Search

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has accentuated the need for diverse, high-quality pre-training data. Synthetic data emerges as a viable solution to the challenges of data scarcity and inaccessibility. While previous literature has focused predominantly on the quality and quantity of real data, our work enables the measurement of diversity in synthetic data and explores its impact on LLM performance. We study the downstream effects of synthetic data diversity during both the pre-training and fine-tuning stages by introducing a new diversity metric, \textit{LLM cluster-agent}, designed to evaluate the diversity of synthetic datasets. Through a series of controlled experiments with models of 350M and 1.4B parameters, we demonstrate that the proposed cluster-based LLM scoring of diversity correlates positively with both pre-training and supervised fine-tuning performance. Our findings also reveal that synthetic data diversity in pre-training affects supervised fine-tuning more significantly than pre-training itself, even for smaller models. We hope this study advances our understanding of the optimal use of synthetic data in LLM training and opens new avenues for efficient data generation processes.

Understanding how speech foundation models capture non-verbal cues is crucial for improving their interpretability and adaptability across diverse tasks. In our work, we analyze several prominent models such as Whisper, Seamless, Wav2Vec, HuBERT, and Qwen2-Audio focusing on their learned representations in both paralinguistic and non-paralinguistic tasks from the Dynamic-SUPERB benchmark. Our study addresses three key questions: (1) What non-verbal cues (e.g., speaker intent, emotion, environmental context) are captured? (2) How are these cues represented across different layers of the models? and (3) To what extent can these representations be effectively adapted to downstream tasks? To answer these questions, we first evaluate the models in a zero-shot setting, followed by fine-tuning on layer-wise features extracted from these models. Our results provide insights into the models' capacity for generalization, the characteristics of their layer-wise representations, and the degree of transformation required for downstream task adaptation. Our findings suggest that some of these models perform well on various tasks in zero-shot settings, despite not being explicitly trained for those tasks. We also observe that zero-shot performance correlates with better-learned representations. The analysis of layer-wise features demonstrates that some models exhibit a convex relationship between the separability of the learned representations and model depth, with different layers capturing task-specific features., Comment: 20 Pages

Recent work on distilling Whisper's knowledge into small models using pseudo-labels shows promising performance while reducing the size by up to 50\%. This results in small, efficient, and dedicated models. However, a critical step of distillation from pseudo-labels involves filtering high-quality predictions and using only those during training. This step requires ground truth labels to compare and filter low-quality examples making the whole process supervised. In addition to that, the distillation process requires a large amount of data thereby limiting the ability to distill models in low-resource settings. To address this challenge, we propose a distillation framework that does not require any labeled data. Through experimentation, we show that our best distilled models outperform the teacher model by 5-7 points in terms of WER compared to those without filtering and are on par with or perform better than similar supervised data filtering setups. When we scale the data, our models significantly outperform all zero-shot and supervised models. We demonstrate that it is possible to distill large Whisper models into relatively small ones without using any labeled data. Our distilled models are also 25-50\% more compute- and memory-efficient while maintaining performance equal to or better than that of the teacher model., Comment: Work in progress

Zero-shot multi-speaker text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) systems have advanced for English, however, it still lags behind due to insufficient resources. We address this gap for Arabic, a language of more than 450 million native speakers, by first adapting a sizeable existing dataset to suit the needs of speech synthesis. Additionally, we employ a set of Arabic dialect identification models to explore the impact of pre-defined dialect labels on improving the ZS-TTS model in a multi-dialect setting. Subsequently, we fine-tune the XTTS\footnote{https://docs.coqui.ai/en/latest/models/xtts.html}\footnote{https://medium.com/machine-learns/xtts-v2-new-version-of-the-open-source-text-to-speech-model-af73914db81f}\footnote{https://medium.com/@erogol/xtts-v1-techincal-notes-eb83ff05bdc} model, an open-source architecture. We then evaluate our models on a dataset comprising 31 unseen speakers and an in-house dialectal dataset. Our automated and human evaluation results show convincing performance while capable of generating dialectal speech. Our study highlights significant potential for improvements in this emerging area of research in Arabic.

Arabic is known to present unique challenges for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). On one hand, its rich linguistic diversity and wide range of dialects complicate the development of robust, inclusive models. On the other, current multilingual ASR models are compute-intensive and lack proper comprehensive evaluations. In light of these challenges, we distill knowledge from large teacher models into smaller student variants that are more efficient. We also introduce a novel human-annotated dataset covering five under-represented Arabic dialects for evaluation. We further evaluate both our models and existing SoTA multilingual models on both standard available benchmarks and our new dialectal data. Our best-distilled model's overall performance ($45.0$\% WER) surpasses that of a SoTA model twice its size (SeamlessM4T-large-v2, WER=$47.0$\%) and its teacher model (Whisper-large-v2, WER=$55.1$\%), and its average performance on our new dialectal data ($56.9$\% WER) outperforms all other models. To gain more insight into the poor performance of these models on dialectal data, we conduct an error analysis and report the main types of errors the different models tend to make. The GitHub repository for the project is available at \url{https://github.com/UBC-NLP/distill-whisper-ar}., Comment: Accepted at ACL'24 main

Arabic is a complex language with many varieties and dialects spoken by over 450 millions all around the world. Due to the linguistic diversity and variations, it is challenging to build a robust and generalized ASR system for Arabic. In this work, we address this gap by developing and demoing a system, dubbed VoxArabica, for dialect identification (DID) as well as automatic speech recognition (ASR) of Arabic. We train a wide range of models such as HuBERT (DID), Whisper, and XLS-R (ASR) in a supervised setting for Arabic DID and ASR tasks. Our DID models are trained to identify 17 different dialects in addition to MSA. We finetune our ASR models on MSA, Egyptian, Moroccan, and mixed data. Additionally, for the remaining dialects in ASR, we provide the option to choose various models such as Whisper and MMS in a zero-shot setting. We integrate these models into a single web interface with diverse features such as audio recording, file upload, model selection, and the option to raise flags for incorrect outputs. Overall, we believe VoxArabica will be useful for a wide range of audiences concerned with Arabic research. Our system is currently running at https://cdce-206-12-100-168.ngrok.io/., Comment: Accepted at ArabicNLP conference co-located with EMNLP'23. First three authors contributed equally

The motion or out-of-focus effect in digital images is the main reason for the blurred regions in defocused-blurred images. It may adversely affect various image features such as texture, pixel, and region. Therefore, it is important to detect in-focused objects in defocused-blurred images after the segmentation of blurred and non-blurred regions. The state-of-the-art techniques are prone to noisy pixels, and their local descriptors for developing segmentation metrics are also complex. To address these issues, this research, therefore, proposed a novel and hybrid-focused detection approach based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients and PC Neural Net (PCNN) structure. The proposed approach partially resolves the limitations of the existing contrast schemes to detect in-focused smooth objects from the out-of-focused smooth regions in the defocus dataset. The visual and quantitative evaluation illustrates that the proposed approach outperformed in terms of accuracy and efficiency to referenced algorithms. The highest F-score of the proposed approach on Zhao's dataset is 0.7940 whereas on Shi's dataset is 0.9178.

Despite the purported multilingual proficiency of instruction-finetuned large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Bard, the linguistic inclusivity of these models remains insufficiently explored. Considering this constraint, we present a thorough assessment of Bard and ChatGPT (encompassing both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) regarding their machine translation proficiencies across ten varieties of Arabic. Our evaluation covers diverse Arabic varieties such as Classical Arabic (CA), Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and several country-level dialectal variants. Our analysis indicates that LLMs may encounter challenges with dialects for which minimal public datasets exist, but on average are better translators of dialects than existing commercial systems. On CA and MSA, instruction-tuned LLMs, however, trail behind commercial systems such as Google Translate. Finally, we undertake a human-centric study to scrutinize the efficacy of the relatively recent model, Bard, in following human instructions during translation tasks. Our analysis reveals a circumscribed capability of Bard in aligning with human instructions in translation contexts. Collectively, our findings underscore that prevailing LLMs remain far from inclusive, with only limited ability to cater for the linguistic and cultural intricacies of diverse communities., Comment: ArabicNLP 2023

Whisper, the recently developed multilingual weakly supervised model, is reported to perform well on multiple speech recognition benchmarks in both monolingual and multilingual settings. However, it is not clear how Whisper would fare under diverse conditions even on languages it was evaluated on such as Arabic. In this work, we address this gap by comprehensively evaluating Whisper on several varieties of Arabic speech for the ASR task. Our evaluation covers most publicly available Arabic speech data and is performed under n-shot (zero-, few-, and full) finetuning. We also investigate the robustness of Whisper under completely novel conditions, such as in dialect-accented standard Arabic and in unseen dialects for which we develop evaluation data. Our experiments show that although Whisper zero-shot outperforms fully finetuned XLS-R models on all datasets, its performance deteriorates significantly in the zero-shot setting for five unseen dialects (i.e., Algeria, Jordan, Palestine, UAE, and Yemen)., Comment: 4 pages, INTERSPEECH 2023

ChatGPT's emergence heralds a transformative phase in NLP, particularly demonstrated through its excellent performance on many English benchmarks. However, the model's efficacy across diverse linguistic contexts remains largely uncharted territory. This work aims to bridge this knowledge gap, with a primary focus on assessing ChatGPT's capabilities on Arabic languages and dialectal varieties. Our comprehensive study conducts a large-scale automated and human evaluation of ChatGPT, encompassing 44 distinct language understanding and generation tasks on over 60 different datasets. To our knowledge, this marks the first extensive performance analysis of ChatGPT's deployment in Arabic NLP. Our findings indicate that, despite its remarkable performance in English, ChatGPT is consistently surpassed by smaller models that have undergone finetuning on Arabic. We further undertake a meticulous comparison of ChatGPT and GPT-4's Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Dialectal Arabic (DA), unveiling the relative shortcomings of both models in handling Arabic dialects compared to MSA. Although we further explore and confirm the utility of employing GPT-4 as a potential alternative for human evaluation, our work adds to a growing body of research underscoring the limitations of ChatGPT., Comment: EMNLP 2023 Main Conference

Large language models (LLMs) with instruction fine-tuning demonstrate superior generative capabilities. However, these models are resource-intensive. To alleviate this issue, we explore distilling knowledge from instruction-tuned LLMs into much smaller ones. To this end, we carefully develop a large set of 2.58M instructions based on both existing and newly-generated instructions. In addition to being sizable, we design our instructions to cover a broad set of topics to ensure diversity. Extensive analysis of our instruction dataset confirms its diversity, and we generate responses for these instructions using gpt-3.5-turbo. Leveraging these instructions, we fine-tune a diverse herd of models, collectively referred to as LaMini-LM, which includes models from both the encoder-decoder and decoder-only families, with varying sizes. We evaluate the performance of our models using automatic metrics on 15 different natural language processing (NLP) benchmarks, as well as through human assessment. The results demonstrate that our proposed LaMini-LM models are comparable to competitive baselines, while being much smaller in size., Comment: 21 pages, 8 figures, 17 tables, accepted by EACL2024 main conference

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the mental health of people under risk. Social counselling has gained remarkable significance in this environment. Unlike general goal-oriented dialogues, a conversation between a patient and a therapist is considerably implicit, though the objective of the conversation is quite apparent. In such a case, understanding the intent of the patient is imperative in providing effective counselling in therapy sessions, and the same applies to a dialogue system as well. In this work, we take forward a small but an important step in the development of an automated dialogue system for mental-health counselling. We develop a novel dataset, named HOPE, to provide a platform for the dialogue-act classification in counselling conversations. We identify the requirement of such conversation and propose twelve domain-specific dialogue-act (DAC) labels. We collect 12.9K utterances from publicly-available counselling session videos on YouTube, extract their transcripts, clean, and annotate them with DAC labels. Further, we propose SPARTA, a transformer-based architecture with a novel speaker- and time-aware contextual learning for the dialogue-act classification. Our evaluation shows convincing performance over several baselines, achieving state-of-the-art on HOPE. We also supplement our experiments with extensive empirical and qualitative analyses of SPARTA., Comment: 9 pages; Accepted to WSDM 2022