Specifically, we report comprehensive benchmark evaluations on dialects and regional language varieties in English, Arabic, Mandarin and Cantonese, Tibetan, Indic languages, Thai, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Italian. Our study used over 2 million training utterances from 30 publicly available speech corpora that are provided with dialectal information. We evaluate the performance of several widely used speech foundation models in classifying speech dialects. We assess the robustness of the dialectal models under noisy conditions and present an error analysis that highlights modeling results aligned with geographic continuity. In addition to benchmarking dialect classification, we demonstrate several downstream applications enabled by Voxlect . Specifically, we show that Voxlect can be applied to augment existing speech recognition datasets with dialect information, enabling a more detailed analysis of ASR performance across dialectal variations. Voxlect is also used as a tool to evaluate the performance of speech generation systems.

The capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in low-resource languages lag far behind those in English, making their universal accessibility a significant challenge. To alleviate this, we present $\textit{Franken-Adapter}$, a modular language adaptation approach for decoder-only LLMs with embedding surgery. Our method begins by creating customized vocabularies for target languages and performing language adaptation through embedding tuning on multilingual data. These pre-trained embeddings are subsequently integrated with LLMs that have been instruction-tuned on English alignment data to enable zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. Our experiments on $\texttt{Gemma2}$ models with up to 27B parameters demonstrate improvements of up to 20% across 96 languages, spanning both discriminative and generative tasks, with minimal regressions ($<$1%) in English. Further in-depth analysis reveals the critical role of customizing tokenizers in enhancing language adaptation, while boosting inference efficiency. Additionally, we show the versatility of our method by achieving a 14% improvement over a math-optimized LLM across 20 languages, offering a modular solution to transfer reasoning abilities across languages post hoc.

In contexts with limited computational and data resources, high-resource language models often prove inadequate, particularly when addressing the specific needs of Malay languages. This paper introduces a Personal Intelligence System designed to efficiently integrate both on-device and server-based models. The system incorporates SLiM-34M for on-device processing, optimized for low memory and power usage, and MANYAK-1.3B for server-based tasks, allowing for scalable, high-performance language processing. The models achieve significant results across various tasks, such as machine translation, question-answering, and translate IndoMMLU. Particularly noteworthy is SLiM-34M's ability to achieve a high improvement in accuracy compared to other LLMs while using 2 times fewer pre-training tokens. This work challenges the prevailing assumption that large-scale computational resources are necessary to build effective language models, contributing to the development of resource-efficient models for the Malay language with the unique orchestration between SLiM-34M and MANYAK-1.3B.

Vietnamese, a low-resource language, is typically categorized into three primary dialect groups that belong to Northern, Central, and Southern Vietnam. However, each province within these regions exhibits its own distinct pronunciation variations. Despite the existence of various speech recognition datasets, none of them has provided a fine-grained classification of the 63 dialects specific to individual provinces of Vietnam. To address this gap, we introduce Vietnamese Multi-Dialect (ViMD) dataset, a novel comprehensive dataset capturing the rich diversity of 63 provincial dialects spoken across Vietnam. Our dataset comprises 102.56 hours of audio, consisting of approximately 19,000 utterances, and the associated transcripts contain over 1.2 million words. To provide benchmarks and simultaneously demonstrate the challenges of our dataset, we fine-tune state-of-the-art pre-trained models for two downstream tasks: (1) Dialect identification and (2) Speech recognition. The empirical results suggest two implications including the influence of geographical factors on dialects, and the constraints of current approaches in speech recognition tasks involving multi-dialect speech data. Our dataset is available for research purposes.

Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region rich in linguistic diversity and cultural variety, with over 1,300 indigenous languages and a population of 671 million people. However, prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA, compromising the quality of AI models for SEA languages. Evaluating models for SEA languages is challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality datasets, compounded by the dominance of English training data, raising concerns about potential cultural misrepresentation. To address these challenges, we introduce SEACrowd, a collaborative initiative that consolidates a comprehensive resource hub that fills the resource gap by providing standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities. Through our SEACrowd benchmarks, we assess the quality of AI models on 36 indigenous languages across 13 tasks, offering valuable insights into the current AI landscape in SEA. Furthermore, we propose strategies to facilitate greater AI advancements, maximizing potential utility and resource equity for the future of AI in SEA.

Cancer remains a global challenge due to its growing clinical and economic burden. Its uniquely personal manifestation, which makes treatment difficult, has fuelled the quest for personalized treatment strategies. Thus, genomic profiling is increasingly becoming part of clinical diagnostic panels. Effective use of such panels requires accurate drug response prediction (DRP) models, which are challenging to build due to limited labelled patient data. Previous methods to address this problem have used various forms of transfer learning. However, they do not explicitly model the variable length sequential structure of the list of mutations in such diagnostic panels. Further, they do not utilize auxiliary information (like patient survival) for model training. We address these limitations through a novel transformer based method, which surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art DRP models on benchmark data. We also present the design of a treatment recommendation system (TRS), which is currently deployed at the National University Hospital, Singapore and is being evaluated in a clinical trial.

Several recent papers have published good solutions for language identification (LID) for about 300 high-resource and medium-resource languages. However, there is no LID available that (i) covers a wide range of low-resource languages, (ii) is rigorously evaluated and reliable and (iii) efficient and easy to use. Here, we publish GlotLID-M, an LID model that satisfies the desiderata of wide coverage, reliability and efficiency. It identifies 1665 languages, a large increase in coverage compared to prior work. In our experiments, GlotLID-M outperforms four baselines (CLD3, FT176, OpenLID and NLLB) when balancing F1 and false positive rate (FPR). We analyze the unique challenges that low-resource LID poses: incorrect corpus metadata, leakage from high-resource languages, difficulty separating closely related languages, handling of macrolanguage vs varieties and in general noisy data. We hope that integrating GlotLID-M into dataset creation pipelines will improve quality and enhance accessibility of NLP technology for low-resource languages and cultures. GlotLID-M model, code, and list of data sources are available: https://github.com/cisnlp/GlotLID.

The paper applies reinforcement learning to novel Internet of Thing configurations. Our analysis of inaudible attacks on voice-activated devices confirms the alarming risk factor of 7.6 out of 10, underlining significant security vulnerabilities scored independently by NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Our baseline network model showcases a scenario in which an attacker uses inaudible voice commands to gain unauthorized access to confidential information on a secured laptop. We simulated many attack scenarios on this baseline network model, revealing the potential for mass exploitation of interconnected devices to discover and own privileged information through physical access without adding new hardware or amplifying device skills. Using Microsoft's CyberBattleSim framework, we evaluated six reinforcement learning algorithms and found that Deep-Q learning with exploitation proved optimal, leading to rapid ownership of all nodes in fewer steps. Our findings underscore the critical need for understanding non-conventional networks and new cybersecurity measures in an ever-expanding digital landscape, particularly those characterized by mobile devices, voice activation, and non-linear microphones susceptible to malicious actors operating stealth attacks in the near-ultrasound or inaudible ranges. By 2024, this new attack surface might encompass more digital voice assistants than people on the planet yet offer fewer remedies than conventional patching or firmware fixes since the inaudible attacks arise inherently from the microphone design and digital signal processing. Voice-activated devices, such as digital voice assistants, have experienced rapid proliferation in recent years.

Neural machine translation (NMT) has progressed rapidly over the past several years, and modern models are able to achieve relatively high quality using only monolingual text data, an approach dubbed Unsupervised Machine Translation (UNMT). We test the efficacy of bilingual lexica in a real-world set-up, on 200-language translation models trained on web-crawled text. We present several findings: (1) using lexical data augmentation, we demonstrate sizable performance gains for unsupervised translation; (2) we compare several families of data augmentation, demonstrating that they yield similar improvements, and can be combined for even greater improvements; (3) we demonstrate the importance of carefully curated lexica over larger, noisier ones, especially with larger models; and (4) we compare the efficacy of multilingual lexicon data versus human-translated parallel data. Neural machine translation (NMT) has emerged as the dominant way of training machine translation models (Bahdanau ...

Instruction tuning enables pretrained language models to perform new tasks from inference-time natural language descriptions. These approaches rely on vast amounts of human supervision in the form of crowdsourced datasets or user interactions. In this work, we introduce Unnatural Instructions: a large dataset of creative and diverse instructions, collected with virtually no human labor. We collect 64,000 examples by prompting a language model with three seed examples of instructions and eliciting a fourth. This set is then expanded by prompting the model to rephrase each instruction, creating a total of approximately 240,000 examples of instructions, inputs, and outputs. Experiments show that despite containing a fair amount of noise, training on Unnatural Instructions rivals the effectiveness of training on open-source manually-curated datasets, surpassing the performance of models such as T0++ and Tk-Instruct across various benchmarks. These results demonstrate the potential of model-generated data as a cost-effective alternative to crowdsourcing for dataset expansion and diversification.