Yun-Nung Chen

Ya-Hsin Chang, Yun-Nung Chen

Spoken language understanding (SLU) is an essential task for machines to understand human speech for better interactions. However, errors from the automatic speech recognizer (ASR) usually hurt the understanding performance. In reality, ASR systems may not be easy to adjust for the target scenarios. Therefore, this paper focuses on learning utterance representations that are robust to ASR errors using a contrastive objective, and further strengthens the generalization ability by combining supervised contrastive learning and self-distillation in model fine-tuning. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Chih-Kai Yang, Yen-Ting Piao, Tzu-Wen Hsu et al.

Knowledge editing offers an efficient way to update model knowledge without full retraining, but prior work has concentrated almost exclusively on textual or visual modalities. We introduce SAKE, the first benchmark specifically designed for editing auditory attribute knowledge in Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs). Unlike factual updates, SAKE targets several abstract auditory attributes, capturing knowledge types that go beyond conventional textual and visual domains. We benchmark seven editing methods on two LALMs along four dimensions: reliability, generality, audio/text locality, and portability. Results highlight challenges such as preserving intra-attribute knowledge unrelated to the edit, generalizing edits to multimodal reasoning, and maintaining edits under sequential updates. SAKE provides a principled framework to study how knowledge editing extends to the auditory modalities, opening new directions for maintaining and adapting LALMs in more diverse real-world scenarios.

Yen-Shan Chen, Sian-Yao Huang, Cheng-Lin Yang et al.

Existing data poisoning attacks on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems scale poorly because they require costly optimization of poisoned documents for each target phrase. We introduce Eyes-on-Me, a modular attack that decomposes an adversarial document into reusable Attention Attractors and Focus Regions. Attractors are optimized to direct attention to the Focus Region. Attackers can then insert semantic baits for the retriever or malicious instructions for the generator, adapting to new targets at near zero cost. This is achieved by steering a small subset of attention heads that we empirically identify as strongly correlated with attack success. Across 18 end-to-end RAG settings (3 datasets $\times$ 2 retrievers $\times$ 3 generators), Eyes-on-Me raises average attack success rates from 21.9 to 57.8 (+35.9 points, 2.6$\times$ over prior work). A single optimized attractor transfers to unseen black box retrievers and generators without retraining. Our findings establish a scalable paradigm for RAG data poisoning and show that modular, reusable components pose a practical threat to modern AI systems. They also reveal a strong link between attention concentration and model outputs, informing interpretability research.