We introduce DiffuseST, a low-latency, direct speech-to-speech translation system capable of preserving the input speaker's voice zero-shot while translating from multiple source languages into English. We experiment with the synthesizer component of the architecture, comparing a Tacotron-based synthesizer to a novel diffusion-based synthesizer. We find the diffusion-based synthesizer to improve MOS and PESQ audio quality metrics by 23\% each and speaker similarity by 5\% while maintaining comparable BLEU scores. Despite having more than double the parameter count, the diffusion synthesizer has lower latency, allowing the entire model to run more than 5$\times$ faster than real-time.

Many tasks within NLP can be framed as sequential decision problems, ranging from sequence tagging to text generation. However, for many tasks, the standard training methods, including maximum likelihood (teacher forcing) and scheduled sampling, suffer from exposure bias and a mismatch between metrics employed during training and inference. DAgger provides a solution to mitigate these problems, yet it requires a metric-specific dynamic oracle algorithm, which does not exist for many common metrics like span-based F1, ROUGE, and BLEU. In this paper, we develop these novel dynamic oracles and show they maintain DAgger's no-regret guarantee for decomposable metrics like span-based F1. We evaluate the algorithm's performance on named entity recognition (NER), text summarization, and machine translation (MT). While DAgger with dynamic oracle yields less favorable results in our MT experiments, it outperforms the baseline techniques in NER and text summarization.

In this paper, we work towards extending Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) to multilingual settings. Existing AVQA research has predominantly revolved around English and replicating it for addressing AVQA in other languages requires a substantial allocation of resources. As a scalable solution, we leverage machine translation and present two multilingual AVQA datasets for eight languages created from existing benchmark AVQA datasets. This prevents extra human annotation efforts of collecting questions and answers manually. To this end, we propose, MERA framework, by leveraging state-of-the-art (SOTA) video, audio, and textual foundation models for AVQA in multiple languages. We introduce a suite of models namely MERA-L, MERA-C, MERA-T with varied model architectures to benchmark the proposed datasets. We believe our work will open new research directions and act as a reference benchmark for future works in multilingual AVQA.

Score distillation sampling (SDS) has proven to be an important tool, enabling the use of large-scale diffusion priors for tasks operating in data-poor domains. Unfortunately, SDS has a number of characteristic artifacts that limit its usefulness in general-purpose applications. In this paper, we make progress toward understanding the behavior of SDS and its variants by viewing them as solving an optimal-cost transport path from a source distribution to a target distribution. Under this new interpretation, these methods seek to transport corrupted images (source) to the natural image distribution (target). We argue that current methods' characteristic artifacts are caused by (1) linear approximation of the optimal path and (2) poor estimates of the source distribution. We show that calibrating the text conditioning of the source distribution can produce high-quality generation and translation results with little extra overhead. Our method can be easily applied across many domains, matching or beating the performance of specialized methods. We demonstrate its utility in text-to-2D, text-based NeRF optimization, translating paintings to real images, optical illusion generation, and 3D sketch-to-real. We compare our method to existing approaches for score distillation sampling and show that it can produce high-frequency details with realistic colors.

Multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis (MABSA) aims to understand opinions in a granular manner, advancing human-computer interaction and other fields. Traditionally, MABSA methods use a joint prediction approach to identify aspects and sentiments simultaneously. However, we argue that joint models are not always superior. Our analysis shows that joint models struggle to align relevant text tokens with image patches, leading to misalignment and ineffective image utilization. In contrast, a pipeline framework first identifies aspects through MATE (Multimodal Aspect Term Extraction) and then aligns these aspects with image patches for sentiment classification (MASC: Multimodal Aspect-Oriented Sentiment Classification). This method is better suited for multimodal scenarios where effective image use is crucial. We present three key observations: (a) MATE and MASC have different feature requirements, with MATE focusing on token-level features and MASC on sequence-level features; (b) the aspect identified by MATE is crucial for effective image utilization; and (c) images play a trivial role in previous MABSA methods due to high noise. Based on these observations, we propose a pipeline framework that first predicts the aspect and then uses translation-based alignment (TBA) to enhance multimodal semantic consistency for better image utilization. Our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on widely used MABSA datasets Twitter-15 and Twitter-17. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the pipeline approach and its potential to provide valuable insights for future MABSA research. For reproducibility, the code and checkpoint will be released.

Current large language models demonstrate deficiencies in understanding low-resource languages, particularly the minority languages in China. This limitation stems from the scarcity of available pre-training data. To address this accessibility challenge, we present MC$^2$, a Multilingual Corpus of Minority Languages in China, which is the largest open-source corpus of its kind so far. MC$^2$ includes four underrepresented languages: Tibetan, Uyghur, Kazakh, and Mongolian. Notably, we focus on the less common writing systems of Kazakh and Mongolian, i.e., Kazakh Arabic script and traditional Mongolian script, respectively, which have been long neglected in previous corpus construction efforts. Recognizing the prevalence of language contamination within existing corpora, we adopt a quality-centric solution for collecting MC$^2$, prioritizing accuracy while enhancing diversity. Furthermore, we underscore the importance of attending to the multiplicity of writing systems, which is closely related to the cultural awareness of the resulting models. The MC$^2$ corpus and related models are made public to the community.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance in various natural language processing tasks. Techniques like instruction tuning have effectively enhanced the proficiency of LLMs in the downstream task of machine translation. However, the existing approaches fail to yield satisfactory translation outputs that match the quality of supervised neural machine translation (NMT) systems. One plausible explanation for this discrepancy is that the straightforward prompts employed in these methodologies are unable to fully exploit the acquired instruction-following capabilities. To this end, we propose the TasTe framework, which stands for translating through self-reflection. The self-reflection process includes two stages of inference. In the first stage, LLMs are instructed to generate preliminary translations and conduct self-assessments on these translations simultaneously. In the second stage, LLMs are tasked to refine these preliminary translations according to the evaluation results. The evaluation results in four language directions on the WMT22 benchmark reveal the effectiveness of our approach compared to existing methods. Our work presents a promising approach to unleash the potential of LLMs and enhance their capabilities in MT. The codes and datasets are open-sourced at https://github.com/YutongWang1216/ReflectionLLMMT.

The quality of output from large language models (LLMs), particularly in machine translation (MT), is closely tied to the quality of in-context examples (ICEs) provided along with the query, i.e., the text to translate. The effectiveness of these ICEs is influenced by various factors, such as the domain of the source text, the order in which the ICEs are presented, the number of these examples, and the prompt templates used. Naturally, selecting the most impactful ICEs depends on understanding how these affect the resulting translation quality, which ultimately relies on translation references or human judgment. This paper presents a novel methodology for in-context learning (ICL) that relies on a search algorithm guided by domain-specific quality estimation (QE). Leveraging the XGLM model, our methodology estimates the resulting translation quality without the need for translation references, selecting effective ICEs for MT to maximize translation quality. Our results demonstrate significant improvements over existing ICL methods and higher translation performance compared to fine-tuning a pre-trained language model (PLM), specifically mBART-50.

Spoken language glossification (SLG) aims to translate the spoken language text into the sign language gloss, i.e., a written record of sign language. In this work, we present a framework named $S$emi-$S$upervised $S$poken $L$anguage $G$lossification ($S^3$LG) for SLG. To tackle the bottleneck of limited parallel data in SLG, our $S^3$LG incorporates large-scale monolingual spoken language text into SLG training. The proposed framework follows the self-training structure that iteratively annotates and learns from pseudo labels. Considering the lexical similarity and syntactic difference between sign language and spoken language, our $S^3$LG adopts both the rule-based heuristic and model-based approach for auto-annotation. During training, we randomly mix these complementary synthetic datasets and mark their differences with a special token. As the synthetic data may be less quality, the $S^3$LG further leverages consistency regularization to reduce the negative impact of noise in the synthetic data. Extensive experiments are conducted on public benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the $S^3$LG. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/yaohj11/S3LG}.

Understanding representation transfer in multilingual neural machine translation can reveal the representational issue causing the zero-shot translation deficiency. In this work, we introduce the identity pair, a sentence translated into itself, to address the lack of the base measure in multilingual investigations, as the identity pair represents the optimal state of representation among any language transfers. In our analysis, we demonstrate that the encoder transfers the source language to the representational subspace of the target language instead of the language-agnostic state. Thus, the zero-shot translation deficiency arises because representations are entangled with other languages and are not transferred effectively to the target language. Based on our findings, we propose two methods: 1) low-rank language-specific embedding at the encoder, and 2) language-specific contrastive learning of the representation at the decoder. The experimental results on Europarl-15, TED-19, and OPUS-100 datasets show that our methods substantially enhance the performance of zero-shot translations by improving language transfer capacity, thereby providing practical evidence to support our conclusions.