Audio-language models have shown promising results in various sound understanding tasks, yet they remain limited in their ability to reason over the fine-grained semantics of sound. In this paper, we present AUDSEMTHINKER, a model whose reasoning is structured around a framework of auditory semantics inspired by human cognition. To support this, we introduce AUDSEM, a novel dataset specifically curated for semantic descriptor reasoning in audio-language models. AUDSEM addresses the persistent challenge of data contamination in zero-shot evaluations by providing a carefully filtered collection of audio samples paired with captions generated through a robust multi-stage pipeline. Our experiments demonstrate that AUDSEMTHINKER outperforms state-of-the-art models across multiple training settings, highlighting its strength in semantic audio reasoning.

The ability to invent novel and interesting problems is a remarkable feature of human intelligence that drives innovation, art, and science. We propose a method that aims to automate this process by harnessing the power of state-of-the-art generative models to produce a diversity of challenging yet solvable problems, here in the context of Python programming puzzles. Inspired by the intrinsically motivated literature, Autotelic CodE Search (ACES) jointly optimizes for the diversity and difficulty of generated problems. We represent problems in a space of LLM-generated semantic descriptors describing the programming skills required to solve them (e.g.

The ability to invent novel and interesting problems is a remarkable feature of human intelligence that drives innovation, art, and science. We propose a method that aims to automate this process by harnessing the power of state-of-the-art generative models to produce a diversity of challenging yet solvable problems, here in the context of Python programming puzzles. Inspired by the intrinsically motivated literature, Autotelic CodE Search (ACES) jointly optimizes for the diversity and difficulty of generated problems. We represent problems in a space of LLM-generated semantic descriptors describing the programming skills required to solve them (e.g. ACES iteratively prompts a large language model to generate difficult problems achieving a diversity of target semantic descriptors (goal-directed exploration) using previously generated problems as in-context examples.

The olfactory system employs responses of an ensemble of odorant receptors (ORs) to sense molecules and to generate olfactory percepts. Here we hypothesized that ORs can be viewed as 3D spatial filters that extract molecular features relevant to the olfactory system, similarly to the spatio-temporal filters found in other sensory modalities. To build these filters, we trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict human olfactory percepts obtained from several semantic datasets. Our neural network, the DeepNose, produced responses that are approximately invariant to the molecules' orientation, due to its equivariant architecture. Our network offers high-fidelity perceptual predictions for different olfactory datasets. In addition, our approach allows us to identify molecular features that contribute to specific perceptual descriptors. Because the DeepNose network is designed to be aligned with the biological system, our approach predicts distinct perceptual qualities for different stereoisomers. The architecture of the DeepNose relying on the processing of several molecules at the same time permits inferring the perceptual quality of odor mixtures. We propose that the DeepNose network can use 3D molecular shapes to generate high-quality predictions for human olfactory percepts and help identify molecular features responsible for odor quality.

AdaFold extracts a particle-based representation of cloth from RGB-D images and feeds back the representation to a model predictive control to re-plan folding trajectory at every time-step. A key component of AdaFold that enables feedback-loop manipulation is the use of semantic descriptors extracted from geometric features. These descriptors enhance the particle representation of the cloth to distinguish between ambiguous point clouds of differently folded cloths. Our experiments demonstrate AdaFold's ability to adapt folding trajectories to cloths with varying physical properties and generalize from simulated training to real-world execution.

Deep learning methods have shown outstanding classification accuracy in medical imaging problems, which is largely attributed to the availability of large-scale datasets manually annotated with clean labels. However, given the high cost of such manual annotation, new medical imaging classification problems may need to rely on machine-generated noisy labels extracted from radiology reports. Indeed, many Chest X-ray (CXR) classifiers have already been modelled from datasets with noisy labels, but their training procedure is in general not robust to noisy-label samples, leading to sub-optimal models. Furthermore, CXR datasets are mostly multi-label, so current noisy-label learning methods designed for multi-class problems cannot be easily adapted. In this paper, we propose a new method designed for the noisy multi-label CXR learning, which detects and smoothly re-labels samples from the dataset, which is then used to train common multi-label classifiers. The proposed method optimises a bag of multi-label descriptors (BoMD) to promote their similarity with the semantic descriptors produced by BERT models from the multi-label image annotation. Our experiments on diverse noisy multi-label training sets and clean testing sets show that our model has state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness in many CXR multi-label classification benchmarks.

Zero-shot classification of image scenes which can recognize the image scenes that are not seen in the training stage holds great promise of lowering the dependence on large numbers of labeled samples. To address the zero-shot image scene classification, the cross-modal feature alignment methods have been proposed in recent years. These methods mainly focus on matching the visual features of each image scene with their corresponding semantic descriptors in the latent space. Less attention has been paid to the contrastive relationships between different image scenes and different semantic descriptors. In light of the challenge of large intra-class difference and inter-class similarity among image scenes and the potential noisy samples, these methods are susceptible to the influence of the instances which are far from these of the same classes and close to these of other classes. In this work, we propose a multi-level cross-modal feature alignment method via contrastive learning for zero-shot classification of remote sensing image scenes. While promoting the single-instance level positive alignment between each image scene with their corresponding semantic descriptors, the proposed method takes the cross-instance contrastive relationships into consideration,and learns to keep the visual and semantic features of different classes in the latent space apart from each other. Extensive experiments have been done to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results show that our proposed method outperforms state of the art methods for zero-shot remote sensing image scene classification. All the code and data are available at github https://github.com/masuqiang/MCFA-Pytorch

In recent years, machine learning has been widely adopted to automate the audio mixing process. Automatic mixing systems have been applied to various audio effects such as gain-adjustment, equalization, and reverberation. These systems can be controlled through visual interfaces, providing audio examples, using knobs, and semantic descriptors. Using semantic descriptors or textual information to control these systems is an effective way for artists to communicate their creative goals. In this paper, we explore the novel idea of using word embeddings to represent semantic descriptors. Word embeddings are generally obtained by training neural networks on large corpora of written text. These embeddings serve as the input layer of the neural network to create a translation from words to EQ settings. Using this technique, the machine learning model can also generate EQ settings for semantic descriptors that it has not seen before. We compare the EQ settings of humans with the predictions of the neural network to evaluate the quality of predictions. The results showed that the embedding layer enables the neural network to understand semantic descriptors. We observed that the models with embedding layers perform better than those without embedding layers, but still not as good as human labels.

Generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) aims to recognize objects from both seen and unseen classes, when only the labeled examples from seen classes are provided. Recent feature generation methods learn a generative model that can synthesize the missing visual features of unseen classes to mitigate the data-imbalance problem in GZSL. However, the original visual feature space is suboptimal for GZSL classification since it lacks discriminative information. To tackle this issue, we propose to integrate the generation model with the embedding model, yielding a hybrid GZSL framework. The hybrid GZSL approach maps both the real and the synthetic samples produced by the generation model into an embedding space, where we perform the final GZSL classification. Specifically, we propose a contrastive embedding (CE) for our hybrid GZSL framework. The proposed contrastive embedding can leverage not only the class-wise supervision but also the instance-wise supervision, where the latter is usually neglected by existing GZSL researches. We evaluate our proposed hybrid GZSL framework with contrastive embedding, named CE-GZSL, on five benchmark datasets. The results show that our CEGZSL method can outperform the state-of-the-arts by a significant margin on three datasets. Our codes are available on https://github.com/Hanzy1996/CE-GZSL.

Because of their ability to detect, track, and follow objects of interest while maintaining safe distances, drones have become an important tool for professional and amateur filmmakers alike. This being the case, quadcopters' camera controls remain difficult to master. Drones might take different paths for the same scenes even if their positions, velocities, and angles are carefully tuned, potentially ruining the consistency of a shot. In search of a solution, Carnegie Mellon, University of Sao Paulo, and Facebook researchers developed a framework that enables users to define drone camera shots working from labels like "exciting," "enjoyable," and "establishing." Using a software simulator, they generated a database of video clips with a diverse set of shot types and then leveraged crowdsourcing and AI to learn the relationship between the labels and certain semantic descriptors.