SongRewriter: A Chinese Song Rewriting System with Controllable Content and Rhyme Scheme

Although lyrics generation has achieved significant progress in recent years, it has limited practical applications because the generated lyrics cannot be performed without composing compatible melodies. In this work, we bridge this practical gap by proposing a song rewriting system which rewrites the lyrics of an existing song such that the generated lyrics are compatible with the rhythm of the existing melody and thus singable. In particular, we propose SongRewriter, a controllable Chinese lyric generation and editing system which assists users without prior knowledge of melody composition. The system is trained by a randomized multi-level masking strategy which produces a unified model for generating entirely new lyrics or editing a few fragments. To improve the controllabiliy of the generation process, we further incorporate a keyword prompt to control the lexical choices of the content and propose novel decoding constraints and a vowel modeling task to enable flexible end and internal rhyme schemes. While prior rhyming metrics are mainly for rap lyrics, we propose three novel rhyming evaluation metrics for song lyrics. Both automatic and human evaluations show that the proposed model performs better than the state-of-the-art models in both contents and rhyming quality. Our code and models implemented in MindSpore Lite tool will be available

AiM: Taking Answers in Mind to Correct Chinese Cloze Tests in Educational Applications

To automatically correct handwritten assignments, the traditional approach is to use an OCR model to recognize characters and compare them to answers. The OCR model easily gets confused on recognizing handwritten Chinese characters, and the textual information of the answers is missing during the model inference. However, teachers always have these answers in mind to review and correct assignments. In this paper, we focus on the Chinese cloze tests correction and propose a multimodal approach (named AiM). The encoded representations of answers interact with the visual information of students' handwriting. Instead of predicting 'right' or 'wrong', we perform the sequence labeling on the answer text to infer which answer character differs from the handwritten content in a fine-grained way. We take samples of OCR datasets as the positive samples for this task, and develop a negative sample augmentation method to scale up the training data. Experimental results show that AiM outperforms OCR-based methods by a large margin. Extensive studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our multimodal approach.Comment: Accepted to COLING 202

NeTO:Neural Reconstruction of Transparent Objects with Self-Occlusion Aware Refraction-Tracing

We present a novel method, called NeTO, for capturing 3D geometry of solid transparent objects from 2D images via volume rendering. Reconstructing transparent objects is a very challenging task, which is ill-suited for general-purpose reconstruction techniques due to the specular light transport phenomena. Although existing refraction-tracing based methods, designed specially for this task, achieve impressive results, they still suffer from unstable optimization and loss of fine details, since the explicit surface representation they adopted is difficult to be optimized, and the self-occlusion problem is ignored for refraction-tracing. In this paper, we propose to leverage implicit Signed Distance Function (SDF) as surface representation, and optimize the SDF field via volume rendering with a self-occlusion aware refractive ray tracing. The implicit representation enables our method to be capable of reconstructing high-quality reconstruction even with a limited set of images, and the self-occlusion aware strategy makes it possible for our method to accurately reconstruct the self-occluded regions. Experiments show that our method achieves faithful reconstruction results and outperforms prior works by a large margin. Visit our project page at \url{https://www.xxlong.site/NeTO/

M4LE: A Multi-Ability Multi-Range Multi-Task Multi-Domain Long-Context Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models

Managing long sequences has become an important and necessary feature for large language models (LLMs). However, it is still an open question of how to comprehensively and systematically evaluate the long-sequence capability of LLMs. One of the reasons is that conventional and widely-used benchmarks mainly consist of short sequences. In this paper, we propose M4LE, a Multi-ability, Multi-range, Multi-task, Multi-domain benchmark for Long-context Evaluation. M4LE is based on a diverse NLP task pool comprising 36 NLP datasets, 11 task types and 12 domains. To alleviate the scarcity of tasks with naturally long sequences and incorporate multiple-ability assessment, we propose an automatic approach (but with negligible human annotations) to convert short-sequence tasks into a unified long-sequence scenario where LLMs have to identify single or multiple relevant spans in long contexts based on explicit or semantic hints. Specifically, the scenario includes five different types of abilities: (1) explicit single-span; (2) semantic single-span; (3) explicit multiple-span; (4) semantic multiple-span; and (5) global context understanding. The resulting samples in M4LE are evenly distributed from 1k to 8k input length. We conducted a systematic evaluation on 11 well-established LLMs, especially those optimized for long-sequence inputs. Our results reveal that: 1) Current LLMs struggle to understand long context, particularly when tasks require multiple-span attention. 2) Semantic retrieval task is more difficult for competent LLMs. 3) Models fine-tuned on longer text with position interpolation have comparable performance to those using Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) aware scaling methods without fine-tuning. We make our benchmark publicly available to encourage future research in this challenging area.Comment: Code and data are available at https://github.com/KwanWaiChung/M4L

Synthesis, photophysical properties and two-photon absorption study of tetraazachrysene-based N-heteroacenes

Three novel N‐heteroacene molecules (SDNU‐1, SDNU‐2 and SDNU‐3) based on tetraazachrysene units as cores have been designed, synthesized and fully characterized. Their photophysical, electrochemical and fluorescence properties were investigated, and they exhibited blue to green emission in the solid state. Interestingly, SDNU‐2 exhibited high solid photoluminescence quantum efficiencies (75.3 %), which is the highest value of N‐heteroacenes derivatives to date. Two‐photon absorption studies have been conducted by using the open and close aperture Z‐san technique. SDNU‐3 showed a significant enhancement in the two‐photon absorption cross‐section with magnitudes as high as about 700 GM (1 GM=1×10−50 cm4 s/photon) when excited with 800 nm light, which is the largest value based on a heteroacene system measured by using a Z‐scan experiment so far. We attribute the outcome to sufficient electronic coupling between the strong charge transfer of quadrupolar substituents and the tetraazachrysene core. Our result would provide a new guideline to design novel efficient two‐photon materials based on N‐heteroacene cores