Machine learning relies heavily on data, yet the continuous growth of real-world data poses challenges for efficient dataset construction and training. A fundamental yet unsolved question is: given our current model and data, does a new data (sample/batch) need annotation/learning? Conventional approaches retain all available data, leading to non-optimal data and training efficiency. Active learning aims to reduce data redundancy by selecting a subset of samples to annotate, while it increases pipeline complexity and introduces bias. In this work, we propose Info-Coevolution, a novel framework that efficiently enables models and data to coevolve through online selective annotation with no bias. Leveraging task-specific models (and open-source models), it selectively annotates and integrates online and web data to improve datasets efficiently. For real-world datasets like ImageNet-1K, Info-Coevolution reduces annotation and training costs by 32\% without performance loss. It is able to automatically give the saving ratio without tuning the ratio. It can further reduce the annotation ratio to 50\% with semi-supervised learning. We also explore retrieval-based dataset enhancement using unlabeled open-source data. Code is available at https://github.com/NUS-HPC-AI-Lab/Info-Coevolution/.

For classification tasks, a weak supervision approach is often designed to just attach rough Active learning (AL) is a label-efficient machine learning class labels to individual instances. For example, instead paradigm that focuses on selectively annotating high-value of attaching the exact class label "song sparrow" or "house instances to maximize learning efficiency. Its effectiveness sparrow" to an image instance, annotators can attach a can be further enhanced by incorporating weak supervision, rough class label "sparrows." This approach drastically reduces which uses rough yet cost-effective annotations instead annotation costs (budgets) because the fee paid to a of exact (i.e., full) but expensive annotations. We introduce non-expert annotator, who can only assign rough class labels a novel AL framework, Instance-wise Supervision-rather than exact ones via a crowdsourcing service, is Level Optimization (ISO), which not only selects the instances lower than that of an expert annotator. Hereafter, we call to annotate but also determines their optimal annotation rough classes as superclasses; therefore, "sparrows" is a superclass level within a fixed annotation budget.

--Human activity recognition (HAR) is a research field that employs Machine Learning (ML) techniques to identify user activities. Recent studies have prioritized the development of HAR solutions directly executed on wearable devices, enabling the on-device activity recognition. This approach is supported by the Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) paradigm, which integrates ML within embedded devices with limited resources. However, existing approaches in the field lack in the capability for on-device learning of new HAR tasks, particularly when supervised data are scarce. T o address this limitation, our paper introduces Dendron, a novel TinyML methodology designed to facilitate the on-device learning of new tasks for HAR, even in conditions of limited supervised data. Experimental results on two public-available datasets and an off-the-shelf device (STM32-NUCLEO-F401RE) show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed solution. I NTRODUCTION Human activity recognition (HAR) is a research area focusing on developing systems that can automatically identify user activities (e.g., lying, standing, walking, or running) by using Machine Learning (ML) techniques.

The training of automatic speech recognition (ASR) with little to no supervised data remains an open question. In this work, we demonstrate that streaming Transformer-Transducer (TT) models can be trained from scratch in consumer and accessible GPUs in their entirety with pseudo-labeled (PL) speech from foundational speech models (FSM). This allows training a robust ASR model just in one stage and does not require large data and computational budget compared to the two-step scenario with pre-training and fine-tuning. We perform a comprehensive ablation on different aspects of PL-based streaming TT models such as the impact of (1) shallow fusion of n-gram LMs, (2) contextual biasing with named entities, (3) chunk-wise decoding for low-latency streaming applications, and (4) TT overall performance as the function of the FSM size. Our results demonstrate that TT can be trained from scratch without supervised data, even with very noisy PLs. We validate the proposed framework on 6 languages from CommonVoice and propose multiple heuristics to filter out hallucinated PLs.

This study introduces an innovative automatic labeling framework to address the challenges of lexical normalization in social media texts for low-resource languages like Vietnamese. Social media data is rich and diverse, but the evolving and varied language used in these contexts makes manual labeling labor-intensive and expensive. To tackle these issues, we propose a framework that integrates semi-supervised learning with weak supervision techniques. This approach enhances the quality of training dataset and expands its size while minimizing manual labeling efforts. Our framework automatically labels raw data, converting non-standard vocabulary into standardized forms, thereby improving the accuracy and consistency of the training data. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our weak supervision framework in normalizing Vietnamese text, especially when utilizing Pre-trained Language Models. The proposed framework achieves an impressive F1-score of 82.72% and maintains vocabulary integrity with an accuracy of up to 99.22%. Additionally, it effectively handles undiacritized text under various conditions. This framework significantly enhances natural language normalization quality and improves the accuracy of various NLP tasks, leading to an average accuracy increase of 1-3%.

Recognizing overlapping speech from multiple speakers in conversational scenarios is one of the most challenging problem for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Serialized output training (SOT) is a classic method to address multi-talker ASR, with the idea of concatenating transcriptions from multiple speakers according to the emission times of their speech for training. However, SOT-style transcriptions, derived from concatenating multiple related utterances in a conversation, depend significantly on modeling long contexts. Therefore, compared to traditional methods that primarily emphasize encoder performance in attention-based encoder-decoder (AED) architectures, a novel approach utilizing large language models (LLMs) that leverages the capabilities of pre-trained decoders may be better suited for such complex and challenging scenarios. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based SOT approach for multi-talker ASR, leveraging pre-trained speech encoder and LLM, fine-tuning them on multi-talker dataset using appropriate strategies. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach surpasses traditional AED-based methods on the simulated dataset LibriMix and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the evaluation set of the real-world dataset AMI, outperforming the AED model trained with 1000 times more supervised data in previous works.

Current multimodal machine translation (MMT) systems rely on fully supervised data (i.e models are trained on sentences with their translations and accompanying images). However, this type of data is costly to collect, limiting the extension of MMT to other language pairs for which such data does not exist. In this work, we propose a method to bypass the need for fully supervised data to train MMT systems, using multimodal English data only. Our method, called ZeroMMT, consists in adapting a strong text-only machine translation (MT) model by training it on a mixture of two objectives: visually conditioned masked language modelling and the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the original and new MMT outputs. We evaluate on standard MMT benchmarks and the recently released CoMMuTE, a contrastive benchmark aiming to evaluate how well models use images to disambiguate English sentences. We obtain disambiguation performance close to state-of-the-art MMT models trained additionally on fully supervised examples. To prove that our method generalizes to languages with no fully supervised training data available, we extend the CoMMuTE evaluation dataset to three new languages: Arabic, Russian and Chinese. We further show that we can control the trade-off between disambiguation capabilities and translation fidelity at inference time using classifier-free guidance and without any additional data. Our code, data and trained models are publicly accessible.

Solving nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) with multiple solutions using neural networks has found widespread applications in various fields such as physics, biology, and engineering. However, classical neural network methods for solving nonlinear PDEs, such as Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINN), Deep Ritz methods, and DeepONet, often encounter challenges when confronted with the presence of multiple solutions inherent in the nonlinear problem. These methods may encounter ill-posedness issues. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called the Newton Informed Neural Operator, which builds upon existing neural network techniques to tackle nonlinearities. Our method combines classical Newton methods, addressing well-posed problems, and efficiently learns multiple solutions in a single learning process while requiring fewer supervised data points compared to existing neural network methods.