OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
SAR: Self-Supervised Anti-Distortion Representation for End-To-End Speech Model
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

In recent Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems, a neural vocoder often generates speech samples by solely conditioning on acoustic features predicted from an acoustic model. However, there are always distortions existing in the predicted acoustic features, compared to those of the groundtruth, especially in the common case of poor acoustic modeling due to low-quality training data. To overcome such limits, we propose a Self-supervised learning framework to learn an Anti-distortion acoustic Representation (SAR) to replace human-crafted acoustic features by introducing distortion prior to an auto-encoder pre-training process. The learned acoustic representation from the proposed framework is proved anti-distortion compared to the most commonly used mel-spectrogram through both objective and subjective evaluation.
Lightweight Machine Learning for Digital Cross-Link Interference Cancellation with RF Chain Characteristics in Flexible Duplex MIMO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

The flexible duplex (FD) technique, including dynamic time-division duplex (D-TDD) and dynamic frequency-division duplex (D-FDD), is regarded as a promising solution to achieving a more flexible uplink/downlink transmission in 5G-Advanced or 6G mobile communication systems. However, it may introduce serious cross-link interference (CLI). For better mitigating the impact of CLI, we first present a more realistic base station (BS)-to-BS channel model incorporating the radio frequency (RF) chain characteristics, which exhibit a hardware-dependent nonlinear property, and hence the accuracy of conventional channel modelling is inadequate for CLI cancellation. Then, we propose a channel parameter estimation based polynomial CLI canceller and two machine learning (ML) based CLI cancellers that use the lightweight feedforward neural network (FNN). Our simulation results and analysis show that the ML based CLI cancellers achieve notable performance improvement and dramatic reduction of computational complexity, in comparison with the polynomial CLI canceller.
Experts prefer text but videos help novices: an analysis of the utility of multi-media content
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-media increases engagement and is increasingly prevalent in online content including news, web blogs, and social media, however, it may not always be beneficial to users. To determine what types of media users actually wanted, we conducted an exploratory study where users got to choose their own media augmentation. Our findings showed that users desired different amounts and types of media depending on their familiarity with the content. To further investigate this difference, we created two versions of a media augmented document, one designed for novices and one designed for experts. We evaluated these prototypes in a two-way between-subject study with 48 participants and found that while multi-media enhanced novice readers' perception of usability (p = .0100) and helped them with reading time (p = .0427), time on task (p= .0156), comprehension (p = .0161), experts largely ignored multi-media and primarily utilized text.
Meta-multigraph Search: Rethinking Meta-structure on Heterogeneous Information Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Meta-structures are widely used to define which subset of neighbors to aggregate information in heterogeneous information networks (HINs). In this work, we investigate existing meta-structures, including meta-path and meta-graph, and observe that they are initially designed manually with fixed patterns and hence are insufficient to encode various rich semantic information on diverse HINs. Through reflection on their limitation, we define a new concept called meta-multigraph as a more expressive and flexible generalization of meta-graph, and propose a stable differentiable search method to automatically optimize the meta-multigraph for specific HINs and tasks. As the flexibility of meta-multigraphs may propagate redundant messages, we further introduce a complex-to-concise (C2C) meta-multigraph that propagates messages from complex to concise along the depth of meta-multigraph. Moreover, we observe that the differentiable search typically suffers from unstable search and a significant gap between the meta-structures in search and evaluation. To this end, we propose a progressive search algorithm by implicitly narrowing the search space to improve search stability and reduce inconsistency. Extensive experiments are conducted on six medium-scale benchmark datasets and one large-scale benchmark dataset over two representative tasks, i.e., node classification and recommendation. Empirical results demonstrate that our search methods can automatically find expressive meta-multigraphs and C2C meta-multigraphs, enabling our model to outperform state-of-the-art heterogeneous graph neural networks.
Quantifying over Trees in Monadic Second-Order Logic
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

Monadic Second-Order Logic (MSO) extends First-Order Logic (FO) with variables ranging over sets and quantifications over those variables. We introduce and study Monadic Tree Logic (MTL), a fragment of MSO interpreted on infinite-tree models, where the sets over which the variables range are arbitrary subtrees of the original model. We analyse the expressiveness of MTL compared with variants of MSO and MPL, namely MSO with quantifications over paths. We also discuss the connections with temporal logics, by providing non-trivial fragments of the Graded μ-Calculus that can be embedded into MTL and by showing that MTL is enough to encode temporal logics for reasoning about strategies with FO-definable goals.
An Asynchronous Decentralized Algorithm for Wasserstein Barycenter Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Wasserstein Barycenter Problem (WBP) has recently received much attention in the field of artificial intelligence. In this paper, we focus on the decentralized setting for WBP and propose an asynchronous decentralized algorithm (A$^2$DWB). A$^2$DWB is induced by a novel stochastic block coordinate descent method to optimize the dual of entropy regularized WBP. To our knowledge, A$^2$DWB is the first asynchronous decentralized algorithm for WBP. Unlike its synchronous counterpart, it updates local variables in a manner that only relies on the stale neighbor information, which effectively alleviate the waiting overhead, and thus substantially improve the time efficiency. Empirical results validate its superior performance compared to the latest synchronous algorithm.
TGNN: A Joint Semi-supervised Framework for Graph-level Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

This paper studies semi-supervised graph classification, a crucial task with a wide range of applications in social network analysis and bioinformatics. Recent works typically adopt graph neural networks to learn graph-level representations for classification, failing to explicitly leverage features derived from graph topology (e.g., paths). Moreover, when labeled data is scarce, these methods are far from satisfactory due to their insufficient topology exploration of unlabeled data. We address the challenge by proposing a novel semi-supervised framework called Twin Graph Neural Network (TGNN). To explore graph structural information from complementary views, our TGNN has a message passing module and a graph kernel module. To fully utilize unlabeled data, for each module, we calculate the similarity of each unlabeled graph to other labeled graphs in the memory bank and our consistency loss encourages consistency between two similarity distributions in different embedding spaces. The two twin modules collaborate with each other by exchanging instance similarity knowledge to fully explore the structure information of both labeled and unlabeled data. We evaluate our TGNN on various public datasets and show that it achieves strong performance.
The Disharmony between BN and ReLU Causes Gradient Explosion, but is Offset by the Correlation between Activations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Deep neural networks, which employ batch normalization and ReLU-like activation functions, suffer from instability in the early stages of training due to the high gradient induced by temporal gradient explosion. In this study, we analyze the occurrence and mitigation of gradient explosion both theoretically and empirically, and discover that the correlation between activations plays a key role in preventing the gradient explosion from persisting throughout the training. Finally, based on our observations, we propose an improved adaptive learning rate algorithm to effectively control the training instability.
HKNAS: Classification of Hyperspectral Imagery Based on Hyper Kernel Neural Architecture Search
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recent neural architecture search (NAS) based approaches have made great progress in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification tasks. However, the architectures are usually optimized independently of the network weights, increasing searching time and restricting model performances. To tackle these issues, in this paper, different from previous methods that extra define structural parameters, we propose to directly generate structural parameters by utilizing the specifically designed hyper kernels, ingeniously converting the original complex dual optimization problem into easily implemented one-tier optimizations, and greatly shrinking searching costs. Then, we develop a hierarchical multi-module search space whose candidate operations only contain convolutions, and these operations can be integrated into unified kernels. Using the above searching strategy and searching space, we obtain three kinds of networks to separately conduct pixel-level or image-level classifications with 1-D or 3-D convolutions. In addition, by combining the proposed hyper kernel searching scheme with the 3-D convolution decomposition mechanism, we obtain diverse architectures to simulate 3-D convolutions, greatly improving network flexibilities. A series of quantitative and qualitative experiments on six public datasets demonstrate that the proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art results compared with other advanced NAS-based HSI classification approaches.
An Artificial Intelligence-based Framework to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in the Context of Bangladesh
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Sustainable development is a framework for achieving human development goals. It provides natural systems' ability to deliver natural resources and ecosystem services. Sustainable development is crucial for the economy and society. Artificial intelligence (AI) has attracted increasing attention in recent years, with the potential to have a positive influence across many domains. AI is a commonly employed component in the quest for long-term sustainability. In this study, we explore the impact of AI on three pillars of sustainable development: society, environment, and economy, as well as numerous case studies from which we may deduce the impact of AI in a variety of areas, i.e., agriculture, classifying waste, smart water management, and Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems. Furthermore, we present AI-based strategies for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which are effective for developing countries like Bangladesh. The framework that we propose may reduce the negative impact of AI and promote the proactiveness of this technology.
COVID-19 Spreading Prediction and Impact Analysis by Using Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Global Health Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic is considered as the most alarming global health calamity of this century. COVID-19 has been confirmed to be mutated from coronavirus family. As stated by the records of The World Health Organization (WHO at April 18 2020), the present epidemic of COVID-19, has influenced more than 2,164,111 persons and killed more than 146,198 folks in over 200 countries across the globe and billions had confronted impacts in lifestyle because of this virus outbreak. The ongoing overall outbreak of the COVID-19 opened up new difficulties to the research sectors. Artificial intelligence (AI) driven strategies can be valuable to predict the parameters, hazards, and impacts of such an epidemic in a cost-efficient manner. The fundamental difficulties of AI in this situation is the limited availability of information and the uncertain nature of the disease. Here in this article, we have tried to integrate AI to predict the infection outbreak and along with this, we have also tried to test whether AI with help deep learning can recognize COVID-19 infected chest X-Rays or not. The global outbreak of the virus posed enormous economic, ecological and societal challenges into the human population and with help of this paper, we have tried to give a message that AI can help us to identify certain features of the disease outbreak that could prove to be essential to protect the humanity from this deadly disease.
Improving Classification Neural Networks by using Absolute activation function (MNIST/LeNET-5 example)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The paper discusses the use of the Absolute activation function in classification neural networks. An examples are shown of using this activation function in simple and more complex problems. Using as a baseline LeNet-5 network for solving the MNIST problem, the efficiency of Absolute activation function is shown in comparison with the use of Tanh, ReLU and SeLU activations. It is shown that in deep networks Absolute activation does not cause vanishing and exploding gradients, and therefore Absolute activation can be used in both simple and deep neural networks. Due to high volatility of training networks with Absolute activation, a special modification of ADAM training algorithm is used, that estimates lower bound of accuracy at any test dataset using validation dataset analysis at each training epoch, and uses this value to stop/decrease learning rate, and re-initializes ADAM algorithm between these steps. It is shown that solving the MNIST problem with the LeNet-like architectures based on Absolute activation allows to significantly reduce the number of trained parameters in the neural network with improving the prediction accuracy.
Hierarchical Diffusion Autoencoders and Disentangled Image Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Diffusion models have attained impressive visual quality for image synthesis. However, how to interpret and manipulate the latent space of diffusion models has not been extensively explored. Prior work diffusion autoencoders encode the semantic representations into a semantic latent code, which fails to reflect the rich information of details and the intrinsic feature hierarchy. To mitigate those limitations, we propose Hierarchical Diffusion Autoencoders (HDAE) that exploit the fine-grained-to-abstract and lowlevel-to-high-level feature hierarchy for the latent space of diffusion models. The hierarchical latent space of HDAE inherently encodes different abstract levels of semantics and provides more comprehensive semantic representations. In addition, we propose a truncated-feature-based approach for disentangled image manipulation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach with extensive experiments and applications on image reconstruction, style mixing, controllable interpolation, detail-preserving and disentangled image manipulation, and multi-modal semantic image synthesis.
Can we Trust Chatbots for now? Accuracy, reproducibility, traceability; a Case Study on Leonardo da Vinci's Contribution to Astronomy
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Large Language Models (LLM) are studied. Applications to chatbots and education are considered. A case study on Leonardo's contribution to astronomy is presented. Major problems with accuracy, reproducibility and traceability of answers are reported for ChatGPT, GPT-4, BLOOM and Google Bard. Possible reasons for problems are discussed and some solutions are proposed.
Improving Knowledge Distillation via Transferring Learning Ability
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Existing knowledge distillation methods generally use a teacher-student approach, where the student network solely learns from a well-trained teacher. However, this approach overlooks the inherent differences in learning abilities between the teacher and student networks, thus causing the capacity-gap problem. To address this limitation, we propose a novel method called SLKD.
Geometric Relational Embeddings: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Geometric relational embeddings map relational data as geometric objects that combine vector information suitable for machine learning and structured/relational information for structured/relational reasoning, typically in low dimensions. Their preservation of relational structures and their appealing properties and interpretability have led to their uptake for tasks such as knowledge graph completion, ontology and hierarchy reasoning, logical query answering, and hierarchical multi-label classification. We survey methods that underly geometric relational embeddings and categorize them based on (i) the embedding geometries that are used to represent the data; and (ii) the relational reasoning tasks that they aim to improve. We identify the desired properties (i.e., inductive biases) of each kind of embedding and discuss some potential future work.
ICDAR 2023 Competition on Reading the Seal Title
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Reading seal title text is a challenging task due to the variable shapes of seals, curved text, background noise, and overlapped text. However, this important element is commonly found in official and financial scenarios, and has not received the attention it deserves in the field of OCR technology. To promote research in this area, we organized ICDAR 2023 competition on reading the seal title (ReST), which included two tasks: seal title text detection (Task 1) and end-to-end seal title recognition (Task 2). We constructed a dataset of 10,000 real seal data, covering the most common classes of seals, and labeled all seal title texts with text polygons and text contents. The competition opened on 30th December, 2022 and closed on 20th March, 2023. The competition attracted 53 participants from academia and industry including 28 submissions for Task 1 and 25 submissions for Task 2, which demonstrated significant interest in this challenging task. In this report, we present an overview of the competition, including the organization, challenges, and results. We describe the dataset and tasks, and summarize the submissions and evaluation results. The results show that significant progress has been made in the field of seal title text reading, and we hope that this competition will inspire further research and development in this important area of OCR technology.
Causal Effect Estimation with Variational AutoEncoder and the Front Door Criterion
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

An essential problem in causal inference is estimating causal effects from observational data. The problem becomes more challenging with the presence of unobserved confounders. When there are unobserved confounders, the commonly used back-door adjustment is not applicable. Although the instrumental variable (IV) methods can deal with unobserved confounders, they all assume that the treatment directly affects the outcome, and there is no mediator between the treatment and the outcome. This paper aims to use the front-door criterion to address the challenging problem with the presence of unobserved confounders and mediators. In practice, it is often difficult to identify the set of variables used for front-door adjustment from data. By leveraging the ability of deep generative models in representation learning, we propose FDVAE to learn the representation of a Front-Door adjustment set with a Variational AutoEncoder, instead of trying to search for a set of variables for front-door adjustment. Extensive experiments on synthetic datasets validate the effectiveness of FDVAE and its superiority over existing methods. The experiments also show that the performance of FDVAE is not sensitive to the causal strength of unobserved confounders and is feasible in the case of dimensionality mismatch between learned representations and the ground truth. We further apply the method to three real-world datasets to demonstrate its potential applications.
Zero-shot text-to-speech synthesis conditioned using self-supervised speech representation model
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

This paper proposes a zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) conditioned by a self-supervised speech-representation model acquired through self-supervised learning (SSL). Conventional methods with embedding vectors from x-vector or global style tokens still have a gap in reproducing the speaker characteristics of unseen speakers. A novel point of the proposed method is the direct use of the SSL model to obtain embedding vectors from speech representations trained with a large amount of data. We also introduce the separate conditioning of acoustic features and a phoneme duration predictor to obtain the disentangled embeddings between rhythm-based speaker characteristics and acoustic-feature-based ones. The disentangled embeddings will enable us to achieve better reproduction performance for unseen speakers and rhythm transfer conditioned by different speeches. Objective and subjective evaluations showed that the proposed method can synthesize speech with improved similarity and achieve speech-rhythm transfer.
Fed-BioMed: Open, Transparent and Trusted Federated Learning for Real-world Healthcare Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The real-world implementation of federated learning is complex and requires research and development actions at the crossroad between different domains ranging from data science, to software programming, networking, and security. While today several FL libraries are proposed to data scientists and users, most of these frameworks are not designed to find seamless application in medical use-cases, due to the specific challenges and requirements of working with medical data and hospital infrastructures. Moreover, governance, design principles, and security assumptions of these frameworks are generally not clearly illustrated, thus preventing the adoption in sensitive applications. Motivated by the current technological landscape of FL in healthcare, in this document we present Fed-BioMed: a research and development initiative aiming at translating federated learning (FL) into real-world medical research applications. We describe our design space, targeted users, domain constraints, and how these factors affect our current and future software architecture.
Occlusion Robust 3D Human Pose Estimation with StridedPoseGraphFormer and Data Augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Occlusion is an omnipresent challenge in 3D human pose estimation (HPE). In spite of the large amount of research dedicated to 3D HPE, only a limited number of studies address the problem of occlusion explicitly. To fill this gap, we propose to combine exploitation of spatio-temporal features with synthetic occlusion augmentation during training to deal with occlusion. To this end, we build a spatio-temporal 3D HPE model, StridedPoseGraphFormer based on graph convolution and transformers, and train it using occlusion augmentation. Unlike the existing occlusion-aware methods, that are only tested for limited occlusion, we extensively evaluate our method for varying degrees of occlusion. We show that our proposed method compares favorably with the state-of-the-art (SoA). Our experimental results also reveal that in the absence of any occlusion handling mechanism, the performance of SoA 3D HPE methods degrades significantly when they encounter occlusion.