Yi Zhao

Chunyu Qiang, Wang Geng, Yi Zhao et al.

Deep learning has brought significant improvements to the field of cross-modal representation learning. For tasks such as text-to-speech (TTS), voice conversion (VC), and automatic speech recognition (ASR), a cross-modal fine-grained (frame-level) sequence representation is desired, emphasizing the semantic content of the text modality while de-emphasizing the paralinguistic information of the speech modality. We propose a method called "Vector Quantized Contrastive Token-Acoustic Pre-training (VQ-CTAP)", which uses the cross-modal aligned sequence transcoder to bring text and speech into a joint multimodal space, learning how to connect text and speech at the frame level. The proposed VQ-CTAP is a paradigm for cross-modal sequence representation learning, offering a promising solution for fine-grained generation and recognition tasks in speech processing. The VQ-CTAP can be directly applied to VC and ASR tasks without fine-tuning or additional structures. We propose a sequence-aware semantic connector, which connects multiple frozen pre-trained modules for the TTS task, exhibiting a plug-and-play capability. We design a stepping optimization strategy to ensure effective model convergence by gradually injecting and adjusting the influence of various loss components. Furthermore, we propose a semantic-transfer-wise paralinguistic consistency loss to enhance representational capabilities, allowing the model to better generalize to unseen data and capture the nuances of paralinguistic information. In addition, VQ-CTAP achieves high-compression speech coding at a rate of 25Hz from 24kHz input waveforms, which is a 960-fold reduction in the sampling rate. The audio demo is available at https://qiangchunyu.github.io/VQCTAP/

Yi Zhao, Yongjun Zhu, Donghun Kim et al.

The influence of gender diversity on the success of scientific teams is of great interest to academia. However, prior findings remain inconsistent, and most studies operationalize diversity in aggregate terms, overlooking internal role differentiation. This limitation obscures a more nuanced understanding of how gender diversity shapes team impact. In particular, the effect of gender diversity across different team roles remains poorly understood. To this end, we define a scientific team as all coauthors of a paper and measure team impact through five-year citation counts. Using author contribution statements, we classified members into leadership and support roles. Drawing on more than 130,000 papers from PLOS journals, most of which are in biomedical-related disciplines, we employed multivariable regression to examine the association between gender diversity in these roles and team impact. Furthermore, we apply a threshold regression model to investigate how team size moderates this relationship. The results show that (1) the relationship between gender diversity and team impact follows an inverted U-shape for both leadership and support groups; (2) teams with an all-female leadership group and an all-male support group achieve higher impact than other team types. Interestingly, (3) the effect of leadership-group gender diversity is significantly negative for small teams but becomes positive and statistically insignificant in large teams. In contrast, the estimates for support-group gender diversity remain significant and positive, regardless of team size.

Wenqing Wu, Chengzhi Zhang, Yi Zhao

Novelty is a crucial criterion in the peer review process for evaluating academic papers. Traditionally, it's judged by experts or measure by unique reference combinations. Both methods have limitations: experts have limited knowledge, and the effectiveness of the combination method is uncertain. Moreover, it's unclear if unique citations truly measure novelty. The large language model (LLM) possesses a wealth of knowledge, while human experts possess judgment abilities that the LLM does not possess. Therefore, our research integrates the knowledge and abilities of LLM and human experts to address the limitations of novelty assessment. One of the most common types of novelty in academic papers is the introduction of new methods. In this paper, we propose leveraging human knowledge and LLM to assist pretrained language models (PLMs, e.g. BERT etc.) in predicting the method novelty of papers. Specifically, we extract sentences related to the novelty of the academic paper from peer review reports and use LLM to summarize the methodology section of the academic paper, which are then used to fine-tune PLMs. In addition, we have designed a text-guided fusion module with novel Sparse-Attention to better integrate human and LLM knowledge. We compared the method we proposed with a large number of baselines. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance.