Dongwei Jiang

Yining Lu, Dixuan Wang, Tianjian Li et al.

As LLMs become increasingly prevalent, it is interesting to consider how ``creative'' these models can be. From cognitive science, creativity consists of at least two key characteristics: \emph{convergent} thinking (purposefulness to achieve a given goal) and \emph{divergent} thinking (adaptability to explore new environments or constraints) \citep{runco2003critical}. In this work, we introduce a framework for quantifying LLM creativity that incorporates the two design ingredients: (1) We introduce DENIAL PROMPTING which pushes LLMs to develop more creative solutions to a given problem by incrementally imposing new constraints on the previous solution, compelling LLMs to adopt new strategies. (2) We define NEOGAUGE, a metric that quantifies both convergent and divergent thinking in the generated creative responses by LLMs. We test the proposed framework on Codeforces problems, which serve as both a natural dataset for coding tasks and a collection of prior human solutions. We quantify NEOGAUGE for various proprietary and open-source models and find that even the most creative model, GPT-4, still falls short of demonstrating human-like creativity. We also experiment with advanced reasoning strategies (MCTS, self-correction, etc.) and observe no significant improvement in creativity. As a by-product of our analysis, we release NEOCODER dataset for reproducing our results on future models.

Young Min Cho, Daniele Bonadiman, Divya Bhargavi et al.

Training large foundation models for agentic tasks is increasingly impractical due to the high computational costs, long iteration cycles, and rapid obsolescence as new models are continuously released. Instead of post-training massive models for every new task or domain, we propose Supplement Generation Training (SGT), a more efficient and sustainable strategy. SGT trains a smaller LLM to generate useful supplemental text that, when appended to the original input, helps the larger LLM solve the task more effectively. These lightweight models can dynamically adapt supplements to task requirements, improving performance without modifying the underlying large models. This approach decouples task-specific optimization from large foundation models and enables more flexible, cost-effective deployment of LLM-powered agents in real-world applications.

Dongwei Jiang, Jingyu Zhang, Orion Weller et al.

Can LLMs consistently improve their previous outputs for better results? For this to be true, LLMs would need to be better at discriminating among previously-generated alternatives, than generating initial responses. We explore the validity of this hypothesis in practice. We first formulate a unified framework that allows us to compare the generative and discriminative capability of any model on any task. In our resulting experimental analysis of several open-source and industrial LLMs, we observe that models are not reliably better at discriminating among previously-generated alternatives than generating initial responses. This finding challenges the notion that LLMs may be able to enhance their performance only through their own judgment.

Dongwei Jiang, Marcio Fonseca, Shay B. Cohen

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with complex logical reasoning due to logical inconsistencies and the inherent difficulty of such reasoning. We use Lean, a theorem proving framework, to address these challenges. By formalizing logical reasoning problems into theorems within Lean, we can solve them by proving or disproving the corresponding theorems. This method reduces the risk of logical inconsistencies with the help of Lean's symbolic solver. It also enhances our ability to treat complex reasoning tasks by using Lean's extensive library of theorem proofs. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the FOLIO dataset and achieves performance near this level on ProofWriter. Notably, these results were accomplished by fine-tuning on fewer than 100 in-domain samples for each dataset.

Nathaniel Weir, Kate Sanders, Orion Weller et al.

Recent language models enable new opportunities for structured reasoning with text, such as the construction of intuitive, proof-like textual entailment trees without relying on brittle formal logic. However, progress in this direction has been hampered by a long-standing lack of a clear protocol for determining what valid compositional entailment is. This absence causes noisy datasets and limited performance gains by modern neuro-symbolic engines. To address these problems, we formulate a consistent and theoretically grounded approach to annotating decompositional entailment and evaluate its impact on LLM-based textual inference. We find that our new dataset, RDTE (Recognizing Decompositional Textual Entailment), has a substantially higher internal consistency (+9%) than prior decompositional entailment datasets. We also find that training an RDTE-oriented entailment classifier via knowledge distillation and employing it in an entailment tree reasoning engine significantly improves both accuracy and proof quality, illustrating the practical benefit of this advance for textual inference.

Dongwei Jiang, Alvin Zhang, Andrew Wang et al.

Recent studies have shown LLMs possess some ability to improve their responses when given external feedback. However, it remains unclear how effectively and thoroughly these models can incorporate extrinsic feedback. In an ideal scenario, if LLMs receive near-perfect and complete feedback, we would expect them to fully integrate the feedback and reach correct solutions. In this paper, we systematically investigate LLMs' ability to incorporate feedback by designing a controlled experimental environment. For each problem, a solver model attempts a solution, then a feedback generator with access to near-complete ground-truth answers produces targeted feedback, after which the solver tries again. We evaluate this pipeline across a diverse range of tasks, including math reasoning, knowledge reasoning, scientific reasoning, and general multi-domain evaluations with state-of-the-art language models including Claude 3.7 with extended thinking. Surprisingly, even under these near-ideal conditions, solver models consistently show resistance to feedback, a limitation that we term Feedback Friction. To mitigate this limitation, we experiment with sampling-based strategies like progressive temperature increases and explicit rejection of previously attempted incorrect answers, which yield improvements but still fail to help models achieve target performance. We analyze Feedback Friction and find that models' confidence on specific questions, measured by semantic entropy, predicts feedback resistance: high-confidence predictions remain resistant to external correction. We hope that highlighting this issue in LLMs will help future research in self-improvement.

Dongwei Jiang, Wubo Li, Miao Cao et al.

Self-supervised visual pretraining has shown significant progress recently. Among those methods, SimCLR greatly advanced the state of the art in self-supervised and semi-supervised learning on ImageNet. The input feature representations for speech and visual tasks are both continuous, so it is natural to consider applying similar objective on speech representation learning. In this paper, we propose Speech SimCLR, a new self-supervised objective for speech representation learning. During training, Speech SimCLR applies augmentation on raw speech and its spectrogram. Its objective is the combination of contrastive loss that maximizes agreement between differently augmented samples in the latent space and reconstruction loss of input representation. The proposed method achieved competitive results on speech emotion recognition and speech recognition.

Wubo Li, Dongwei Jiang, Wei Zou et al.

Audio Visual Scene-aware Dialog (AVSD) is a task to generate responses when discussing about a given video. The previous state-of-the-art model shows superior performance for this task using Transformer-based architecture. However, there remain some limitations in learning better representation of modalities. Inspired by Neural Machine Translation (NMT), we propose the Transformer-based Modal Translator (TMT) to learn the representations of the source modal sequence by translating the source modal sequence to the related target modal sequence in a supervised manner. Based on Multimodal Transformer Networks (MTN), we apply TMT to video and dialog, proposing MTN-TMT for the video-grounded dialog system. On the AVSD track of the Dialog System Technology Challenge 7, MTN-TMT outperforms the MTN and other submission models in both Video and Text task and Text Only task. Compared with MTN, MTN-TMT improves all metrics, especially, achieving relative improvement up to 14.1% on CIDEr. Index Terms: multimodal learning, audio-visual scene-aware dialog, neural machine translation, multi-task learning

Ruixiong Zhang, Haiwei Wu, Wubo Li et al.

Recently, a variety of acoustic tasks and related applications arised. For many acoustic tasks, the labeled data size may be limited. To handle this problem, we propose an unsupervised pre-training method using Transformer based encoder to learn a general and robust high-level representation for all acoustic tasks. Experiments have been conducted on three kinds of acoustic tasks: speech emotion recognition, sound event detection and speech translation. All the experiments have shown that pre-training using its own training data can significantly improve the performance. With a larger pre-training data combining MuST-C, Librispeech and ESC-US datasets, for speech emotion recognition, the UAR can further improve absolutely 4.3% on IEMOCAP dataset. For sound event detection, the F1 score can further improve absolutely 1.5% on DCASE2018 task5 development set and 2.1% on evaluation set. For speech translation, the BLEU score can further improve relatively 12.2% on En-De dataset and 8.4% on En-Fr dataset.

Dongwei Jiang, Wubo Li, Ruixiong Zhang et al.

Building a good speech recognition system usually requires large amounts of transcribed data, which is expensive to collect. To tackle this problem, many unsupervised pre-training methods have been proposed. Among these methods, Masked Predictive Coding achieved significant improvements on various speech recognition datasets with BERT-like Masked Reconstruction loss and Transformer backbone. However, many aspects of MPC have not been fully investigated. In this paper, we conduct a further study on MPC and focus on three important aspects: the effect of pre-training data speaking style, its extension on streaming model, and how to better transfer learned knowledge from pre-training stage to downstream tasks. Experiments reveled that pre-training data with matching speaking style is more useful on downstream recognition tasks. A unified training objective with APC and MPC provided 8.46% relative error reduction on streaming model trained on HKUST. Also, the combination of target data adaption and layer-wise discriminative training helped the knowledge transfer of MPC, which achieved 3.99% relative error reduction on AISHELL over a strong baseline.

Dongwei Jiang, Xiaoning Lei, Wubo Li et al.

Speech recognition technologies are gaining enormous popularity in various industrial applications. However, building a good speech recognition system usually requires large amounts of transcribed data, which is expensive to collect. To tackle this problem, an unsupervised pre-training method called Masked Predictive Coding is proposed, which can be applied for unsupervised pre-training with Transformer based model. Experiments on HKUST show that using the same training data, we can achieve CER 23.3%, exceeding the best end-to-end model by over 0.2% absolute CER. With more pre-training data, we can further reduce the CER to 21.0%, or a 11.8% relative CER reduction over baseline.

Ne Luo, Dongwei Jiang, Shuaijiang Zhao et al.

Code-switching speech recognition has attracted an increasing interest recently, but the need for expert linguistic knowledge has always been a big issue. End-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) simplifies the building of ASR systems considerably by predicting graphemes or characters directly from acoustic input. In the mean time, the need of expert linguistic knowledge is also eliminated, which makes it an attractive choice for code-switching ASR. This paper presents a hybrid CTC-Attention based end-to-end Mandarin-English code-switching (CS) speech recognition system and studies the effect of hybrid CTC-Attention based models, different modeling units, the inclusion of language identification and different decoding strategies on the task of code-switching ASR. On the SEAME corpus, our system achieves a mixed error rate (MER) of 34.24%.

Wei Zou, Dongwei Jiang, Shuaijiang Zhao et al.

End-To-End speech recognition have become increasingly popular in mandarin speech recognition and achieved delightful performance. Mandarin is a tonal language which is different from English and requires special treatment for the acoustic modeling units. There have been several different kinds of modeling units for mandarin such as phoneme, syllable and Chinese character. In this work, we explore two major end-to-end models: connectionist temporal classification (CTC) model and attention based encoder-decoder model for mandarin speech recognition. We compare the performance of three different scaled modeling units: context dependent phoneme(CDP), syllable with tone and Chinese character. We find that all types of modeling units can achieve approximate character error rate (CER) in CTC model and the performance of Chinese character attention model is better than syllable attention model. Furthermore, we find that Chinese character is a reasonable unit for mandarin speech recognition. On DidiCallcenter task, Chinese character attention model achieves a CER of 5.68% and CTC model gets a CER of 7.29%, on the other DidiReading task, CER are 4.89% and 5.79%, respectively. Moreover, attention model achieves a better performance than CTC model on both datasets.