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Improving Target Sound Extraction via Disentangled Codec Representations with Privileged Knowledge Distillation
Target sound extraction aims to isolate target sound sources from an input mixture using a target clue to identify the sounds of interest. To address the challenge posed by the wide variety of sounds, recent work has introduced privileged knowledge distillation (PKD), which utilizes privileged information (PI) about the target sound, available only during training. While PKD has shown promise, existing approaches often suffer from overfitting of the teacher model for the overly rich PI and ineffective knowledge transfer to the student model. In this paper, we propose Disentangled Codec Knowledge Distillation (DCKD) to mitigate these issues by regulating the amount and the flow of target sound information within the teacher model. We begin by extracting a compressed representation of the target sound using a neural audio codec to regulate the amount of PI. Disentangled representation learning is then applied to remove class information and extract fine-grained temporal information as PI. Subsequently, an n-hot vector as the class information and the class-independent PI are used to condition the early and later layers of the teacher model, respectively, forming a regulated coarse-to-fine target information flow. The resulting representation is transferred to the student model through feature-level knowledge distillation. Experimental results show that DCKD consistently improves existing methods across model architectures under the multi-target selection condition.
Multi-head Temporal Latent Attention
While Transformer self-attention offers strong parallelism, the Key-Value (KV) cache grows linearly with sequence length and becomes a bottleneck for inference efficiency. Multi-head latent attention was recently developed to compress the KV cache into a low-rank latent space. This paper proposes Multi-head Temporal Latent Attention (MTLA), which further reduces the KV cache size along the temporal dimension, greatly lowering the memory footprint of self-attention inference. MTLA employs a hyper-network to dynamically merge temporally adjacent KV cache vectors. To address the mismatch between the compressed KV cache and processed sequence lengths, a stride-aware causal mask is proposed to ensure efficient parallel training and consistency with inference behaviour. Experiments across tasks, including speech translation, speech recognition, speech understanding and text summarisation, demonstrate that MTLA achieves competitive performance compared to standard Multi-Head Attention (MHA), while greatly improving inference speed and GPU memory usage. For example, on a English-German speech translation task, MTLA achieves a 5.3 speedup and a reduction in GPU memory usage by a factor of 8.3 compared to MHA, while maintaining translation quality.
Group-Level Data Selection for Efficient Pretraining
The efficiency and quality of language model pretraining are largely determined by the way pretraining data are selected. In this paper, we introduce Group-MATES, an efficient group-level data selection approach to optimize the speed-quality frontier of language model pretraining. Specifically, Group-MATES parameterizes costly group-level selection with a relational data influence model. To train this model, we sample training trajectories of the language model and collect oracle data influences alongside. The relational data influence model approximates the oracle data influence by weighting individual influence with relationships among training data. To enable efficient selection with our relational data influence model, we within partition each the cluster dataset independently into small clusters . Experiments using relationship on DCLM weights 400M-4x, and 1B-1x, select data and 3B-1x show that Group-MATES achieves 3.5%-9.4%
Masked Gated Linear Unit
Gated Linear Units (GLUs) have become essential components in the feed-forward networks of state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs). However, they require twice as many memory reads compared to feed-forward layers without gating, due to the use of separate weight matrices for the gate and value streams. To address this bottleneck, we introduce Masked Gated Linear Units (MGLUs), a novel family of GLUs with an efficient kernel implementation. The core contribution of MGLUs include: (1) the Mixture of Element-wise Gating (MoEG) architecture that learns multiple binary masks, each determining gate or value assignments at the element level on a single shared weight matrix resulting in reduced memory transfer, and (2) FlashMGLU, a hardware-friendly kernel that yields up to a 19.7 inference-time speed-up over a naïve PyTorch MGLU and is 47% more memory-efficient and 34% faster than standard GLUs despite added architectural complexity on an RTX5090 GPU. In LLM experiments, the Swish-activated variant SwiMGLU preserves its memory advantages while matching--or even surpassing--the downstream accuracy of the SwiGLU baseline.
Searching Efficient Semantic Segmentation Architectures via Dynamic Path Selection
Existing NAS methods for semantic segmentation typically apply uniform optimization to all candidate networks (paths) within a one-shot supernet. However, the concurrent existence of both promising and suboptimal paths often results in inefficient weight updates and gradient conflicts. This issue is particularly severe in semantic segmentation due to its complex multi-branch architectures and large search space, which further degrade the supernet's ability to accurately evaluate individual paths and identify high-quality candidates. To address this issue, we propose Dynamic Path Selection (DPS), a selective training strategy that leverages multiple performance proxies to guide path optimization. DPS follows a stagewise paradigm, where each phase emphasizes a different objective: early stages prioritize convergence, the middle stage focuses on expressiveness, and the final stage emphasizes a balanced combination of expressiveness and generalization. At each stage, paths are selected based on these criteria, concentrating optimization efforts on promising paths, thus facilitating targeted and efficient model updates. Additionally, DPS integrates a dynamic stage scheduler and a diversity-driven exploration strategy, which jointly enable adaptive stage transitions and maintain structural diversity among selected paths. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, under the same search space, DPS can discover efficient models with strong generalization and superior performance.
Part-Aware Bottom-Up Group Reasoning for Fine-Grained Social Interaction Detection
Social interactions often emerge from subtle, fine-grained cues such as facial expressions, gaze, and gestures. However, existing methods for social interaction detection overlook such nuanced cues and primarily rely on holistic representations of individuals. Moreover, they directly detect social groups without explicitly modeling the underlying interactions between individuals. These drawbacks limit their ability to capture localized social signals and introduce ambiguity when group configurations should be inferred from social interactions grounded in nuanced cues. In this work, we propose a part-aware bottom-up group reasoning framework for fine-grained social interaction detection. The proposed method infers social groups and their interactions using body part features and their interpersonal relations. Our model first detects individuals and enhances their features using part-aware cues, and then infers group configuration by associating individuals via similarity-based reasoning, which considers not only spatial relations but also subtle social cues that signal interactions, leading to more accurate group inference. Experiments on the NVI dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms prior methods, achieving the new state of the art, while additional results on the Café dataset further validate its generalizability to group activity understanding.
Transstratal Adversarial Attack: Compromising Multi-Layered Defenses in Text-to-Image Models
Modern Text-to-Image (T2I) models deploy multi-layered defenses to block NotSafe-For-Work (NSFW) content generation. These defenses typically include sequential layers such as prompt filters, concept erasers and image filters. While existing adversarial attacks have demonstrated vulnerabilities in isolated defense layers, they prove largely ineffective against multi-layered defenses deployed in real-world T2I systems. In this paper, we demonstrate that exploiting overlapping vulnerabilities across these distinct defense layers enables adversaries to systematically bypass the entire safeguard of T2I systems. We propose Transstratal Adversarial Attack (TAA), a novel black-box framework to compromise T2I models with multi-layered protection. It generates transstratal adversarial prompts to evade all defense layers simultaneously. This is accomplished through transstratal adversarial candidate generation using LLMs to fulfill implicit and subjective adversarial requirements against different defense layers, combined with adversarial genetic optimization for efficient black-box search to maximize the bypass rates and generated image harmfulness. Evaluated across 14 T2I models (e.g., Stable Diffusion, DALL E, and Midjourney) and 17 safety modules, our attack achieves an average attack success rate of 85.6%, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by 73.5%. Our findings challenge the isolated design of safety mechanisms and establish the first benchmark for holistic robustness evaluation in multi-layered safeguarded T2I models.