Diffusion models have achieved significant success in computer vision and shown immense potential in natural language processing applications, particularly for text generation tasks. However, generating high-quality text using these models often necessitates thousands of iterations, leading to slow sampling rates. Existing acceleration methods either neglect the importance of the distribution of sampling steps, resulting in compromised performance with smaller number of iterations, or require additional training, introducing considerable computational overheads. In this paper, we present Few-shot Temporal Pruning, a novel technique designed to accelerate diffusion models for text generation without supplementary training while effectively leveraging limited data. Employing a Bayesian optimization approach, our method effectively eliminates redundant sampling steps during the sampling process, thereby enhancing the generation speed. A comprehensive evaluation of discrete and continuous diffusion models across various tasks, including machine translation, question generation, and paraphrasing, reveals that our approach achieves competitive performance even with minimal sampling steps after down to less than 1 minute of optimization, yielding a significant acceleration of up to 400x in text generation tasks.

Large Language Model (LLM)-enhanced agents become increasingly prevalent in Human-AI communication, offering vast potential from entertainment to professional domains. However, current multi-modal dialogue systems overlook the acoustic information present in speech, which is crucial for understanding human communication nuances. This oversight can lead to misinterpretations of speakers’ intentions, resulting in inconsistent or even contradictory responses within dialogues. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose PerceptiveAgent, an empathetic multi-modal dialogue system designed to discern deeper or more subtle meanings beyond the literal interpretations of words through the integration of speech modality perception. Employing LLMs as a cognitive core, PerceptiveAgent perceives acoustic information from input speech and generates empathetic responses based on speaking styles described in natural language. Experimental results indicate that PerceptiveAgent excels in contextual understanding by accurately discerning the speakers’ true intentions in scenarios where the linguistic meaning is either contrary to or inconsistent with the speaker’s true feelings, producing more nuanced and expressive spoken dialogues. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Haoqiu-Yan/PerceptiveAgent.

Document Information Extraction (DIE) has attracted increasing attention due to its various advanced applications in the real world. Although recent literature has already achieved competitive results, these approaches usually fail when dealing with complex documents with noisy OCR results or mutative layouts. This paper proposes Generative Multi-modal Network (GMN) for real-world scenarios to address these problems, which is a robust multi-modal generation method without predefined label categories. With the carefully designed spatial encoder and modal-aware mask module, GMN can deal with complex documents that are hard to serialized into sequential order. Moreover, GMN tolerates errors in OCR results and requires no character-level annotation, which is vital because fine-grained annotation of numerous documents is laborious and even requires annotators with specialized domain knowledge. Extensive experiments show that GMN achieves new state-of-the-art performance on several public DIE datasets and surpasses other methods by a large margin, especially in realistic scenes.