC-VECSEL) is demonstrated. An intra-cryostat VECSEL focusing cavity design is used to enable continuous-wave lasing with a cavity length over 30 mm which corresponds to a round-trip frequency near 5 GHz. Strong RF current modulation is injected to the QC-metasurface electrical bias to pull and lock the round-trip frequency. The injection locking range at various RF injection powers is recorded and compared with the injection locking theory. Moreover, the lasing spectrum broadens from 14 GHz in free-running mode to a maximum spectral width around 100 GHz with 20 dBm of injected RF power. This experimental setup is suitable for further exploration of active mode-locking and picosecond pulse generation in THz QC-VECSELs.

physics.optics↗