pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
x-vectors meet emotions: A study on dependencies between emotion and speaker recognition
Authors: Raghavendra Pappagari, Tianzi Wang, Jesus Villalba, Nanxin Chen, Najim Dehak
Date: 2020-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Classification, Emotion Recognition, Speaker Recognition, Speaker Verification, Transfer Learning

In this work, we explore the dependencies between speaker recognition and emotion recognition. We first show that knowledge learned for speaker recognition can be reused for emotion recognition through transfer learning. Then, we show the effect of emotion on speaker recognition. For emotion recognition, we show that using a simple linear model is enough to obtain good performance on the features extracted from pre-trained models such as the x-vector model. Then, we improve emotion recognition performance by fine-tuning for emotion classification. We evaluated our experiments on three different types of datasets: IEMOCAP, MSP-Podcast, and Crema-D. By fine-tuning, we obtained 30.40%, 7.99%, and 8.61% absolute improvement on IEMOCAP, MSP-Podcast, and Crema-D respectively over baseline model with no pre-training. Finally, we present results on the effect of emotion on speaker verification. We observed that speaker verification performance is prone to changes in test speaker emotions. We found that trials with angry utterances performed worst in all three datasets. We hope our analysis will initiate a new line of research in the speaker recognition community.
Robustness analytics to data heterogeneity in edge computing
Authors: Jia Qian, Lars Kai Hansen, Xenofon Fafoutis, Prayag Tiwari, Hari Mohan Pandey
Date: 2020-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, Federated Learning

Federated Learning is a framework that jointly trains a model \textit{with} complete knowledge on a remotely placed centralized server, but \textit{without} the requirement of accessing the data stored in distributed machines. Some work assumes that the data generated from edge devices are identically and independently sampled from a common population distribution. However, such ideal sampling may not be realistic in many contexts. Also, models based on intrinsic agency, such as active sampling schemes, may lead to highly biased sampling. So an imminent question is how robust Federated Learning is to biased sampling? In this work\footnote{\url{https://github.com/jiaqian/robustness_of_FL}}, we experimentally investigate two such scenarios. First, we study a centralized classifier aggregated from a collection of local classifiers trained with data having categorical heterogeneity. Second, we study a classifier aggregated from a collection of local classifiers trained by data through active sampling at the edge. We present evidence in both scenarios that Federated Learning is robust to data heterogeneity when local training iterations and communication frequency are appropriately chosen.
Active Learning for Sound Event Detection
Authors: Shuyang Zhao, Toni Heittola, Tuomas Virtanen
Date: 2020-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Change Point Detection, Event Detection, Sound Event Detection

This paper proposes an active learning system for sound event detection (SED). It aims at maximizing the accuracy of a learned SED model with limited annotation effort. The proposed system analyzes an initially unlabeled audio dataset, from which it selects sound segments for manual annotation. The candidate segments are generated based on a proposed change point detection approach, and the selection is based on the principle of mismatch-first farthest-traversal. During the training of SED models, recordings are used as training inputs, preserving the long-term context for annotated segments. The proposed system clearly outperforms reference methods in the two datasets used for evaluation (TUT Rare Sound 2017 and TAU Spatial Sound 2019). Training with recordings as context outperforms training with only annotated segments. Mismatch-first farthest-traversal outperforms reference sample selection methods based on random sampling and uncertainty sampling. Remarkably, the required annotation effort can be greatly reduced on the dataset where target sound events are rare: by annotating only 2% of the training data, the achieved SED performance is similar to annotating all the training data.
Learning light field synthesis with Multi-Plane Images: scene encoding as a recurrent segmentation task
Authors: Tomás Völker, Guillaume Boisson, Bertrand Chupeau
Date: 2020-02-12 00:00:00

In this paper we address the problem of view synthesis from large baseline light fields, by turning a sparse set of input views into a Multi-plane Image (MPI). Because available datasets are scarce, we propose a lightweight network that does not require extensive training. Unlike latest approaches, our model does not learn to estimate RGB layers but only encodes the scene geometry within MPI alpha layers, which comes down to a segmentation task. A Learned Gradient Descent (LGD) framework is used to cascade the same convolutional network in a recurrent fashion in order to refine the volumetric representation obtained. Thanks to its low number of parameters, our model trains successfully on a small light field video dataset and provides visually appealing results. It also exhibits convenient generalization properties regarding both the number of input views, the number of depth planes in the MPI, and the number of refinement iterations.
M-estimators of scatter with eigenvalue shrinkage
Authors: Esa Ollila, Daniel P. Palomar, Frederic Pascal
Date: 2020-02-12 00:00:00

A popular regularized (shrinkage) covariance estimator is the shrinkage sample covariance matrix (SCM) which shares the same set of eigenvectors as the SCM but shrinks its eigenvalues toward its grand mean. In this paper, a more general approach is considered in which the SCM is replaced by an M-estimator of scatter matrix and a fully automatic data adaptive method to compute the optimal shrinkage parameter with minimum mean squared error is proposed. Our approach permits the use of any weight function such as Gaussian, Huber's, or $t$ weight functions, all of which are commonly used in M-estimation framework. Our simulation examples illustrate that shrinkage M-estimators based on the proposed optimal tuning combined with robust weight function do not loose in performance to shrinkage SCM estimator when the data is Gaussian, but provide significantly improved performance when the data is sampled from a heavy-tailed distribution.
Real-Time Semantic Background Subtraction
Authors: Anthony Cioppa, Marc Van Droogenbroeck, Marc Braham
Date: 2020-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU, Semantic Segmentation

Semantic background subtraction SBS has been shown to improve the performance of most background subtraction algorithms by combining them with semantic information, derived from a semantic segmentation network. However, SBS requires high-quality semantic segmentation masks for all frames, which are slow to compute. In addition, most state-of-the-art background subtraction algorithms are not real-time, which makes them unsuitable for real-world applications. In this paper, we present a novel background subtraction algorithm called Real-Time Semantic Background Subtraction (denoted RT-SBS) which extends SBS for real-time constrained applications while keeping similar performances. RT-SBS effectively combines a real-time background subtraction algorithm with high-quality semantic information which can be provided at a slower pace, independently for each pixel. We show that RT-SBS coupled with ViBe sets a new state of the art for real-time background subtraction algorithms and even competes with the non real-time state-of-the-art ones. Note that we provide python CPU and GPU implementations of RT-SBS at https://github.com/cioppaanthony/rt-sbs.
Saliency Driven Perceptual Image Compression
Authors: Yash Patel, Srikar Appalaraju, R. Manmatha
Date: 2020-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression, MS-SSIM, object-detection, Object Detection, SSIM

This paper proposes a new end-to-end trainable model for lossy image compression, which includes several novel components. The method incorporates 1) an adequate perceptual similarity metric; 2) saliency in the images; 3) a hierarchical auto-regressive model. This paper demonstrates that the popularly used evaluations metrics such as MS-SSIM and PSNR are inadequate for judging the performance of image compression techniques as they do not align with the human perception of similarity. Alternatively, a new metric is proposed, which is learned on perceptual similarity data specific to image compression. The proposed compression model incorporates the salient regions and optimizes on the proposed perceptual similarity metric. The model not only generates images which are visually better but also gives superior performance for subsequent computer vision tasks such as object detection and segmentation when compared to existing engineered or learned compression techniques.
Sparse Recovery With Non-Linear Fourier Features
Authors: Ayca Ozcelikkale
Date: 2020-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Random non-linear Fourier features have recently shown remarkable performance in a wide-range of regression and classification applications. Motivated by this success, this article focuses on a sparse non-linear Fourier feature (NFF) model. We provide a characterization of the sufficient number of data points that guarantee perfect recovery of the unknown parameters with high-probability. In particular, we show how the sufficient number of data points depends on the kernel matrix associated with the probability distribution function of the input data. We compare our results with the recoverability bounds for the bounded orthonormal systems and provide examples that illustrate sparse recovery under the NFF model.
Predictions of 2019-nCoV Transmission Ending via Comprehensive Methods
Authors: Tianyu Zeng, Yunong Zhang, Zhenyu Li, Xiao Liu, Binbin Qiu
Date: 2020-02-12 00:00:00

Since the SARS outbreak in 2003, a lot of predictive epidemiological models have been proposed. At the end of 2019, a novel coronavirus, termed as 2019-nCoV, has broken out and is propagating in China and the world. Here we propose a multi-model ordinary differential equation set neural network (MMODEs-NN) and model-free methods to predict the interprovincial transmissions in mainland China, especially those from Hubei Province. Compared with the previously proposed epidemiological models, the proposed network can simulate the transportations with the ODEs activation method, while the model-free methods based on the sigmoid function, Gaussian function, and Poisson distribution are linear and fast to generate reasonable predictions. According to the numerical experiments and the realities, the special policies for controlling the disease are successful in some provinces, and the transmission of the epidemic, whose outbreak time is close to the beginning of China Spring Festival travel rush, is more likely to decelerate before February 18 and to end before April 2020. The proposed mathematical and artificial intelligence methods can give consistent and reasonable predictions of the 2019-nCoV ending. We anticipate our work to be a starting point for comprehensive prediction researches of the 2019-nCoV.
Joint Embedding in Named Entity Linking on Sentence Level
Authors: Wei Shi, Si-Yuan Zhang, Zhiwei Zhang, Hong Cheng, Jeffrey Xu Yu
Date: 2020-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Linking, Knowledge Graphs, Sentence

Named entity linking is to map an ambiguous mention in documents to an entity in a knowledge base. The named entity linking is challenging, given the fact that there are multiple candidate entities for a mention in a document. It is difficult to link a mention when it appears multiple times in a document, since there are conflicts by the contexts around the appearances of the mention. In addition, it is difficult since the given training dataset is small due to the reason that it is done manually to link a mention to its mapping entity. In the literature, there are many reported studies among which the recent embedding methods learn vectors of entities from the training dataset at document level. To address these issues, we focus on how to link entity for mentions at a sentence level, which reduces the noises introduced by different appearances of the same mention in a document at the expense of insufficient information to be used. We propose a new unified embedding method by maximizing the relationships learned from knowledge graphs. We confirm the effectiveness of our method in our experimental studies.
Content Based Singing Voice Extraction From a Musical Mixture
Authors: Pritish Chandna, Merlijn Blaauw, Jordi Bonada, Emilia Gomez
Date: 2020-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Deep Learning, Knowledge Distillation

We present a deep learning based methodology for extracting the singing voice signal from a musical mixture based on the underlying linguistic content. Our model follows an encoder decoder architecture and takes as input the magnitude component of the spectrogram of a musical mixture with vocals. The encoder part of the model is trained via knowledge distillation using a teacher network to learn a content embedding, which is decoded to generate the corresponding vocoder features. Using this methodology, we are able to extract the unprocessed raw vocal signal from the mixture even for a processed mixture dataset with singers not seen during training. While the nature of our system makes it incongruous with traditional objective evaluation metrics, we use subjective evaluation via listening tests to compare the methodology to state-of-the-art deep learning based source separation algorithms. We also provide sound examples and source code for reproducibility.
Towards Precise Intra-camera Supervised Person Re-identification
Authors: Menglin Wang, Baisheng Lai, Haokun Chen, Jianqiang Huang, Xiaojin Gong, Xian-Sheng Hua
Date: 2020-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Person Re-Identification

Intra-camera supervision (ICS) for person re-identification (Re-ID) assumes that identity labels are independently annotated within each camera view and no inter-camera identity association is labeled. It is a new setting proposed recently to reduce the burden of annotation while expect to maintain desirable Re-ID performance. However, the lack of inter-camera labels makes the ICS Re-ID problem much more challenging than the fully supervised counterpart. By investigating the characteristics of ICS, this paper proposes camera-specific non-parametric classifiers, together with a hybrid mining quintuplet loss, to perform intra-camera learning. Then, an inter-camera learning module consisting of a graph-based ID association step and a Re-ID model updating step is conducted. Extensive experiments on three large-scale Re-ID datasets show that our approach outperforms all existing ICS works by a great margin. Our approach performs even comparable to state-of-the-art fully supervised methods in two of the datasets.
Federated Matrix Factorization: Algorithm Design and Application to Data Clustering
Authors: Shuai Wang, Tsung-Hui Chang
Date: 2020-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Federated Learning

Recent demands on data privacy have called for federated learning (FL) as a new distributed learning paradigm in massive and heterogeneous networks. Although many FL algorithms have been proposed, few of them have considered the matrix factorization (MF) model, which is known to have a vast number of signal processing and machine learning applications. Different from the existing FL algorithms that are designed for smooth problems with single block of variables, in federated MF (FedMF), one has to deal with challenging non-convex and non-smooth problems (due to constraints or regularization) with two blocks of variables. In this paper, we address the challenge by proposing two new FedMF algorithms, namely, FedMAvg and FedMGS, based on the model averaging and gradient sharing principles, respectively. Both FedMAvg and FedMGS adopt multiple steps of local updates per communication round to speed up convergence, and allow only a randomly sampled subset of clients to communicate with the server for reducing the communication cost. Convergence analyses for the two algorithms are respectively presented, which delineate the impacts of data distribution, local update number, and partial client communication on the algorithm performance. By focusing on a data clustering task, extensive experiment results are presented to examine the practical performance of both algorithms, as well as demonstrating their efficacy over the existing distributed clustering algorithms.
Beyond UCB: Optimal and Efficient Contextual Bandits with Regression Oracles
Authors: Dylan J. Foster, Alexander Rakhlin
Date: 2020-02-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Multi-Armed Bandits, regression

A fundamental challenge in contextual bandits is to develop flexible, general-purpose algorithms with computational requirements no worse than classical supervised learning tasks such as classification and regression. Algorithms based on regression have shown promising empirical success, but theoretical guarantees have remained elusive except in special cases. We provide the first universal and optimal reduction from contextual bandits to online regression. We show how to transform any oracle for online regression with a given value function class into an algorithm for contextual bandits with the induced policy class, with no overhead in runtime or memory requirements. We characterize the minimax rates for contextual bandits with general, potentially nonparametric function classes, and show that our algorithm is minimax optimal whenever the oracle obtains the optimal rate for regression. Compared to previous results, our algorithm requires no distributional assumptions beyond realizability, and works even when contexts are chosen adversarially.
Synaptic Integration of Spatiotemporal Features with a Dynamic Neuromorphic Processor
Authors: Mattias Nilsson, Foteini Liwicki, Fredrik Sandin
Date: 2020-02-12 00:00:00

Spiking neurons can perform spatiotemporal feature detection by nonlinear synaptic and dendritic integration of presynaptic spike patterns. Multicompartment models of non-linear dendrites and related neuromorphic circuit designs enable faithful imitation of such dynamic integration processes, but these approaches are also associated with a relatively high computing cost or circuit size. Here, we investigate synaptic integration of spatiotemporal spike patterns with multiple dynamic synapses on point-neurons in the DYNAP-SE neuromorphic processor, which offers a complementary resource-efficient, albeit less flexible, approach to feature detection. We investigate how previously proposed excitatory--inhibitory pairs of dynamic synapses can be combined to integrate multiple inputs, and we generalize that concept to a case in which one inhibitory synapse is combined with multiple excitatory synapses. We characterize the resulting delayed excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs) by measuring and analyzing the membrane potentials of the neuromorphic neuronal circuits. We find that biologically relevant EPSP delays, with variability of order 10 milliseconds per neuron, can be realized in the proposed manner by selecting different synapse combinations, thanks to device mismatch. Based on these results, we demonstrate that a single point-neuron with dynamic synapses in the DYNAP-SE can respond selectively to presynaptic spikes with a particular spatiotemporal structure, which enables, for instance, visual feature tuning of single neurons.
Targeted free energy estimation via learned mappings
Authors: Peter Wirnsberger, Andrew J. Ballard, George Papamakarios, Stuart Abercrombie, Sébastien Racanière, Alexander Pritzel, Danilo Jimenez Rezende, Charles Blundell
Date: 2020-02-12 00:00:00

Free energy perturbation (FEP) was proposed by Zwanzig more than six decades ago as a method to estimate free energy differences, and has since inspired a huge body of related methods that use it as an integral building block. Being an importance sampling based estimator, however, FEP suffers from a severe limitation: the requirement of sufficient overlap between distributions. One strategy to mitigate this problem, called Targeted Free Energy Perturbation, uses a high-dimensional mapping in configuration space to increase overlap of the underlying distributions. Despite its potential, this method has attracted only limited attention due to the formidable challenge of formulating a tractable mapping. Here, we cast Targeted FEP as a machine learning problem in which the mapping is parameterized as a neural network that is optimized so as to increase overlap. We develop a new model architecture that respects permutational and periodic symmetries often encountered in atomistic simulations and test our method on a fully-periodic solvation system. We demonstrate that our method leads to a substantial variance reduction in free energy estimates when compared against baselines, without requiring any additional data.
Ensemble of Sparse Gaussian Process Experts for Implicit Surface Mapping with Streaming Data
Authors: Johannes A. Stork, Todor Stoyanov
Date: 2020-02-12 00:00:00

Creating maps is an essential task in robotics and provides the basis for effective planning and navigation. In this paper, we learn a compact and continuous implicit surface map of an environment from a stream of range data with known poses. For this, we create and incrementally adjust an ensemble of approximate Gaussian process (GP) experts which are each responsible for a different part of the map. Instead of inserting all arriving data into the GP models, we greedily trade-off between model complexity and prediction error. Our algorithm therefore uses less resources on areas with few geometric features and more where the environment is rich in variety. We evaluate our approach on synthetic and real-world data sets and analyze sensitivity to parameters and measurement noise. The results show that we can learn compact and accurate implicit surface models under different conditions, with a performance comparable to or better than that of exact GP regression with subsampled data.
A Zero-Shot based Fingerprint Presentation Attack Detection System
Authors: Haozhe Liu, Wentian Zhang, Guojie Liu, Feng Liu
Date: 2020-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

With the development of presentation attacks, Automated Fingerprint Recognition Systems(AFRSs) are vulnerable to presentation attack. Thus, numerous methods of presentation attack detection(PAD) have been proposed to ensure the normal utilization of AFRS. However, the demand of large-scale presentation attack images and the low-level generalization ability always astrict existing PAD methods' actual performances. Therefore, we propose a novel Zero-Shot Presentation Attack Detection Model to guarantee the generalization of the PAD model. The proposed ZSPAD-Model based on generative model does not utilize any negative samples in the process of establishment, which ensures the robustness for various types or materials based presentation attack. Different from other auto-encoder based model, the Fine-grained Map architecture is proposed to refine the reconstruction error of the auto-encoder networks and a task-specific gaussian model is utilized to improve the quality of clustering. Meanwhile, in order to improve the performance of the proposed model, 9 confidence scores are discussed in this article. Experimental results showed that the ZSPAD-Model is the state of the art for ZSPAD, and the MS-Score is the best confidence score. Compared with existing methods, the proposed ZSPAD-Model performs better than the feature-based method and under the multi-shot setting, the proposed method overperforms the learning based method with little training data. When large training data is available, their results are similar.