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In the field of emotion analysis, much NLP research focuses on identifying a limited number of discrete emotion categories, often applied across languages. These basic sets, however, are rarely designed with textual data in mind, and culture, language, and dialect can influence how particular emotions are interpreted. In this work, we broaden our scope to a practically unbounded set of \textit{affective states}, which includes any terms that humans use to describe their experiences of feeling. We collect and publish MASIVE, a dataset of Reddit posts in English and Spanish containing over 1,000 unique affective states each. We then define the new problem of \textit{affective state identification} for language generation models framed as a masked span prediction task. On this task, we find that smaller finetuned multilingual models outperform much larger LLMs, even on region-specific Spanish affective states. Additionally, we show that pretraining on MASIVE improves model performance on existing emotion benchmarks. Finally, through machine translation experiments, we find that native speaker-written data is vital to good performance on this task.

Constraint Programming (CP) and Machine Learning (ML) face challenges in text generation due to CP's struggle with implementing "meaning'' and ML's difficulty with structural constraints. This paper proposes a solution by combining both approaches and embedding a Large Language Model (LLM) in CP. The LLM handles word generation and meaning, while CP manages structural constraints. This approach builds on GenCP, an improved version of On-the-fly Constraint Programming Search (OTFS) using LLM-generated domains. Compared to Beam Search (BS), a standard NLP method, this combined approach (GenCP with LLM) is faster and produces better results, ensuring all constraints are satisfied. This fusion of CP and ML presents new possibilities for enhancing text generation under constraints.

The emotion recognition has attracted more attention in recent decades. Although significant progress has been made in the recognition technology of the seven basic emotions, existing methods are still hard to tackle compound emotion recognition that occurred commonly in practical application. This article introduces our achievements in the 7th Field Emotion Behavior Analysis (ABAW) competition. In the competition, we selected pre trained ResNet18 and Transformer, which have been widely validated, as the basic network framework. Considering the continuity of emotions over time, we propose a time pyramid structure network for frame level emotion prediction. Furthermore. At the same time, in order to address the lack of data in composite emotion recognition, we utilized fine-grained labels from the DFEW database to construct training data for emotion categories in competitions. Taking into account the characteristics of valence arousal of various complex emotions, we constructed a classification framework from coarse to fine in the label space.

Despite significant progress in 3D point cloud segmentation, existing methods primarily address specific tasks and depend on explicit instructions to identify targets, lacking the capability to infer and understand implicit user intentions in a unified framework. In this work, we propose a model, called SegPoint, that leverages the reasoning capabilities of a multi-modal Large Language Model (LLM) to produce point-wise segmentation masks across a diverse range of tasks: 1) 3D instruction segmentation, 2) 3D referring segmentation, 3) 3D semantic segmentation, and 4) 3D open-vocabulary semantic segmentation. To advance 3D instruction research, we introduce a new benchmark, Instruct3D, designed to evaluate segmentation performance from complex and implicit instructional texts, featuring 2,565 point cloud-instruction pairs. Our experimental results demonstrate that SegPoint achieves competitive performance on established benchmarks such as ScanRefer for referring segmentation and ScanNet for semantic segmentation, while delivering outstanding outcomes on the Instruct3D dataset. To our knowledge, SegPoint is the first model to address these varied segmentation tasks within a single framework, achieving satisfactory performance.

In this paper, we investigate the use of diffusion models which are pre-trained on large-scale image-caption pairs for open-vocabulary 3D semantic understanding. We propose a novel method, namely Diff2Scene, which leverages frozen representations from text-image generative models, along with salient-aware and geometric-aware masks, for open-vocabulary 3D semantic segmentation and visual grounding tasks. Diff2Scene gets rid of any labeled 3D data and effectively identifies objects, appearances, materials, locations and their compositions in 3D scenes. We show that it outperforms competitive baselines and achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods. In particular, Diff2Scene improves the state-of-the-art method on ScanNet200 by 12%.

3D deblurring reconstruction techniques have recently seen significant advancements with the development of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Although these techniques can recover relatively clear 3D reconstructions from blurry image inputs, they still face limitations in handling severe blurring and complex camera motion. To address these issues, we propose Event-assisted 3D Deblur Reconstruction with Gaussian Splatting (EaDeblur-GS), which integrates event camera data to enhance the robustness of 3DGS against motion blur. By employing an Adaptive Deviation Estimator (ADE) network to estimate Gaussian center deviations and using novel loss functions, EaDeblur-GS achieves sharp 3D reconstructions in real-time, demonstrating performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods.

Mobile robot platforms will increasingly be tasked with activities that involve grasping and manipulating objects in open world environments. Affordance understanding provides a robot with means to realise its goals and execute its tasks, e.g. to achieve autonomous navigation in unknown buildings where it has to find doors and ways to open these. In order to get actionable suggestions, robots need to be able to distinguish subtle differences between objects, as they may result in different action sequences: doorknobs require grasp and twist, while handlebars require grasp and push. In this paper, we improve affordance perception for a robot in an open-world setting. Our contribution is threefold: (1) We provide an affordance representation with precise, actionable affordances; (2) We connect this knowledge base to a foundational vision-language models (VLM) and prompt the VLM for a wider variety of new and unseen objects; (3) We apply a human-in-the-loop for corrections on the output of the VLM. The mix of affordance representation, image detection and a human-in-the-loop is effective for a robot to search for objects to achieve its goals. We have demonstrated this in a scenario of finding various doors and the many different ways to open them.

We consider molecule generation in 3D space using language models (LMs), which requires discrete tokenization of 3D molecular geometries. Although tokenization of molecular graphs exists, that for 3D geometries is largely unexplored. Here, we attempt to bridge this gap by proposing the Geo2Seq, which converts molecular geometries into $SE(3)$-invariant 1D discrete sequences. Geo2Seq consists of canonical labeling and invariant spherical representation steps, which together maintain geometric and atomic fidelity in a format conducive to LMs. Our experiments show that, when coupled with Geo2Seq, various LMs excel in molecular geometry generation, especially in controlled generation tasks.

Face-based Voice Conversion (FVC) is a novel task that leverages facial images to generate the target speaker's voice style. Previous work has two shortcomings: (1) suffering from obtaining facial embeddings that are well-aligned with the speaker's voice identity information, and (2) inadequacy in decoupling content and speaker identity information from the audio input. To address these issues, we present a novel FVC method, Identity-Disentanglement Face-based Voice Conversion (ID-FaceVC), which overcomes the above two limitations. More precisely, we propose an Identity-Aware Query-based Contrastive Learning (IAQ-CL) module to extract speaker-specific facial features, and a Mutual Information-based Dual Decoupling (MIDD) module to purify content features from audio, ensuring clear and high-quality voice conversion. Besides, unlike prior works, our method can accept either audio or text inputs, offering controllable speech generation with adjustable emotional tone and speed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ID-FaceVC achieves state-of-the-art performance across various metrics, with qualitative and user study results confirming its effectiveness in naturalness, similarity, and diversity. Project website with audio samples and code can be found at https://id-facevc.github.io.

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have rapidly penetrated into people's work and daily lives over the past few years, due to their extraordinary conversational skills and intelligence. ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing software in terms of user numbers in human history and become an important foundational model for the next generation of artificial intelligence applications. However, the generations of LLMs are not entirely reliable, often producing content with factual errors, biases, and toxicity. Given their vast number of users and wide range of application scenarios, these unreliable responses can lead to many serious negative impacts. This thesis introduces the exploratory works in the field of language model reliability during the PhD study, focusing on the correctness, non-toxicity, and fairness of LLMs from both software testing and natural language processing perspectives. First, to measure the correctness of LLMs, we introduce two testing frameworks, FactChecker and LogicAsker, to evaluate factual knowledge and logical reasoning accuracy, respectively. Second, for the non-toxicity of LLMs, we introduce two works for red-teaming LLMs. Third, to evaluate the fairness of LLMs, we introduce two evaluation frameworks, BiasAsker and XCulturalBench, to measure the social bias and cultural bias of LLMs, respectively.

Pediatric pneumonia is the leading cause of death among children under five years worldwide, imposing a substantial burden on affected families. Currently, there are three significant hurdles in diagnosing and treating pediatric pneumonia. Firstly, pediatric pneumonia shares similar symptoms with other respiratory diseases, making rapid and accurate differential diagnosis challenging. Secondly, primary hospitals often lack sufficient medical resources and experienced doctors. Lastly, providing personalized diagnostic reports and treatment recommendations is labor-intensive and time-consuming. To tackle these challenges, we proposed a Medical Multimodal Large Language Model for Pediatric Pneumonia (P2Med-MLLM). It was capable of handling diverse clinical tasks, such as generating free-text radiology reports and medical records within a unified framework. Specifically, P2Med-MLLM can process both pure text and image-text data, trained on an extensive and large-scale dataset (P2Med-MD), including real clinical information from 163,999 outpatient and 8,684 inpatient cases. This dataset comprised 2D chest X-ray images, 3D chest CT images, corresponding radiology reports, and outpatient and inpatient records. We designed a three-stage training strategy to enable P2Med-MLLM to comprehend medical knowledge and follow instructions for various clinical tasks. To rigorously evaluate P2Med-MLLM's performance, we developed P2Med-MBench, a benchmark consisting of 642 meticulously verified samples by pediatric pulmonology specialists, covering six clinical decision-support tasks and a balanced variety of diseases. The automated scoring results demonstrated the superiority of P2Med-MLLM. This work plays a crucial role in assisting primary care doctors with prompt disease diagnosis and treatment planning, reducing severe symptom mortality rates, and optimizing the allocation of medical resources.

Many of the recent breakthroughs in language modeling have resulted from scaling effectively the same model architecture to larger datasets. In this vein, recent work has highlighted performance gains from increasing training dataset size and quality, suggesting a need for novel sources of large-scale datasets. In this work, we introduce BeanCounter, a public dataset consisting of more than 159B tokens extracted from businesses' disclosures. We show that this data is indeed novel: less than 0.1% of BeanCounter appears in Common Crawl-based datasets and it is an order of magnitude larger than datasets relying on similar sources. Given the data's provenance, we hypothesize that BeanCounter is comparatively more factual and less toxic than web-based datasets. Exploring this hypothesis, we find that many demographic identities occur with similar prevalence in BeanCounter but with significantly less toxic context relative to other datasets. To demonstrate the utility of BeanCounter, we evaluate and compare two LLMs continually pre-trained on BeanCounter with their base models. We find an 18-33% reduction in toxic generation and improved performance within the finance domain for the continually pretrained models. Collectively, our work suggests that BeanCounter is a novel source of low-toxicity and high-quality domain-specific data with sufficient scale to train multi-billion parameter LLMs.