OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Energy-Efficient Decentralized Learning Via Graph Sparsification
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

This work aims at improving the energy efficiency of decentralized learning by optimizing the mixing matrix, which controls the communication demands during the learning process. Through rigorous analysis based on a state-of-the-art decentralized learning algorithm, the problem is formulated as a bi-level optimization, with the lower level solved by graph sparsification. A solution with guaranteed performance is proposed for the special case of fully-connected base topology and a greedy heuristic is proposed for the general case. Simulations based on real topology and dataset show that the proposed solution can lower the energy consumption at the busiest node by 54%-76% while maintaining the quality of the trained model.
Noise-Aware Speech Separation with Contrastive Learning
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, speech separation (SS) task has achieved remarkable progress driven by deep learning technique. However, it is still challenging to separate target speech from noisy mixture, as the neural model is vulnerable to assign background noise to each speaker. In this paper, we propose a noise-aware SS (NASS) method, which aims to improve the speech quality for separated signals under noisy conditions. Specifically, NASS views background noise as an additional output and predicts it along with other speakers in a mask-based manner. To effectively denoise, we introduce patch-wise contrastive learning (PCL) between noise and speaker representations from the decoder input and encoder output. PCL loss aims to minimize the mutual information between predicted noise and other speakers at multiple-patch level to suppress the noise information in separated signals. Experimental results show that NASS achieves 1 to 2dB SI-SNRi or SDRi over DPRNN and Sepformer on WHAM! and LibriMix noisy datasets, with less than 0.1M parameter increase.
EPA: Neural Collapse Inspired Robust Out-of-distribution Detector
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection plays a crucial role in ensuring the security of neural networks. Existing works have leveraged the fact that In-distribution (ID) samples form a subspace in the feature space, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. However, the comprehensive characteristics of the ID subspace still leave under-explored. Recently, the discovery of Neural Collapse ($\mathcal{NC}$) sheds light on novel properties of the ID subspace. Leveraging insight from $\mathcal{NC}$, we observe that the Principal Angle between the features and the ID feature subspace forms a superior representation for measuring the likelihood of OOD. Building upon this observation, we propose a novel $\mathcal{NC}$-inspired OOD scoring function, named Entropy-enhanced Principal Angle (EPA), which integrates both the global characteristic of the ID subspace and its inner property. We experimentally compare EPA with various SOTA approaches, validating its superior performance and robustness across different network architectures and OOD datasets.
Unsupervised Multiple Choices Question Answering Via Universal Corpus
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Unsupervised question answering is a promising yet challenging task, which alleviates the burden of building large-scale annotated data in a new domain. It motivates us to study the unsupervised multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) problem. In this paper, we propose a novel framework designed to generate synthetic MCQA data barely based on contexts from the universal domain without relying on any form of manual annotation. Possible answers are extracted and used to produce related questions, then we leverage both named entities (NE) and knowledge graphs to discover plausible distractors to form complete synthetic samples. Experiments on multiple MCQA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
T-Pixel2Mesh: Combining Global and Local Transformer for 3D Mesh Generation from a Single Image
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Pixel2Mesh (P2M) is a classical approach for reconstructing 3D shapes from a single color image through coarse-to-fine mesh deformation. Although P2M is capable of generating plausible global shapes, its Graph Convolution Network (GCN) often produces overly smooth results, causing the loss of fine-grained geometry details. Moreover, P2M generates non-credible features for occluded regions and struggles with the domain gap from synthetic data to real-world images, which is a common challenge for single-view 3D reconstruction methods. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Transformer-boosted architecture, named T-Pixel2Mesh, inspired by the coarse-to-fine approach of P2M. Specifically, we use a global Transformer to control the holistic shape and a local Transformer to progressively refine the local geometry details with graph-based point upsampling. To enhance real-world reconstruction, we present the simple yet effective Linear Scale Search (LSS), which serves as prompt tuning during the input preprocessing. Our experiments on ShapeNet demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, while results on real-world data show the generalization capability.
Meta-Learning With Versatile Loss Geometries for Fast Adaptation Using Mirror Descent
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Utilizing task-invariant prior knowledge extracted from related tasks, meta-learning is a principled framework that empowers learning a new task especially when data records are limited. A fundamental challenge in meta-learning is how to quickly "adapt" the extracted prior in order to train a task-specific model within a few optimization steps. Existing approaches deal with this challenge using a preconditioner that enhances convergence of the per-task training process. Though effective in representing locally a quadratic training loss, these simple linear preconditioners can hardly capture complex loss geometries. The present contribution addresses this limitation by learning a nonlinear mirror map, which induces a versatile distance metric to enable capturing and optimizing a wide range of loss geometries, hence facilitating the per-task training. Numerical tests on few-shot learning datasets demonstrate the superior expressiveness and convergence of the advocated approach.
Gradient-Aware Logit Adjustment Loss for Long-Tailed Classifier
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

In the real-world setting, data often follows a long-tailed distribution, where head classes contain significantly more training samples than tail classes. Consequently, models trained on such data tend to be biased toward head classes. The medium of this bias is imbalanced gradients, which include not only the ratio of scale between positive and negative gradients but also imbalanced gradients from different negative classes. Therefore, we propose the Gradient-Aware Logit Adjustment (GALA) loss, which adjusts the logits based on accumulated gradients to balance the optimization process. Additionally, We find that most of the solutions to long-tailed problems are still biased towards head classes in the end, and we propose a simple and post hoc prediction re-balancing strategy to further mitigate the basis toward head class. Extensive experiments are conducted on multiple popular long-tailed recognition benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of these two designs. Our approach achieves top-1 accuracy of 48.5\%, 41.4\%, and 73.3\% on CIFAR100-LT, Places-LT, and iNaturalist, outperforming the state-of-the-art method GCL by a significant margin of 3.62\%, 0.76\% and 1.2\%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/lt-project-repository/lt-project.
An Efficient Algorithm for Multiuser Sum-Rate Maximization of Large-Scale Active RIS-Aided MIMO System
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Active reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a new RIS architecture that can reflect and amplify communication signals. It can provide enhanced performance gain compared to the conventional passive RIS systems that can only reflect the signals. On the other hand, the design problem of active RIS-aided systems is more challenging than the passive RIS-aided systems and its efficient algorithms are less studied. In this paper, we consider the sum rate maximization problem in the multiuser massive multiple-input single-output (MISO) downlink with the aid of a large-scale active RIS. Existing approaches for handling this problem usually resort to general optimization solvers and can be computationally prohibitive. We propose an efficient block successive upper bound minimization (BSUM) method, of which each step has a (semi) closed-form update. Thus, the proposed algorithm has an attractive low per-iteration complexity. By simulation, our proposed algorithm consumes much less computation than the existing approaches. In particular, when the MIMO and/or RIS sizes are large, our proposed algorithm can be orders-of-magnitude faster than existing approaches.
In-Context Learning for Few-Shot Nested Named Entity Recognition
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

In nested Named entity recognition (NER), entities are nested with each other, and thus requiring more data annotations to address. This leads to the development of few-shot nested NER, where the prevalence of pretrained language models with in-context learning (ICL) offers promising solutions. In this work, we introduce an effective and innovative ICL framework for the setting of few-shot nested NER. We improve the ICL prompt by devising a novel example demonstration selection mechanism, EnDe retriever. In EnDe retriever, we employ contrastive learning to perform three types of representation learning, in terms of semantic similarity, boundary similarity, and label similarity, to generate high-quality demonstration examples. Extensive experiments over three nested NER and four flat NER datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our system.
First-Shot Unsupervised Anomalous Sound Detection with Unknown Anomalies Estimated by Metadata-Assisted Audio Generation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

First-shot (FS) unsupervised anomalous sound detection (ASD) is a brand-new task introduced in DCASE 2023 Challenge Task 2, where the anomalous sounds for the target machine types are unseen in training. Existing methods often rely on the availability of normal and abnormal sound data from the target machines. However, due to the lack of anomalous sound data for the target machine types, it becomes challenging when adapting the existing ASD methods to the first-shot task. In this paper, we propose a new framework for the first-shot unsupervised ASD, where metadata-assisted audio generation is used to estimate unknown anomalies, by utilising the available machine information (i.e., metadata and sound data) to fine-tune a text-to-audio generation model for generating the anomalous sounds that contain unique acoustic characteristics accounting for each different machine type. We then use the method of Time-Weighted Frequency domain audio Representation with Gaussian Mixture Model (TWFR-GMM) as the backbone to achieve the first-shot unsupervised ASD. Our proposed FS-TWFR-GMM method achieves competitive performance amongst top systems in DCASE 2023 Challenge Task 2, while requiring only 1% model parameters for detection, as validated in our experiments.
Adaptive Data Augmentation for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP) aims to predict the quad sentiment elements for a given sentence, which is a critical task in the field of aspect-based sentiment analysis. However, the data imbalance issue has not received sufficient attention in ASQP task. In this paper, we divide the issue into two-folds, quad-pattern imbalance and aspect-category imbalance, and propose an Adaptive Data Augmentation (ADA) framework to tackle the imbalance issue. Specifically, a data augmentation process with a condition function adaptively enhances the tail quad patterns and aspect categories, alleviating the data imbalance in ASQP. Following previous studies, we also further explore the generative framework for extracting complete quads by introducing the category prior knowledge and syntax-guided decoding target. Experimental results demonstrate that data augmentation for imbalance in ASQP task can improve the performance, and the proposed ADA method is superior to naive data oversampling.
Robust Single-Particle Cryo-Em Image Denoising and Restoration
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has achieved near-atomic level resolution of biomolecules by reconstructing 2D micrographs. However, the resolution and accuracy of the reconstructed particles are significantly reduced due to the extremely low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and complex noise structure of cryo-EM images. In this paper, we introduce a diffusion model with post-processing framework to effectively denoise and restore single particle cryo-EM images. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) denoising methods by effectively removing structural noise that has not been addressed before. Additionally, more accurate and high-resolution three-dimensional reconstruction structures can be obtained from denoised cryo-EM images.
ARFA: An Asymmetric Receptive Field Autoencoder Model for Spatiotemporal Prediction
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Spatiotemporal prediction aims to generate future sequences by paradigms learned from historical contexts. It is essential in numerous domains, such as traffic flow prediction and weather forecasting. Recently, research in this field has been predominantly driven by deep neural networks based on autoencoder architectures. However, existing methods commonly adopt autoencoder architectures with identical receptive field sizes. To address this issue, we propose an Asymmetric Receptive Field Autoencoder (ARFA) model, which introduces corresponding sizes of receptive field modules tailored to the distinct functionalities of the encoder and decoder. In the encoder, we present a large kernel module for global spatiotemporal feature extraction. In the decoder, we develop a small kernel module for local spatiotemporal information reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that ARFA consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on popular datasets. Additionally, we construct the RainBench, a large-scale radar echo dataset for precipitation prediction, to address the scarcity of meteorological data in the domain.
CIF-T: A Novel CIF-Based Transducer Architecture for Automatic Speech Recognition
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

RNN-T models are widely used in ASR, which rely on the RNN-T loss to achieve length alignment between input audio and target sequence. However, the implementation complexity and the alignment-based optimization target of RNN-T loss lead to computational redundancy and a reduced role for predictor network, respectively. In this paper, we propose a novel model named CIF-Transducer (CIF-T) which incorporates the Continuous Integrate-and-Fire (CIF) mechanism with the RNN-T model to achieve efficient alignment. In this way, the RNN-T loss is abandoned, thus bringing a computational reduction and allowing the predictor network a more significant role. We also introduce Funnel-CIF, Context Blocks, Unified Gating and Bilinear Pooling joint network, and auxiliary training strategy to further improve performance. Experiments on the 178-hour AISHELL-1 and 10000-hour WenetSpeech datasets show that CIF-T achieves state-of-the-art results with lower computational overhead compared to RNN-T models.
Toward Sufficient Spatial-Frequency Interaction for Gradient-Aware Underwater Image Enhancement
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Underwater images suffer from complex and diverse degradation, which inevitably affects the performance of underwater visual tasks. However, most existing learning-based Underwater image enhancement (UIE) methods mainly restore such degradations in the spatial domain, and rarely pay attention to the fourier frequency information. In this paper, we develop a novel UIE framework based on spatial-frequency interaction and gradient maps, namely SFGNet, which consists of two stages. Specifically, in the first stage, we propose a dense spatial-frequency fusion network (DSFFNet), mainly including our designed dense fourier fusion block and dense spatial fusion block, achieving sufficient spatial-frequency interaction by cross connections between these two blocks. In the second stage, we propose a gradient-aware corrector (GAC) to further enhance perceptual details and geometric structures of images by gradient map. Experimental results on two real-world underwater image datasets show that our approach can successfully enhance underwater images, and achieves competitive performance in visual quality improvement. The code is available at https://github.com/zhihefang/SFGNet.
Noise-BERT: A Unified Perturbation-Robust Framework with Noise Alignment Pre-Training for Noisy Slot Filling Task
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

In a realistic dialogue system, the input information from users is often subject to various types of input perturbations, which affects the slot-filling task. Although rule-based data augmentation methods have achieved satisfactory results, they fail to exhibit the desired generalization when faced with unknown noise disturbances. In this study, we address the challenges posed by input perturbations in slot filling by proposing Noise-BERT, a unified Perturbation-Robust Framework with Noise Alignment Pre-training. Our framework incorporates two Noise Alignment Pre-training tasks: Slot Masked Prediction and Sentence Noisiness Discrimination, aiming to guide the pre-trained language model in capturing accurate slot information and noise distribution. During fine-tuning, we employ a contrastive learning loss to enhance the semantic representation of entities and labels. Additionally, we introduce an adversarial attack training strategy to improve the model's robustness. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over state-of-the-art models, and further analysis confirms its effectiveness and generalization ability.
MossFormer2: Combining Transformer and RNN-Free Recurrent Network for Enhanced Time-Domain Monaural Speech Separation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Our previously proposed MossFormer has achieved promising performance in monaural speech separation. However, it predominantly adopts a self-attention-based MossFormer module, which tends to emphasize longer-range, coarser-scale dependencies, with a deficiency in effectively modelling finer-scale recurrent patterns. In this paper, we introduce a novel hybrid model that provides the capabilities to model both long-range, coarse-scale dependencies and fine-scale recurrent patterns by integrating a recurrent module into the MossFormer framework. Instead of applying the recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that use traditional recurrent connections, we present a recurrent module based on a feedforward sequential memory network (FSMN), which is considered "RNN-free" recurrent network due to the ability to capture recurrent patterns without using recurrent connections. Our recurrent module mainly comprises an enhanced dilated FSMN block by using gated convolutional units (GCU) and dense connections. In addition, a bottleneck layer and an output layer are also added for controlling information flow. The recurrent module relies on linear projections and convolutions for seamless, parallel processing of the entire sequence. The integrated MossFormer2 hybrid model demonstrates remarkable enhancements over MossFormer and surpasses other state-of-the-art methods in WSJ0-2/3mix, Libri2Mix, and WHAM!/WHAMR! benchmarks (https://github.com/modelscope/ClearerVoice-Studio).
Emotion-Aware Contrastive Adaptation Network for Source-Free Cross-Corpus Speech Emotion Recognition
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Cross-corpus speech emotion recognition (SER) aims to transfer emotional knowledge from a labeled source corpus to an unlabeled corpus. However, prior methods require access to source data during adaptation, which is unattainable in real-life scenarios due to data privacy protection concerns. This paper tackles a more practical task, namely source-free cross-corpus SER, where a pre-trained source model is adapted to the target domain without access to source data. To address the problem, we propose a novel method called emotion-aware contrastive adaptation network (ECAN). The core idea is to capture local neighborhood information between samples while considering the global class-level adaptation. Specifically, we propose a nearest neighbor contrastive learning to promote local emotion consistency among features of highly similar samples. Furthermore, relying solely on nearest neighborhoods may lead to ambiguous boundaries between clusters. Thus, we incorporate supervised contrastive learning to encourage greater separation between clusters representing different emotions, thereby facilitating improved class-level adaptation. Extensive experiments indicate that our proposed ECAN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods under the source-free cross-corpus SER setting on several speech emotion corpora.
Supplementing Missing Visions Via Dialog for Scene Graph Generations
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Most current AI systems rely on the premise that the input visual data are sufficient to achieve competitive performance in various computer vision tasks. However, the classic task setup rarely considers the challenging, yet common practical situations where the complete visual data may be inaccessible due to various reasons (e.g., restricted view range and occlusions). To this end, we investigate a computer vision task setting with incomplete visual input data. Specifically, we exploit the Scene Graph Generation (SGG) task with various levels of visual data missingness as input. While insufficient visual input intuitively leads to performance drop, we propose to supplement the missing visions via the natural language dialog interactions to better accomplish the task objective. We design a model-agnostic Supplementary Interactive Dialog (SI-Dial) framework that can be jointly learned with most existing models, endowing the current AI systems with the ability of question-answer interactions in natural language. We demonstrate the feasibility of such a task setting with missing visual input and the effectiveness of our proposed dialog module as the supplementary information source through extensive experiments and analysis, by achieving promising performance improvement over multiple baselines.
BPDO: Boundary Points Dynamic Optimization for Arbitrary Shape Scene Text Detection
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Arbitrary shape scene text detection is of great importance in scene understanding tasks. Due to the complexity and diversity of text in natural scenes, existing scene text algorithms have limited accuracy for detecting arbitrary shape text. In this paper, we propose a novel arbitrary shape scene text detector through boundary points dynamic optimization(BPDO). The proposed model is designed with a text aware module (TAM) and a boundary point dynamic optimization module (DOM). Specifically, the model designs a text aware module based on segmentation to obtain boundary points describing the central region of the text by extracting a priori information about the text region. Then, based on the idea of deformable attention, it proposes a dynamic optimization model for boundary points, which gradually optimizes the exact position of the boundary points based on the information of the adjacent region of each boundary point. Experiments on CTW-1500, Total-Text, and MSRA-TD500 datasets show that the model proposed in this paper achieves a performance that is better than or comparable to the state-of-the-art algorithm, proving the effectiveness of the model.