ChatTracker: Enhancing Visual Tracking Performance via Chatting with Multimodal Large Language Model

Visual object tracking aims to locate a targeted object in a video sequence based on an initial bounding box. Recently, Vision-Language~(VL) trackers have proposed to utilize additional natural language descriptions to enhance versatility in various applications. However, VL trackers are still inferior to State-of-The-Art (SoTA) visual trackers in terms of tracking performance. We found that this inferiority primarily results from their heavy reliance on manual textual annotations, which include the frequent provision of ambiguous language descriptions. In this paper, we propose ChatTracker to leverage the wealth of world knowledge in the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to generate high-quality language descriptions and enhance tracking performance. To this end, we propose a novel reflection-based prompt optimization module to iteratively refine the ambiguous and inaccurate descriptions of the target with tracking feedback. To further utilize semantic information produced by MLLM, a simple yet effective VL tracking framework is proposed and can be easily integrated as a plug-and-play module to boost the performance of both VL and visual trackers. Experimental results show that our proposed ChatTracker achieves a performance comparable to existing methods.

Enhancing Low-Resource ASR through Versatile TTS: Bridging the Data Gap

While automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have achieved remarkable performance with large-scale datasets, their efficacy remains inadequate in low-resource settings, encompassing dialects, accents, minority languages, and long-tail hotwords, domains with significant practical relevance. With the advent of versatile and powerful text-to-speech (TTS) models, capable of generating speech with human-level naturalness, expressiveness, and diverse speaker profiles, leveraging TTS for ASR data augmentation provides a cost-effective and practical approach to enhancing ASR performance. Comprehensive experiments on an unprecedentedly rich variety of low-resource datasets demonstrate consistent and substantial performance improvements, proving that the proposed method of enhancing low-resource ASR through a versatile TTS model is highly effective and has broad application prospects. Furthermore, we delve deeper into key characteristics of synthesized speech data that contribute to ASR improvement, examining factors such as text diversity, speaker diversity, and the volume of synthesized data, with text diversity being studied for the first time in this work. We hope our findings provide helpful guidance and reference for the practical application of TTS-based data augmentation and push the advancement of low-resource ASR one step further.

SEFraud: Graph-based Self-Explainable Fraud Detection via Interpretative Mask Learning

Graph-based fraud detection has widespread application in modern industry scenarios, such as spam review and malicious account detection. While considerable efforts have been devoted to designing adequate fraud detectors, the interpretability of their results has often been overlooked. Previous works have attempted to generate explanations for specific instances using post-hoc explaining methods such as a GNNExplainer. However, post-hoc explanations can not facilitate the model predictions and the computational cost of these methods cannot meet practical requirements, thus limiting their application in real-world scenarios. To address these issues, we propose SEFraud, a novel graph-based self-explainable fraud detection framework that simultaneously tackles fraud detection and result in interpretability. Concretely, SEFraud first leverages customized heterogeneous graph transformer networks with learnable feature masks and edge masks to learn expressive representations from the informative heterogeneously typed transactions. A new triplet loss is further designed to enhance the performance of mask learning. Empirical results on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SEFraud as it shows considerable advantages in both the fraud detection performance and interpretability of prediction results. Moreover, SEFraud has been deployed and offers explainable fraud detection service for the largest bank in China, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited (ICBC). Results collected from the production environment of ICBC show that SEFraud can provide accurate detection results and comprehensive explanations that align with the expert business understanding, confirming its efficiency and applicability in large-scale online services.

MaLa-ASR: Multimedia-Assisted LLM-Based ASR

As more and more information-rich data like video become available, utilizing multi-modal auxiliary information to enhance audio tasks has sparked widespread research interest. The recent surge in research on LLM-based audio models provides fresh perspectives for tackling audio tasks. Given that LLM can flexibly ingest multiple inputs, we propose MaLa-ASR, an LLM-based ASR model that can integrate textual keywords extracted from presentation slides to improve recognition of conference content. MaLa-ASR yields average WERs of 9.4% and 11.7% on the L95 and S95 subsets of the SlideSpeech corpus, representing a significant relative WER drop of 27.9% and 44.7% over the baseline model reported in SlideSpeech. MaLa-ASR underscores LLM's strong performance in speech tasks and the capability to integrate auxiliary information conveniently. By adding keywords to the input prompt, the biased word error rate (B-WER) reduces relatively by 46.0% and 44.2%, establishing a new SOTA on this dataset.

An Embarrassingly Simple Approach for LLM with Strong ASR Capacity

In this paper, we focus on solving one of the most important tasks in the field of speech processing, i.e., automatic speech recognition (ASR), with speech foundation encoders and large language models (LLM). Recent works have complex designs such as compressing the output temporally for the speech encoder, tackling modal alignment for the projector, and utilizing parameter-efficient fine-tuning for the LLM. We found that delicate designs are not necessary, while an embarrassingly simple composition of off-the-shelf speech encoder, LLM, and the only trainable linear projector is competent for the ASR task. To be more specific, we benchmark and explore various combinations of LLMs and speech encoders, leading to the optimal LLM-based ASR system, which we call SLAM-ASR. The proposed SLAM-ASR provides a clean setup and little task-specific design, where only the linear projector is trained. To the best of our knowledge, SLAM-ASR achieves the best performance on the Librispeech benchmark among LLM-based ASR models and even outperforms the latest LLM-based audio-universal model trained on massive pair data. Finally, we explore the capability emergence of LLM-based ASR in the process of modal alignment. We hope that our study can facilitate the research on extending LLM with cross-modality capacity and shed light on the LLM-based ASR community.

LCB-net: Long-Context Biasing for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition

The growing prevalence of online conferences and courses presents a new challenge in improving automatic speech recognition (ASR) with enriched textual information from video slides. In contrast to rare phrase lists, the slides within videos are synchronized in real-time with the speech, enabling the extraction of long contextual bias. Therefore, we propose a novel long-context biasing network (LCB-net) for audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) to leverage the long-context information available in videos effectively. Specifically, we adopt a bi-encoder architecture to simultaneously model audio and long-context biasing. Besides, we also propose a biasing prediction module that utilizes binary cross entropy (BCE) loss to explicitly determine biased phrases in the long-context biasing. Furthermore, we introduce a dynamic contextual phrases simulation to enhance the generalization and robustness of our LCB-net. Experiments on the SlideSpeech, a large-scale audio-visual corpus enriched with slides, reveal that our proposed LCB-net outperforms general ASR model by 9.4%/9.1%/10.9% relative WER/U-WER/B-WER reduction on test set, which enjoys high unbiased and biased performance. Moreover, we also evaluate our model on LibriSpeech corpus, leading to 23.8%/19.2%/35.4% relative WER/U-WER/B-WER reduction over the ASR model.

Hourglass-AVSR: Down-Up Sampling-based Computational Efficiency Model for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition

Recently audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR), which better leverages video modality as additional information to extend automatic speech recognition (ASR), has shown promising results in complex acoustic environments. However, there is still substantial space to improve as complex computation of visual modules and ineffective fusion of audio-visual modalities. To eliminate these drawbacks, we propose a down-up sampling-based AVSR model (Hourglass-AVSR) to enjoy high efficiency and performance, whose time length is scaled during the intermediate processing, resembling an hourglass. Firstly, we propose a context and residual aware video upsampling approach to improve the recognition performance, which utilizes contextual information from visual representations and captures residual information between adjacent video frames. Secondly, we introduce a visual-audio alignment approach during the upsampling by explicitly incorporating boundary constraint loss. Besides, we propose a cross-layer attention fusion to capture the modality dependencies within each visual encoder layer. Experiments conducted on the MISP-AVSR dataset reveal that our proposed Hourglass-AVSR model outperforms ASR model by 12.9% and 20.8% relative concatenated minimum permutation character error rate (cpCER) reduction on far-field and middle-field test sets, respectively. Moreover, compared to other state-of-the-art AVSR models, our model exhibits the highest improvement in cpCER for the visual module. Furthermore, on the benefit of our down-up sampling approach, Hourglass-AVSR model reduces 54.2% overall computation costs with minor performance degradation.

BA-MoE: Boundary-Aware Mixture-of-Experts Adapter for Code-Switching Speech Recognition

Mixture-of-experts based models, which use language experts to extract language-specific representations effectively, have been well applied in code-switching automatic speech recognition. However, there is still substantial space to improve as similar pronunciation across languages may result in ineffective multi-language modeling and inaccurate language boundary estimation. To eliminate these drawbacks, we propose a cross-layer language adapter and a boundary-aware training method, namely Boundary-Aware Mixture-of-Experts (BA-MoE). Specifically, we introduce language-specific adapters to separate language-specific representations and a unified gating layer to fuse representations within each encoder layer. Second, we compute language adaptation loss of the mean output of each language-specific adapter to improve the adapter module's language-specific representation learning. Besides, we utilize a boundary-aware predictor to learn boundary representations for dealing with language boundary confusion. Our approach achieves significant performance improvement, reducing the mixture error rate by 16.55\% compared to the baseline on the ASRU 2019 Mandarin-English code-switching challenge dataset.

SA-Paraformer: Non-autoregressive End-to-End Speaker-Attributed ASR

Joint modeling of multi-speaker ASR and speaker diarization has recently shown promising results in speaker-attributed automatic speech recognition (SA-ASR).Although being able to obtain state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, most of the studies are based on an autoregressive (AR) decoder which generates tokens one-by-one and results in a large real-time factor (RTF). To speed up inference, we introduce a recently proposed non-autoregressive model Paraformer as an acoustic model in the SA-ASR model.Paraformer uses a single-step decoder to enable parallel generation, obtaining comparable performance to the SOTA AR transformer models. Besides, we propose a speaker-filling strategy to reduce speaker identification errors and adopt an inter-CTC strategy to enhance the encoder's ability in acoustic modeling. Experiments on the AliMeeting corpus show that our model outperforms the cascaded SA-ASR model by a 6.1% relative speaker-dependent character error rate (SD-CER) reduction on the test set. Moreover, our model achieves a comparable SD-CER of 34.8% with only 1/10 RTF compared with the SOTA joint AR SA-ASR model.

The second multi-channel multi-party meeting transcription challenge 2.0): A benchmark for speaker-attributed ASR

With the success of the first Multi-channel Multi-party Meeting Transcription challenge (M2MeT), the second M2MeT challenge (M2MeT 2.0) held in ASRU2023 particularly aims to tackle the complex task of speaker-attributed ASR (SA-ASR), which directly addresses the practical and challenging problem of "who spoke what at when" at typical meeting scenario. We particularly established two sub-tracks. 1) The fixed training condition sub-track, where the training data is constrained to predetermined datasets, but participants can use any open-source pre-trained model. 2) The open training condition sub-track, which allows for the use of all available data and models. In addition, we release a new 10-hour test set for challenge ranking. This paper provides an overview of the dataset, track settings, results, and analysis of submitted systems, as a benchmark to show the current state of speaker-attributed ASR.