SpikeLM: Towards General Spike-Driven Language Modeling via Elastic Bi-Spiking Mechanisms

Towards energy-efficient artificial intelligence similar to the human brain, the bio-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs) have advantages of biological plausibility, event-driven sparsity, and binary activation. Recently, large-scale language models exhibit promising generalization capability, making it a valuable issue to explore more general spike-driven models. However, the binary spikes in existing SNNs fail to encode adequate semantic information, placing technological challenges for generalization. This work proposes the first fully spiking mechanism for general language tasks, including both discriminative and generative ones. Different from previous spikes with {0,1} levels, we propose a more general spike formulation with bi-directional, elastic amplitude, and elastic frequency encoding, while still maintaining the addition nature of SNNs. In a single time step, the spike is enhanced by direction and amplitude information; in spike frequency, a strategy to control spike firing rate is well designed. We plug this elastic bi-spiking mechanism in language modeling, named SpikeLM. It is the first time to handle general language tasks with fully spike-driven models, which achieve much higher accuracy than previously possible. SpikeLM also greatly bridges the performance gap between SNNs and ANNs in language modeling. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xingrun-Xing/SpikeLM.

A Knowledge-enhanced Two-stage Generative Framework for Medical Dialogue Information Extraction

This paper focuses on term-status pair extraction from medical dialogues (MD-TSPE), which is essential in diagnosis dialogue systems and the automatic scribe of electronic medical records (EMRs). In the past few years, works on MD-TSPE have attracted increasing research attention, especially after the remarkable progress made by generative methods. However, these generative methods output a whole sequence consisting of term-status pairs in one stage and ignore integrating prior knowledge, which demands a deeper understanding to model the relationship between terms and infer the status of each term. This paper presents a knowledge-enhanced two-stage generative framework (KTGF) to address the above challenges. Using task-specific prompts, we employ a single model to complete the MD-TSPE through two phases in a unified generative form: we generate all terms the first and then generate the status of each generated term. In this way, the relationship between terms can be learned more effectively from the sequence containing only terms in the first phase, and our designed knowledge-enhanced prompt in the second phase can leverage the category and status candidates of the generated term for status generation. Furthermore, our proposed special status ``not mentioned" makes more terms available and enriches the training data in the second phase, which is critical in the low-resource setting. The experiments on the Chunyu and CMDD datasets show that the proposed method achieves superior results compared to the state-of-the-art models in the full training and low-resource settings.

ViLaS: Integrating Vision and Language into Automatic Speech Recognition

Employing additional multimodal information to improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance has been proven effective in previous works. However, many of these works focus only on the utilization of visual cues from human lip motion. In fact, context-dependent visual and linguistic cues can also be used to improve ASR performance in many scenarios. In this paper, we first propose a multimodal ASR model (ViLaS) that can simultaneously or separately integrate visual and linguistic cues to help recognize the input speech, and introduce a training strategy that can improve performance in modal-incomplete test scenarios. Then, we create a multimodal ASR dataset (VSDial) with visual and linguistic cues to explore the effects of integrating vision and language. Finally, we report empirical results on the public Flickr8K and self-constructed VSDial datasets, investigate cross-modal fusion schemes, and analyze fine-grained cross-modal alignment on VSDial.

Mixture of personality improved Spiking actor network for efficient multi-agent cooperation

Adaptive human-agent and agent-agent cooperation are becoming more and more critical in the research area of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where remarked progress has been made with the help of deep neural networks. However, many established algorithms can only perform well during the learning paradigm but exhibit poor generalization during cooperation with other unseen partners. The personality theory in cognitive psychology describes that humans can well handle the above cooperation challenge by predicting others' personalities first and then their complex actions. Inspired by this two-step psychology theory, we propose a biologically plausible mixture of personality (MoP) improved spiking actor network (SAN), whereby a determinantal point process is used to simulate the complex formation and integration of different types of personality in MoP, and dynamic and spiking neurons are incorporated into the SAN for the efficient reinforcement learning. The benchmark Overcooked task, containing a strong requirement for cooperative cooking, is selected to test the proposed MoP-SAN. The experimental results show that the MoP-SAN can achieve both high performances during not only the learning paradigm but also the generalization test (i.e., cooperation with other unseen agents) paradigm where most counterpart deep actor networks failed. Necessary ablation experiments and visualization analyses were conducted to explain why MoP and SAN are effective in multi-agent reinforcement learning scenarios while DNN performs poorly in the generalization test.

Matching-based Term Semantics Pre-training for Spoken Patient Query Understanding

Medical Slot Filling (MSF) task aims to convert medical queries into structured information, playing an essential role in diagnosis dialogue systems. However, the lack of sufficient term semantics learning makes existing approaches hard to capture semantically identical but colloquial expressions of terms in medical conversations. In this work, we formalize MSF into a matching problem and propose a Term Semantics Pre-trained Matching Network (TSPMN) that takes both terms and queries as input to model their semantic interaction. To learn term semantics better, we further design two self-supervised objectives, including Contrastive Term Discrimination (CTD) and Matching-based Mask Term Modeling (MMTM). CTD determines whether it is the masked term in the dialogue for each given term, while MMTM directly predicts the masked ones. Experimental results on two Chinese benchmarks show that TSPMN outperforms strong baselines, especially in few-shot settings.