Canada

We consider the problem of personalizing audio to maximize user experience. Briefly, we aim to find a filter h*, which applied to any music or speech, will maximize the user’s satisfaction. This is a black-box optimization problem since the user’s satisfaction function is unknown. Substantive work has been done on this topic where the key idea is to play audio samples to the user, each shaped by a different filter hi, and query the user for their satisfaction scores f(hi). A family of “surrogate” functions is then designed to fit these scores and the optimization method gradually refines these functions to arrive at the filter ˆh* that maximizes satisfaction. 

In certain applications, we observe that a second type of querying is possible where users can tell us the individual elements h*[j] of the optimal filter h*. Consider an analogy from cooking where the goal is to cook a recipe that maximizes user satisfaction. A user can be asked to score various cooked recipes (e.g., tofu fried rice) or to score individual ingredients (say, salt, sugar, rice, chicken, etc.). Given a budget of B queries, where a query can be of either type, our goal is to find the recipe that will maximize this user’s satisfaction. 

Our proposal builds on Sparse Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) and shows how a hybrid approach can outperform any one type of querying. Our results are validated through simulations and real world experiments, where volunteers gave feedback on music/speech audio and were able to achieve high satisfaction levels. We believe this idea of hybrid querying opens new problems in black-box optimization and solutions can benefit other applications beyond audio personalization.

AAAI 2024

Sample-Constrained Black Box Optimization for Audio Personalization | VIDEO

hai: user experience and usability

so: non-convex optimization

hai: human-in-the-loop machine learning

ml: dimensionality reduction/feature selection

ml: bayesian learning

cso: constraint learning and acquisition

hai: learning human values and preferences

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

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The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

Shuffled regression is the problem of learning regression models from shuffled data that consists of a set of input features and a set of target outputs where the correspondence between the input and output is unknown. This study proposes a new deep learning method for shuffled regression called Shuffled Deep Regression (SDR). We derive the sparse and stochastic variant of the Expectation-Maximization algorithm for SDR that iteratively updates discrete latent variables and the parameters of neural networks. The effectiveness of the proposal is confirmed by benchmark data experiments.

Shuffled Deep Regression

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformer-based networks have recently enjoyed significant attention for various audio classification and tagging tasks following their wide adoption in the computer vision domain.
Despite the difference in information distribution between audio spectrograms and natural images, there has been limited exploration of effective information retrieval from spectrograms using domain-specific layers tailored for the audio domain. In this paper, we leverage the power of the Multi-Axis Vision Transformer (MaxViT) to create DTF-AT (Decoupled Time-Frequency Audio Transformer) that facilitates interactions across time, frequency, spatial, and channel dimensions.
The proposed DTF-AT architecture is rigorously evaluated across diverse audio and speech classification tasks, consistently establishing new benchmarks for state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Notably, on the challenging AudioSet 2M classification task, our approach demonstrates a substantial improvement of 4.4% when the model is trained from scratch and 3.2% when the model is initialised from ImageNet-1K pretrained weights. In addition, we present comprehensive ablation studies to investigate the impact and efficacy of our proposed approach. The codebase and pretrained weights are available on https://github.com/ta012/DTFAT.git

DTF-AT: Decoupled Time-Frequency Audio Transformer for Event Classification

The imperative task of revising or updating the knowledge stored within large language models arises from two distinct sources: intrinsic errors inherent in the model which should be corrected and outdated knowledge due to external shifts in the real world which should be updated. Prevailing efforts in model editing conflate these two distinct categories of edits arising from distinct reasons and directly modify the original knowledge in models into new knowledge. However, we argue that preserving the model's original knowledge remains pertinent. Specifically, if a model's knowledge becomes outdated due to evolving worldly dynamics, it should retain recollection of the historical knowledge while integrating the newfound knowledge. In this work, we introduce the task of Temporal Knowledge Editing (TKE) and establish a benchmark AToKe (Assessment of TempOral Knowledge Editing) to evaluate current model editing methods. We find that while existing model editing methods are effective at making models remember new knowledge, the edited model catastrophically forgets historical knowledge. To address this gap, we propose a simple and general framework termed Multi-Editing with Time Objective (METO) for enhancing existing editing models, which edits both historical and new knowledge concurrently and optimizes the model's prediction for the time of each fact. Our assessments demonstrate that while AToKe is still difficult, METO maintains the effectiveness of learning new knowledge and meanwhile substantially improves the performance of edited models on utilizing historical knowledge.

History Matters: Temporal Knowledge Editing in Large Language Model

Network Pruning is a promising way to address the huge computing resource demands of the deployment and inference of Large Language Models (LLMs). Retraining-free is important for LLMs' pruning methods. However, almost all of the existing retraining-free pruning approaches for LLMs focus on unstructured pruning, which requires specific hardware support for acceleration. In this paper, we propose a novel retraining-free structured pruning framework for LLMs, named FLAP (FLuctuation-based Adaptive
Structured Pruning). It is hardware-friendly by effectively reducing storage and enhancing inference speed. For effective structured pruning of LLMs, we highlight three critical elements that demand the utmost attention: formulating structured importance metrics, adaptively searching the global compressed model, and implementing compensation mechanisms to mitigate performance loss. First, FLAP determines whether the output feature map is easily recoverable when a column of weight is removed, based on the fluctuation pruning metric. Then it standardizes the importance scores to adaptively determine the global compressed model structure. At last, FLAP adds additional bias terms to recover the output feature maps using the baseline values. We thoroughly evaluate our approach on a variety of language benchmarks. Without any retraining, our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, including LLM-Pruner and the extension of Wanda in structured pruning. The code is released at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/FLAP.

Fluctuation-Based Adaptive Structured Pruning for Large Language Models

We present FPRF, a feed-forward photorealistic style transfer method for large-scale 3D neural radiance fields. FPRF stylizes large-scale 3D scenes with arbitrary, multiple style reference images without additional optimization while preserving multi-view appearance consistency. Prior arts required tedious per-style/-scene optimization and were limited to small-scale 3D scenes. FPRF efficiently stylizes large-scale 3D scenes by introducing a style-decomposed 3D neural radiance field, which inherits AdaIN’s feed-forward stylization machinery, supporting arbitrary style reference images. Furthermore, FPRF supports multi-reference stylization with the semantic correspondence matching and local AdaIN, which adds diverse user control for 3D scene styles. FPRF also preserves multi-view consistency by applying semantic matching and style transfer processes directly onto queried features in 3D space. In experiments, we demonstrate that FPRF achieves favorable photorealistic quality 3D scene stylization for large-scale scenes with diverse reference images.

FPRF: Feed-Forward Photorealistic Style Transfer of Large-Scale 3D Neural Radiance Fields

As a promising approach to deal with distributed data, Federated Learning (FL) achieves major advancements in recent years. FL enables collaborative model training by exploiting the raw data dispersed in multiple edge devices. However, the data is generally non-independent and identically distributed, i.e., statistical heterogeneity, and the edge devices significantly differ in terms of both computation and communication capacity, i.e., system heterogeneity. The statistical heterogeneity leads to severe accuracy degradation while the system heterogeneity significantly prolongs the training process. In order to address the heterogeneity issue, we propose an Asynchronous Staleness-aware Model Update FL framework, i.e., FedASMU, with two novel methods. First, we propose an asynchronous FL system model with a dynamical model aggregation method between updated local models and the global model on the server for superior accuracy and high efficiency. Then, we propose an adaptive local model adjustment method by aggregating the fresh global model with local models on devices to further improve the accuracy. Extensive experimentation with 6 models and 5 public datasets demonstrates that FedASMU significantly outperforms baseline approaches in terms of accuracy (0.60% to 23.90% higher) and efficiency (3.54% to 97.98% faster).

FedASMU: Efficient Asynchronous Federated Learning with Dynamic Staleness-Aware Model Update | VIDEO

Open-World Compositional Zero-shot Learning (OW-CZSL) aims to recognize novel compositions of state and object primitives in images with no priors on the compositional space, which induces a tremendously large output space containing all possible state-object compositions. Existing works either learn the joint compositional state-object embedding or predict simple primitives with separate classifiers. However, the former method heavily relies on external word embedding methods, and the latter ignores the interactions of interdependent primitives, respectively. In this paper, we revisit the primitive prediction approach and propose a novel method, termed Progressive Cross-primitive Compatibility (ProCC), to mimic the human learning process for OW-CZSL tasks. Specifically, the cross-primitive compatibility module \emph{explicitly} learns to model the interactions of state and object features with the trainable memory units, which efficiently acquires cross-primitive visual attention to reason high-feasibility compositions, \emph{without} the aid of external knowledge. Moreover, to alleviate the invalid cross-primitive interactions, especially for partial-supervision conditions (pCZSL), we design a progressive training paradigm to optimize the primitive classifiers conditioned on pre-trained features in an easy-to-hard manner. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms other representative methods on both OW-CZSL and pCZSL settings by large margins$\footnote{https://github.com/huofushuo/procc}$.

ProCC: Progressive Cross-Primitive Compatibility for Open-World Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

Since artificial intelligence has seen tremendous recent successes in many areas, it has sparked great interest in its potential for trustworthy and interpretable risk prediction. However, most models lack causal reasoning and struggle with class imbalance, leading to poor precision and recall. To address this, we propose a Task-Driven Causal Feature Distillation model (TDCFD) to transform original feature values into causal feature attributions for the specific risk prediction task. The causal feature attribution helps describe how much contribution the value of this feature can make to the risk prediction result. After the causal feature distillation, a deep neural network is applied to produce trustworthy prediction results with causal interpretability and high precision/recall. We evaluate the performance of our TDCFD method on several synthetic and real datasets, and the results demonstrate its superiority over the state-of-the-art methods regarding precision, recall, interpretability, and causality.

Task-Driven Causal Feature Distillation: Towards Trustworthy Risk Prediction

Much effort has been devoted to building multi-modal knowledge graphs by visualizing entities on images, but ignoring the multi-modal information of the relation between entities. Hence, in this paper, we aim to construct a new large-scale multi-modal knowledge graph with triplet facts grounded on images that reflect not only entities but also their relations. To achieve this purpose, we propose a novel pipeline method, including triplet fact filtering, image retrieving, entity-based image filtering, relation-based image filtering, and image clustering. In this way, a multi-modal knowledge graph named ImgFact is constructed, which contains 247,732 triplet facts and 3,730,805 images. In experiments, the manual and automatic evaluations prove the reliable quality of our ImgFact. We further use the obtained images to enhance model performance on two tasks. In particular, the model optimized by our ImgFact achieves an impressive 8.38% and 9.87% improvement over the solutions enhanced by an existing multi-modal knowledge graph and VisualChatGPT on F1 of relation classification. We release ImgFact and its instructions at https://github.com/kleinercubs/ImgFact.

Beyond Entities: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph with Triplet Fact Grounding

Incorporating factual knowledge in knowledge graph is regarded as a promising approach for mitigating the hallucination of large language models (LLMs). Existing methods usually only use the user's input to query the knowledge graph, thus failing to address the factual hallucination generated by LLMs during its reasoning process. To address this problem, this paper proposes Knowledge Graph-based Retrofitting (KGR), a new framework that incorporates LLMs with KGs to mitigate factual hallucination during the reasoning process by retrofitting the initial draft responses of LLMs based on the factual knowledge stored in KGs. Specifically, KGR leverages LLMs to extract, select, validate, and retrofit factual statements within the model-generated responses, which enables an autonomous knowledge verifying and refining procedure without any additional manual efforts. Experiments show that KGR can significantly improve the performance of LLMs on factual QA benchmarks especially when involving complex reasoning processes, which demonstrates the necessity and effectiveness of KGR in mitigating hallucination and enhancing the reliability of LLMs.

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