We are The prevailing approach for neural machine translation motivated by different but related ideas: (i) neural metrics is to work at the sentence level, metrics often make use of underlying language constructing sequences of contextualized encoder models trained on wider contexts, which means states from the source sentence, a reference translation, there is no real impediment to feeding them multiple and a system output. The specific mechanics sentences, and (ii) a sentence's evaluation will vary by metric, but a general approach, employed differ based on its order in a block of sentences, by COMET (Rei et al., 2020b), is to pool these encodings so it may be helpful to evaluate each sentence in into separate sentence-level embeddings, multiple different contexts. In this work, we therefore concatenate them, and fed them into a regressor, experiment with a strided window approach which is trained against human annotations. Quality applied to COMET, whose underlying encoder is Estimation (QE) approaches work similarly, but InfoXLM (Lample and Conneau, 2019; Chi et al., do not have access to a reference translation.

The emergent ability of Large Language Models to use a small number of examples to learn to perform in novel domains and tasks, also called in-context learning (ICL). In this work, we show that a much smaller model can be trained to perform ICL by fine-tuning towards a specialized training objective, exemplified on the task of domain adaptation for neural machine translation. With this capacity for ICL, the model can take advantage of relevant few-shot examples to adapt its output towards the domain. We compare the quality of this domain adaptation to traditional supervised techniques and ICL with a 40B-parameter Large Language Model. Our approach allows efficient batch inference on a mix of domains and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of both translation quality and immediate adaptation rate, i.e. the ability to reproduce a specific term after being shown a single example.

In this paper, we propose methods to build a powerful and efficient Image-to-Speech captioning (Im2Sp) model. To this end, we start with importing the rich knowledge related to image comprehension and language modeling from a large-scale pre-trained vision-language model into Im2Sp. We set the output of the proposed Im2Sp as discretized speech units, i.e., the quantized speech features of a self-supervised speech model. The speech units mainly contain linguistic information while suppressing other characteristics of speech. This allows us to incorporate the language modeling capability of the pre-trained vision-language model into the spoken language modeling of Im2Sp. With the vision-language pre-training strategy, we set new state-of-the-art Im2Sp performances on two widely used benchmark databases, COCO and Flickr8k. Then, we further improve the efficiency of the Im2Sp model. Similar to the speech unit case, we convert the original image into image units, which are derived through vector quantization of the raw image. With these image units, we can drastically reduce the required data storage for saving image data to just 0.8% when compared to the original image data in terms of bits. Demo page: https://ms-dot-k.github.io/Image-to-Speech-Captioning.

Multilingual semantic search is the task of retrieving relevant contents to a query expressed in different language combinations. This requires a better semantic understanding of the user's intent and its contextual meaning. Multilingual semantic search is less explored and more challenging than its monolingual or bilingual counterparts, due to the lack of multilingual parallel resources for this task and the need to circumvent "language bias". In this work, we propose an alignment approach: MAML-Align, specifically for low-resource scenarios. Our approach leverages meta-distillation learning based on MAML, an optimization-based Model-Agnostic Meta-Learner. MAML-Align distills knowledge from a Teacher meta-transfer model T-MAML, specialized in transferring from monolingual to bilingual semantic search, to a Student model S-MAML, which meta-transfers from bilingual to multilingual semantic search. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to extend meta-distillation to a multilingual search application. Our empirical results show that on top of a strong baseline based on sentence transformers, our meta-distillation approach boosts the gains provided by MAML and significantly outperforms naive fine-tuning methods. Furthermore, multilingual meta-distillation learning improves generalization even to unseen languages.

Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) with discrete self-supervised representations has achieved remarkable accuracy, but is unable to preserve the speaker timbre of the source speech during translation. Meanwhile, the scarcity of high-quality speaker-parallel data poses a challenge for learning style transfer between source and target speech. We propose an S2ST framework with an acoustic language model based on discrete units from a self-supervised model and a neural codec for style transfer. The acoustic language model leverages self-supervised in-context learning, acquiring the ability for style transfer without relying on any speaker-parallel data, thereby overcoming the issue of data scarcity. By using extensive training data, our model achieves zero-shot cross-lingual style transfer on previously unseen source languages. Experiments show that our model generates translated speeches with high fidelity and style similarity. Audio samples are available at http://stylelm.github.io/ .

This paper proposes a direct text to speech translation system using discrete acoustic units. This framework employs text in different source languages as input to generate speech in the target language without the need for text transcriptions in this language. Motivated by the success of acoustic units in previous works for direct speech to speech translation systems, we use the same pipeline to extract the acoustic units using a speech encoder combined with a clustering algorithm. Once units are obtained, an encoder-decoder architecture is trained to predict them. Then a vocoder generates speech from units. Our approach for direct text to speech translation was tested on the new CVSS corpus with two different text mBART models employed as initialisation. The systems presented report competitive performance for most of the language pairs evaluated. Besides, results show a remarkable improvement when initialising our proposed architecture with a model pre-trained with more languages.

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) outputs translation while reading the source sentence. Unlike conventional sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) training, existing SiMT methods adopt the prefix-to-prefix (prefix2prefix) training, where the model predicts target tokens based on partial source tokens. However, the prefix2prefix training diminishes the ability of the model to capture global information and introduces forced predictions due to the absence of essential source information. Consequently, it is crucial to bridge the gap between the prefix2prefix training and seq2seq training to enhance the translation capability of the SiMT model. In this paper, we propose a novel method that glances future in curriculum learning to achieve the transition from the seq2seq training to prefix2prefix training. Specifically, we gradually reduce the available source information from the whole sentence to the prefix corresponding to that latency. Our method is applicable to a wide range of SiMT methods and experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms strong baselines.

Understanding procedural natural language (e.g., step-by-step instructions) is a crucial step to execution and planning. However, while there are ample corpora and downstream tasks available in English, the field lacks such resources for most languages. To address this gap, we conduct a case study on Turkish procedural texts. We first expand the number of tutorials in Turkish wikiHow from 2,000 to 52,000 using automated translation tools, where the translation quality and loyalty to the original meaning are validated by a team of experts on a random set. Then, we generate several downstream tasks on the corpus, such as linking actions, goal inference, and summarization. To tackle these tasks, we implement strong baseline models via fine-tuning large language-specific models such as TR-BART and BERTurk, as well as multilingual models such as mBART, mT5, and XLM. We find that language-specific models consistently outperform their multilingual models by a significant margin across most procedural language understanding (PLU) tasks. We release our corpus, downstream tasks and the baseline models with https://github.com/ GGLAB-KU/turkish-plu.

Deep learning approaches to natural language processing have made great strides in recent years. While these models produce symbols that convey vast amounts of diverse knowledge, it is unclear how such symbols are grounded in data from the world. In this paper, we explore the development of a private language for visual data representation by training emergent language (EL) encoders/decoders in both i) a traditional referential game environment and ii) a contrastive learning environment utilizing a within-class matching training paradigm. An additional classification layer utilizing neural machine translation and random forest classification was used to transform symbolic representations (sequences of integer symbols) to class labels. These methods were applied in two experiments focusing on object recognition and action recognition. For object recognition, a set of sketches produced by human participants from real imagery was used (Sketchy dataset) and for action recognition, 2D trajectories were generated from 3D motion capture systems (MOVI dataset). In order to interpret the symbols produced for data in each experiment, gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) methods were used to identify pixel regions indicating semantic features which contribute evidence towards symbols in learned languages. Additionally, a t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) method was used to investigate embeddings learned by CNN feature extractors.

Hallucination in a foundation model (FM) refers to the generation of content that strays from factual reality or includes fabricated information. This survey paper provides an extensive overview of recent efforts that aim to identify, elucidate, and tackle the problem of hallucination, with a particular focus on ``Large'' Foundation Models (LFMs). The paper classifies various types of hallucination phenomena that are specific to LFMs and establishes evaluation criteria for assessing the extent of hallucination. It also examines existing strategies for mitigating hallucination in LFMs and discusses potential directions for future research in this area. Essentially, the paper offers a comprehensive examination of the challenges and solutions related to hallucination in LFMs.