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Increasing educational attainment is one of the most important and effective tools for health and economic improvements. The extent to which extreme climate events disrupt education, resulting in fewer years of schooling and reduced educational attainment, remains under-studied. Children in low- and middle-income countries may be uniquely vulnerable to loss of schooling after such disasters due to the poor physical condition of schools and the lack of resources to rebuild and mitigate unexpected household shocks. Our analysis assesses this overlooked social cost of tropical cyclones on schooling attainment. We study the education records of nearly 5.1 million people living in 13 low- and middle-income countries that were exposed to tropical cyclones between 1954-2010. We find that exposure to tropical cyclones during preschool age is associated with a 2.7 percentage point decrease in primary school enrollment on average (14.2% decrease), with larger effects from more intense storms (up to 28% decrease for the most intense storms). These effects are more pronounced among school-age girls compared to boys and are greater in areas less accustomed to experiencing tropical cyclones. We estimate that, across all LMICs, tropical cyclone exposure has resulted in more than 410,000 children not attending primary school in the last 20 years, leading to a reduction of more than 4.1 million total years of schooling. These impacts, identified among some of the world's poorest populations, may grow in importance as exposure to severe tropical cyclones is projected to increase with climate change.

In sound event detection (SED), overlapping sound events pose a significant challenge, as certain events can be easily masked by background noise or other events, resulting in poor detection performance. To address this issue, we propose the text-queried SED (TQ-SED) framework. Specifically, we first pre-train a language-queried audio source separation (LASS) model to separate the audio tracks corresponding to different events from the input audio. Then, multiple target SED branches are employed to detect individual events. AudioSep is a state-of-the-art LASS model, but has limitations in extracting dynamic audio information because of its pure convolutional structure for separation. To address this, we integrate a dual-path recurrent neural network block into the model. We refer to this structure as AudioSep-DP, which achieves the first place in DCASE 2024 Task 9 on language-queried audio source separation (objective single model track). Experimental results show that TQ-SED can significantly improve the SED performance, with an improvement of 7.22\% on F1 score over the conventional framework. Additionally, we setup comprehensive experiments to explore the impact of model complexity. The source code and pre-trained model are released at https://github.com/apple-yinhan/TQ-SED., Comment: Submitted to ICASSP2025

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly impacting human society, particularly in textual information. Based on more than 30,000 papers and 1,000 presentations from machine learning conferences, we examined and compared the words used in writing and speaking, representing the first large-scale investigating study of how LLMs influence the two main modes of verbal communication and expression within the same group of people. Our empirical results show that LLM-style words such as "significant" have been used more frequently in abstracts and oral presentations. The impact on speaking is beginning to emerge and is likely to grow in the future, calling attention to the implicit influence and ripple effect of LLMs on human society., Comment: 16 pages

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise in a broad range of vision-language tasks with their strong reasoning and generalization capabilities. However, they heavily depend on high-quality data in the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) phase. The existing approaches aim to curate high-quality data via GPT-4V, but they are not scalable due to the commercial nature of GPT-4V and the simplicity of the prompts used to instruct the model. To this end, we devised the FullAnno system, which is a data engine that can generate large-scale, high-quality, and fine-grained image annotations consisting of the category and position of objects, region descriptions, text information, as well as image dense captions. This engine is characterized by its cascade annotation process, which involves multiple expert models and employs rich prompts to instruct LLMs in generating dense image captions. We re-annotated the COCO and Visual Genome datasets using our FullAnno system, tripling the number of object annotations and increasing the length of the original image captions by a factor of 15. Experiments show that the regenerated annotation can significantly enhance the capabilities of LLaVA-v1.5 on several benchmarks. The re-annotated data are available at: https://arcana-project-page.github.io, Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables

Traditional federated learning (FL) frameworks rely heavily on terrestrial networks, where coverage limitations and increasing bandwidth congestion significantly hinder model convergence. Fortunately, the advancement of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks offers promising new communication avenues to augment traditional terrestrial FL. Despite this potential, the limited satellite-ground communication bandwidth and the heterogeneous operating environments of ground devices-including variations in data, bandwidth, and computing power-pose substantial challenges for effective and robust satellite-assisted FL. To address these challenges, we propose SatFed, a resource-efficient satellite-assisted heterogeneous FL framework. SatFed implements freshness-based model prioritization queues to optimize the use of highly constrained satellite-ground bandwidth, ensuring the transmission of the most critical models. Additionally, a multigraph is constructed to capture real-time heterogeneous relationships between devices, including data distribution, terrestrial bandwidth, and computing capability. This multigraph enables SatFed to aggregate satellite-transmitted models into peer guidance, enhancing local training in heterogeneous environments. Extensive experiments with real-world LEO satellite networks demonstrate that SatFed achieves superior performance and robustness compared to state-of-the-art benchmarks., Comment: 11 pages, 12 figures

Diabetes is a chronic disease that poses a significant global health burden, and optimizing diabetes management requires multi-stakeholder collaboration. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in various healthcare scenarios, but their effectiveness across a diverse range of diabetes tasks remains unproven. In this study, we introduced a framework to train and validate diabetes-specific LLMs. We first developed a comprehensive data processing pipeline that includes data collection, filtering, augmentation and refinement. This approach contributes to creating a high-quality, diabetes-specific dataset, and several evaluation benchmarks entirely from scratch. Utilizing the collected training dataset, we fine-tuned a diabetes-specific LLM family that demonstrated state-of-the-art proficiency in understanding and processing various diabetes tasks compared to other LLMs. Furthermore, clinical studies showed the potential applications of our models in diabetes care, including providing personalized healthcare, assisting medical education, and streamlining clinical tasks. In conclusion, our study introduced a framework to develop and evaluate a diabetes-specific LLM family, and highlighted its potential to enhance clinical practice and provide personalized, data-driven support for diabetes support when facing different end users. The code is provided via GitHub at https://github.com/waltonfuture/Diabetica.

Rapid developments of AI tools are expected to offer unprecedented assistance to the research of natural science including chemistry. However, neither existing unimodal task-specific specialist models nor emerging general large multimodal models (LMM) can cover the wide range of chemical data modality and task categories. To address the real demands of chemists, a cross-modal Chemical General Intelligence (CGI) system, which serves as a truly practical and useful research assistant utilizing the great potential of LMMs, is in great need. In this work, we introduce the first Cross-modal Dialogue Foundation Model for Chemistry (ChemDFM-X). Diverse multimodal data are generated from an initial modality by approximate calculations and task-specific model predictions. This strategy creates sufficient chemical training corpora, while significantly reducing excessive expense, resulting in an instruction-tuning dataset containing 7.6M data. After instruction finetuning, ChemDFM-X is evaluated on extensive experiments of different chemical tasks with various data modalities. The results demonstrate the capacity of ChemDFM-X for multimodal and inter-modal knowledge comprehension. ChemDFM-X marks a significant milestone toward aligning all modalities in chemistry, a step closer to CGI., Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, 11 tables

In order to solve problems of practical importance, quantum computers will likely need to incorporate quantum error correction, where a logical qubit is redundantly encoded in many noisy physical qubits. The large physical-qubit overhead typically associated with error correction motivates the search for more hardware-efficient approaches. Here, using a microfabricated superconducting quantum circuit, we realize a logical qubit memory formed from the concatenation of encoded bosonic cat qubits with an outer repetition code of distance $d=5$. The bosonic cat qubits are passively protected against bit flips using a stabilizing circuit. Cat-qubit phase-flip errors are corrected by the repetition code which uses ancilla transmons for syndrome measurement. We realize a noise-biased CX gate which ensures bit-flip error suppression is maintained during error correction. We study the performance and scaling of the logical qubit memory, finding that the phase-flip correcting repetition code operates below threshold, with logical phase-flip error decreasing with code distance from $d=3$ to $d=5$. Concurrently, the logical bit-flip error is suppressed with increasing cat-qubit mean photon number. The minimum measured logical error per cycle is on average $1.75(2)\%$ for the distance-3 code sections, and $1.65(3)\%$ for the longer distance-5 code, demonstrating the effectiveness of bit-flip error suppression throughout the error correction cycle. These results, where the intrinsic error suppression of the bosonic encodings allows us to use a hardware-efficient outer error correcting code, indicate that concatenated bosonic codes are a compelling paradigm for reaching fault-tolerant quantum computation., Comment: Comments on the manuscript welcome!

We report the first measurement of the azimuthal anisotropy of J$/\psi$ at forward rapidity ($1.2<|\eta|<2.2$) in Au$+$Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}=200$ GeV at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The data were collected by the PHENIX experiment in 2014 and 2016 with integrated luminosity of 14.5~nb$^{-1}$. The second Fourier coefficient ($v_2$) of the azimuthal distribution of $J/\psi$ is determined as a function of the transverse momentum ($p_T$) using the event-plane method. The measurements were performed for several selections of collision centrality: 0\%--50\%, 10\%--60\%, and 10\%-40\%. We find that in all cases the values of $v_2(p_T)$, which quantify the elliptic flow of J$/\psi$, are consistent with zero. The results are consistent with measurements at midrapidity, indicating no significant elliptic flow of the J$/\psi$ within the quark-gluon-plasma medium at collision energies of $\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}=200$ GeV., Comment: 369 authors from 72 institutions, 12 pages, 7 figures, 5 tables. v1 is version submitted to Physical Review C. HEPdata tables for the points plotted in figures for this and previous PHENIX publications are (or will be) publicly available at http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/papers.html

We present the first forward-rapidity measurements of elliptic anisotropy of open-heavy-flavor muons at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The measurements are based on data samples of Au$+$Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}=200$ GeV collected by the PHENIX experiment in 2014 and 2016 with integrated luminosity of 14.5~nb$^{-1}$. The measurements are performed in the pseudorapidity range $1.2<|\eta|<2$ and cover transverse momenta $1

Built upon vector quantization (VQ), discrete audio codec models have achieved great success in audio compression and auto-regressive audio generation. However, existing models face substantial challenges in perceptual quality and signal distortion, especially when operating in extremely low bandwidth, rooted in the sensitivity of the VQ codebook to noise. This degradation poses significant challenges for several downstream tasks, such as codec-based speech synthesis. To address this issue, we propose a novel VQ method, Normal Distribution-based Vector Quantization (NDVQ), by introducing an explicit margin between the VQ codes via learning a variance. Specifically, our approach involves mapping the waveform to a latent space and quantizing it by selecting the most likely normal distribution, with each codebook entry representing a unique normal distribution defined by its mean and variance. Using these distribution-based VQ codec codes, a decoder reconstructs the input waveform. NDVQ is trained with additional distribution-related losses, alongside reconstruction and discrimination losses. Experiments demonstrate that NDVQ outperforms existing audio compression baselines, such as EnCodec, in terms of audio quality and zero-shot TTS, particularly in very low bandwidth scenarios.

The differential branching fraction and angular coefficients of \ensuremath{\it{\Lambda}^\mathrm{0}_b \rightarrow pK^-\mu^+\mu^-}\xspace decays are measured in bins of the dimuon mass squared and dihadron mass. The analysis is performed using a data set corresponding to 9$\aunit{fb}^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity collected with the $\mbox{LHCb}$ detector between 2011 and 2018. The data are consistent with receiving contributions from a mixture of $\it{\Lambda}$ resonances with different spin-parity quantum numbers. The angular coefficients show a pattern of vector--axial vector interference that is a characteristic of the type of flavour-changing neutral-current transition relevant for these decays., Comment: All figures and tables, along with machine-readable versions and any supplementary material and additional information, are available at https://cern.ch/lhcbproject/Publications/p/3264.html (LHCb public pages)

GRB 230812B, detected by the Gamma-Ray Integrated Detectors (GRID) constellation mission, is an exceptionally bright gamma-ray burst (GRB) with a duration of only 3 seconds. Sitting near the traditional boundary ($\sim$ 2 s) between long and short GRBs, GRB 230812B is notably associated with a supernova (SN), indicating a massive star progenitor. This makes it a rare example of a short-duration GRB resulting from stellar collapse. Our analysis, using a time-evolving synchrotron model, suggests that the burst has an emission radius of approximately $10^{14.5}$~cm. We propose that the short duration of GRB 230812B is due to the combined effects of the central engine's activity time and the time required for the jet to break through the stellar envelope. Our findings provide another case that challenges the conventional view that short-duration GRBs originate exclusively from compact object mergers, demonstrating that a broader range of durations exists for GRBs arising from the collapse of massive stars., Comment: 10 pages, 3 tables, 11 figures

Van der Waals (vdW) antiferromagnets are exceptional platforms for exploring the spin dynamics of antiferromagnetic materials owing to their weak interlayer exchange coupling. In this study, we examined the antiferromagnetic resonance spectra of anisotropic Van der Waals antiferromagnet CrSBr. In addition to the ordinary resonance modes, we observed a dipolar spin wave mode when the microwave field was oriented perpendicular to the in-plane easy axis of CrSBr. Furthermore, our results uncovered a pronounced dependency of various resonant modes on the orientation of the microwave field, which is pivotal for the accurate determination of exchange coupling constants. Numerical simulations have elucidated this orientation dependence of spin dynamics arises from the magnetostatic effect. This discovery underscores the previously underappreciated significance of dipolar interactions in shaping the dynamical properties of two-dimensional AFM materials, thereby enhancing our understanding of the intrinsic dynamic properties of vdW magnets.

Diffusion-based text-to-audio (TTA) generation has made substantial progress, leveraging latent diffusion model (LDM) to produce high-quality, diverse and instruction-relevant audios. However, beyond generation, the task of audio editing remains equally important but has received comparatively little attention. Audio editing tasks face two primary challenges: executing precise edits and preserving the unedited sections. While workflows based on LDMs have effectively addressed these challenges in the field of image processing, similar approaches have been scarcely applied to audio editing. In this paper, we introduce AudioEditor, a training-free audio editing framework built on the pretrained diffusion-based TTA model. AudioEditor incorporates Null-text Inversion and EOT-suppression methods, enabling the model to preserve original audio features while executing accurate edits. Comprehensive objective and subjective experiments validate the effectiveness of AudioEditor in delivering high-quality audio edits. Code and demo can be found at https://github.com/NKU-HLT/AudioEditor.

While pre-trained automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems demonstrate impressive performance on matched domains, their performance often degrades when confronted with channel mismatch stemming from unseen recording environments and conditions. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel channel-aware data simulation method for robust ASR training. Our method harnesses the synergistic power of channel-extractive techniques and generative adversarial networks (GANs). We first train a channel encoder capable of extracting embeddings from arbitrary audio. On top of this, channel embeddings are extracted using a minimal amount of target-domain data and used to guide a GAN-based speech synthesizer. This synthesizer generates speech that faithfully preserves the phonetic content of the input while mimicking the channel characteristics of the target domain. We evaluate our method on the challenging Hakka Across Taiwan (HAT) and Taiwanese Across Taiwan (TAT) corpora, achieving relative character error rate (CER) reductions of 20.02% and 9.64%, respectively, compared to the baselines. These results highlight the efficacy of our channel-aware data simulation method for bridging the gap between source- and target-domain acoustics., Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 2025

Chain-of-thought prompting significantly boosts the reasoning ability of large language models but still faces three issues: hallucination problem, restricted interpretability, and uncontrollable generation. To address these challenges, we present AgentCOT, a llm-based autonomous agent framework, which can solve complex problems in an agent-style manner by multiple round LLM generation. At each step, AgentCOT selects an action and executes it to yield an intermediate result with supporting evidence. In addition, we integrate the step's index into the reasoning process to form a graph structure for complex inference logic. We introduce two new strategies to enhance the performance of AgentCOT.We conduct extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of our method on six common benchmarks. Results exhibit that our method brings in substantial improvements over current competitive approaches.

With the advent of the big data and large language model era, zero-shot personalized rapid customization has emerged as a significant trend. In this report, we introduce Takin AudioLLM, a series of techniques and models, mainly including Takin TTS, Takin VC, and Takin Morphing, specifically designed for audiobook production. These models are capable of zero-shot speech production, generating high-quality speech that is nearly indistinguishable from real human speech and facilitating individuals to customize the speech content according to their own needs. Specifically, we first introduce Takin TTS, a neural codec language model that builds upon an enhanced neural speech codec and a multi-task training framework, capable of generating high-fidelity natural speech in a zero-shot way. For Takin VC, we advocate an effective content and timbre joint modeling approach to improve the speaker similarity, while advocating for a conditional flow matching based decoder to further enhance its naturalness and expressiveness. Last, we propose the Takin Morphing system with highly decoupled and advanced timbre and prosody modeling approaches, which enables individuals to customize speech production with their preferred timbre and prosody in a precise and controllable manner. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and robustness of our Takin AudioLLM series models. For detailed demos, please refer to https://takinaudiollm.github.io.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale more effectively than dense models due to sparse computation through expert routing, selectively activating only a small subset of expert modules. However, sparse computation challenges traditional training practices, as discrete expert routing hinders standard backpropagation and thus gradient-based optimization, which are the cornerstone of deep learning. To better pursue the scaling power of MoE, we introduce GRIN (GRadient-INformed MoE training), which incorporates sparse gradient estimation for expert routing and configures model parallelism to avoid token dropping. Applying GRIN to autoregressive language modeling, we develop a top-2 16$\times$3.8B MoE model. Our model, with only 6.6B activated parameters, outperforms a 7B dense model and matches the performance of a 14B dense model trained on the same data. Extensive evaluations across diverse tasks demonstrate the potential of GRIN to significantly enhance MoE efficacy, achieving 79.4 on MMLU, 83.7 on HellaSwag, 74.4 on HumanEval, and 58.9 on MATH., Comment: 58 pages

Large Language Model can reasonably understand and generate human expressions but may lack of thorough thinking and reasoning mechanisms. Recently there have been several studies which enhance the thinking ability of language models but most of them are not data-driven or training-based. In this paper, we are motivated by the cognitive mechanism in the natural world, and design a novel model architecture called TaS which allows it to first consider the thoughts and then express the response based upon the query. We design several pipelines to annotate or generate the thought contents from prompt-response samples, then add language heads in a middle layer which behaves as the thinking layer. We train the language model by the thoughts-augmented data and successfully let the thinking layer automatically generate reasonable thoughts and finally output more reasonable responses. Both qualitative examples and quantitative results validate the effectiveness and performance of TaS. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TadE., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained popularity in task planning for long-horizon manipulation tasks. To enhance the validity of LLM-generated plans, visual demonstrations and online videos have been widely employed to guide the planning process. However, for manipulation tasks involving subtle movements but rich contact interactions, visual perception alone may be insufficient for the LLM to fully interpret the demonstration. Additionally, visual data provides limited information on force-related parameters and conditions, which are crucial for effective execution on real robots. In this paper, we introduce an in-context learning framework that incorporates tactile and force-torque information from human demonstrations to enhance LLMs' ability to generate plans for new task scenarios. We propose a bootstrapped reasoning pipeline that sequentially integrates each modality into a comprehensive task plan. This task plan is then used as a reference for planning in new task configurations. Real-world experiments on two different sequential manipulation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in improving LLMs' understanding of multi-modal demonstrations and enhancing the overall planning performance.

Topological valley photonics, which exploits valley degree of freedom to manipulate electromagnetic waves, offers a practical and effective pathway for various classical and quantum photonic applications across the entire spectrum. Current valley photonics, however, has been limited to two dimensions, which typically suffer from out-of-plane losses and can only manipulate the flow of light in planar geometries. Here, we have theoretically and experimentally developed a framework of three-dimensional (3D) topological valley photonics with a complete photonic bandgap and vectorial valley contrasting physics. Unlike the two-dimensional counterparts with a pair of valleys characterized by scalar valley Chern numbers, the 3D valley systems exhibit triple pairs of valleys characterized by valley Chern vectors, enabling the creation of vectorial bulk valley vortices and canalized chiral valley surface states. Notably, the valley Chern vectors and the circulating propagation direction of the valley surface states are intrinsically governed by the right-hand-thumb rule. Our findings reveal the vectorial nature of the 3D valley states and highlight their potential applications in 3D waveguiding, directional radiation, and imaging.

In this paper, we propose SRIF, a novel Semantic shape Registration framework based on diffusion-based Image morphing and Flow estimation. More concretely, given a pair of extrinsically aligned shapes, we first render them from multi-views, and then utilize an image interpolation framework based on diffusion models to generate sequences of intermediate images between them. The images are later fed into a dynamic 3D Gaussian splatting framework, with which we reconstruct and post-process for intermediate point clouds respecting the image morphing processing. In the end, tailored for the above, we propose a novel registration module to estimate continuous normalizing flow, which deforms source shape consistently towards the target, with intermediate point clouds as weak guidance. Our key insight is to leverage large vision models (LVMs) to associate shapes and therefore obtain much richer semantic information on the relationship between shapes than the ad-hoc feature extraction and alignment. As a consequence, SRIF achieves high-quality dense correspondences on challenging shape pairs, but also delivers smooth, semantically meaningful interpolation in between. Empirical evidence justifies the effectiveness and superiority of our method as well as specific design choices. The code is released at https://github.com/rqhuang88/SRIF.

Metallic bismuth is both non-toxic and cost-effective. Bi-based catalysts have demonstrated the ability to efficiently produce HCOOH through CO2RR while effectively inhibiting the HER. Although many experiments have been reported concerning its performance towards CO2 reduction, the impact its valence states and crystal faces on CO2RR selectivity (e.g. HCOOH versus CO) it still under debate. Here, we performed a comprehensive study via density functional theory, by including three typical valence states of Bi, such as 0 (Bi), +3 (Bi2O3) and +5 (Bi2O5), as well as their often-studied crystal facets. The results show that metallic Bi demonstrates a poor selectivity for HCOOH, but boasts a higher conversion rate for CO2. While Bi2O3 exhibits a good selectivity for HCOOH production, yet it displays a lower conversion rate for CO2. For Bi2O5, all studied surfaces show high energy barriers in both cases of HCOOH and CO production, and lower energy barriers for HER reactions, indicating that Bi at +5 valence state is not the good choice for 2e transfer reactions. Subsequently, we further examined the effects of oxygen contents on the selectivity of HCOOH and the conversion rate for CO2. Interestingly, we found that partial oxidization of Bi benefits both the selectivity and the conversion rate. With these observations, we suggest that a mixture of Bi (0) and Bi2O3 (+3) phases would be a better choice than single crystals for future experiments.

Assembly is a crucial skill for robots in both modern manufacturing and service robotics. However, mastering transferable insertion skills that can handle a variety of high-precision assembly tasks remains a significant challenge. This paper presents a novel framework that utilizes diffusion models to generate 6D wrench for high-precision tactile robotic insertion tasks. It learns from demonstrations performed on a single task and achieves a zero-shot transfer success rate of 95.7% across various novel high-precision tasks. Our method effectively inherits the self-adaptability demonstrated by our previous work. In this framework, we address the frequency misalignment between the diffusion policy and the real-time control loop with a dynamic system-based filter, significantly improving the task success rate by 9.15%. Furthermore, we provide a practical guideline regarding the trade-off between diffusion models' inference ability and speed., Comment: 7 pages

Segmentation of the fetal and maternal structures, particularly intrapartum ultrasound imaging as advocated by the International Society of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology (ISUOG) for monitoring labor progression, is a crucial first step for quantitative diagnosis and clinical decision-making. This requires specialized analysis by obstetrics professionals, in a task that i) is highly time- and cost-consuming and ii) often yields inconsistent results. The utility of automatic segmentation algorithms for biometry has been proven, though existing results remain suboptimal. To push forward advancements in this area, the Grand Challenge on Pubic Symphysis-Fetal Head Segmentation (PSFHS) was held alongside the 26th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2023). This challenge aimed to enhance the development of automatic segmentation algorithms at an international scale, providing the largest dataset to date with 5,101 intrapartum ultrasound images collected from two ultrasound machines across three hospitals from two institutions. The scientific community's enthusiastic participation led to the selection of the top 8 out of 179 entries from 193 registrants in the initial phase to proceed to the competition's second stage. These algorithms have elevated the state-of-the-art in automatic PSFHS from intrapartum ultrasound images. A thorough analysis of the results pinpointed ongoing challenges in the field and outlined recommendations for future work. The top solutions and the complete dataset remain publicly available, fostering further advancements in automatic segmentation and biometry for intrapartum ultrasound imaging.

Retinal fundus photography is significant in diagnosing and monitoring retinal diseases. However, systemic imperfections and operator/patient-related factors can hinder the acquisition of high-quality retinal images. Previous efforts in retinal image enhancement primarily relied on GANs, which are limited by the trade-off between training stability and output diversity. In contrast, the Schr\"odinger Bridge (SB), offers a more stable solution by utilizing Optimal Transport (OT) theory to model a stochastic differential equation (SDE) between two arbitrary distributions. This allows SB to effectively transform low-quality retinal images into their high-quality counterparts. In this work, we leverage the SB framework to propose an image-to-image translation pipeline for retinal image enhancement. Additionally, previous methods often fail to capture fine structural details, such as blood vessels. To address this, we enhance our pipeline by introducing Dynamic Snake Convolution, whose tortuous receptive field can better preserve tubular structures. We name the resulting retinal fundus image enhancement framework the Context-aware Unpaired Neural Schr\"{o}dinger Bridge (CUNSB-RFIE). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first endeavor to use the SB approach for retinal image enhancement. Experimental results on a large-scale dataset demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method compared to several state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised methods in terms of image quality and performance on downstream tasks.The code is available at https://github.com/Retinal-Research/CUNSB-RFIE .

The hydrogen Lyman-alpha (Lya) emission line, the brightest spectral feature of a photoionized gas, is considered an indirect tracer of the escape of Lyman continuum (LyC) photons, particularly when the intergalactic medium is too opaque for direct detection. However, resonant scattering complicates interpreting the empirical properties of Lya photons, necessitating radiative transfer simulations to capture their strong coupling with underlying gas kinematics. In this study, we leverage the exceptional spatial resolution from strong gravitational lensing to investigate the connection between Lya line profiles and LyC leakage on scales of a few 100 pc in the Sunburst Arc galaxy at $z\sim2.37$. New optical echelle spectra obtained using Magellan MIKE show that both the LyC leaking and non-leaking regions exhibit a classic double-peak Lya feature with an enhanced red peak, indicating outflows at multiple locations in the galaxy. Both regions also show a central Gaussian peak atop the double peaks, indicating directly escaped Lya photons independent of LyC leakage. We introduce a machine learning-based method for emulating Lya simulations to quantify intrinsic dynamics ($\sigma_{\mathrm{int}}$), neutral hydrogen column density ($N_{\mathrm{HI}}$), outflow velocity ($v_{\mathrm{exp}}$), and effective temperature ($T$) across continuous parameter spaces. By comparing the spatially and spectrally resolved Lya lines in Sunburst, we argue that the directly escaped Lya photons originate in a volume-filling, warm ionized medium spanning $\sim1$ kpc, while the LyC leakage is confined to regions of $\lesssim200$ pc. These sub-kpc variations in Lya profiles highlight the complexity of interpreting integrated properties in the presence of inhomogeneous mixtures of gas and young stars, emphasizing the need for spatially and spectrally resolved observations of distant galaxies., Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, 8 tables; added full names of authors

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly important. However, due to the quadratic time complexity of attention computation, scaling LLMs to longer contexts incurs extremely slow inference latency and high GPU memory consumption for caching key-value (KV) vectors. This paper proposes RetrievalAttention, a training-free approach to both accelerate attention computation and reduce GPU memory consumption. By leveraging the dynamic sparsity of attention mechanism, RetrievalAttention proposes to use approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) indexes for KV vectors in CPU memory and retrieves the most relevant ones with vector search during generation. Unfortunately, we observe that the off-the-shelf ANNS indexes are often ineffective for such retrieval tasks due to the out-of-distribution (OOD) between query vectors and key vectors in attention mechanism. RetrievalAttention addresses the OOD challenge by designing an attention-aware vector search algorithm that can adapt to the distribution of query vectors. Our evaluation shows that RetrievalAttention only needs to access 1--3% of data while maintaining high model accuracy. This leads to significant reduction in the inference cost of long-context LLMs with much lower GPU memory footprint. In particular, RetrievalAttention only needs a single NVIDIA RTX4090 (24GB) for serving 128K tokens in LLMs with 8B parameters, which is capable of generating one token in 0.188 seconds., Comment: 16 pages

DETR introduces a simplified one-stage framework for scene graph generation (SGG). However, DETR-based SGG models face two challenges: i) Sparse supervision, as each image typically contains fewer than 10 relation annotations, while the models employ over 100 relation queries. This sparsity arises because each ground truth relation is assigned to only one single query during training. ii) False negative samples, since one ground truth relation may have multiple queries with similar matching scores. These suboptimally matched queries are simply treated as negative samples, causing the loss of valuable supervisory signals. As a response, we devise Hydra-SGG, a one-stage SGG method that adopts a new Hybrid Relation Assignment. This assignment combines a One-to-One Relation Assignment with a newly introduced IoU-based One-to-Many Relation Assignment. Specifically, each ground truth is assigned to multiple relation queries with high IoU subject-object boxes. This Hybrid Relation Assignment increases the number of positive training samples, alleviating sparse supervision. Moreover, we, for the first time, empirically show that self-attention over relation queries helps reduce duplicated relation predictions. We, therefore, propose Hydra Branch, a parameter-sharing auxiliary decoder without a self-attention layer. This design promotes One-to-Many Relation Assignment by enabling different queries to predict the same relation. Hydra-SGG achieves state-of-the-art performance with 10.6 mR@20 and 16.0 mR@50 on VG150, while only requiring 12 training epochs. It also sets a new state-of-the-art on Open Images V6 and and GQA.

Current emotional text-to-speech (TTS) models predominantly conduct supervised training to learn the conversion from text and desired emotion to its emotional speech, focusing on a single emotion per text-speech pair. These models only learn the correct emotional outputs without fully comprehending other emotion characteristics, which limits their capabilities of capturing the nuances between different emotions. We propose a controllable Emo-DPO approach, which employs direct preference optimization to differentiate subtle emotional nuances between emotions through optimizing towards preferred emotions over less preferred emotional ones. Instead of relying on traditional neural architectures used in existing emotional TTS models, we propose utilizing the emotion-aware LLM-TTS neural architecture to leverage LLMs' in-context learning and instruction-following capabilities. Comprehensive experiments confirm that our proposed method outperforms the existing baselines., Comment: 5 pages

Pre-trained large language models(LLMs) have attracted increasing attention in biomedical domains due to their success in natural language processing. However, the complex traits and heterogeneity of multi-sources genomics data pose significant challenges when adapting these models to the bioinformatics and biomedical field. To address these challenges, we present GP-GPT, the first specialized large language model for genetic-phenotype knowledge representation and genomics relation analysis. Our model is fine-tuned in two stages on a comprehensive corpus composed of over 3,000,000 terms in genomics, proteomics, and medical genetics, derived from multiple large-scale validated datasets and scientific publications. GP-GPT demonstrates proficiency in accurately retrieving medical genetics information and performing common genomics analysis tasks, such as genomics information retrieval and relationship determination. Comparative experiments across domain-specific tasks reveal that GP-GPT outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs, including Llama2, Llama3 and GPT-4. These results highlight GP-GPT's potential to enhance genetic disease relation research and facilitate accurate and efficient analysis in the fields of genomics and medical genetics. Our investigation demonstrated the subtle changes of bio-factor entities' representations in the GP-GPT, which suggested the opportunities for the application of LLMs to advancing gene-phenotype research.

Given recent advances in generative AI technology, a key question is how large language models (LLMs) can enhance acoustic modeling tasks using text decoding results from a frozen, pretrained automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. To explore new capabilities in language modeling for speech processing, we introduce the generative speech transcription error correction (GenSEC) challenge. This challenge comprises three post-ASR language modeling tasks: (i) post-ASR transcription correction, (ii) speaker tagging, and (iii) emotion recognition. These tasks aim to emulate future LLM-based agents handling voice-based interfaces while remaining accessible to a broad audience by utilizing open pretrained language models or agent-based APIs. We also discuss insights from baseline evaluations, as well as lessons learned for designing future evaluations., Comment: IEEE SLT 2024. The initial draft version has been done in December 2023. Post-ASR Text Processing and Understanding Community: https://huggingface.co/GenSEC-LLM

The rapid development of diffusion models has significantly advanced AI-generated content (AIGC), particularly in Text-to-Image (T2I) and Text-to-Video (T2V) generation. Text-based video editing, leveraging these generative capabilities, has emerged as a promising field, enabling precise modifications to videos based on text prompts. Despite the proliferation of innovative video editing models, there is a conspicuous lack of comprehensive evaluation benchmarks that holistically assess these models' performance across various dimensions. Existing evaluations are limited and inconsistent, typically summarizing overall performance with a single score, which obscures models' effectiveness on individual editing tasks. To address this gap, we propose EditBoard, the first comprehensive evaluation benchmark for text-based video editing models. EditBoard encompasses nine automatic metrics across four dimensions, evaluating models on four task categories and introducing three new metrics to assess fidelity. This task-oriented benchmark facilitates objective evaluation by detailing model performance and providing insights into each model's strengths and weaknesses. By open-sourcing EditBoard, we aim to standardize evaluation and advance the development of robust video editing models.

Recent advancements in event-based zero-shot object recognition have demonstrated promising results. However, these methods heavily depend on extensive training and are inherently constrained by the characteristics of CLIP. To the best of our knowledge, this research is the first study to explore the understanding capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for event-based visual content. We demonstrate that LLMs can achieve event-based object recognition without additional training or fine-tuning in conjunction with CLIP, effectively enabling pure zero-shot event-based recognition. Particularly, we evaluate the ability of GPT-4o / 4turbo and two other open-source LLMs to directly recognize event-based visual content. Extensive experiments are conducted across three benchmark datasets, systematically assessing the recognition accuracy of these models. The results show that LLMs, especially when enhanced with well-designed prompts, significantly improve event-based zero-shot recognition performance. Notably, GPT-4o outperforms the compared models and exceeds the recognition accuracy of state-of-the-art event-based zero-shot methods on N-ImageNet by five orders of magnitude. The implementation of this paper is available at \url{https://github.com/ChrisYu-Zz/Pure-event-based-recognition-based-LLM}.

Pre-training language models followed by fine-tuning on specific tasks is standard in NLP, but traditional models often underperform when applied to the medical domain, leading to the development of specialized medical pre-trained language models (Med-PLMs). These models are valuable assets but are vulnerable to misuse and theft, requiring copyright protection. However, no existing watermarking methods are tailored for Med-PLMs, and adapting general PLMs watermarking techniques to the medical domain faces challenges such as task incompatibility, loss of fidelity, and inefficiency. To address these issues, we propose the first training-free backdoor watermarking method for Med-PLMs. Our method uses rare special symbols as trigger words, which do not impact downstream task performance, embedding watermarks by replacing their original embeddings with those of specific medical terms in the Med-PLMs' word embeddings layer. After fine-tuning the watermarked Med-PLMs on various medical downstream tasks, the final models (FMs) respond to the trigger words in the same way they would to the corresponding medical terms. This property can be utilized to extract the watermark. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves high fidelity while effectively extracting watermarks across various medical downstream tasks. Additionally, our method demonstrates robustness against various attacks and significantly enhances the efficiency of watermark embedding, reducing the embedding time from 10 hours to 10 seconds., Comment: 9 pages

Music is essential in daily life, fulfilling emotional and entertainment needs, and connecting us personally, socially, and culturally. A better understanding of music can enhance our emotions, cognitive skills, and cultural connections. The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has introduced new ways to analyze music, aiming to replicate human understanding of music and provide related services. While the traditional models focused on audio features and simple tasks, the recent development of large language models (LLMs) and foundation models (FMs), which excel in various fields by integrating semantic information and demonstrating strong reasoning abilities, could capture complex musical features and patterns, integrate music with language and incorporate rich musical, emotional and psychological knowledge. Therefore, they have the potential in handling complex music understanding tasks from a semantic perspective, producing outputs closer to human perception. This work, to our best knowledge, is one of the early reviews of the intersection of AI techniques and music understanding. We investigated, analyzed, and tested recent large-scale music foundation models in respect of their music comprehension abilities. We also discussed their limitations and proposed possible future directions, offering insights for researchers in this field., Comment: 20 pages, 2 figures

Currently, inspired by the success of vision-language models (VLMs), an increasing number of researchers are focusing on improving VLMs and have achieved promising results. However, most existing methods concentrate on optimizing the connector and enhancing the language model component, while neglecting improvements to the vision encoder itself. In contrast, we propose Text Guided LLaVA (TG-LLaVA) in this paper, which optimizes VLMs by guiding the vision encoder with text, offering a new and orthogonal optimization direction. Specifically, inspired by the purpose-driven logic inherent in human behavior, we use learnable latent embeddings as a bridge to analyze textual instruction and add the analysis results to the vision encoder as guidance, refining it. Subsequently, another set of latent embeddings extracts additional detailed text-guided information from high-resolution local patches as auxiliary information. Finally, with the guidance of text, the vision encoder can extract text-related features, similar to how humans focus on the most relevant parts of an image when considering a question. This results in generating better answers. Experiments on various datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Remarkably, without the need for additional training data, our propsoed method can bring more benefits to the baseline (LLaVA-1.5) compared with other concurrent methods. Furthermore, the proposed method consistently brings improvement in different settings.

The inverse medium problem, inherently ill-posed and nonlinear, presents significant computational challenges. This study introduces a novel approach by integrating a Neumann series structure within a neural network framework to effectively handle multiparameter inputs. Experiments demonstrate that our methodology not only accelerates computations but also significantly enhances generalization performance, even with varying scattering properties and noisy data. The robustness and adaptability of our framework provide crucial insights and methodologies, extending its applicability to a broad spectrum of scattering problems. These advancements mark a significant step forward in the field, offering a scalable solution to traditionally complex inverse problems.

We participated in the KDD CUP 2024 paper source tracing competition and achieved the 3rd place. This competition tasked participants with identifying the reference sources (i.e., ref-sources, as referred to by the organizers of the competition) of given academic papers. Unlike most teams that addressed this challenge by fine-tuning pre-trained neural language models such as BERT or ChatGLM, our primary approach utilized closed-source large language models (LLMs). With recent advancements in LLM technology, closed-source LLMs have demonstrated the capability to tackle complex reasoning tasks in zero-shot or few-shot scenarios. Consequently, in the absence of GPUs, we employed closed-source LLMs to directly generate predicted reference sources from the provided papers. We further refined these predictions through ensemble learning. Notably, our method was the only one among the award-winning approaches that did not require the use of GPUs for model training. Code available at https://github.com/Cklwanfifa/KDDCUP2024-PST.

Recent works have demonstrated the effectiveness of retrieval augmentation in the Event Argument Extraction (EAE) task. However, existing retrieval-based EAE methods have two main limitations: (1) input length constraints and (2) the gap between the retriever and the inference model. These issues limit the diversity and quality of the retrieved information. In this paper, we propose a Compressive Memory-based Retrieval (CMR) mechanism for EAE, which addresses the two limitations mentioned above. Our compressive memory, designed as a dynamic matrix that effectively caches retrieved information and supports continuous updates, overcomes the limitations of the input length. Additionally, after pre-loading all candidate demonstrations into the compressive memory, the model further retrieves and filters relevant information from memory based on the input query, bridging the gap between the retriever and the inference model. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets (RAMS, WikiEvents, ACE05), significantly outperforming existing retrieval-based EAE methods., Comment: 15 pages

We introduce Seed-Music, a suite of music generation systems capable of producing high-quality music with fine-grained style control. Our unified framework leverages both auto-regressive language modeling and diffusion approaches to support two key music creation workflows: controlled music generation and post-production editing. For controlled music generation, our system enables vocal music generation with performance controls from multi-modal inputs, including style descriptions, audio references, musical scores, and voice prompts. For post-production editing, it offers interactive tools for editing lyrics and vocal melodies directly in the generated audio. We encourage readers to listen to demo audio examples at https://team.doubao.com/seed-music "https://team.doubao.com/seed-music"., Comment: Seed-Music technical report, 20 pages, 5 figures

The key manifestation of coronary artery disease (CAD) is development of fibroatheromatous plaque, the cap of which may rupture and subsequently lead to coronary artery blocking and heart attack. As such, quantitative analysis of coronary plaque, its plaque cap, and consequently the cap's likelihood to rupture are of critical importance when assessing a risk of cardiovascular events. This paper reports a new deep learning based approach, called FiAt-Net, for detecting angular extent of fibroatheroma (FA) and segmenting its cap in 3D intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) images. IVOCT 2D image frames are first associated with distinct clusters and data from each cluster are used for model training. As plaque is typically focal and thus unevenly distributed, a binary partitioning method is employed to identify FA plaque areas to focus on to mitigate the data imbalance issue. Additional image representations (called auxiliary images) are generated to capture IVOCT intensity changes to help distinguish FA and non-FA areas on the coronary wall. Information in varying scales is derived from the original IVOCT and auxiliary images, and a multi-head self-attention mechanism is employed to fuse such information. Our FiAt-Net achieved high performance on a 3D IVOCT coronary image dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in accurately detecting FA cap in IVOCT images.

Due to the vast testing space, the increasing demand for effective and efficient testing of deep neural networks (DNNs) has led to the development of various DNN test case prioritization techniques. However, the fact that DNNs can deliver high-confidence predictions for incorrectly predicted examples, known as the over-confidence problem, causes these methods to fail to reveal high-confidence errors. To address this limitation, in this work, we propose FAST, a method that boosts existing prioritization methods through guided FeAture SelecTion. FAST is based on the insight that certain features may introduce noise that affects the model's output confidence, thereby contributing to high-confidence errors. It quantifies the importance of each feature for the model's correct predictions, and then dynamically prunes the information from the noisy features during inference to derive a new probability vector for the uncertainty estimation. With the help of FAST, the high-confidence errors and correctly classified examples become more distinguishable, resulting in higher APFD (Average Percentage of Fault Detection) values for test prioritization, and higher generalization ability for model enhancement. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate FAST across a diverse set of model structures on multiple benchmark datasets to validate the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of FAST compared to the state-of-the-art prioritization techniques.

With the advancement of Self-supervised Learning (SSL) in speech-related tasks, there has been growing interest in utilizing discrete tokens generated by SSL for automatic speech recognition (ASR), as they offer faster processing techniques. However, previous studies primarily focused on multilingual ASR with Fbank features or English ASR with discrete tokens, leaving a gap in adapting discrete tokens for multilingual ASR scenarios. This study presents a comprehensive comparison of discrete tokens generated by various leading SSL models across multiple language domains. We aim to explore the performance and efficiency of speech discrete tokens across multiple language domains for both monolingual and multilingual ASR scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that discrete tokens achieve comparable results against systems trained on Fbank features in ASR tasks across seven language domains with an average word error rate (WER) reduction of 0.31% and 1.76% absolute (2.80% and 15.70% relative) on dev and test sets respectively, with particularly WER reduction of 6.82% absolute (41.48% relative) on the Polish test set., Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 2025

Articulated object manipulation is ubiquitous in daily life. In this paper, we present DexSim2Real$^{2}$, a novel robot learning framework for goal-conditioned articulated object manipulation using both two-finger grippers and multi-finger dexterous hands. The key of our framework is constructing an explicit world model of unseen articulated objects through active one-step interactions. This explicit world model enables sampling-based model predictive control to plan trajectories achieving different manipulation goals without needing human demonstrations or reinforcement learning. It first predicts an interaction motion using an affordance estimation network trained on self-supervised interaction data or videos of human manipulation from the internet. After executing this interaction on the real robot, the framework constructs a digital twin of the articulated object in simulation based on the two point clouds before and after the interaction. For dexterous multi-finger manipulation, we propose to utilize eigengrasp to reduce the high-dimensional action space, enabling more efficient trajectory searching. Extensive experiments validate the framework's effectiveness for precise articulated object manipulation in both simulation and the real world using a two-finger gripper and a 16-DoF dexterous hand. The robust generalizability of the explicit world model also enables advanced manipulation strategies, such as manipulating with different tools., Comment: Project Webpage: https://jiangtaoran.github.io/dexsim2real2_website/. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2302.10693