Speech or text representation generated by pre-trained models contains modal-specific information that could be combined for benefiting spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks. In this work, we propose a novel pre-training paradigm termed Continuous Integrate-and-Fire Pre-Training (CIF-PT). It relies on a simple but effective frame-to-token alignment: continuous integrate-and-fire (CIF) to bridge the representations between speech and text. It jointly performs speech-to-text training and language model distillation through CIF as the pre-training (PT). Evaluated on SLU benchmark SLURP dataset, CIF-PT outperforms the state-of-the-art model by 1.94% of accuracy and 2.71% of SLU-F1 on the tasks of intent classification and slot filling, respectively. We also observe the cross-modal representation extracted by CIF-PT obtains better performance than other neural interfaces for the tasks of SLU, including the dominant speech representation learned from self-supervised pre-training.

The explicit incorporation of task-specific inductive biases through symmetry has emerged as a general design precept in the development of high-performance machine learning models. For example, group equivariant neural networks have demonstrated impressive performance across various domains and applications such as protein and drug design. A prevalent intuition about such models is that the integration of relevant symmetry results in enhanced generalization. Moreover, it is posited that when the data and/or the model may only exhibit $\textit{approximate}$ or $\textit{partial}$ symmetry, the optimal or best-performing model is one where the model symmetry aligns with the data symmetry. In this paper, we conduct a formal unified investigation of these intuitions. To begin, we present general quantitative bounds that demonstrate how models capturing task-specific symmetries lead to improved generalization. In fact, our results do not require the transformations to be finite or even form a group and can work with partial or approximate equivariance. Utilizing this quantification, we examine the more general question of model mis-specification i.e. when the model symmetries don't align with the data symmetries. We establish, for a given symmetry group, a quantitative comparison between the approximate/partial equivariance of the model and that of the data distribution, precisely connecting model equivariance error and data equivariance error. Our result delineates conditions under which the model equivariance error is optimal, thereby yielding the best-performing model for the given task and data.

This paper describes CIC NLP's submission to the AmericasNLP 2023 Shared Task on machine translation systems for indigenous languages of the Americas. We present the system descriptions for three methods. We used two multilingual models, namely M2M-100 and mBART50, and one bilingual (one-to-one) -- Helsinki NLP Spanish-English translation model, and experimented with different transfer learning setups. We experimented with 11 languages from America and report the setups we used as well as the results we achieved. Overall, the mBART setup was able to improve upon the baseline for three out of the eleven languages.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of sign language translation (SLT) without gloss annotations. Although intermediate representation like gloss has been proven effective, gloss annotations are hard to acquire, especially in large quantities. This limits the domain coverage of translation datasets, thus handicapping real-world applications. To mitigate this problem, we design the Gloss-Free End-to-end sign language translation framework (GloFE). Our method improves the performance of SLT in the gloss-free setting by exploiting the shared underlying semantics of signs and the corresponding spoken translation. Common concepts are extracted from the text and used as a weak form of intermediate representation. The global embedding of these concepts is used as a query for cross-attention to find the corresponding information within the learned visual features. In a contrastive manner, we encourage the similarity of query results between samples containing such concepts and decrease those that do not. We obtained state-of-the-art results on large-scale datasets, including OpenASL and How2Sign. The code and model will be available at https://github.com/HenryLittle/GloFE.

Transformers are central in modern natural language processing and computer vision applications. Despite recent works devoted to reducing the quadratic cost of such models (as a function of the sequence length), dealing with ultra long sequences (e.g., with more than 16K tokens) remains challenging. Applications such as answering questions based on a book or summarizing a scientific article are inefficient or infeasible. Here, we propose to significantly improve the efficiency of Transformers for ultra long sequences, by compressing the sequence into a much smaller representation at each layer. Specifically, by exploiting the fact that in many tasks, only a small subset of special tokens (we call VIP-tokens) are most relevant to the final prediction, we propose a VIP-token centric compression (VCC) scheme which selectively compresses the sequence based on their impact on approximating the representation of the VIP-tokens. Compared with competitive baselines, our algorithm is not only efficient (achieving more than $3\times$ efficiency gain compared to baselines on 4K and 16K lengths), but also offers competitive/better performance on a large number of tasks. Further, we show that our algorithm scales to 128K tokens (or more) while consistently offering accuracy improvement.

The BLOOM model is a large publicly available multilingual language model, but its pretraining was limited to 46 languages. To extend the benefits of BLOOM to other languages without incurring prohibitively large costs, it is desirable to adapt BLOOM to new languages not seen during pretraining. In this work, we apply existing language adaptation strategies to BLOOM and benchmark its zero-shot prompting performance on eight new languages in a resource-constrained setting. We find language adaptation to be effective at improving zero-shot performance in new languages. Surprisingly, we find that adapter-based finetuning is more effective than continued pretraining for large models. In addition, we discover that prompting performance is not significantly affected by language specifics, such as the writing system. It is primarily determined by the size of the language adaptation data. We also add new languages to BLOOMZ, which is a multitask finetuned version of BLOOM capable of following task instructions zero-shot. We find including a new language in the multitask fine-tuning mixture to be the most effective method to teach BLOOMZ a new language. We conclude that with sufficient training data language adaptation can generalize well to diverse languages. Our code is available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/multilingual-modeling.

We investigate safe multi-agent reinforcement learning, where agents seek to collectively maximize an aggregate sum of local objectives while satisfying their own safety constraints. The objective and constraints are described by {\it general utilities}, i.e., nonlinear functions of the long-term state-action occupancy measure, which encompass broader decision-making goals such as risk, exploration, or imitations. The exponential growth of the state-action space size with the number of agents presents challenges for global observability, further exacerbated by the global coupling arising from agents' safety constraints. To tackle this issue, we propose a primal-dual method utilizing shadow reward and $\kappa$-hop neighbor truncation under a form of correlation decay property, where $\kappa$ is the communication radius. In the exact setting, our algorithm converges to a first-order stationary point (FOSP) at the rate of $\mathcal{O}\left(T^{-2/3}\right)$. In the sample-based setting, we demonstrate that, with high probability, our algorithm requires $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}\left(\epsilon^{-3.5}\right)$ samples to achieve an $\epsilon$-FOSP with an approximation error of $\mathcal{O}(\phi_0^{2\kappa})$, where $\phi_0\in (0,1)$. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our model through extensive numerical experiments.

The RoboCup competitions hold various leagues, and the Soccer Simulation 2D League is a major one among them. Soccer Simulation 2D (SS2D) match involves two teams, including 11 players and a coach, competing against each other. The players can only communicate with the Soccer Simulation Server during the game. This paper presents the latest research of the CYRUS soccer simulation 2D team, the champion of RoboCup 2021. We will explain our denoising idea powered by long short-term memory networks (LSTM) and deep neural networks (DNN). The CYRUS team uses the CYRUS2D base code that was developed based on the Helios and Gliders bases.

In this paper, we present a parallel Spanish-Mazatec and Spanish-Mixtec corpus for machine translation (MT) tasks, where Mazatec and Mixtec are two indigenous Mexican languages. We evaluated the usability of the collected corpus using three different approaches: transformer, transfer learning, and fine-tuning pre-trained multilingual MT models. Fine-tuning the Facebook M2M100-48 model outperformed the other approaches, with BLEU scores of 12.09 and 22.25 for Mazatec-Spanish and Spanish-Mazatec translations, respectively, and 16.75 and 22.15 for Mixtec-Spanish and Spanish-Mixtec translations, respectively. The findings show that the dataset size (9,799 sentences in Mazatec and 13,235 sentences in Mixtec) affects translation performance and that indigenous languages work better when used as target languages. The findings emphasize the importance of creating parallel corpora for indigenous languages and fine-tuning models for low-resource translation tasks. Future research will investigate zero-shot and few-shot learning approaches to further improve translation performance in low-resource settings. The dataset and scripts are available at \url{https://github.com/atnafuatx/Machine-Translation-Resources}

Accurate analysis and modeling of renal functions require a precise segmentation of the renal blood vessels. Micro-CT scans provide image data at higher resolutions, making more small vessels near the renal cortex visible. Although deep-learning-based methods have shown state-of-the-art performance in automatic blood vessel segmentations, they require a large amount of labeled training data. However, voxel-wise labeling in micro-CT scans is extremely time-consuming given the huge volume sizes. To mitigate the problem, we simulate synthetic renal vascular trees physiologically while generating corresponding scans of the simulated trees by training a generative model on unlabeled scans. This enables the generative model to learn the mapping implicitly without the need for explicit functions to emulate the image acquisition process. We further propose an additional segmentation branch over the generative model trained on the generated scans. We demonstrate that the model can directly segment blood vessels on real scans and validate our method on both 3D micro-CT scans of rat kidneys and a proof-of-concept experiment on 2D retinal images. Code and 3D results are available at https://github.com/miccai2023anony/RenalVesselSeg