Kai Shen

Kai Shen, Junliang Guo, Xu Tan et al.

The Transformer architecture consists of self-attention and feed-forward networks (FFNs) which can be viewed as key-value memories according to previous works. However, FFN and traditional memory utilize different activation functions (i.e., ReLU and Softmax respectively), which makes them not equivalent. In this paper, we first rebuild the connections between FFN and key-value memory by conducting extensive studies on ReLU and Softmax, and find they are equivalent when adding an additional layer normalization module on Softmax. In addition, ReLU outperforms Softmax on both FFN and key-value memory when the number of value slots is large. We analyze the reasons and then explore this good property of ReLU on the self-attention network where the original Softmax activation performs poorly on long input sequences. We then propose a full ReLU architecture named ReLUFormer which performs better than the baseline Transformer on long sequence tasks such as document translation. This paper sheds light on the following points: 1) Softmax and ReLU use different normalization methods over elements which lead to different variances of results, and ReLU is good at dealing with a large number of key-value slots; 2) FFN and key-value memory are equivalent, and thus the Transformer can be viewed as a memory network where FFNs and self-attention networks are both key-value memories.

Kai Shen, Yichong Leng, Xu Tan et al.

Text error correction aims to correct the errors in text sequences such as those typed by humans or generated by speech recognition models. Previous error correction methods usually take the source (incorrect) sentence as encoder input and generate the target (correct) sentence through the decoder. Since the error rate of the incorrect sentence is usually low (e.g., 10\%), the correction model can only learn to correct on limited error tokens but trivially copy on most tokens (correct tokens), which harms the effective training of error correction. In this paper, we argue that the correct tokens should be better utilized to facilitate effective training and then propose a simple yet effective masking strategy to achieve this goal. Specifically, we randomly mask out a part of the correct tokens in the source sentence and let the model learn to not only correct the original error tokens but also predict the masked tokens based on their context information. Our method enjoys several advantages: 1) it alleviates trivial copy; 2) it leverages effective training signals from correct tokens; 3) it is a plug-and-play module and can be applied to different models and tasks. Experiments on spelling error correction and speech recognition error correction on Mandarin datasets and grammar error correction on English datasets with both autoregressive and non-autoregressive generation models show that our method improves the correction accuracy consistently.

Dong Guo, Faming Wu, Feida Zhu et al. · pku

We present Seed1.5-VL, a vision-language foundation model designed to advance general-purpose multimodal understanding and reasoning. Seed1.5-VL is composed with a 532M-parameter vision encoder and a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLM of 20B active parameters. Despite its relatively compact architecture, it delivers strong performance across a wide spectrum of public VLM benchmarks and internal evaluation suites, achieving the state-of-the-art performance on 38 out of 60 public benchmarks. Moreover, in agent-centric tasks such as GUI control and gameplay, Seed1.5-VL outperforms leading multimodal systems, including OpenAI CUA and Claude 3.7. Beyond visual and video understanding, it also demonstrates strong reasoning abilities, making it particularly effective for multimodal reasoning challenges such as visual puzzles. We believe these capabilities will empower broader applications across diverse tasks. In this report, we mainly provide a comprehensive review of our experiences in building Seed1.5-VL across model design, data construction, and training at various stages, hoping that this report can inspire further research. Seed1.5-VL is now accessible at https://www.volcengine.com/ (Volcano Engine Model ID: doubao-1-5-thinking-vision-pro-250428)

Detai Xin, Xu Tan, Kai Shen et al.

We present RALL-E, a robust language modeling method for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. While previous work based on large language models (LLMs) shows impressive performance on zero-shot TTS, such methods often suffer from poor robustness, such as unstable prosody (weird pitch and rhythm/duration) and a high word error rate (WER), due to the autoregressive prediction style of language models. The core idea behind RALL-E is chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, which decomposes the task into simpler steps to enhance the robustness of LLM-based TTS. To accomplish this idea, RALL-E first predicts prosody features (pitch and duration) of the input text and uses them as intermediate conditions to predict speech tokens in a CoT style. Second, RALL-E utilizes the predicted duration prompt to guide the computing of self-attention weights in Transformer to enforce the model to focus on the corresponding phonemes and prosody features when predicting speech tokens. Results of comprehensive objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that, compared to a powerful baseline method VALL-E, RALL-E significantly improves the WER of zero-shot TTS from $5.6\%$ (without reranking) and $1.7\%$ (with reranking) to $2.5\%$ and $1.0\%$, respectively. Furthermore, we demonstrate that RALL-E correctly synthesizes sentences that are hard for VALL-E and reduces the error rate from $68\%$ to $4\%$.

Kai Shen, Anya Mcguirk, Yuwei Liao et al.

Sensor data analysis plays a key role in health assessment of critical equipment. Such data are multivariate and exhibit nonlinear relationships. This paper describes how one can exploit nonlinear dimension reduction techniques, such as the t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) and kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) for fault detection. We show that using anomaly detection with low dimensional representations provides better interpretability and is conducive to edge processing in IoT applications.