Yun Hong

Yan Zhou, Qingkai Fang, Yun Hong et al.

Currently, large language models (LLMs) predominantly focus on the text modality. To enable more natural human-AI interaction, speech LLMs are emerging, but building effective end-to-end speech LLMs remains challenging due to limited data and the difficulty in expanding to more languages. In this paper, we introduce Cross-lingual Speech Language Model (CSLM), an efficient training method for cross-lingual speech LLMs based on discrete speech tokens. We propose a novel alignment strategy that achieves cross-modal and cross-lingual alignment through continual pre-training. By conducting instruction fine-tuning following a speech-text interleaved chain-of-modality generation process, we enhance modal alignment at a finer granularity, thereby improving generation quality and reducing latency. CSLM aligns different modalities and languages simultaneously without the need for massive speech data, thus exhibiting good language scalability. Evaluations on cross-modal tasks, mono-lingual conversational tasks, and cross-lingual conversational tasks demonstrate CSLM's strong cross-modal alignment capabilities and general task abilities. (Code is available at: https://github.com/ictnlp/CSLM)

Jie Jia, Yaofeng Su, Zeyu Bao et al.

Occlusion-aware prediction remains a critical challenge in autonomous driving due to the inherent uncertainty of unobserved regions. Existing approaches either overestimate risk based on reachable states or struggle to predict accurate trajectories under high occlusion uncertainty. To address these limitations, we propose a unified risk map modeling and learning framework for partially observable environments. Our method integrates traffic flow risk and collision risk through spatiotemporal modeling, enabling fine-grained assessment of occlusion-induced hazards. To address the scarcity of scenarios involving occluded interactions, we introduce a diffusion-based scenario generation framework that produces realistic yet adversarial scenarios. We integrate the modeling and learning of a unified risk map into a framework that supports risk-aware planning under partial observability. Experiments on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art occlusion-aware baseline, improving minimum time-to-collision by 0.78 times and average time-to-collision by 1.67 times. The proposed framework offers a comprehensive and practical solution for risk-aware planning in partially observable environments.

Yun Hong, Yan Zhou, Yang Feng

Empathy is essential for fostering natural interactions in spoken dialogue systems, as it enables machines to recognize the emotional tone of human speech and deliver empathetic responses. Recent research has made significant progress in developing empathetic spoken chatbots based on large language models (LLMs). However, several challenges still exist when training such models, including reliance on costly empathetic speech instruction data and a lack of emotional expressiveness in the generated speech. Finetuning LLM with cross-modal empathetic instruction data may also lead to catastrophic forgetting and a degradation of its general capability. To address these challenges, we propose FreezeEmpath, an end-to-end empathetic spoken chatbot trained in a simple and efficient manner. The entire training process relies solely on existing speech instruction data and speech emotion recognition (SER) data, while keeping the LLM's parameters frozen. Experiments demonstrate that FreezeEmpath is able to generate emotionally expressive speech and outperforms other empathetic models in empathetic dialogue, SER, and SpokenQA tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our training strategy.

Jin Han, Yun Hong, Wu-Jun Li

Virtual screening (VS) is a critical step in computer-aided drug discovery, aiming to identify molecules that bind to a specific target receptor like protein. Traditional VS methods, such as docking, are often too time-consuming for screening large-scale molecular databases. Recent advances in deep learning have demonstrated that learning vector representations for both proteins and molecules using contrastive learning can outperform traditional docking methods. However, given that target databases often contain billions of molecules, real-valued vector representations adopted by existing methods can still incur significant memory and time costs in VS. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a hashing-based contrastive learning method, called DrugHash, for VS. DrugHash treats VS as a retrieval task that uses efficient binary hash codes for retrieval. In particular, DrugHash designs a simple yet effective hashing strategy to enable end-to-end learning of binary hash codes for both protein and molecule modalities, which can dramatically reduce the memory and time costs with higher accuracy compared with existing methods. Experimental results show that DrugHash can outperform existing methods to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy, with a memory saving of 32$\times$ and a speed improvement of 3.5$\times$.