Gong Cheng

Cheng Gong, Yao Chen, Qiuyang Luo et al.

Multi-exit network is a promising architecture for efficient model inference by sharing backbone networks and weights among multiple exits. However, the gradient conflict of the shared weights results in sub-optimal accuracy. This paper introduces Deep Feature Surgery (\methodname), which consists of feature partitioning and feature referencing approaches to resolve gradient conflict issues during the training of multi-exit networks. The feature partitioning separates shared features along the depth axis among all exits to alleviate gradient conflict while simultaneously promoting joint optimization for each exit. Subsequently, feature referencing enhances multi-scale features for distinct exits across varying depths to improve the model accuracy. Furthermore, \methodname~reduces the training operations with the reduced complexity of backpropagation. Experimental results on Cifar100 and ImageNet datasets exhibit that \methodname~provides up to a \textbf{50.00\%} reduction in training time and attains up to a \textbf{6.94\%} enhancement in accuracy when contrasted with baseline methods across diverse models and tasks. Budgeted batch classification evaluation on MSDNet demonstrates that DFS uses about $\mathbf{2}\boldsymbol{\times}$ fewer average FLOPs per image to achieve the same classification accuracy as baseline methods on Cifar100. The code is available at https://github.com/GongCheng1919/dfs.

Zhongling Huang, Yihan Zhuang, Zipei Zhong et al.

SAR image simulation has attracted much attention due to its great potential to supplement the scarce training data for deep learning algorithms. Consequently, evaluating the quality of the simulated SAR image is crucial for practical applications. The current literature primarily uses image quality assessment techniques for evaluation that rely on human observers' perceptions. However, because of the unique imaging mechanism of SAR, these techniques may produce evaluation results that are not entirely valid. The distribution inconsistency between real and simulated data is the main obstacle that influences the utility of simulated SAR images. To this end, we propose a novel trustworthy utility evaluation framework with a counterfactual explanation for simulated SAR images for the first time, denoted as X-Fake. It unifies a probabilistic evaluator and a causal explainer to achieve a trustworthy utility assessment. We construct the evaluator using a probabilistic Bayesian deep model to learn the posterior distribution, conditioned on real data. Quantitatively, the predicted uncertainty of simulated data can reflect the distribution discrepancy. We build the causal explainer with an introspective variational auto-encoder to generate high-resolution counterfactuals. The latent code of IntroVAE is finally optimized with evaluation indicators and prior information to generate the counterfactual explanation, thus revealing the inauthentic details of simulated data explicitly. The proposed framework is validated on four simulated SAR image datasets obtained from electromagnetic models and generative artificial intelligence approaches. The results demonstrate the proposed X-Fake framework outperforms other IQA methods in terms of utility. Furthermore, the results illustrate that the generated counterfactual explanations are trustworthy, and can further improve the data utility in applications.

Yiwei Liu, Yucheng Li, Xiao Li et al.

Joint logical-numerical reasoning remains a major challenge for language models, yet existing datasets rely on fixed rule sets and offer limited control over task complexity, constraining their generalizability for evaluation and training. We present LogiNumSynth, a flexible natural language problem synthesizer that synthesizes tasks requiring proficiency in joint logical reasoning (e.g., rule-based reasoning) and numerical reasoning (e.g., arithmetic computation). LogiNumSynth supports fine-grained control over reasoning world richness, logical reasoning depth, and the complexity of numerical computations, enabling flexible data synthesis across difficulty levels. We demonstrate three key contributions: (1) Synthesizer -- synthesizing fully controllable joint reasoning tasks over natural language; (2) Evaluation & Process Analysis -- evaluating both process accuracy and answer accuracy; (3) Targeted Training -- using synthesized data to enhance LLMs' reasoning performance. Experiments with multiple LLMs highlight persistent weaknesses in logical-numerical reasoning, showing that LogiNumSynth can serve as both a diagnostic tool and a source of targeted supervision for advancing integrated reasoning skills.

Cheng Gong, Erica Cooper, Xin Wang et al.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) representations from massively multilingual models offer a promising solution for low-resource language speech tasks. Despite advancements, language adaptation in TTS systems remains an open problem. This paper explores the language adaptation capability of ZMM-TTS, a recent SSL-based multilingual TTS system proposed in our previous work. We conducted experiments on 12 languages using limited data with various fine-tuning configurations. We demonstrate that the similarity in phonetics between the pre-training and target languages, as well as the language category, affects the target language's adaptation performance. Additionally, we find that the fine-tuning dataset size and number of speakers influence adaptability. Surprisingly, we also observed that using paired data for fine-tuning is not always optimal compared to audio-only data. Beyond speech intelligibility, our analysis covers speaker similarity, language identification, and predicted MOS.

Xudong Dai, Cheng Gong, Longbiao Wang et al.

Expressive neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems incorporate a style encoder to learn a latent embedding as the style information. However, this embedding process may encode redundant textual information. This phenomenon is called content leakage. Researchers have attempted to resolve this problem by adding an ASR or other auxiliary supervision loss functions. In this study, we propose an unsupervised method called the "information sieve" to reduce the effect of content leakage in prosody transfer. The rationale of this approach is that the style encoder can be forced to focus on style information rather than on textual information contained in the reference speech by a well-designed downsample-upsample filter, i.e., the extracted style embeddings can be downsampled at a certain interval and then upsampled by duplication. Furthermore, we used instance normalization in convolution layers to help the system learn a better latent style space. Objective metrics such as the significantly lower word error rate (WER) demonstrate the effectiveness of this model in mitigating content leakage. Listening tests indicate that the model retains its prosody transferability compared with the baseline models such as the original GST-Tacotron and ASR-guided Tacotron.

Kun Han, Junwen Chen, Hui Zhang et al.

In this paper we present DELTA, a deep learning based language technology platform. DELTA is an end-to-end platform designed to solve industry level natural language and speech processing problems. It integrates most popular neural network models for training as well as comprehensive deployment tools for production. DELTA aims to provide easy and fast experiences for using, deploying, and developing natural language processing and speech models for both academia and industry use cases. We demonstrate the reliable performance with DELTA on several natural language processing and speech tasks, including text classification, named entity recognition, natural language inference, speech recognition, speaker verification, etc. DELTA has been used for developing several state-of-the-art algorithms for publications and delivering real production to serve millions of users.