Mengyue Wu

Jiahao Mei, Heinrich Dinkel, Yadong Niu et al.

Audio generation has long been fragmented, with speech, music, and sound effects produced by domain-specific models that fail to jointly generate coherent audio scenes from a single description. The key obstacles are insufficient fine-grained supervision for real-world mixed audio and limited acoustic representations for modeling concurrent audio components. We present Dasheng AudioGen, a unified framework for generating general mixed-audio scenes from text. Dasheng AudioGen introduces structured multi-view captions, which explicitly decouple complex acoustic scenes into complementary description views, thereby enabling fine-grained control over audio layers. Furthermore, we employ a high-dimensional unified semantic-acoustic representation as the shared latent space. It injects semantic priors that facilitate cross-modal training convergence, while its high-dimensional feature space provides sufficient capacity to disentangle and fuse concurrent audio components effectively. With these designs, a simple flow-matching DiT achieves high-quality end-to-end audio scene generation. We also establish a comprehensive evaluation pipeline for audio scene generation. Experiments demonstrate that Dasheng AudioGen achieves performance approaching real-world recordings in mixed-audio categories, while remaining competitive with specialized models in single-type generation tasks. Demos are available at https://nieeim.github.io/Dasheng-AudioGen-Web/.

Siyu Lou, Xuenan Xu, Mengyue Wu et al.

Audio-text retrieval based on natural language descriptions is a challenging task. It involves learning cross-modality alignments between long sequences under inadequate data conditions. In this work, we investigate several audio features as well as sequence aggregation methods for better audio-text alignment. Moreover, through a qualitative analysis we observe that semantic mapping is more important than temporal relations in contextual retrieval. Using pre-trained audio features and a descriptor-based aggregation method, we build our contextual audio-text retrieval system. Specifically, we utilize PANNs features pre-trained on a large sound event dataset and NetRVLAD pooling, which directly works with averaged descriptors. Experiments are conducted on the AudioCaps and CLOTHO datasets, and results are compared with the previous state-of-the-art system. With our proposed system, a significant improvement has been achieved on bidirectional audio-text retrieval, on all metrics including recall, median and mean rank.

Wen Wu, Mengyue Wu, Kai Yu

Automatic depression detection has attracted increasing amount of attention but remains a challenging task. Psychological research suggests that depressive mood is closely related with emotion expression and perception, which motivates the investigation of whether knowledge of emotion recognition can be transferred for depression detection. This paper uses pretrained features extracted from the emotion recognition model for depression detection, further fuses emotion modality with audio and text to form multimodal depression detection. The proposed emotion transfer improves depression detection performance on DAIC-WOZ as well as increases the training stability. The analysis of how the emotion expressed by depressed individuals is further perceived provides clues for further understanding of the relationship between depression and emotion.

Zhi Chen, Yuncong Liu, Lu Chen et al.

This paper presents an ontology-aware pretrained language model (OPAL) for end-to-end task-oriented dialogue (TOD). Unlike chit-chat dialogue models, task-oriented dialogue models fulfill at least two task-specific modules: dialogue state tracker (DST) and response generator (RG). The dialogue state consists of the domain-slot-value triples, which are regarded as the user's constraints to search the domain-related databases. The large-scale task-oriented dialogue data with the annotated structured dialogue state usually are inaccessible. It prevents the development of the pretrained language model for the task-oriented dialogue. We propose a simple yet effective pretraining method to alleviate this problem, which consists of two pretraining phases. The first phase is to pretrain on large-scale contextual text data, where the structured information of the text is extracted by the information extracting tool. To bridge the gap between the pretraining method and downstream tasks, we design two pretraining tasks: ontology-like triple recovery and next-text generation, which simulates the DST and RG, respectively. The second phase is to fine-tune the pretrained model on the TOD data. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieves an exciting boost and get competitive performance even without any TOD data on CamRest676 and MultiWOZ benchmarks.

Luoyi Sun, Xuenan Xu, Mengyue Wu et al.

Recently, the AI community has made significant strides in developing powerful foundation models, driven by large-scale multimodal datasets. However, for audio representation learning, existing datasets suffer from limitations in the following aspects: insufficient volume, simplistic content, and arduous collection procedures. To establish an audio dataset with high-quality captions, we propose an innovative, automatic approach leveraging multimodal inputs, such as video frames, audio streams. Specifically, we construct a large-scale, high-quality, audio-language dataset, named as Auto-ACD, comprising over 1.5M audio-text pairs. We exploit a series of pre-trained models or APIs, to determine audio-visual synchronisation, generate image captions, object detection, or audio tags for specific videos. Subsequently, we employ LLM to paraphrase a congruent caption for each audio, guided by the extracted multi-modality clues. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed dataset, we train widely used models on our dataset and show performance improvement on various downstream tasks, for example, audio-language retrieval, audio captioning, zero-shot classification. In addition, we establish a novel benchmark with environmental information and provide a benchmark for audio-text tasks.

Binwei Yao, Chao Shi, Likai Zou et al.

In a depression-diagnosis-directed clinical session, doctors initiate a conversation with ample emotional support that guides the patients to expose their symptoms based on clinical diagnosis criteria. Such a dialogue system is distinguished from existing single-purpose human-machine dialog systems, as it combines task-oriented and chit-chats with uniqueness in dialogue topics and procedures. However, due to the social stigma associated with mental illness, the dialogue data related to depression consultation and diagnosis are rarely disclosed. Based on clinical depression diagnostic criteria ICD-11 and DSM-5, we designed a 3-phase procedure to construct D$^4$: a Chinese Dialogue Dataset for Depression-Diagnosis-Oriented Chat, which simulates the dialogue between doctors and patients during the diagnosis of depression, including diagnosis results and symptom summary given by professional psychiatrists for each conversation. Upon the newly-constructed dataset, four tasks mirroring the depression diagnosis process are established: response generation, topic prediction, dialog summary, and severity classification of depressive episode and suicide risk. Multi-scale evaluation results demonstrate that a more empathy-driven and diagnostic-accurate consultation dialogue system trained on our dataset can be achieved compared to rule-based bots.

Zhi Chen, Jijia Bao, Lu Chen et al.

Building a universal conversational agent has been a long-standing goal of the dialogue research community. Most previous works only focus on a small set of dialogue tasks. In this work, we aim to build a unified dialogue foundation model (DFM) which can be used to solve massive diverse dialogue tasks. To achieve this goal, a large-scale well-annotated dialogue dataset with rich task diversity (DialogZoo) is collected. We introduce a framework to unify all dialogue tasks and propose novel auxiliary self-supervised tasks to achieve stable training of DFM on the highly diverse large scale DialogZoo corpus. Experiments show that, compared with models of the same size, DFM can achieve state-of-the-art or competitive performance on very rich cross-domain downstream dialogue tasks. This demonstrates that DFM largely extends the ability of unified dialogue pre-trained model.

Zhiling Zhang, Siyuan Chen, Mengyue Wu et al.

Mental disease detection (MDD) from social media has suffered from poor generalizability and interpretability, due to lack of symptom modeling. This paper introduces PsySym, the first annotated symptom identification corpus of multiple psychiatric disorders, to facilitate further research progress. PsySym is annotated according to a knowledge graph of the 38 symptom classes related to 7 mental diseases complied from established clinical manuals and scales, and a novel annotation framework for diversity and quality. Experiments show that symptom-assisted MDD enabled by PsySym can outperform strong pure-text baselines. We also exhibit the convincing MDD explanations provided by symptom predictions with case studies, and point to their further potential applications.

Zhiling Zhang, Siyuan Chen, Mengyue Wu et al.

Depression is a prominent health challenge to the world, and early risk detection (ERD) of depression from online posts can be a promising technique for combating the threat. Early depression detection faces the challenge of efficiently tackling streaming data, balancing the tradeoff between timeliness, accuracy and explainability. To tackle these challenges, we propose a psychiatric scale guided risky post screening method that can capture risky posts related to the dimensions defined in clinical depression scales, and providing interpretable diagnostic basis. A Hierarchical Attentional Network equipped with BERT (HAN-BERT) is proposed to further advance explainable predictions. For ERD, we propose an online algorithm based on an evolving queue of risky posts that can significantly reduce the number of model inferences to boost efficiency. Experiments show that our method outperforms the competitive feature-based and neural models under conventional depression detection settings, and achieves simultaneous improvement in both efficacy and efficiency for ERD.

Xiujie Song, Qi Jia, Shota Watanabe et al.

An image can convey a compelling story by presenting rich, logically connected visual clues. These connections form Chains-of-Reasoning (CoRs) within the image, enabling viewers to infer events, causal relationships, and other information, thereby understanding the underlying story. In this paper, we focus on these semantically rich images and define them as Storytelling Images. Such images have diverse applications beyond illustration creation and cognitive screening, leveraging their ability to convey multi-layered information visually and inspire active interpretation. However, due to their complex semantic nature, Storytelling Images are inherently challenging to create, and thus remain relatively scarce. To address this challenge, we introduce the Storytelling Image Generation task, which explores how generative AI models can be leveraged to create such images. Specifically, we propose a two-stage pipeline, StorytellingPainter, which combines the creative reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the visual synthesis capabilities of Text-to-Image (T2I) models to generate Storytelling Images. Alongside this pipeline, we develop a dedicated evaluation framework comprising three main evaluators: a Semantic Complexity Evaluator, a KNN-based Diversity Evaluator and a Story-Image Alignment Evaluator. Given the critical role of story generation in the Storytelling Image Generation task and the performance disparity between open-source and proprietary LLMs, we further explore tailored training strategies to reduce this gap, resulting in a series of lightweight yet effective models named Mini-Storytellers. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/xiujiesong/StorytellingImageGeneration.

Hanxue Zhang, Zeyu Xie, Xuenan Xu et al.

Automated audio captioning (AAC) is an important cross-modality translation task, aiming at generating descriptions for audio clips. However, captions generated by previous AAC models have faced ``false-repetition'' errors due to the training objective. In such scenarios, we propose a new task of AAC error correction and hope to reduce such errors by post-processing AAC outputs. To tackle this problem, we use observation-based rules to corrupt captions without errors, for pseudo grammatically-erroneous sentence generation. One pair of corrupted and clean sentences can thus be used for training. We train a neural network-based model on the synthetic error dataset and apply the model to correct real errors in AAC outputs. Results on two benchmark datasets indicate that our approach significantly improves fluency while maintaining semantic information.

Yufei Wang, Chunhao Zhang, Jieyi Huang et al.

Deciphering the semantics of animal language has been a grand challenge. This study presents a data-driven investigation into the semantics of dog vocalizations via correlating different sound types with consistent semantics. We first present a new dataset of Shiba Inu sounds, along with contextual information such as location and activity, collected from YouTube with a well-constructed pipeline. The framework is also applicable to other animal species. Based on the analysis of conditioned probability between dog vocalizations and corresponding location and activity, we discover supporting evidence for previous heuristic research on the semantic meaning of various dog sounds. For instance, growls can signify interactions. Furthermore, our study yields new insights that existing word types can be subdivided into finer-grained subtypes and minimal semantic unit for Shiba Inu is word-related. For example, whimper can be subdivided into two types, attention-seeking and discomfort.

Minghao Lv, Lu Chen, Enchang Zhang et al.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into emotionally sensitive domains, the structural integrity of their emotional intelligence (EI) becomes a critical frontier for safety and alignment. Current benchmarks often conflate superficial politeness with deep affective reasoning, failing to distinguish between perceptual accuracy and interactive efficacy. Here, we introduce FACET (Functional Affective Competence and Empathy Test), a psychometrically grounded framework comprising 480 expert-crafted items. Unlike previous metrics, FACET is theoretically anchored in the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso four-branch ability model, operationalizing EI through perception, facilitation, understanding, and management of emotions. Through an evaluation of nine frontier models (including GPT-5, Claude-Sonnet-4), we demonstrate that emotional intelligence is not a monolithic capability but is fragmented across cognitive and interactive dimensions. While frontier models demonstrate robust proficiency in objective emotion recognition and social reasoning, this does not consistently translate to interactive success. We categorize these discrepancies into three distinct performance profiles: cognitive-dominant, interactive-dominant, and context-dependent. These typologies indicate that emotional skills do not scale uniformly with general intelligence or model size; rather, they are shaped by specific alignment paradigms. Notably, we identify hidden emotion recognition as a universal performance bottleneck across all architectures. Our results suggest that current RLHF processes may optimize for "stochastic empathy", a statistical mimicry of emotional syntax, at the expense of integrated affective reasoning. These findings challenge the assumption of linear emotional scaling and provide a rigorous roadmap for developing socially aware agents capable of genuine clinical resonance.

Haohe Liu, Xuenan Xu, Yi Yuan et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced audio processing through audio codecs that convert audio into discrete tokens, enabling the application of language modelling techniques to audio data. However, traditional codecs often operate at high bitrates or within narrow domains such as speech and lack the semantic clues required for efficient language modelling. Addressing these challenges, we introduce SemantiCodec, a novel codec designed to compress audio into fewer than a hundred tokens per second across diverse audio types, including speech, general sound, and music, without compromising quality. SemantiCodec features a dual-encoder architecture: a semantic encoder using a self-supervised pre-trained Audio Masked Autoencoder (AudioMAE), discretized using k-means clustering on extensive audio data, and an acoustic encoder to capture the remaining details. The semantic and acoustic encoder outputs are used to reconstruct audio via a diffusion-model-based decoder. SemantiCodec is presented in three variants with token rates of 25, 50, and 100 per second, supporting a range of ultra-low bit rates between 0.31 kbps and 1.40 kbps. Experimental results demonstrate that SemantiCodec significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art Descript codec on reconstruction quality. Our results also suggest that SemantiCodec contains significantly richer semantic information than all evaluated state-of-the-art audio codecs, even at significantly lower bitrates. Our code and demos are available at https://haoheliu.github.io/SemantiCodec/.

Yuning Wu, Jiahao Mei, Ming Yan et al.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced text generation capabilities, yet evaluating their performance in generative writing remains a challenge. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on generic text generation or limited in writing tasks, failing to capture the diverse requirements of high-quality written contents across various domains. To bridge this gap, we present WritingBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across 6 core writing domains and 100 subdomains, encompassing creative, persuasive, informative, and technical writing. We further propose a query-dependent evaluation framework that empowers LLMs to dynamically generate instance-specific assessment criteria. This framework is complemented by a fine-tuned critic model for criteria-aware scoring, enabling evaluations in style, format and length. The framework's validity is further demonstrated by its data curation capability, which enables 7B-parameter models to approach state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. We open-source the benchmark, along with evaluation tools and modular framework components, to advance the development of LLMs in writing.

Kunyao Lan, Bingrui Jin, Zichen Zhu et al.

Mental health issues, particularly depressive disorders, present significant challenges in contemporary society, necessitating the development of effective automated diagnostic methods. This paper introduces the Agent Mental Clinic (AMC), a self-improving conversational agent system designed to enhance depression diagnosis through simulated dialogues between patient and psychiatrist agents. To enhance the dialogue quality and diagnosis accuracy, we design a psychiatrist agent consisting of a tertiary memory structure, a dialogue control and reflect plugin that acts as ``supervisor'' and a memory sampling module, fully leveraging the skills reflected by the psychiatrist agent, achieving great accuracy on depression risk and suicide risk diagnosis via conversation. Experiment results on datasets collected in real-life scenarios demonstrate that the system, simulating the procedure of training psychiatrists, can be a promising optimization method for aligning LLMs with real-life distribution in specific domains without modifying the weights of LLMs, even when only a few representative labeled cases are available.

Jieyi Huang, Chunhao Zhang, Yufei Wang et al.

How hosts language influence their pets' vocalization is an interesting yet underexplored problem. This paper presents a preliminary investigation into the possible correlation between domestic dog vocal expressions and their human host's language environment. We first present a new dataset of Shiba Inu dog vocals from YouTube, which provides 7500 clean sound clips, including their contextual information of these vocals and their owner's speech clips with a carefully-designed data processing pipeline. The contextual information includes the scene category in which the vocal was recorded, the dog's location and activity. With a classification task and prominent factor analysis, we discover significant acoustic differences in the dog vocals from the two language environments. We further identify some acoustic features from dog vocalizations that are potentially correlated to their host language patterns.

Haoan Jin, Siyuan Chen, Dilawaier Dilixiati et al.

Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) in the mental health domain poses distinct challenged from other domains, given the subtle and highly subjective nature of symptoms that exhibit significant variability among individuals. This paper presents PsyEval, the first comprehensive suite of mental health-related tasks for evaluating LLMs. PsyEval encompasses five sub-tasks that evaluate three critical dimensions of mental health. This comprehensive framework is designed to thoroughly assess the unique challenges and intricacies of mental health-related tasks, making PsyEval a highly specialized and valuable tool for evaluating LLM performance in this domain. We evaluate twelve advanced LLMs using PsyEval. Experiment results not only demonstrate significant room for improvement in current LLMs concerning mental health but also unveil potential directions for future model optimization.

Zihao Zheng, Wen Wu, Chao Zhang et al.

Current Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems typically use separate models for speech-prompted and text-prompted timbre control. While unifying both control signals into a single model is desirable, the challenge of cross-modal alignment often results in overly complex architectures and training objective. To address this challenge, we propose CAST-TTS, a simple yet effective framework for unified timbre control. Features are extracted from speech prompts and text prompts using pre-trained encoders. The multi-stage training strategy efficiently aligns the speech and projected text representations within a shared embedding space. A single cross-attention mechanism then allows the model to use either of these representations to control the timbre. Extensive experiments validate that the unified cross-attention mechanism is critical for achieving high-quality synthesis. CAST-TTS achieves performance comparable to specialized single-input models while operating within a unified architecture. The demo page can be accessed at https://HiRookie9.github.io/CAST-TTS-Page.

Siyuan Chen, Cong Ming, Zhiling Zhang et al.

In the realm of mental health support chatbots, it is vital to show empathy and encourage self-exploration to provide tailored solutions. However, current approaches tend to provide general insights or solutions without fully understanding the help-seeker's situation. Therefore, we propose PsyMix, a chatbot that integrates the analyses of the seeker's state from the perspective of a psychotherapy approach (Chain-of-Psychotherapies, CoP) before generating the response, and learns to incorporate the strength of various psychotherapies by fine-tuning on a mixture of CoPs. Through comprehensive evaluation, we found that PsyMix can outperform the ChatGPT baseline, and demonstrate a comparable level of empathy in its responses to that of human counselors.

Xuenan Xu, Jiahao Mei, Chenliang Li et al.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) has accelerated AI-native applications, such as AI-based storybooks that automate engaging story production for children. However, challenges remain in improving story attractiveness, enriching storytelling expressiveness, and developing open-source evaluation benchmarks and frameworks. Therefore, we propose and opensource MM-StoryAgent, which creates immersive narrated video storybooks with refined plots, role-consistent images, and multi-channel audio. MM-StoryAgent designs a multi-agent framework that employs LLMs and diverse expert tools (generative models and APIs) across several modalities to produce expressive storytelling videos. The framework enhances story attractiveness through a multi-stage writing pipeline. In addition, it improves the immersive storytelling experience by integrating sound effects with visual, music and narrative assets. MM-StoryAgent offers a flexible, open-source platform for further development, where generative modules can be substituted. Both objective and subjective evaluation regarding textual story quality and alignment between modalities validate the effectiveness of our proposed MM-StoryAgent system. The demo and source code are available.

Yuechun Yu, Han Ying, Haoan Jin et al.

The reliable evaluation of large language models (LLMs) in medical applications remains an open challenge, particularly in capturing the complexity of multi-turn doctor-patient interactions that unfold in real clinical environments. Existing evaluation methods typically rely on post hoc review of full conversation transcripts, thereby neglecting the dynamic, context-sensitive nature of medical dialogues and the evolving informational needs of patients. In this work, we present MedKGEval, a novel multi-turn evaluation framework for clinical LLMs grounded in structured medical knowledge. Our approach introduces three key contributions: (1) a knowledge graph-driven patient simulation mechanism, where a dedicated control module retrieves relevant medical facts from a curated knowledge graph, thereby endowing the patient agent with human-like and realistic conversational behavior. This knowledge graph is constructed by integrating open-source resources with additional triples extracted from expert-annotated datasets; (2) an in-situ, turn-level evaluation framework, where each model response is assessed by a Judge Agent for clinical appropriateness, factual correctness, and safety as the dialogue progresses using a suite of fine-grained, task-specific metrics; (3) a comprehensive multi-turn benchmark of eight state-of-the-art LLMs, demonstrating MedKGEval's ability to identify subtle behavioral flaws and safety risks that are often overlooked by conventional evaluation pipelines. Although initially designed for Chinese and English medical applications, our framework can be readily extended to additional languages by switching the input knowledge graphs, ensuring seamless bilingual support and domain-specific applicability.

Zelin Zhou, Zhiling Zhang, Xuenan Xu et al.

Automated audio captioning aims at generating textual descriptions for an audio clip. To evaluate the quality of generated audio captions, previous works directly adopt image captioning metrics like SPICE and CIDEr, without justifying their suitability in this new domain, which may mislead the development of advanced models. This problem is still unstudied due to the lack of human judgment datasets on caption quality. Therefore, we firstly construct two evaluation benchmarks, AudioCaps-Eval and Clotho-Eval. They are established with pairwise comparison instead of absolute rating to achieve better inter-annotator agreement. Current metrics are found in poor correlation with human annotations on these datasets. To overcome their limitations, we propose a metric named FENSE, where we combine the strength of Sentence-BERT in capturing similarity, and a novel Error Detector to penalize erroneous sentences for robustness. On the newly established benchmarks, FENSE outperforms current metrics by 14-25% accuracy. Code, data and web demo available at: https://github.com/blmoistawinde/fense

Rui Qian, Di Hu, Heinrich Dinkel et al.

How to visually localize multiple sound sources in unconstrained videos is a formidable problem, especially when lack of the pairwise sound-object annotations. To solve this problem, we develop a two-stage audiovisual learning framework that disentangles audio and visual representations of different categories from complex scenes, then performs cross-modal feature alignment in a coarse-to-fine manner. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on public dataset of localization, as well as considerable performance on multi-source sound localization in complex scenes. We then employ the localization results for sound separation and obtain comparable performance to existing methods. These outcomes demonstrate our model's ability in effectively aligning sounds with specific visual sources. Code is available at https://github.com/shvdiwnkozbw/Multi-Source-Sound-Localization

Baihan Li, Bingrui Jin, Kunyao Lan et al.

Patient simulation is essential for developing and evaluating mental health dialogue systems. As most existing approaches rely on snapshot-style prompts with limited profile information, homogeneous behaviors and incoherent disease progression in multi-turn interactions have become key chellenges. In this work, we propose DEPROFILE, a data-grounded patient simulation framework that constructs unified, multi-source patient profiles by integrating demographic attributes, standardized clinical symptoms, counseling dialogues, and longitudinal life-event histories from real-world data. We further introduce a Chain-of-Change agent to transform noisy longitudinal records into structured, temporally grounded memory representations for simulation. Experiments across multiple large language model (LLM) backbones show that with more comprehensive profile constructed by DEPROFILE, the dialogue realism, behavioral diversity, and event richness have consistently improved and exceed state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting the importance of grounding patient simulation in verifiable longitudinal evidence.

Xingyuan Li, Mengyue Wu

Detecting medical conditions from speech acoustics is fundamentally a weakly-supervised learning problem: a single, often noisy, session-level label must be linked to nuanced patterns within a long, complex audio recording. This task is further hampered by severe data scarcity and the subjective nature of clinical annotations. While semi-supervised learning (SSL) offers a viable path to leverage unlabeled data, existing audio methods often fail to address the core challenge that pathological traits are not uniformly expressed in a patient's speech. We propose a novel, audio-only SSL framework that explicitly models this hierarchy by jointly learning from frame-level, segment-level, and session-level representations within unsegmented clinical dialogues. Our end-to-end approach dynamically aggregates these multi-granularity features and generates high-quality pseudo-labels to efficiently utilize unlabeled data. Extensive experiments show the framework is model-agnostic, robust across languages and conditions, and highly data-efficient-achieving, for instance, 90\% of fully-supervised performance using only 11 labeled samples. This work provides a principled approach to learning from weak, far-end supervision in medical speech analysis.

Xun Jiang, Feng Li, Han Zhao et al.

Large language models (LLMs) like GPTs, trained on vast datasets, have demonstrated impressive capabilities in language understanding, reasoning, and planning, achieving human-level performance in various tasks. Most studies focus on enhancing these models by training on ever-larger datasets to build more powerful foundation models. While training stronger models is important, enabling models to evolve during inference is equally crucial, a process we refer to as AI self-evolution. Unlike large-scale training, self-evolution may rely on limited data or interactions. Inspired by the columnar organization of the human cerebral cortex, we hypothesize that AI models could develop cognitive abilities and build internal representations through iterative interactions with their environment. To achieve this, models need long-term memory (LTM) to store and manage processed interaction data. LTM supports self-evolution by representing diverse experiences across environments and agents. In this report, we explore AI self-evolution and its potential to enhance models during inference. We examine LTM's role in lifelong learning, allowing models to evolve based on accumulated interactions. We outline the structure of LTM and the systems needed for effective data retention and representation. We also classify approaches for building personalized models with LTM data and show how these models achieve self-evolution through interaction. Using LTM, our multi-agent framework OMNE achieved first place on the GAIA benchmark, demonstrating LTM's potential for AI self-evolution. Finally, we present a roadmap for future research, emphasizing the importance of LTM for advancing AI technology and its practical applications.

Xiujie Song, Mengyue Wu, Kenny Q. Zhu et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), despite their recent success, are hardly comprehensively tested for their cognitive abilities. Inspired by the prevalent use of the Cookie Theft task in human cognitive tests, we propose a novel evaluation benchmark to evaluate high-level cognitive abilities of LVLMs using images with rich semantics. The benchmark consists of 251 images along with comprehensive annotations. It defines eight reasoning capabilities and comprises an image description task and a visual question answering task. Our evaluation of well-known LVLMs shows that there is still a significant gap in cognitive abilities between LVLMs and humans.

Haoan Jin, Jiacheng Shi, Hanhui Xu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate significant potential in advancing medical applications, yet their capabilities in addressing medical ethics challenges remain underexplored. This paper introduces MedEthicEval, a novel benchmark designed to systematically evaluate LLMs in the domain of medical ethics. Our framework encompasses two key components: knowledge, assessing the models' grasp of medical ethics principles, and application, focusing on their ability to apply these principles across diverse scenarios. To support this benchmark, we consulted with medical ethics researchers and developed three datasets addressing distinct ethical challenges: blatant violations of medical ethics, priority dilemmas with clear inclinations, and equilibrium dilemmas without obvious resolutions. MedEthicEval serves as a critical tool for understanding LLMs' ethical reasoning in healthcare, paving the way for their responsible and effective use in medical contexts.

Yaoyun Zhang, Xuenan Xu, Mengyue Wu

The video-to-audio (V2A) generation task has drawn attention in the field of multimedia due to the practicality in producing Foley sound. Semantic and temporal conditions are fed to the generation model to indicate sound events and temporal occurrence. Recent studies on synthesizing immersive and synchronized audio are faced with challenges on videos with moving visual presence. The temporal condition is not accurate enough while low-resolution semantic condition exacerbates the problem. To tackle these challenges, we propose Smooth-Foley, a V2A generative model taking semantic guidance from the textual label across the generation to enhance both semantic and temporal alignment in audio. Two adapters are trained to leverage pre-trained text-to-audio generation models. A frame adapter integrates high-resolution frame-wise video features while a temporal adapter integrates temporal conditions obtained from similarities of visual frames and textual labels. The incorporation of semantic guidance from textual labels achieves precise audio-video alignment. We conduct extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments. Results show that Smooth-Foley performs better than existing models on both continuous sound scenarios and general scenarios. With semantic guidance, the audio generated by Smooth-Foley exhibits higher quality and better adherence to physical laws.

Kunyao Lan, Cong Ming, Binwei Yao et al.

Chatbots can serve as a viable tool for preliminary depression diagnosis via interactive conversations with potential patients. Nevertheless, the blend of task-oriented and chit-chat in diagnosis-related dialogues necessitates professional expertise and empathy. Such unique requirements challenge traditional dialogue frameworks geared towards single optimization goals. To address this, we propose an innovative ontology definition and generation framework tailored explicitly for depression diagnosis dialogues, combining the reliability of task-oriented conversations with the appeal of empathy-related chit-chat. We further apply the framework to D$^4$, the only existing public dialogue dataset on depression diagnosis-oriented chats. Exhaustive experimental results indicate significant improvements in task completion and emotional support generation in depression diagnosis, fostering a more comprehensive approach to task-oriented chat dialogue system development and its applications in digital mental health.

Xingyuan Li, Sinong Wang, Zeyu Xie et al.

This paper delves into the pioneering exploration of potential communication patterns within dog vocalizations and transcends traditional linguistic analysis barriers, which heavily relies on human priori knowledge on limited datasets to find sound units in dog vocalization. We present a self-supervised approach with HuBERT, enabling the accurate classification of phoneme labels and the identification of vocal patterns that suggest a rudimentary vocabulary within dog vocalizations. Our findings indicate a significant acoustic consistency in these identified canine vocabulary, covering the entirety of observed dog vocalization sequences. We further develop a web-based dog vocalization labeling system. This system can highlight phoneme n-grams, present in the vocabulary, in the dog audio uploaded by users.

Haoan Jin, Han Ying, Jiacheng Ji et al.

Recent advances in large language models have enabled their application to a range of healthcare tasks. However, aligning LLMs with the nuanced demands of medical ethics, especially under complex real world scenarios, remains underexplored. In this work, we present MedES, a dynamic, scenario-centric benchmark specifically constructed from 260 authoritative Chinese medical, ethical, and legal sources to reflect the challenges in clinical decision-making. To facilitate model alignment, we introduce a guardian-in-the-loop framework that leverages a dedicated automated evaluator (trained on expert-labeled data and achieving over 97% accuracy within our domain) to generate targeted prompts and provide structured ethical feedback. Using this pipeline, we align a 7B-parameter LLM through supervised fine-tuning and domain-specific preference optimization. Experimental results, conducted entirely within the Chinese medical ethics context, demonstrate that our aligned model outperforms notably larger baselines on core ethical tasks, with observed improvements in both quality and composite evaluation metrics. Our work offers a practical and adaptable framework for aligning LLMs with medical ethics in the Chinese healthcare domain, and suggests that similar alignment pipelines may be instantiated in other legal and cultural environments through modular replacement of the underlying normative corpus.

Tianxi Wan, Jiaming Luo, Siyuan Chen et al.

Psychiatric comorbidity is clinically significant yet challenging due to the complexity of multiple co-occurring disorders. To address this, we develop a novel approach integrating synthetic patient electronic medical record (EMR) construction and multi-agent diagnostic dialogue generation. We create 502 synthetic EMRs for common comorbid conditions using a pipeline that ensures clinical relevance and diversity. Our multi-agent framework transfers the clinical interview protocol into a hierarchical state machine and context tree, supporting over 130 diagnostic states while maintaining clinical standards. Through this rigorous process, we construct PsyCoTalk, the first large-scale dialogue dataset supporting comorbidity, containing 3,000 multi-turn diagnostic dialogues validated by psychiatrists. This dataset enhances diagnostic accuracy and treatment planning, offering a valuable resource for psychiatric comorbidity research. Compared to real-world clinical transcripts, PsyCoTalk exhibits high structural and linguistic fidelity in terms of dialogue length, token distribution, and diagnostic reasoning strategies. Licensed psychiatrists confirm the realism and diagnostic validity of the dialogues. This dataset enables the development and evaluation of models capable of multi-disorder psychiatric screening in a single conversational pass.

Hongshen Xu, Zixv yang, Zichen Zhu et al.

Large Language Models often generate factually incorrect but plausible outputs, known as hallucinations. We identify a more insidious phenomenon, LLM delusion, defined as high belief hallucinations, incorrect outputs with abnormally high confidence, making them harder to detect and mitigate. Unlike ordinary hallucinations, delusions persist with low uncertainty, posing significant challenges to model reliability. Through empirical analysis across different model families and sizes on several Question Answering tasks, we show that delusions are prevalent and distinct from hallucinations. LLMs exhibit lower honesty with delusions, which are harder to override via finetuning or self reflection. We link delusion formation with training dynamics and dataset noise and explore mitigation strategies such as retrieval augmented generation and multi agent debating to mitigate delusions. By systematically investigating the nature, prevalence, and mitigation of LLM delusions, our study provides insights into the underlying causes of this phenomenon and outlines future directions for improving model reliability.

Jiaming Luo, Weiyi Luo, Guoqing Sun et al.

Designing effective debt collection systems is crucial for improving operational efficiency and reducing costs in the financial industry. However, the challenges of maintaining script diversity, contextual relevance, and coherence make this task particularly difficult. This paper presents a debt collection system based on real debtor-collector data from a major commercial bank. We construct a script library from real-world debt collection conversations, and propose a two-stage retrieval based response system for contextual relevance. Experimental results show that our system improves script diversity, enhances response relevance, and achieves practical deployment efficiency through knowledge distillation. This work offers a scalable and automated solution, providing valuable insights for advancing debt collection practices in real-world applications.

Xiujie Song, Xiaoyi Pang, Haifeng Tang et al.

Quantifying image complexity at the entity level is straightforward, but the assessment of semantic complexity has been largely overlooked. In fact, there are differences in semantic complexity across images. Images with richer semantics can tell vivid and engaging stories and offer a wide range of application scenarios. For example, the Cookie Theft picture is such a kind of image and is widely used to assess human language and cognitive abilities due to its higher semantic complexity. Additionally, semantically rich images can benefit the development of vision models, as images with limited semantics are becoming less challenging for them. However, such images are scarce, highlighting the need for a greater number of them. For instance, there is a need for more images like Cookie Theft to cater to people from different cultural backgrounds and eras. Assessing semantic complexity requires human experts and empirical evidence. Automatic evaluation of how semantically rich an image will be the first step of mining or generating more images with rich semantics, and benefit human cognitive assessment, Artificial Intelligence, and various other applications. In response, we propose the Image Semantic Assessment (ISA) task to address this problem. We introduce the first ISA dataset and a novel method that leverages language to solve this vision problem. Experiments on our dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Fei Yang, Xuenan Xu, Mengyue Wu et al.

Pathological speech analysis has been of interest in the detection of certain diseases like depression and Alzheimer's disease and attracts much interest from researchers. However, previous pathological speech analysis models are commonly designed for a specific disease while overlooking the connection between diseases, which may constrain performance and lower training efficiency. Instead of fine-tuning deep models for different tasks, prompt tuning is a much more efficient training paradigm. We thus propose a unified pathological speech analysis system for as many as three diseases with the prompt tuning technique. This system uses prompt tuning to adjust only a small part of the parameters to detect different diseases from speeches of possible patients. Our system leverages a pre-trained spoken language model and demonstrates strong performance across multiple disorders while only fine-tuning a fraction of the parameters. This efficient training approach leads to faster convergence and improved F1 scores by allowing knowledge to be shared across tasks. Our experiments on Alzheimer's disease, Depression, and Parkinson's disease show competitive results, highlighting the effectiveness of our method in pathological speech analysis.

Yufei Wang, Mengyue Wu

Emotion semantic inconsistency is an ubiquitous challenge in multi-modal sentiment analysis (MSA). MSA involves analyzing sentiment expressed across various modalities like text, audio, and videos. Each modality may convey distinct aspects of sentiment, due to subtle and nuanced expression of human beings, leading to inconsistency, which may hinder the prediction of artificial agents. In this work, we introduce a modality conflicting test set and assess the performance of both traditional multi-modal sentiment analysis models and multi-modal large language models (MLLMs). Our findings reveal significant performance degradation across traditional models when confronted with semantically conflicting data and point out the drawbacks of MLLMs when handling multi-modal emotion analysis. Our research presents a new challenge and offer valuable insights for the future development of sentiment analysis systems.

Siyuan Chen, Mengyue Wu, Kenny Q. Zhu et al.

Empowering chatbots in the field of mental health is receiving increasing amount of attention, while there still lacks exploration in developing and evaluating chatbots in psychiatric outpatient scenarios. In this work, we focus on exploring the potential of ChatGPT in powering chatbots for psychiatrist and patient simulation. We collaborate with psychiatrists to identify objectives and iteratively develop the dialogue system to closely align with real-world scenarios. In the evaluation experiments, we recruit real psychiatrists and patients to engage in diagnostic conversations with the chatbots, collecting their ratings for assessment. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of using ChatGPT-powered chatbots in psychiatric scenarios and explore the impact of prompt designs on chatbot behavior and user experience.

Zhiling Zhang, Mengyue Wu, Kenny Q. Zhu

Controlling chatbot utterance generation with multiple attributes such as personalities, emotions and dialogue acts is a practically useful but under-studied problem. We propose a novel framework called DASC that possesses strong controllability with a weighted decoding paradigm, while improving generation quality with the grounding in an attribute semantics space. Generation with multiple attributes is then intuitively implemented with an interpolation of multiple attribute embeddings, which results in substantial reduction in the model sizes. Experiments show that DASC can achieve high control accuracy in generation task with the simultaneous control of 3 aspects while also producing interesting and reasonably sensible responses, even in an out-of-distribution robustness test.

Zhiling Zhang, Zelin Zhou, Haifeng Tang et al.

Audio tagging aims at predicting sound events occurred in a recording. Traditional models require enormous laborious annotations, otherwise performance degeneration will be the norm. Therefore, we investigate robust audio tagging models in low-resource scenarios with the enhancement of knowledge graphs. Besides existing ontological knowledge, we further propose a semi-automatic approach that can construct temporal knowledge graphs on diverse domain-specific label sets. Moreover, we leverage a variant of relation-aware graph neural network, D-GCN, to combine the strength of the two knowledge types. Experiments on AudioSet and SONYC urban sound tagging datasets suggest the effectiveness of the introduced temporal knowledge, and the advantage of the combined KGs with D-GCN over single knowledge source.

Zhi Chen, Lu Chen, Hanqi Li et al.

Recently, Text-to-SQL for multi-turn dialogue has attracted great interest. Here, the user input of the current turn is parsed into the corresponding SQL query of the appropriate database, given all previous dialogue history. Current approaches mostly employ end-to-end models and consequently face two challenges. First, dialogue history modeling and Text-to-SQL parsing are implicitly combined, hence it is hard to carry out interpretable analysis and obtain targeted improvement. Second, SQL annotation of multi-turn dialogue is very expensive, leading to training data sparsity. In this paper, we propose a novel decoupled multi-turn Text-to-SQL framework, where an utterance rewrite model first explicitly solves completion of dialogue context, and then a single-turn Text-to-SQL parser follows. A dual learning approach is also proposed for the utterance rewrite model to address the data sparsity problem. Compared with end-to-end approaches, the proposed decoupled method can achieve excellent performance without any annotated in-domain data. With just a few annotated rewrite cases, the decoupled method outperforms the released state-of-the-art end-to-end models on both SParC and CoSQL datasets.

Heinrich Dinkel, Shuai Wang, Xuenan Xu et al.

Voice activity detection is an essential pre-processing component for speech-related tasks such as automatic speech recognition (ASR). Traditional supervised VAD systems obtain frame-level labels from an ASR pipeline by using, e.g., a Hidden Markov model. These ASR models are commonly trained on clean and fully transcribed data, limiting VAD systems to be trained on clean or synthetically noised datasets. Therefore, a major challenge for supervised VAD systems is their generalization towards noisy, real-world data. This work proposes a data-driven teacher-student approach for VAD, which utilizes vast and unconstrained audio data for training. Unlike previous approaches, only weak labels during teacher training are required, enabling the utilization of any real-world, potentially noisy dataset. Our approach firstly trains a teacher model on a source dataset (Audioset) using clip-level supervision. After training, the teacher provides frame-level guidance to a student model on an unlabeled, target dataset. A multitude of student models trained on mid- to large-sized datasets are investigated (Audioset, Voxceleb, NIST SRE). Our approach is then respectively evaluated on clean, artificially noised, and real-world data. We observe significant performance gains in artificially noised and real-world scenarios. Lastly, we compare our approach against other unsupervised and supervised VAD methods, demonstrating our method's superiority.

Xuenan Xu, Heinrich Dinkel, Mengyue Wu et al.

Automated Audio Captioning is a cross-modal task, generating natural language descriptions to summarize the audio clips' sound events. However, grounding the actual sound events in the given audio based on its corresponding caption has not been investigated. This paper contributes an AudioGrounding dataset, which provides the correspondence between sound events and the captions provided in Audiocaps, along with the location (timestamps) of each present sound event. Based on such, we propose the text-to-audio grounding (TAG) task, which interactively considers the relationship between audio processing and language understanding. A baseline approach is provided, resulting in an event-F1 score of 28.3% and a Polyphonic Sound Detection Score (PSDS) score of 14.7%.

Xuenan Xu, Heinrich Dinkel, Mengyue Wu et al.

Automated audio captioning (AAC) aims at generating summarizing descriptions for audio clips. Multitudinous concepts are described in an audio caption, ranging from local information such as sound events to global information like acoustic scenery. Currently, the mainstream paradigm for AAC is the end-to-end encoder-decoder architecture, expecting the encoder to learn all levels of concepts embedded in the audio automatically. This paper first proposes a topic model for audio descriptions, comprehensively analyzing the hierarchical audio topics that are commonly covered. We then explore a transfer learning scheme to access local and global information. Two source tasks are identified to respectively represent local and global information, being Audio Tagging (AT) and Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC). Experiments are conducted on the AAC benchmark dataset Clotho and Audiocaps, amounting to a vast increase in all eight metrics with topic transfer learning. Further, it is discovered that local information and abstract representation learning are more crucial to AAC than global information and temporal relationship learning.

Heinrich Dinkel, Mengyue Wu, Kai Yu

Sound event detection (SED) is the task of tagging the absence or presence of audio events and their corresponding interval within a given audio clip. While SED can be done using supervised machine learning, where training data is fully labeled with access to per event timestamps and duration, our work focuses on weakly-supervised sound event detection (WSSED), where prior knowledge about an event's duration is unavailable. Recent research within the field focuses on improving segment- and event-level localization performance for specific datasets regarding specific evaluation metrics. Specifically, well-performing event-level localization requires fully labeled development subsets to obtain event duration estimates, which significantly benefits localization performance. Moreover, well-performing segment-level localization models output predictions at a coarse-scale (e.g., 1 second), hindering their deployment on datasets containing very short events (< 1 second). This work proposes a duration robust CRNN (CDur) framework, which aims to achieve competitive performance in terms of segment- and event-level localization. This paper proposes a new post-processing strategy named "Triple Threshold" and investigates two data augmentation methods along with a label smoothing method within the scope of WSSED. Evaluation of our model is done on the DCASE2017 and 2018 Task 4 datasets, and URBAN-SED. Our model outperforms other approaches on the DCASE2018 and URBAN-SED datasets without requiring prior duration knowledge. In particular, our model is capable of similar performance to strongly-labeled supervised models on the URBAN-SED dataset. Lastly, ablation experiments to reveal that without post-processing, our model's localization performance drop is significantly lower compared with other approaches.

Die Zhang, Huilin Zhou, Hao Zhang et al.

This paper proposes a method to disentangle and quantify interactions among words that are encoded inside a DNN for natural language processing. We construct a tree to encode salient interactions extracted by the DNN. Six metrics are proposed to analyze properties of interactions between constituents in a sentence. The interaction is defined based on Shapley values of words, which are considered as an unbiased estimation of word contributions to the network prediction. Our method is used to quantify word interactions encoded inside the BERT, ELMo, LSTM, CNN, and Transformer networks. Experimental results have provided a new perspective to understand these DNNs, and have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method.

Heinrich Dinkel, Yefei Chen, Mengyue Wu et al.

Traditional supervised voice activity detection (VAD) methods work well in clean and controlled scenarios, with performance severely degrading in real-world applications. One possible bottleneck is that speech in the wild contains unpredictable noise types, hence frame-level label prediction is difficult, which is required for traditional supervised VAD training. In contrast, we propose a general-purpose VAD (GPVAD) framework, which can be easily trained from noisy data in a weakly supervised fashion, requiring only clip-level labels. We proposed two GPVAD models, one full (GPV-F), trained on 527 Audioset sound events, and one binary (GPV-B), only distinguishing speech and noise. We evaluate the two GPV models against a CRNN based standard VAD model (VAD-C) on three different evaluation protocols (clean, synthetic noise, real data). Results show that our proposed GPV-F demonstrates competitive performance in clean and synthetic scenarios compared to traditional VAD-C. Further, in real-world evaluation, GPV-F largely outperforms VAD-C in terms of frame-level evaluation metrics as well as segment-level ones. With a much lower requirement for frame-labeled data, the naive binary clip-level GPV-B model can still achieve comparable performance to VAD-C in real-world scenarios.

Pingyue Zhang, Mengyue Wu, Heinrich Dinkel et al.

Depression detection research has increased over the last few decades, one major bottleneck of which is the limited data availability and representation learning. Recently, self-supervised learning has seen success in pretraining text embeddings and has been applied broadly on related tasks with sparse data, while pretrained audio embeddings based on self-supervised learning are rarely investigated. This paper proposes DEPA, a self-supervised, pretrained depression audio embedding method for depression detection. An encoder-decoder network is used to extract DEPA on in-domain depressed datasets (DAIC and MDD) and out-domain (Switchboard, Alzheimer's) datasets. With DEPA as the audio embedding extracted at response-level, a significant performance gain is achieved on downstream tasks, evaluated on both sparse datasets like DAIC and large major depression disorder dataset (MDD). This paper not only exhibits itself as a novel embedding extracting method capturing response-level representation for depression detection but more significantly, is an exploration of self-supervised learning in a specific task within audio processing.