Code generation focuses on the automatic conversion of natural language (NL) utterances into code snippets. The sequence-to-tree (Seq2Tree) approaches are proposed for code generation, with the guarantee of the grammatical correctness of the generated code, which generate the subsequent Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) node relying on antecedent predictions of AST nodes. Existing Seq2Tree methods tend to treat both antecedent predictions and subsequent predictions equally. However, under the AST constraints, it is difficult for Seq2Tree models to produce the correct subsequent prediction based on incorrect antecedent predictions. Thus, antecedent predictions ought to receive more attention than subsequent predictions. To this end, in this paper, we propose an effective method, named Antecedent Prioritized (AP) Loss, that helps the model attach importance to antecedent predictions by exploiting the position information of the generated AST nodes. We design an AST-to-Vector (AST2Vec) method, that maps AST node positions to two-dimensional vectors, to model the position information of AST nodes. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed loss, we implement and train an Antecedent Prioritized Tree-based code generation model called APT. With better antecedent predictions and accompanying subsequent predictions, APT significantly improves the performance. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority and generality of our proposed method.

This article has been accepted for publication in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing. This is the author's version which has not been fully edited and content may change prior to final publication. Abstract--Neural audio/speech coding has recently demonstrated its capability to deliver high quality at much lower bitrates than traditional methods. However, existing neural audio/speech codecs employ either acoustic features or learned blind features with a convolutional neural network for encoding, by which there are still temporal redundancies within encoded features. Specifically, the extracted features are encoded conditioned on a prediction from past quantized latent frames so that temporal correlations are further removed. Moreover, we introduce a learnable compression on the timefrequency input to adaptively adjust the attention paid to main frequencies and details at different bitrates. A differentiable vector quantization scheme based on distance-to-soft mapping and Gumbel-Softmax is proposed to better model the latent distributions with rate constraint. Subjective results on multilingual speech datasets show that, with low latency, the proposed TF-Codec at 1 kbps achieves significantly better quality than Opus at 9 kbps, and TF-Codec at 3 kbps outperforms both EVS at 9.6 Numerous studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques.

Recently end-to-end neural audio/speech coding has shown its great potential to outperform traditional signal analysis based audio codecs. This is mostly achieved by following the VQ-VAE paradigm where blind features are learned, vector-quantized and coded. In this paper, instead of blind end-to-end learning, we propose to learn disentangled features for real-time neural speech coding. Specifically, more global-like speaker identity and local content features are learned with disentanglement to represent speech. Such a compact feature decomposition not only achieves better coding efficiency by exploiting bit allocation among different features but also provides the flexibility to do audio editing in embedding space, such as voice conversion in real-time communications. Both subjective and objective results demonstrate its coding efficiency and we find that the learned disentangled features show comparable performance on any-to-any voice conversion with modern self-supervised speech representation learning models with far less parameters and low latency, showing the potential of our neural coding framework.

Triplet learning, i.e. learning from triplet data, has attracted much attention in computer vision tasks with an extremely large number of categories, e.g., face recognition and person re-identification. Albeit with rapid progress in designing and applying triplet learning algorithms, there is a lacking study on the theoretical understanding of their generalization performance. To fill this gap, this paper investigates the generalization guarantees of triplet learning by leveraging the stability analysis. Specifically, we establish the first general high-probability generalization bound for the triplet learning algorithm satisfying the uniform stability, and then obtain the excess risk bounds of the order $O(n^{-\frac{1}{2}} \mathrm{log}n)$ for both stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and regularized risk minimization (RRM), where $2n$ is approximately equal to the number of training samples. Moreover, an optimistic generalization bound in expectation as fast as $O(n^{-1})$ is derived for RRM in a low noise case via the on-average stability analysis. Finally, our results are applied to triplet metric learning to characterize its theoretical underpinning.

In the process of code generation, it is essential to guarantee the generated code satisfies grammar constraints of programming language (PL). However, neglecting grammar constraints is a fatal drawback of commonly used sequence-based code generation. In this paper, we devise a pushdown automaton (PDA)-based methodology to address this problem, exploiting the principle that PL is a subset of PDA recognizable language and code accepted by PDA is grammatical. Specifically, we construct a PDA module and design an algorithm to constrain the generation of sequence-based models to ensure grammatical correctness. Guided by this methodology, we further propose CodePAD, a sequence-based code generation framework equipped with a PDA module, to integrate the deduction of PDA into deep learning. Additionally, this framework can leverage states of PDA deduction (including state representation, state prediction task, and joint prediction with state) to assist models in learning PDA deduction. To comprehensively evaluate CodePAD, we construct a PDA for Python and conduct extensive experiments on four public benchmark datasets. CodePAD can leverage existing sequence-based models, and we show that it can achieve 100\% grammatical correctness percentage on these benchmark datasets. Thus, it relatively improve 17\% CodeBLEU on CONALA, 8\% EM on DJANGO, and 15\% CodeBLEU on JUICE-10K compared to base models. In addition, our method significantly enhances pre-trained models, e.g., CodeBLEU of CodeGen-350M improvement from 3.21 to 21.54 on MBPP in zero-shot setting.

Research and development of electroencephalogram (EEG) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have advanced rapidly, partly due to deeper understanding of the brain and wide adoption of sophisticated machine learning approaches for decoding the EEG signals. However, recent studies have shown that machine learning algorithms are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. This article proposes to use narrow period pulse for poisoning attack of EEG-based BCIs, which is implementable in practice and has never been considered before. One can create dangerous backdoors in the machine learning model by injecting poisoning samples into the training set. Test samples with the backdoor key will then be classified into the target class specified by the attacker. What most distinguishes our approach from previous ones is that the backdoor key does not need to be synchronized with the EEG trials, making it very easy to implement. The effectiveness and robustness of the backdoor attack approach is demonstrated, highlighting a critical security concern for EEG-based BCIs and calling for urgent attention to address it.