Evaluating and Improving Automatic Speech Recognition Systems for Korean Meteorological Experts

This paper explores integrating Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) into natural language query systems to improve weather forecasting efficiency for Korean meteorologists. We address challenges in developing ASR systems for the Korean weather domain, specifically specialized vocabulary and Korean linguistic intricacies. To tackle these issues, we constructed an evaluation dataset of spoken queries recorded by native Korean speakers. Using this dataset, we assessed various configurations of a multilingual ASR model family, identifying performance limitations related to domain-specific terminology. We then implemented a simple text-to-speech-based data augmentation method, which improved the recognition of specialized terms while maintaining general-domain performance. Our contributions include creating a domain-specific dataset, comprehensive ASR model evaluations, and an effective augmentation technique. We believe our work provides a foundation for future advancements in ASR for the Korean weather forecasting domain.

Breaking Chains: Unraveling the Links in Multi-Hop Knowledge Unlearning

Large language models (LLMs) serve as giant information stores, often including personal or copyrighted data, and retraining them from scratch is not a viable option. This has led to the development of various fast, approximate unlearning techniques to selectively remove knowledge from LLMs. Prior research has largely focused on minimizing the probabilities of specific token sequences by reversing the language modeling objective. However, these methods still leave LLMs vulnerable to adversarial attacks that exploit indirect references. In this work, we examine the limitations of current unlearning techniques in effectively erasing a particular type of indirect prompt: multi-hop queries. Our findings reveal that existing methods fail to completely remove multi-hop knowledge when one of the intermediate hops is unlearned. To address this issue, we propose MUNCH, a simple uncertainty-based approach that breaks down multi-hop queries into subquestions and leverages the uncertainty of the unlearned model in final decision-making. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, and MUNCH can be easily integrated with existing unlearning techniques, making it a flexible and useful solution for enhancing unlearning processes.

Generative Location Modeling for Spatially Aware Object Insertion

Generative models have become a powerful tool for image editing tasks, including object insertion. However, these methods often lack spatial awareness, generating objects with unrealistic locations and scales, or unintentionally altering the scene background. A key challenge lies in maintaining visual coherence, which requires both a geometrically suitable object location and a high-quality image edit. In this paper, we focus on the former, creating a location model dedicated to identifying realistic object locations. Specifically, we train an autoregressive model that generates bounding box coordinates, conditioned on the background image and the desired object class. This formulation allows to effectively handle sparse placement annotations and to incorporate implausible locations into a preference dataset by performing direct preference optimization. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our generative location model, when paired with an inpainting method, substantially outperforms state-of-the-art instruction-tuned models and location modeling baselines in object insertion tasks, delivering accurate and visually coherent results.

SurFhead: Affine Rig Blending for Geometrically Accurate 2D Gaussian Surfel Head Avatars

Recent advancements in head avatar rendering using Gaussian primitives have achieved significantly high-fidelity results. Although precise head geometry is crucial for applications like mesh reconstruction and relighting, current methods struggle to capture intricate geometric details and render unseen poses due to their reliance on similarity transformations, which cannot handle stretch and shear transforms essential for detailed deformations of geometry. To address this, we propose SurFhead, a novel method that reconstructs riggable head geometry from RGB videos using 2D Gaussian surfels, which offer well-defined geometric properties, such as precise depth from fixed ray intersections and normals derived from their surface orientation, making them advantageous over 3D counterparts. SurFhead ensures high-fidelity rendering of both normals and images, even in extreme poses, by leveraging classical mesh-based deformation transfer and affine transformation interpolation. SurFhead introduces precise geometric deformation and blends surfels through polar decomposition of transformations, including those affecting normals. Our key contribution lies in bridging classical graphics techniques, such as mesh-based deformation, with modern Gaussian primitives, achieving state-of-the-art geometry reconstruction and rendering quality. Unlike previous avatar rendering approaches, SurFhead enables efficient reconstruction driven by Gaussian primitives while preserving high-fidelity geometry.

SimBa: Simplicity Bias for Scaling Up Parameters in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Recent advances in CV and NLP have been largely driven by scaling up the number of network parameters, despite traditional theories suggesting that larger networks are prone to overfitting. These large networks avoid overfitting by integrating components that induce a simplicity bias, guiding models toward simple and generalizable solutions. However, in deep RL, designing and scaling up networks have been less explored. Motivated by this opportunity, we present SimBa, an architecture designed to scale up parameters in deep RL by injecting a simplicity bias. SimBa consists of three components: (i) an observation normalization layer that standardizes inputs with running statistics, (ii) a residual feedforward block to provide a linear pathway from the input to output, and (iii) a layer normalization to control feature magnitudes. By scaling up parameters with SimBa, the sample efficiency of various deep RL algorithms-including off-policy, on-policy, and unsupervised methods-is consistently improved. Moreover, solely by integrating SimBa architecture into SAC, it matches or surpasses state-of-the-art deep RL methods with high computational efficiency across DMC, MyoSuite, and HumanoidBench. These results demonstrate SimBa's broad applicability and effectiveness across diverse RL algorithms and environments.

Single Ground Truth Is Not Enough: Add Linguistic Variability to Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Evaluation

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is the challenging task of extracting sentiment along with its corresponding aspects and opinions from human language. Due to the inherent variability of natural language, aspect and opinion terms can be expressed in various surface forms, making their accurate identification complex. Current evaluation methods for this task often restrict answers to a single ground truth, penalizing semantically equivalent predictions that differ in surface form. To address this limitation, we propose a novel, fully automated pipeline that augments existing test sets with alternative valid responses for aspect and opinion terms. This approach enables a fairer assessment of language models by accommodating linguistic diversity, resulting in higher human agreement than single-answer test sets (up to 10%p improvement in Kendall's Tau score). Our experimental results demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) show substantial performance improvements over T5 models when evaluated using our augmented test set, suggesting that LLMs' capabilities in ABSA tasks may have been underestimated. This work contributes to a more comprehensive evaluation framework for ABSA, potentially leading to more accurate assessments of model performance in information extraction tasks, particularly those involving span extraction.

Bones Can't Be Triangles: Accurate and Efficient Vertebrae Keypoint Estimation through Collaborative Error Revision

Recent advances in interactive keypoint estimation methods have enhanced accuracy while minimizing user intervention. However, these methods require user input for error correction, which can be costly in vertebrae keypoint estimation where inaccurate keypoints are densely clustered or overlap. We introduce a novel approach, KeyBot, specifically designed to identify and correct significant and typical errors in existing models, akin to user revision. By characterizing typical error types and using simulated errors for training, KeyBot effectively corrects these errors and significantly reduces user workload. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on three public datasets confirm that KeyBot significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in interactive vertebrae keypoint estimation. The source code and demo video are available at: https://ts-kim.github.io/KeyBot/

Skip-and-Play: Depth-Driven Pose-Preserved Image Generation for Any Objects

The emergence of diffusion models has enabled the generation of diverse high-quality images solely from text, prompting subsequent efforts to enhance the controllability of these models. Despite the improvement in controllability, pose control remains limited to specific objects (e.g., humans) or poses (e.g., frontal view) due to the fact that pose is generally controlled via camera parameters (e.g., rotation angle) or keypoints (e.g., eyes, nose). Specifically, camera parameters-conditional pose control models generate unrealistic images depending on the object, owing to the small size of 3D datasets for training. Also, keypoint-based approaches encounter challenges in acquiring reliable keypoints for various objects (e.g., church) or poses (e.g., back view). To address these limitations, we propose depth-based pose control, as depth maps are easily obtainable from a single depth estimation model regardless of objects and poses, unlike camera parameters and keypoints. However, depth-based pose control confronts issues of shape dependency, as depth maps influence not only the pose but also the shape of the generated images. To tackle this issue, we propose Skip-and-Play (SnP), designed via analysis of the impact of three components of depth-conditional ControlNet on the pose and the shape of the generated images. To be specific, based on the analysis, we selectively skip parts of the components to mitigate shape dependency on the depth map while preserving the pose. Through various experiments, we demonstrate the superiority of SnP over baselines and showcase the ability of SnP to generate images of diverse objects and poses. Remarkably, SnP exhibits the ability to generate images even when the objects in the condition (e.g., a horse) and the prompt (e.g., a hedgehog) differ from each other.

What to Preserve and What to Transfer: Faithful, Identity-Preserving Diffusion-based Hairstyle Transfer

Hairstyle transfer is a challenging task in the image editing field that modifies the hairstyle of a given face image while preserving its other appearance and background features. The existing hairstyle transfer approaches heavily rely on StyleGAN, which is pre-trained on cropped and aligned face images. Hence, they struggle to generalize under challenging conditions such as extreme variations of head poses or focal lengths. To address this issue, we propose a one-stage hairstyle transfer diffusion model, HairFusion, that applies to real-world scenarios. Specifically, we carefully design a hair-agnostic representation as the input of the model, where the original hair information is thoroughly eliminated. Next, we introduce a hair align cross-attention (Align-CA) to accurately align the reference hairstyle with the face image while considering the difference in their face shape. To enhance the preservation of the face image's original features, we leverage adaptive hair blending during the inference, where the output's hair regions are estimated by the cross-attention map in Align-CA and blended with non-hair areas of the face image. Our experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to the existing methods in preserving the integrity of both the transferred hairstyle and the surrounding features. The codes are available at https://github.com/cychungg/HairFusion.

Training Spatial-Frequency Visual Prompts and Probabilistic Clusters for Accurate Black-Box Transfer Learning

Despite the growing prevalence of black-box pre-trained models (PTMs) such as prediction API services, there remains a significant challenge in directly applying general models to real-world scenarios due to the data distribution gap. Considering a data deficiency and constrained computational resource scenario, this paper proposes a novel parameter-efficient transfer learning framework for vision recognition models in the black-box setting. Our framework incorporates two novel training techniques. First, we align the input space (i.e., image) of PTMs to the target data distribution by generating visual prompts of spatial and frequency domain. Along with the novel spatial-frequency hybrid visual prompter, we design a novel training technique based on probabilistic clusters, which can enhance class separation in the output space (i.e., prediction probabilities). In experiments, our model demonstrates superior performance in a few-shot transfer learning setting across extensive visual recognition datasets, surpassing state-of-the-art baselines. Additionally, we show that the proposed method efficiently reduces computational costs for training and inference phases.