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Existing speech to speech translation systems heavily rely on the text of target language: they usually translate source language either to target text and then synthesize target speech from text, or directly to target speech with target text for auxiliary training. However, those methods cannot be applied to unwritten target languages, which have no written text or phoneme available. In this paper, we develop a translation system for unwritten languages, named as UWSpeech, which converts target unwritten speech into discrete tokens with a converter, and then translates source-language speech into target discrete tokens with a translator, and finally synthesizes target speech from target discrete tokens with an inverter. We propose a method called XL-VAE, which enhances vector quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) with cross-lingual (XL) speech recognition, to train the converter and inverter of UWSpeech jointly. Experiments on Fisher Spanish-English conversation translation dataset show that UWSpeech outperforms direct translation and VQ-VAE baseline by about 16 and 10 BLEU points respectively, which demonstrate the advantages and potentials of UWSpeech.

AAAI 2021

UWSpeech: Speech to Speech Translation for Unwritten Languages

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Document editing has become a pervasive component of production of information, with version control systems enabling edits to be efficiently stored and applied. In light of this, the task of learning distributed representations of edits has been recently proposed.  With this in mind, we propose a novel approach that employs variational inference to learn a continuous latent space of vector representations to capture the underlying semantic information with regard to the document editing process.  We achieve this by introducing a latent variable to explicitly model the aforementioned features. This latent variable is then combined with a document representation to guide the generation of an edited-version of this document. Additionally, to facilitate standardized automatic evaluation of edit representations, which has heavily relied on direct human input thus far, we also propose a suite of downstream tasks, PEER, specifically designed to measure the quality of edit representations in the context of natural language processing.

Variational Inference for Learning Representations of Natural Language Edits

Language encoders encode words and phrases in ways that capture their local semantic relatedness, but are known to be globally inconsistent. Global inconsistency can seemingly be corrected for, in part, by leveraging signals from knowledge bases, but previous results are partial and limited to monolingual English encoders. We extract a large-scale multilingual, multi-word analogy dataset from Wikidata for diagnosing and correcting for global inconsistencies, and then implement a four-way Siamese BERT architecture for grounding multilingual BERT (mBERT) in Wikidata through analogy training. We show that analogy training not only improves the global consistency of mBERT, as well as the isomorphism of language-specific subspaces, but also leads to consistent gains on downstream tasks such as bilingual dictionary induction and sentence retrieval.

Analogy Training Multilingual Encoders

Adding constraint support in Machine Learning has the potential to address outstanding issues in data-driven AI systems, such as safety and fairness. Existing approaches typically apply constrained optimization techniques to ML training, enforce constraint satisfaction by adjusting the model design, or use constraints to correct the output. Here, we investigate a different, complementary, strategy based on "teaching" constraint satisfaction to a supervised ML method via the direct use of a state-of-the-art constraint solver: this enables taking advantage of decades of research on constrained optimization with limited effort. In practice, we use a decomposition scheme alternating master steps (in charge of enforcing the constraints) and learner steps (where any supervised ML model and training algorithm can be employed). The process leads to approximate constraint satisfaction in general, and convergence properties are difficult to establish; despite this fact, we found empirically that even a naive setup of our approach performs well on ML tasks with fairness constraints, and on classical datasets with synthetic constraints.

Teaching the Old Dog New Tricks: Supervised Learning with Constraints

The majority of current research in Automated Essay Scoring (AES) focuses on prompt-specific scoring of either the overall quality of an essay or the quality with regards to certain traits. In real-world applications obtaining labelled data for a target essay prompt is often expensive or unfeasible, requiring the AES system to be able to perform well when predicting scores for essays from unseen prompts. As a result, some recent research has been dedicated to cross-prompt AES. However, this line of research has thus far only been concerned with holistic, overall scoring, with no exploration into the scoring of different traits. As users of AES systems often require feedback with regards to different aspects of their writing, trait scoring is a necessary component of an effective AES system. Therefore, to address this need, we introduce a new task named Automated Cross-prompt Scoring of Essay Traits, which requires the model to be trained solely on non-target-prompt essays and to predict the holistic, overall score as well as scores for a number of specific traits for target-prompt essays. This task challenges the model's ability to generalize in order to score essays from a novel domain as well as its ability to represent the quality of essays from multiple different aspects. In addition, we introduce a new, innovative approach which builds on top of a state-of-the-art method for cross-prompt AES. Our method utilizes a trait-attention mechanism and a multi-task architecture that leverages the relationships between each trait to simultaneously predict the overall score and the score of each individual trait. We conduct extensive experiments on the widely used ASAP and ASAP++ datasets and demonstrate that our approach is able to outperform leading prompt-specific trait scoring and cross-prompt AES methods.

Automated Cross-Prompt Scoring of Essay Traits

Wasserstein GANs (WGANs), built upon the Kantorovich-Rubinstein (KR) duality of Wasserstein distance, is one of the most theoretically sound GAN models. However, in practice it does not always outperform other variants of GANs. This is mostly due to the imperfect implementation of the Lipschitz condition required by the KR duality. Extensive work has been done in the community with different implementations of the Lipschitz constraint, which, however, is still hard to satisfy the restriction perfectly in practice. In this paper, we argue that the strong Lipschitz constraint might be unnecessary for optimization. Instead, we take a step back and try to relax the Lipschitz constraint. Theoretically, we first demonstrate a more general dual form of the Wasserstein distance called the Sobolev duality, which relaxes the Lipschitz constraint but still maintains the favorable gradient property of the Wasserstein distance. Moreover, we show that the KR duality is actually a special case of the Sobolev duality. Based on the relaxed duality, we further propose a generalized WGAN training scheme named Sobolev Wasserstein GAN, and empirically demonstrate the improvement over existing methods with extensive experiments.

Towards Generalized Implementation of Wasserstein Distance in GANs

Value function is the central notion of Reinforcement Learning (RL). Value estimation, especially with function approximation, can be challenging since it involves the stochasticity of environmental dynamics and reward signals that can be sparse and delayed in some cases. A typical model-free RL algorithm usually estimates the values of a policy by Temporal Difference (TD) or Monte Carlo (MC) algorithms directly from rewards, without explicitly taking dynamics into consideration. In this paper, we propose Value Decomposition with Future Prediction (VDFP), providing an explicit two-step understanding of the value estimation process: 1) first foresee the latent future, 2) and then evaluate it. We analytically decompose the value function into a latent future dynamics part and a policy-independent trajectory return part, inducing a way to model latent dynamics and returns separately in value estimation. Further, we derive a practical deep RL algorithm, consisting of a convolutional model to learn compact trajectory representation from past experiences, a conditional variational auto-encoder to predict the latent future dynamics and a convex return model that evaluates trajectory representation. In experiments, we empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for both off-policy and on-policy RL in several OpenAI Gym continuous control tasks as well as a few challenging variants with delayed reward.

Foresee then Evaluate: Decomposing Value Estimation with Latent Future Prediction

With the recent advances in graph neural networks, there is a rising number of studies on graph-based multi-label classification with the consideration of object dependencies within visual data. Nevertheless, graph representations can become indistinguishable due to the complex nature of label relationships. We propose a multi-label image classification framework based on graph transformer networks to fully exploit inter-label interactions. The paper presents a modular learning scheme to enhance the classification performance by segregating the computational graph into multiple sub-graphs based on modularity. The proposed approach, named Modular Graph Transformer Networks (MGTN), is capable of employing multiple backbones for better information propagation over different sub-graphs guided by graph transformers and convolutions. We validate our framework on MS-COCO and Fashion550K datasets to demonstrate improvements for multi-label image classification. The source code is available at https://github.com/ReML-AI/MGTN.

Modular Graph Transformer Networks for Multi-Label Image Classification

We propose a new GAN-based unsupervised model for disentangled representation learning. The new model is discovered in an attempt to utilize the Information Bottleneck (IB) framework to the optimization of GAN, thereby named IB-GAN. 
The architecture of IB-GAN is partially similar to that of InfoGAN but has a critical difference; an intermediate layer of the generator is leveraged to constrain the mutual information between the input and the generated output. The intermediate stochastic layer can serve as a learnable latent distribution that is trained with the generator jointly in an end-to-end fashion. As a result, the generator of IB-GAN can harness the latent space in a disentangled and interpretable manner. With the experiments on dSprites and Color-dSprites dataset, we demonstrate that IB-GAN achieves competitive disentanglement scores to those of state-of-the-art Î²-VAEs and outperforms InfoGAN. Moreover, the visual quality and the diversity of samples generated by IB-GAN are often better than those by Î²-VAEs and Info-GAN in terms of FID score on CelebA and 3D Chairs dataset.

IB-GAN: Disengangled Representation Learning with Information Bottleneck Generative Adversarial Networks

In continual learning, the learner faces a stream of data whose distribution changes over time. Modern neural networks are known to suffer under this setting, as they quickly forget previously acquired knowledge. To address such catastrophic forgetting, many continual learning methods implement different types of experience replay, re-learning on past data stored in a small buffer known as episodic memory. In this work, we complement experience replay with a new objective that we call ``anchoring'', where the learner uses bilevel optimization to
update its knowledge on the current task, while keeping intact the predictions on some anchor points of past tasks. These anchor points are learned using gradient-based optimization to maximize forgetting, which is approximated by fine-tuning the currently trained model on the episodic memory of past tasks. Experiments on several supervised learning benchmarks for continual learning demonstrate that our approach improves the standard experience replay in terms of both accuracy and forgetting metrics and for various sizes of episodic memory.

Using Hindsight to Anchor Past Knowledge in Continual Learning

Recently, high dynamic range (HDR) image reconstruction based on the multiple exposure stack from a given single exposure utilizes a deep learning framework to generate high-quality HDR images. These conventional networks focus on the exposure transfer task to reconstruct the multi-exposure stack. Therefore, they often fail to fuse the multi-exposure stack into a perceptually pleasant HDR image as the inversion artifacts occur. We tackle the problem in stack reconstruction-based methods by proposing a novel framework with a fully differentiable high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) process. By explicitly using the loss, which compares the network's output with the ground truth HDR image, our framework enables a neural network that generates the multiple exposure stack for HDRI to train stably. In other words, our differentiable HDR synthesis layer helps the deep neural network to train to create multi-exposure stacks while reflecting the precise correlations between multi-exposure images in the HDRI process. In addition, our network uses the image decomposition and the recursive process to facilitate the exposure transfer task and to adaptively respond to recursion frequency. The experimental results show that the proposed network outperforms the state-of-the-art quantitative and qualitative results in terms of both the exposure transfer tasks and the whole HDRI process.

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Variational Inference for Learning Representations of Natural Language Edits

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Next from AAAI 2021

Variational Inference for Learning Representations of Natural Language Edits

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Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Speech Translation

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PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

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RESOURCES

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