Shubham Gupta

Pooneh Mousavi, Shubham Gupta, Cem Subakan et al.

Foundation models based on large language models (LLMs) have shown great success in handling various tasks and modalities. However, adapting these models for general-purpose audio-language tasks is challenging due to differences in acoustic environments and task variations. In this work, we introduce LiSTEN Learning Soft Token Embeddings for Neural Audio LLMs), a framework for adapting LLMs to speech and audio tasks. LiSTEN uses a dynamic prompt selection strategy with learnable key-value pairs, allowing the model to balance general and task-specific knowledge while avoiding overfitting in a multitask setting. Our approach reduces dependence on large-scale ASR or captioning datasets, achieves competitive performance with fewer trainable parameters, and simplifies training by using a single-stage process. Additionally, LiSTEN enhances interpretability by analyzing the diversity and overlap of selected prompts across different tasks.

Shubham Gupta, Zichao Li, Tianyi Chen et al.

Document retrieval is a core component of question-answering systems, as it enables conditioning answer generation on new and large-scale corpora. While effective, the standard practice of encoding documents into high-dimensional embeddings for similarity search entails large memory and compute footprints, and also makes it hard to inspect the inner workings of the system. In this paper, we propose a tree-based method for organizing and representing reference documents at various granular levels, which offers the flexibility to balance cost and utility, and eases the inspection of the corpus content and retrieval operations. Our method, called ReTreever, jointly learns a routing function per internal node of a binary tree such that query and reference documents are assigned to similar tree branches, hence directly optimizing for retrieval performance. Our evaluations show that ReTreever generally preserves full representation accuracy. Its hierarchical structure further provides strong coarse representations and enhances transparency by indirectly learning meaningful semantic groupings. Among hierarchical retrieval methods, ReTreever achieves the best retrieval accuracy at the lowest latency, proving that this family of techniques can be viable in practical applications.

Mehar Bhatia, Tenzin Singhay Bhotia, Akshat Agarwal et al.

This paper is a contribution to the Hate Speech and Offensive Content Identification in Indo-European Languages (HASOC) 2021 shared task. Social media today is a hotbed of toxic and hateful conversations, in various languages. Recent news reports have shown that current models struggle to automatically identify hate posted in minority languages. Therefore, efficiently curbing hate speech is a critical challenge and problem of interest. We present a multilingual architecture using state-of-the-art transformer language models to jointly learn hate and offensive speech detection across three languages namely, English, Hindi, and Marathi. On the provided testing corpora, we achieve Macro F1 scores of 0.7996, 0.7748, 0.8651 for sub-task 1A and 0.6268, 0.5603 during the fine-grained classification of sub-task 1B. These results show the efficacy of exploiting a multilingual training scheme.

Rishi Hazra, Parag Dutta, Shubham Gupta et al.

While deep learning is a powerful tool for natural language processing (NLP) problems, successful solutions to these problems rely heavily on large amounts of annotated samples. However, manually annotating data is expensive and time-consuming. Active Learning (AL) strategies reduce the need for huge volumes of labeled data by iteratively selecting a small number of examples for manual annotation based on their estimated utility in training the given model. In this paper, we argue that since AL strategies choose examples independently, they may potentially select similar examples, all of which may not contribute significantly to the learning process. Our proposed approach, Active$\mathbf{^2}$ Learning (A$\mathbf{^2}$L), actively adapts to the deep learning model being trained to eliminate further such redundant examples chosen by an AL strategy. We show that A$\mathbf{^2}$L is widely applicable by using it in conjunction with several different AL strategies and NLP tasks. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed approach is further able to reduce the data requirements of state-of-the-art AL strategies by an absolute percentage reduction of $\approx\mathbf{3-25\%}$ on multiple NLP tasks while achieving the same performance with no additional computation overhead.