Zhiheng Ma

Detao Bai, Zhiheng Ma, Xihan Wei et al.

The inherent synchronization between a speaker's lip movements, voice, and the underlying linguistic content offers a rich source of information for improving speech processing tasks, especially in challenging conditions where traditional audio-only systems falter. We introduce CoGenAV, a powerful and data-efficient model designed to learn versatile audio-visual representations applicable across a wide range of speech and audio-visual tasks. CoGenAV is trained by optimizing a dual objective derived from natural audio-visual synchrony, contrastive feature alignment and generative text prediction, using only 223 hours of labeled data from the LRS2 dataset. This contrastive-generative synchronization strategy effectively captures fundamental cross-modal correlations. We showcase the effectiveness and versatility of the learned CoGenAV representations on multiple benchmarks. When utilized for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) on LRS2, these representations contribute to achieving a state-of-the-art Word Error Rate (WER) of 1.27. They also enable strong performance in Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) with a WER of 20.5 on LRS2, and significantly improve performance in noisy environments by over 70%. Furthermore, CoGenAV representations benefit speech reconstruction tasks, boosting performance in Speech Enhancement and Separation, and achieve competitive results in audio-visual synchronization tasks like Active Speaker Detection (ASD). Our model will be open-sourced to facilitate further development and collaboration within both academia and industry.

Zekai Li, Xinhao Zhong, Samir Khaki et al.

In recent years, dataset distillation has provided a reliable solution for data compression, where models trained on the resulting smaller synthetic datasets achieve performance comparable to those trained on the original datasets. To further improve the performance of synthetic datasets, various training pipelines and optimization objectives have been proposed, greatly advancing the field of dataset distillation. Recent decoupled dataset distillation methods introduce soft labels and stronger data augmentation during the post-evaluation phase and scale dataset distillation up to larger datasets (e.g., ImageNet-1K). However, this raises a question: Is accuracy still a reliable metric to fairly evaluate dataset distillation methods? Our empirical findings suggest that the performance improvements of these methods often stem from additional techniques rather than the inherent quality of the images themselves, with even randomly sampled images achieving superior results. Such misaligned evaluation settings severely hinder the development of DD. Therefore, we propose DD-Ranking, a unified evaluation framework, along with new general evaluation metrics to uncover the true performance improvements achieved by different methods. By refocusing on the actual information enhancement of distilled datasets, DD-Ranking provides a more comprehensive and fair evaluation standard for future research advancements.

Yong Dai, Xiaopeng Hong, Yabin Wang et al.

Contemporary continual learning approaches typically select prompts from a pool, which function as supplementary inputs to a pre-trained model. However, this strategy is hindered by the inherent noise of its selection approach when handling increasing tasks. In response to these challenges, we reformulate the prompting approach for continual learning and propose the prompt customization (PC) method. PC mainly comprises a prompt generation module (PGM) and a prompt modulation module (PMM). In contrast to conventional methods that employ hard prompt selection, PGM assigns different coefficients to prompts from a fixed-sized pool of prompts and generates tailored prompts. Moreover, PMM further modulates the prompts by adaptively assigning weights according to the correlations between input data and corresponding prompts. We evaluate our method on four benchmark datasets for three diverse settings, including the class, domain, and task-agnostic incremental learning tasks. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvement (by up to 16.2\%), yielded by the proposed method, over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques.

Lingfeng He, De Cheng, Zhiheng Ma et al.

Continual Learning (CL) empowers AI models to continuously learn from sequential task streams. Recently, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT)-based CL methods have garnered increasing attention due to their superior performance. They typically allocate a unique sub-module for learning each task, with a task recognizer to select the appropriate sub-modules for testing images. However, due to the feature subspace misalignment from independently trained sub-modules, these methods tend to produce ambiguous decisions under misleading task-ids. To address this, we propose Cross-subspace Knowledge Alignment and Aggregation (CKAA), a novel framework that enhances model robustness against misleading task-ids through two key innovations: (1) Dual-level Knowledge Alignment (DKA): By aligning intra-class feature distributions across different subspaces and learning a robust global classifier through a feature simulation process, DKA enables the model to distinguish features from both correct and incorrect subspaces during training. (2) Task-Confidence-guided Mixture of Adapters (TC-MoA): A robust inference scheme that adaptively aggregates task-specific knowledge from relevant sub-modules based on task-confidence scores, avoiding overconfidence in misleading task-id predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CKAA outperforms existing PEFT-based CL methods.