A vital aspect of Indian Classical Music (ICM) is Raga, which serves as a melodic framework for compositions and improvisations alike. Raga Recognition is an important music information retrieval task in ICM as it can aid numerous downstream applications ranging from music recommendations to organizing huge music collections. In this work, we propose a deep learning based approach to Raga recognition. Our approach employs efficient pre possessing and learns temporal sequences in music data using Long Short Term Memory based Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM-RNN). We train and test the network on smaller sequences sampled from the original audio while the final inference is performed on the audio as a whole. Our method achieves an accuracy of 88.1% and 97 % during inference on the Comp Music Carnatic dataset and its 10 Raga subset respectively making it the state-of-the-art for the Raga recognition task. Our approach also enables sequence ranking which aids us in retrieving melodic patterns from a given music data base that are closely related to the presented query sequence.

Improving the controllability, portability, and inference speed of diffusion language models (DLMs) is a key challenge in natural language generation. While recent research has shown significant success in complex text generation with language models, the memory and computational power are still very demanding and fall short of expectations, which naturally results in low portability and instability for the models. To mitigate these issues, numerous well-established methods were proposed for neural network quantization. To further enhance their portability of independent deployment as well as improve their stability evaluated by language perplexity, we propose a novel approach called the Quantized Embedding Controllable Diffusion Language Model (QE-CDLM). QE-CDLM builds upon the recent successful controllable DLMs by remodeling the task-specific embedding space via quantization. This leads to a gradient-based controller for the generation tasks, and more stable intermediate latent variables are obtained, which naturally brings in an accelerated convergence as well as better controllability. Additionally, the adaption fine-tuning method is employed to reduce tunable weights. Experimental results on five challenging fine-grained control tasks demonstrate that QE-CDLM compares favorably to existing methods in terms of quality and feasibility, achieving better perplexity and lightweight fine-tuning.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated enhanced capabilities in function-calling, these advancements primarily rely on accessing the functions' responses. This methodology is practical for simpler APIs but faces scalability issues with irreversible APIs that significantly impact the system, such as a database deletion API. Similarly, processes requiring extensive time for each API call and those necessitating forward planning, like automated action pipelines, present complex challenges. Furthermore, scenarios often arise where a generalized approach is needed because algorithms lack direct access to the specific implementations of these functions or secrets to use them. Traditional tool planning methods are inadequate in these cases, compelling the need to operate within black-box environments. Unlike their performance in tool manipulation, LLMs excel in black-box tasks, such as program synthesis. Therefore, we harness the program synthesis capabilities of LLMs to strategize tool usage in black-box settings, ensuring solutions are verified prior to implementation. We introduce TOPGUN, an ingeniously crafted approach leveraging program synthesis for black box tool planning. Accompanied by SwissNYF, a comprehensive suite that integrates black-box algorithms for planning and verification tasks, addressing the aforementioned challenges and enhancing the versatility and effectiveness of LLMs in complex API interactions. The public code for SwissNYF is available at https://github.com/iclr-dummy-user/SwissNYF.

Whataboutism, a potent tool for disrupting narratives and sowing distrust, remains under-explored in quantitative NLP research. Moreover, past work has not distinguished its use as a strategy for misinformation and propaganda from its use as a tool for pragmatic and semantic framing. We introduce new datasets from Twitter and YouTube, revealing overlaps as well as distinctions between whataboutism, propaganda, and the tu quoque fallacy. Furthermore, drawing on recent work in linguistic semantics, we differentiate the `what about' lexical construct from whataboutism. Our experiments bring to light unique challenges in its accurate detection, prompting the introduction of a novel method using attention weights for negative sample mining. We report significant improvements of 4% and 10% over previous state-of-the-art methods in our Twitter and YouTube collections, respectively.

This article introduces Lester, a novel method to automatically synthetise retro-style 2D animations from videos. The method approaches the challenge mainly as an object segmentation and tracking problem. Video frames are processed with the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and the resulting masks are tracked through subsequent frames with DeAOT, a method of hierarchical propagation for semi-supervised video object segmentation. The geometry of the masks' contours is simplified with the Douglas-Peucker algorithm. Finally, facial traits, pixelation and a basic shadow effect can be optionally added. The results show that the method exhibits an excellent temporal consistency and can correctly process videos with different poses and appearances, dynamic shots, partial shots and diverse backgrounds. The proposed method provides a more simple and deterministic approach than diffusion models based video-to-video translation pipelines, which suffer from temporal consistency problems and do not cope well with pixelated and schematic outputs. The method is also much most practical than techniques based on 3D human pose estimation, which require custom handcrafted 3D models and are very limited with respect to the type of scenes they can process.

The rapidly evolving multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) urgently require new benchmarks to uniformly evaluate their performance on understanding and textually describing music. However, due to semantic gaps between Music Information Retrieval (MIR) algorithms and human understanding, discrepancies between professionals and the public, and low precision of annotations, existing music description datasets cannot serve as benchmarks. To this end, we present MuChin, the first open-source music description benchmark in Chinese colloquial language, designed to evaluate the performance of multimodal LLMs in understanding and describing music. We established the Caichong Music Annotation Platform (CaiMAP) that employs an innovative multi-person, multi-stage assurance method, and recruited both amateurs and professionals to ensure the precision of annotations and alignment with popular semantics. Utilizing this method, we built a dataset with multi-dimensional, high-precision music annotations, the Caichong Music Dataset (CaiMD), and carefully selected 1,000 high-quality entries to serve as the test set for MuChin. Based on MuChin, we analyzed the discrepancies between professionals and amateurs in terms of music description, and empirically demonstrated the effectiveness of annotated data for fine-tuning LLMs. Ultimately, we employed MuChin to evaluate existing music understanding models on their ability to provide colloquial descriptions of music. All data related to the benchmark and the code for scoring have been open-sourced.

In the rapidly evolving domain of Recommender Systems (RecSys), new algorithms frequently claim state-of-the-art performance based on evaluations over a limited set of arbitrarily selected datasets. However, this approach may fail to holistically reflect their effectiveness due to the significant impact of dataset characteristics on algorithm performance. Addressing this deficiency, this paper introduces a novel benchmarking methodology to facilitate a fair and robust comparison of RecSys algorithms, thereby advancing evaluation practices. By utilizing a diverse set of $30$ open datasets, including two introduced in this work, and evaluating $11$ collaborative filtering algorithms across $9$ metrics, we critically examine the influence of dataset characteristics on algorithm performance. We further investigate the feasibility of aggregating outcomes from multiple datasets into a unified ranking. Through rigorous experimental analysis, we validate the reliability of our methodology under the variability of datasets, offering a benchmarking strategy that balances quality and computational demands. This methodology enables a fair yet effective means of evaluating RecSys algorithms, providing valuable guidance for future research endeavors.

This paper presents a novel Chunking-Free In-Context (CFIC) retrieval approach, specifically tailored for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Traditional RAG systems often struggle with grounding responses using precise evidence text due to the challenges of processing lengthy documents and filtering out irrelevant content. Commonly employed solutions, such as document chunking and adapting language models to handle longer contexts, have their limitations. These methods either disrupt the semantic coherence of the text or fail to effectively address the issues of noise and inaccuracy in evidence retrieval. CFIC addresses these challenges by circumventing the conventional chunking process. It utilizes the encoded hidden states of documents for in-context retrieval, employing auto-aggressive decoding to accurately identify the specific evidence text required for user queries, eliminating the need for chunking. CFIC is further enhanced by incorporating two decoding strategies, namely Constrained Sentence Prefix Decoding and Skip Decoding. These strategies not only improve the efficiency of the retrieval process but also ensure that the fidelity of the generated grounding text evidence is maintained. Our evaluations of CFIC on a range of open QA datasets demonstrate its superiority in retrieving relevant and accurate evidence, offering a significant improvement over traditional methods. By doing away with the need for document chunking, CFIC presents a more streamlined, effective, and efficient retrieval solution, making it a valuable advancement in the field of RAG systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can make up answers that are not real, and this is known as hallucination. This research aims to see if, how, and to what extent LLMs are aware of hallucination. More specifically, we check whether and how an LLM reacts differently in its hidden states when it answers a question right versus when it hallucinates. To do this, we introduce an experimental framework which allows examining LLM's hidden states in different hallucination situations. Building upon this framework, we conduct a series of experiments with language models in the LLaMA family (Touvron et al., 2023). Our empirical findings suggest that LLMs react differently when processing a genuine response versus a fabricated one. We then apply various model interpretation techniques to help understand and explain the findings better. Moreover, informed by the empirical observations, we show great potential of using the guidance derived from LLM's hidden representation space to mitigate hallucination. We believe this work provides insights into how LLMs produce hallucinated answers and how to make them occur less often.

We introduce a text-to-speech (TTS) model called BASE TTS, which stands for Big Adaptive Streamable TTS with Emergent abilities. BASE TTS is the largest TTS model to-date, trained on 100K hours of public domain speech data, achieving a new state-of-the-art in speech naturalness. It deploys a 1-billionparameter autoregressive Transformer that converts raw texts into discrete codes ("speechcodes") followed by a convolution-based decoder which converts these speechcodes into waveforms in an incremental, streamable manner. Further, our speechcodes are built using a novel speech tokenization technique that features speaker ID disentanglement and compression with byte-pair encoding. Echoing the widely-reported "emergent abilities" of large language models when trained on increasing volume of data, we show that BASE TTS variants built with 10K+ hours and 500M+ parameters begin to demonstrate natural prosody on textually complex sentences. We design and share a specialized dataset to measure these emergent abilities for text-to-speech. We showcase state-of-the-art naturalness of BASE TTS by evaluating against baselines that include publicly available large-scale text-tospeech systems: YourTTS, Bark and TortoiseTTS. Audio samples generated by the model can be heard at https://amazon-ltts-paper.com/.