ELITE: Enhanced Language-Image Toxicity Evaluation for Safety

Current Vision Language Models (VLMs) remain vulnerable to malicious prompts that induce harmful outputs. Existing safety benchmarks for VLMs primarily rely on automated evaluation methods, but these methods struggle to detect implicit harmful content or produce inaccurate evaluations. Therefore, we found that existing benchmarks have low levels of harmfulness, ambiguous data, and limited diversity in image-text pair combinations. To address these issues, we propose the ELITE benchmark, a high-quality safety evaluation benchmark for VLMs, underpinned by our enhanced evaluation method, the ELITE evaluator. The ELITE evaluator explicitly incorporates a toxicity score to accurately assess harmfulness in multimodal contexts, where VLMs often provide specific, convincing, but unharmful descriptions of images. We filter out ambiguous and low-quality image-text pairs from existing benchmarks using the ELITE evaluator and generate diverse combinations of safe and unsafe image-text pairs. Our experiments demonstrate that the ELITE evaluator achieves superior alignment with human evaluations compared to prior automated methods, and the ELITE benchmark offers enhanced benchmark quality and diversity. By introducing ELITE, we pave the way for safer, more robust VLMs, contributing essential tools for evaluating and mitigating safety risks in real-world applications.

Maximizing the Position Embedding for Vision Transformers with Global Average Pooling

In vision transformers, position embedding (PE) plays a crucial role in capturing the order of tokens. However, in vision transformer structures, there is a limitation in the expressiveness of PE due to the structure where position embedding is simply added to the token embedding. A layer-wise method that delivers PE to each layer and applies independent Layer Normalizations for token embedding and PE has been adopted to overcome this limitation. In this paper, we identify the conflicting result that occurs in a layer-wise structure when using the global average pooling (GAP) method instead of the class token. To overcome this problem, we propose MPVG, which maximizes the effectiveness of PE in a layer-wise structure with GAP. Specifically, we identify that PE counterbalances token embedding values at each layer in a layer-wise structure. Furthermore, we recognize that the counterbalancing role of PE is insufficient in the layer-wise structure, and we address this by maximizing the effectiveness of PE through MPVG. Through experiments, we demonstrate that PE performs a counterbalancing role and that maintaining this counterbalancing directionality significantly impacts vision transformers. As a result, the experimental results show that MPVG outperforms existing methods across vision transformers on various tasks.

DyPCL: Dynamic Phoneme-level Contrastive Learning for Dysarthric Speech Recognition

Dysarthric speech recognition often suffers from performance degradation due to the intrinsic diversity of dysarthric severity and extrinsic disparity from normal speech. To bridge these gaps, we propose a Dynamic Phoneme-level Contrastive Learning (DyPCL) method, which leads to obtaining invariant representations across diverse speakers. We decompose the speech utterance into phoneme segments for phoneme-level contrastive learning, leveraging dynamic connectionist temporal classification alignment. Unlike prior studies focusing on utterance-level embeddings, our granular learning allows discrimination of subtle parts of speech. In addition, we introduce dynamic curriculum learning, which progressively transitions from easy negative samples to difficult-to-distinguishable negative samples based on phonetic similarity of phoneme. Our approach to training by difficulty levels alleviates the inherent variability of speakers, better identifying challenging speeches. Evaluated on the UASpeech dataset, DyPCL outperforms baseline models, achieving an average 22.10\% relative reduction in word error rate (WER) across the overall dysarthria group.

FRIDAY: Mitigating Unintentional Facial Identity in Deepfake Detectors Guided by Facial Recognizers

Previous Deepfake detection methods perform well within their training domains, but their effectiveness diminishes significantly with new synthesis techniques. Recent studies have revealed that detection models often create decision boundaries based on facial identity rather than synthetic artifacts, resulting in poor performance on cross-domain datasets. To address this limitation, we propose Facial Recognition Identity Attenuation (FRIDAY), a novel training method that mitigates facial identity influence using a face recognizer. Specifically, we first train a face recognizer using the same backbone as the Deepfake detector. The recognizer is then frozen and employed during the detector's training to reduce facial identity information. This is achieved by feeding input images into both the recognizer and the detector, and minimizing the similarity of their feature embeddings through our Facial Identity Attenuating loss. This process encourages the detector to generate embeddings distinct from the recognizer, effectively reducing the impact of facial identity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances detection performance on both in-domain and cross-domain datasets.

SAFIRE: Segment Any Forged Image Region

Most techniques approach the problem of image forgery localization as a binary segmentation task, training neural networks to label original areas as 0 and forged areas as 1. In contrast, we tackle this issue from a more fundamental perspective by partitioning images according to their originating sources. To this end, we propose Segment Any Forged Image Region (SAFIRE), which solves forgery localization using point prompting. Each point on an image is used to segment the source region containing itself. This allows us to partition images into multiple source regions, a capability achieved for the first time. Additionally, rather than memorizing certain forgery traces, SAFIRE naturally focuses on uniform characteristics within each source region. This approach leads to more stable and effective learning, achieving superior performance in both the new task and the traditional binary forgery localization.

Game-Theoretic Joint Incentive and Cut Layer Selection Mechanism in Split Federated Learning

To alleviate the training burden in federated learning while enhancing convergence speed, Split Federated Learning (SFL) has emerged as a promising approach by combining the advantages of federated and split learning. However, recent studies have largely overlooked competitive situations. In this framework, the SFL model owner can choose the cut layer to balance the training load between the server and clients, ensuring the necessary level of privacy for the clients. Additionally, the SFL model owner sets incentives to encourage client participation in the SFL process. The optimization strategies employed by the SFL model owner influence clients' decisions regarding the amount of data they contribute, taking into account the shared incentives over clients and anticipated energy consumption during SFL. To address this framework, we model the problem using a hierarchical decision-making approach, formulated as a single-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game. We demonstrate the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium among clients and analyze the Stackelberg equilibrium by examining the leader's game. Furthermore, we discuss privacy concerns related to differential privacy and the criteria for selecting the minimum required cut layer. Our findings show that the Stackelberg equilibrium solution maximizes the utility for both the clients and the SFL model owner.

Keyword-Aware ASR Error Augmentation for Robust Dialogue State Tracking

Dialogue State Tracking (DST) is a key part of task-oriented dialogue systems, identifying important information in conversations. However, its accuracy drops significantly in spoken dialogue environments due to named entity errors from Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. We introduce a simple yet effective data augmentation method that targets those entities to improve the robustness of DST model. Our novel method can control the placement of errors using keyword-highlighted prompts while introducing phonetically similar errors. As a result, our method generated sufficient error patterns on keywords, leading to improved accuracy in noised and low-accuracy ASR environments.

Enhancing Dialogue Speech Recognition with Robust Contextual Awareness via Noise Representation Learning

Recent dialogue systems rely on turn-based spoken interactions, requiring accurate Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Errors in ASR can significantly impact downstream dialogue tasks. To address this, using dialogue context from user and agent interactions for transcribing subsequent utterances has been proposed. This method incorporates the transcription of the user's speech and the agent's response as model input, using the accumulated context generated by each turn. However, this context is susceptible to ASR errors because it is generated by the ASR model in an auto-regressive fashion. Such noisy context can further degrade the benefits of context input, resulting in suboptimal ASR performance. In this paper, we introduce Context Noise Representation Learning (CNRL) to enhance robustness against noisy context, ultimately improving dialogue speech recognition accuracy. To maximize the advantage of context awareness, our approach includes decoder pre-training using text-based dialogue data and noise representation learning for a context encoder. Based on the evaluation of speech dialogues, our method shows superior results compared to baselines. Furthermore, the strength of our approach is highlighted in noisy environments where user speech is barely audible due to real-world noise, relying on contextual information to transcribe the input accurately.

An Investigation Into Explainable Audio Hate Speech Detection

Research on hate speech has predominantly revolved around detection and interpretation from textual inputs, leaving verbal content largely unexplored. While there has been limited exploration into hate speech detection within verbal acoustic speech inputs, the aspect of interpretability has been overlooked. Therefore, we introduce a new task of explainable audio hate speech detection. Specifically, we aim to identify the precise time intervals, referred to as audio frame-level rationales, which serve as evidence for hate speech classification. Towards this end, we propose two different approaches: cascading and End-to-End (E2E). The cascading approach initially converts audio to transcripts, identifies hate speech within these transcripts, and subsequently locates the corresponding audio time frames. Conversely, the E2E approach processes audio utterances directly, which allows it to pinpoint hate speech within specific time frames. Additionally, due to the lack of explainable audio hate speech datasets that include audio frame-level rationales, we curated a synthetic audio dataset to train our models. We further validated these models on actual human speech utterances and found that the E2E approach outperforms the cascading method in terms of the audio frame Intersection over Union (IoU) metric. Furthermore, we observed that including frame-level rationales significantly enhances hate speech detection accuracy for the E2E approach. \textbf{Disclaimer} The reader may encounter content of an offensive or hateful nature. However, given the nature of the work, this cannot be avoided.

Improving Hyperbolic Representations via Gromov-Wasserstein Regularization

Hyperbolic representations have shown remarkable efficacy in modeling inherent hierarchies and complexities within data structures. Hyperbolic neural networks have been commonly applied for learning such representations from data, but they often fall short in preserving the geometric structures of the original feature spaces. In response to this challenge, our work applies the Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) distance as a novel regularization mechanism within hyperbolic neural networks. The GW distance quantifies how well the original data structure is maintained after embedding the data in a hyperbolic space. Specifically, we explicitly treat the layers of the hyperbolic neural networks as a transport map and calculate the GW distance accordingly. We validate that the GW distance computed based on a training set well approximates the GW distance of the underlying data distribution. Our approach demonstrates consistent enhancements over current state-of-the-art methods across various tasks, including few-shot image classification, as well as semi-supervised graph link prediction and node classification.