Unveiling Language Skills under Circuits

The exploration of language skills in language models (LMs) has always been one of the central goals in mechanistic interpretability. However, existing circuit analyses often fall short in representing the full functional scope of these models, primarily due to the exclusion of Feed-Forward layers. Additionally, isolating the effect of a single language skill from a text, which inherently involves multiple entangled skills, poses a significant challenge. To address these gaps, we introduce a novel concept, Memory Circuit, a minimum unit that fully and independently manipulates the memory-reading functionality of a language model, and disentangle the transformer model precisely into a circuit graph which is an ensemble of paths connecting different memory circuits. Based on this disentanglement, we identify salient circuit paths, named as skill paths, responsible for three crucial language skills, i.e., the Previous Token Skill, Induction Skill and In-Context Learning (ICL) Skill, leveraging causal effect estimation through interventions and counterfactuals. Our experiments on various datasets confirm the correspondence between our identified skill paths and language skills, and validate three longstanding hypotheses: 1) Language skills are identifiable through circuit dissection; 2) Simple language skills reside in shallow layers, whereas complex language skills are found in deeper layers; 3) Complex language skills are formed on top of simpler language skills. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/Zodiark-ch/Language-Skill-of-LLMs.

Deep CLAS: Deep Contextual Listen, Attend and Spell

Contextual-LAS (CLAS) has been shown effective in improving Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) of rare words. It relies on phrase-level contextual modeling and attention-based relevance scoring without explicit contextual constraint which lead to insufficient use of contextual information. In this work, we propose deep CLAS to use contextual information better. We introduce bias loss forcing model to focus on contextual information. The query of bias attention is also enriched to improve the accuracy of the bias attention score. To get fine-grained contextual information, we replace phrase-level encoding with character-level encoding and encode contextual information with conformer rather than LSTM. Moreover, we directly use the bias attention score to correct the output probability distribution of the model. Experiments using the public AISHELL-1 and AISHELL-NER. On AISHELL-1, compared to CLAS baselines, deep CLAS obtains a 65.78% relative recall and a 53.49% relative F1-score increase in the named entity recognition scene.

Data Processing Techniques for Modern Multimodal Models

Data processing plays an significant role in current multimodal model training. In this paper. we provide an comprehensive review of common data processing techniques used in modern multimodal model training with a focus on diffusion models and multimodal large language models (MLLMs). We summarized all techniques into four categories: data quality, data quantity, data distribution and data safety. We further present our findings in the choice of data process methods in different type of models. This study aims to provide guidance to multimodal models developers with effective data processing techniques.

Individualized Federated Learning for Traffic Prediction with Error Driven Aggregation

Low-latency traffic prediction is vital for smart city traffic management. Federated Learning has emerged as a promising technique for Traffic Prediction (FLTP), offering several advantages such as privacy preservation, reduced communication overhead, improved prediction accuracy, and enhanced adaptability to changing traffic conditions. However, majority of the current FLTP frameworks lack a real-time model updating scheme, which hinders their ability to continuously incorporate new incoming traffic data and adapt effectively to the changing dynamics of traffic trends. Another concern with the existing FLTP frameworks is their reliance on the conventional FL model aggregation method, which involves assigning an identical model (i.e., the global model) to all traffic monitoring devices to predict their individual local traffic trends, thereby neglecting the non-IID characteristics of traffic data collected in different locations. Building upon these findings and harnessing insights from reinforcement learning, we propose NeighborFL, an individualized real-time federated learning scheme that introduces a haversine distance-based and error-driven, personalized local models grouping heuristic from the perspective of each individual traffic node. This approach allows NeighborFL to create location-aware and tailored prediction models for each client while fostering collaborative learning. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of NeighborFL, offering improved real-time prediction accuracy over three baseline models, with one experimental setting showing a 16.9% reduction in MSE value compared to a naive FL setting.

Balance of Number of Embedding and their Dimensions in Vector Quantization

The dimensionality of the embedding and the number of available embeddings ( also called codebook size) are critical factors influencing the performance of Vector Quantization(VQ), a discretization process used in many models such as the Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (VQ-VAE) architecture. This study examines the balance between the codebook sizes and dimensions of embeddings in VQ, while maintaining their product constant. Traditionally, these hyper parameters are static during training; however, our findings indicate that augmenting the codebook size while simultaneously reducing the embedding dimension can significantly boost the effectiveness of the VQ-VAE. As a result, the strategic selection of codebook size and embedding dimensions, while preserving the capacity of the discrete codebook space, is critically important. To address this, we propose a novel adaptive dynamic quantization approach, underpinned by the Gumbel-Softmax mechanism, which allows the model to autonomously determine the optimal codebook configuration for each data instance. This dynamic discretizer gives the VQ-VAE remarkable flexibility. Thorough empirical evaluations across multiple benchmark datasets validate the notable performance enhancements achieved by our approach, highlighting the significant potential of adaptive dynamic quantization to improve model performance.

Super-resolution imaging using super-oscillatory diffractive neural networks

Optical super-oscillation enables far-field super-resolution imaging beyond diffraction limits. However, the existing super-oscillatory lens for the spatial super-resolution imaging system still confronts critical limitations in performance due to the lack of a more advanced design method and the limited design degree of freedom. Here, we propose an optical super-oscillatory diffractive neural network, i.e., SODNN, that can achieve super-resolved spatial resolution for imaging beyond the diffraction limit with superior performance over existing methods. SODNN is constructed by utilizing diffractive layers to implement optical interconnections and imaging samples or biological sensors to implement nonlinearity, which modulates the incident optical field to create optical super-oscillation effects in 3D space and generate the super-resolved focal spots. By optimizing diffractive layers with 3D optical field constraints under an incident wavelength size of $\lambda$, we achieved a super-oscillatory spot with a full width at half maximum of 0.407$\lambda$ in the far field distance over 400$\lambda$ without side-lobes over the field of view, having a long depth of field over 10$\lambda$. Furthermore, the SODNN implements a multi-wavelength and multi-focus spot array that effectively avoids chromatic aberrations. Our research work will inspire the development of intelligent optical instruments to facilitate the applications of imaging, sensing, perception, etc.

Enhancing Voice Wake-Up for Dysarthria: Mandarin Dysarthria Speech Corpus Release and Customized System Design

Smart home technology has gained widespread adoption, facilitating effortless control of devices through voice commands. However, individuals with dysarthria, a motor speech disorder, face challenges due to the variability of their speech. This paper addresses the wake-up word spotting (WWS) task for dysarthric individuals, aiming to integrate them into real-world applications. To support this, we release the open-source Mandarin Dysarthria Speech Corpus (MDSC), a dataset designed for dysarthric individuals in home environments. MDSC encompasses information on age, gender, disease types, and intelligibility evaluations. Furthermore, we perform comprehensive experimental analysis on MDSC, highlighting the challenges encountered. We also develop a customized dysarthria WWS system that showcases robustness in handling intelligibility and achieving exceptional performance. MDSC will be released on https://www.aishelltech.com/AISHELL_6B.

Quantifying Emergence in Large Language Models

Emergence, broadly conceptualized as the ``intelligent'' behaviors of LLMs, has recently been studied and proved challenging to quantify due to the lack of a measurable definition. Most commonly, it has been estimated statistically through model performances across extensive datasets and tasks, which consumes significant resources. In addition, such estimation is difficult to interpret and may not accurately reflect the models' intrinsic emergence. In this work, we propose a quantifiable solution for estimating emergence. Inspired by emergentism in dynamics, we quantify the strength of emergence by comparing the entropy reduction of the macroscopic (semantic) level with that of the microscopic (token) level, both of which are derived from the representations within the transformer block. Using a low-cost estimator, our quantification method demonstrates consistent behaviors across a suite of LMs (GPT-2, GEMMA, etc.) under both in-context learning (ICL) and natural sentences. Empirical results show that (1) our method gives consistent measurements which align with existing observations based on performance metrics, validating the effectiveness of our emergence quantification; (2) our proposed metric uncovers novel emergence patterns such as the correlations between the variance of our metric and the number of ``shots'' in ICL, which further suggests a new way of interpreting hallucinations in LLMs; (3) we offer a potential solution towards estimating the emergence of larger and closed-resource LMs via smaller LMs like GPT-2. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/Zodiark-ch/Emergence-of-LLMs/.

RFL-CDNet: Towards Accurate Change Detection via Richer Feature Learning

Change Detection is a crucial but extremely challenging task of remote sensing image analysis, and much progress has been made with the rapid development of deep learning. However, most existing deep learning-based change detection methods mainly focus on intricate feature extraction and multi-scale feature fusion, while ignoring the insufficient utilization of features in the intermediate stages, thus resulting in sub-optimal results. To this end, we propose a novel framework, named RFL-CDNet, that utilizes richer feature learning to boost change detection performance. Specifically, we first introduce deep multiple supervision to enhance intermediate representations, thus unleashing the potential of backbone feature extractor at each stage. Furthermore, we design the Coarse-To-Fine Guiding (C2FG) module and the Learnable Fusion (LF) module to further improve feature learning and obtain more discriminative feature representations. The C2FG module aims to seamlessly integrate the side prediction from the previous coarse-scale into the current fine-scale prediction in a coarse-to-fine manner, while LF module assumes that the contribution of each stage and each spatial location is independent, thus designing a learnable module to fuse multiple predictions. Experiments on several benchmark datasets show that our proposed RFL-CDNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on WHU cultivated land dataset and CDD dataset, and the second-best performance on WHU building dataset. The source code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/Hhaizee/RFL-CDNet.

A Study of Dropout-Induced Modality Bias on Robustness to Missing Video Frames for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition

Advanced Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) systems have been observed to be sensitive to missing video frames, performing even worse than single-modality models. While applying the dropout technique to the video modality enhances robustness to missing frames, it simultaneously results in a performance loss when dealing with complete data input. In this paper, we investigate this contrasting phenomenon from the perspective of modality bias and reveal that an excessive modality bias on the audio caused by dropout is the underlying reason. Moreover, we present the Modality Bias Hypothesis (MBH) to systematically describe the relationship between modality bias and robustness against missing modality in multimodal systems. Building on these findings, we propose a novel Multimodal Distribution Approximation with Knowledge Distillation (MDA-KD) framework to reduce over-reliance on the audio modality and to maintain performance and robustness simultaneously. Finally, to address an entirely missing modality, we adopt adapters to dynamically switch decision strategies. The effectiveness of our proposed approach is evaluated and validated through a series of comprehensive experiments using the MISP2021 and MISP2022 datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/dalision/ModalBiasAVSR