pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Modeling Field-level Factor Interactions for Fashion Recommendation
Authors: Yujuan Ding, P. Y. Mok, Xun Yang, Yanghong Zhou
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Personalized fashion recommendation aims to explore patterns from historical interactions between users and fashion items and thereby predict the future ones. It is challenging due to the sparsity of the interaction data and the diversity of user preference in fashion. To tackle the challenge, this paper investigates multiple factor fields in fashion domain, such as colour, style, brand, and tries to specify the implicit user-item interaction into field level. Specifically, an attentional factor field interaction graph (AFFIG) approach is proposed which models both the user-factor interactions and cross-field factors interactions for predicting the recommendation probability at specific field. In addition, an attention mechanism is equipped to aggregate the cross-field factor interactions for each field. Extensive experiments have been conducted on three E-Commerce fashion datasets and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for fashion recommendation. The influence of various factor fields on recommendation in fashion domain is also discussed through experiments.
Automated Single-Label Patent Classification using Ensemble Classifiers
Authors: Eleni Kamateri, Vasileios Stamatis, Konstantinos Diamantaras, Michail Salampasis
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Patent classification, Word Embeddings

Many thousands of patent applications arrive at patent offices around the world every day. One important subtask when a patent application is submitted is to assign one or more classification codes from the complex and hierarchical patent classification schemes that will enable routing of the patent application to a patent examiner who is knowledgeable about the specific technical field. This task is typically undertaken by patent professionals, however due to the large number of applications and the potential complexity of an invention, they are usually overwhelmed. Therefore, there is a need for this code assignment manual task to be supported or even fully automated by classification systems that will classify patent applications, hopefully with an accuracy close to patent professionals. Like in many other text analysis problems, in the last years, this intellectually demanding task has been studied using word embeddings and deep learning techniques. In this paper we shortly review these research efforts and experiment with similar deep learning techniques using different feature representations on automatic patent classification in the level of sub-classes. On top of that, we present an innovative method of ensemble classifiers trained with different parts of the patent document. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that an ensemble method was proposed for the patent classification problem. Our first results are quite promising showing that an ensemble architecture of classifiers significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques using the same classifiers as standalone solutions.
Semi-supervised Nonnegative Matrix Factorization for Document Classification
Authors: Jamie Haddock, Lara Kassab, Sixian Li, Alona Kryshchenko, Rachel Grotheer, Elena Sizikova, Chuntian Wang, Thomas Merkh, RWMA Madushani, Miju Ahn, Deanna Needell, Kathryn Leonard
Date: 2022-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Document Classification, regression

We propose new semi-supervised nonnegative matrix factorization (SSNMF) models for document classification and provide motivation for these models as maximum likelihood estimators. The proposed SSNMF models simultaneously provide both a topic model and a model for classification, thereby offering highly interpretable classification results. We derive training methods using multiplicative updates for each new model, and demonstrate the application of these models to single-label and multi-label document classification, although the models are flexible to other supervised learning tasks such as regression. We illustrate the promise of these models and training methods on document classification datasets (e.g., 20 Newsgroups, Reuters).
Reverse Attention-Based Residual Network for Salient Object Detection
Authors: Shuhan Chen, Xiuli Tan, Ben Wang, Huchuan Lu, Xuelong Hu, Yun Fu
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 2020 1
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

Benefiting from the quick development of deep convolutional neural networks, especially fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs), remarkable progresses have been achieved on salient object detection recently. Nevertheless, these FCNs based methods are still challenging to generate high resolution saliency maps, and also not applicable for subsequent applications due to their heavy model weights. In this paper, we propose a compact and efficient deep network with high accuracy for salient object detection. Firstly, we propose two strategies for initial prediction, one is a new designed multi-scale context module, the other is incorporating hand-crafted saliency priors. Secondly, we employ residual learning to refine it progressively by only learning the residual in each side-output, which can be achieved with few convolutional parameters, therefore leads to high compactness and high efficiency. Finally, we further design a novel top-down reverse attention block to guide the above side-output residual learning. Specifically, the current predicted salient regions are used to erase its side-output feature, thus the missing object parts and details can be efficiently learned from these unerased regions, which results in more complete detection and high accuracy. Extensive experimental results on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed network performs favorably against the state-of-the-art approaches, and shows advantages in simplicity, compactness and efficiency.
LSFB-CONT and LSFB-ISOL: Two New Datasets for Vision-Based Sign Language Recognition
Authors: Jérôme Fink, Benoît Frénay, Laurence Meurant, Anthony Cleve
Date: 2021-07-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 2021 7
Tasks: Action Recognition, Sign Language Recognition

While significant progress have been made in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), leading the commercially available products, Sign Language Recognition (SLR) is still in its infancy. The lack of large-scale sign language datasets makes it hard to leverage new Deep Learning methods. In this paper, we introduce LSFB-CONT, a large scale dataset suited for continuous SLR along with LSFB-ISOL, a subset of LSFB-CONT for isolated SLR. Baseline SLR experiments are conducted on LSFB-ISOL and the reached accuracy measures are compared with those obtained on previous datasets. The results suggest that state-of-the-art models for action recognition still lack sufficient internal representation power to capture the high level of variations of a sign language.
Underwater and Air-Water Wireless Communication: State-of-the-art, Channel Characteristics, Security, and Open Problems
Authors: Waqas Aman, Saif Al-Kuwari, Ambrish Kumar, Muhammad Mahboob Ur Rahman, Muhammad Muzzammil
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

We present a first detailed survey on underwater and air-water (A-W) wireless communication networks (WCNs) that mainly focuses on the security challenges and the countermeasures proposed to date. For clarity of exposition, this survey paper is mainly divided into two parts. The first part of the paper focuses on the state-of-the-art underwater and A-W WCNs whereby we outline the benefits and drawbacks of the four promising underwater and A-W candidate technologies: radio frequency (RF), acoustic, optical and magnetic induction (MI), along with their channel characteristics. To this end, we also describe the indirect (relay-aided) and direct mechanisms for the A-W WCNs along with their channel characteristics. This sets the stage for the second part of the paper whereby we provide a thorough comparative discussion of a vast set of works that have reported the security breaches (as well as viable countermeasures) for many diverse configurations of the underwater and A-W WCNs. Specifically, we provide a detailed literature review of the various kinds of active and passive attacks which hamper the confidentiality, integrity, authentication and availability of both underwater and A-W WCNs. Finally, we highlight some research gaps in the open literature and identify security related some open problems for the future work.
Path Weight Sampling: Exact Monte Carlo Computation of the Mutual Information between Stochastic Trajectories
Authors: Manuel Reinhardt, Gašper Tkačik, Pieter Rein ten Wolde
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00

Most natural and engineered information-processing systems transmit information via signals that vary in time. Computing the information transmission rate or the information encoded in the temporal characteristics of these signals, requires the mutual information between the input and output signals as a function of time, i.e. between the input and output trajectories. Yet, this is notoriously difficult because of the high-dimensional nature of the trajectory space, and all existing techniques require approximations. We present an exact Monte Carlo technique called Path Weight Sampling (PWS) that, for the first time, makes it possible to compute the mutual information between input and output trajectories for any stochastic system that is described by a master equation. The principal idea is to use the master equation to evaluate the exact conditional probability of an individual output trajectory for a given input trajectory, and average this via Monte Carlo sampling in trajectory space to obtain the mutual information. We present three variants of PWS, which all generate the trajectories using the standard stochastic simulation algorithm. While Direct PWS is a brute-force method, Rosenbluth-Rosenbluth PWS exploits the analogy between signal trajectory sampling and polymer sampling, and Thermodynamic Integration PWS is based on a reversible work calculation in trajectory space. PWS also makes it possible to compute the mutual information between input and output trajectories for systems with hidden internal states as well as systems with feedback from output to input. Applying PWS to the bacterial chemotaxis system, consisting of 182 coupled chemical reactions, demonstrates not only that the scheme is highly efficient, but also that the number of receptor clusters is much smaller than hitherto believed, while their size is much larger.
Algebraic theory of phase retrieval
Authors: Tamir Bendory, Dan Edidin
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

The purpose of this article is to discuss recent advances in the growing field of phase retrieval, and to publicize open problems that we believe will be of interest to mathematicians in general, and algebraists in particular.
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Aided Joint Radar and Covert Communications: Fundamentals, Optimization, and Challenges
Authors: Hongyang Du, Jiawen Kang, Dusit Niyato, Jiayi Zhang, Dong In Kim
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles

Future wireless communication systems will evolve toward multi-functional integrated systems to improve spectrum utilization and reduce equipment sizes. A joint radar and communication (JRC) system, which can support simultaneous information transmission and target detection, has been regarded as a promising solution for emerging applications such as autonomous vehicles. In JRC, data security and privacy protection are critical issues. Thus, we first apply covert communication into JRC and propose a joint radar and covert communication (JRCC) system to achieve high spectrum utilization and secure data transmission simultaneously. In the JRCC system, an existence of sensitive data transmission is hidden from a maliciously observant warden. However, the performance of JRCC is restricted by severe signal propagation environment and hardware devices. Fortunately, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) can change the signal propagation smartly to improve the networks performance with low cost. We first overview fundamental concepts of JRCC and RIS and then propose the RIS-aided JRCC system design. Furthermore, both covert communication and radar performance metrics are investigated and a game theory-based covert rate optimization scheme is designed to achieve secure communication. Finally, we present several promising applications and future directions of RIS-aided JRCC systems.
Compression of user generated content using denoised references
Authors: Eduardo Pavez, Enrique Perez, Xin Xiong, Antonio Ortega, Balu Adsumilli
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Video shared over the internet is commonly referred to as user generated content (UGC). UGC video may have low quality due to various factors including previous compression. UGC video is uploaded by users, and then it is re-encoded to be made available at various levels of quality. In a traditional video coding pipeline the encoder parameters are optimized to minimize a rate-distortion criterion, but when the input signal has low quality, this results in sub-optimal coding parameters optimized to preserve undesirable artifacts. In this paper we formulate the UGC compression problem as that of compression of a noisy/corrupted source. The noisy source coding theorem reveals that an optimal UGC compression system is comprised of optimal denoising of the UGC signal, followed by compression of the denoised signal. Since optimal denoising is unattainable and users may be against modification of their content, we propose encoding the UGC signal, and using denoised references only to compute distortion, so the encoding process can be guided towards perceptually better solutions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy for JPEG compression of UGC images and videos.
High Speed Emulation in a Vehicle-in-the-Loop Driving Simulator
Authors: Elliot Weiss, J. Christian Gerdes
Date: 2022-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Rendering accurate multisensory feedback is critical to ensure natural user behavior in driving simulators. In this work, we present a virtual reality (VR)-based Vehicle-in-the-Loop (ViL) simulator that provides visual, vestibular, and haptic feedback to drivers in high speed driving conditions. Designing our simulator around a four-wheel steer-by-wire vehicle enables us to emulate the dynamics of a vehicle traveling significantly faster than the test vehicle and to transmit corresponding haptic steering feedback to the driver. By scaling the speed of the test vehicle through a combination of VR visuals, vehicle dynamics emulation, and steering wheel force feedback, we can safely and immersively run experiments up to highway speeds within a limited driving space. In double lane change and highway weaving experiments, our high speed emulation method tracks yaw motion within human perception limits and provides sensory feedback comparable to the same maneuvers driven manually.
Safely: Safe Stochastic Motion Planning Under Constrained Sensing via Duality
Authors: Michael Hibbard, Abraham P. Vinod, Jesse Quattrociocchi, Ufuk Topcu
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Planning

Consider a robot operating in an uncertain environment with stochastic, dynamic obstacles. Despite the clear benefits for trajectory optimization, it is often hard to keep track of each obstacle at every time step due to sensing and hardware limitations. We introduce the Safely motion planner, a receding-horizon control framework, that simultaneously synthesizes both a trajectory for the robot to follow as well as a sensor selection strategy that prescribes trajectory-relevant obstacles to measure at each time step while respecting the sensing constraints of the robot. We perform the motion planning using sequential quadratic programming, and prescribe obstacles to sense based on the duality information associated with the convex subproblems. We guarantee safety by ensuring that the probability of the robot colliding with any of the obstacles is below a prescribed threshold at every time step of the planned robot trajectory. We demonstrate the efficacy of the Safely motion planner through software and hardware experiments.
Visually Supervised Speaker Detection and Localization via Microphone Array
Authors: Davide Berghi, Adrian Hilton, Philip J. B. Jackson
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Speaker Detection

Active speaker detection (ASD) is a multi-modal task that aims to identify who, if anyone, is speaking from a set of candidates. Current audio-visual approaches for ASD typically rely on visually pre-extracted face tracks (sequences of consecutive face crops) and the respective monaural audio. However, their recall rate is often low as only the visible faces are included in the set of candidates. Monaural audio may successfully detect the presence of speech activity but fails in localizing the speaker due to the lack of spatial cues. Our solution extends the audio front-end using a microphone array. We train an audio convolutional neural network (CNN) in combination with beamforming techniques to regress the speaker's horizontal position directly in the video frames. We propose to generate weak labels using a pre-trained active speaker detector on pre-extracted face tracks. Our pipeline embraces the "student-teacher" paradigm, where a trained "teacher" network is used to produce pseudo-labels visually. The "student" network is an audio network trained to generate the same results. At inference, the student network can independently localize the speaker in the visual frames directly from the audio input. Experimental results on newly collected data prove that our approach significantly outperforms a variety of other baselines as well as the teacher network itself. It results in an excellent speech activity detector too.
HRTF measurement for accurate sound localization cues
Authors: Gyeong-Tae Lee, Sang-Min Choi, Byeong-Yun Ko, Yong-Hwa Park
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Sound Source Localization

A new database of head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) for accurate sound source localization is presented through precise measurement and post-processing in terms of improved frequency bandwidth and causality of head-related impulse responses (HRIRs) for accurate spectral cue (SC) and interaural time difference (ITD), respectively. The improvement effects of the proposed methods on binaural sound localization cues were investigated. To achieve sufficient frequency bandwidth with a single source, a one-way sealed speaker module was designed to obtain wide band frequency response based on electro-acoustics, whereas most existing HRTF databases rely on a two-way vented loudspeaker that has multiple sources. The origin transfer function at the head center was obtained by the proposed measurement scheme using a 0 degree on-axis microphone to ensure accurate spectral cue pattern of HRTFs, whereas in the previous measurements with a 90 degree off-axis microphone, the magnitude response of the origin transfer function fluctuated and decreased with increasing frequency, causing erroneous SCs of HRTFs. To prevent discontinuity of ITD due to non-causality of ipsilateral HRTFs, obtained HRIRs were circularly shifted by time delay considering the head radius of the measurement subject. Finally, various sound localization cues such as ITD, interaural level difference (ILD), SC, and horizontal plane directivity (HPD) were derived from the presented HRTFs, and improvements on binaural sound localization cues were examined. As a result, accurate SC patterns of HRTFs were confirmed through the proposed measurement scheme using the 0 degree on-axis microphone, and continuous ITD patterns were obtained due to the non-causality compensation. Source codes and presented HRTF database are available to relevant research groups at GitHub (https://github.com/han-saram/HRTF-HATS-KAIST).
Improving CTC-based speech recognition via knowledge transferring from pre-trained language models
Authors: Keqi Deng, Songjun Cao, Yike Zhang, Long Ma, Gaofeng Cheng, Ji Xu, Pengyuan Zhang
Date: 2022-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Auxiliary Learning, Decoder, Representation Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Recently, end-to-end automatic speech recognition models based on connectionist temporal classification (CTC) have achieved impressive results, especially when fine-tuned from wav2vec2.0 models. Due to the conditional independence assumption, CTC-based models are always weaker than attention-based encoder-decoder models and require the assistance of external language models (LMs). To solve this issue, we propose two knowledge transferring methods that leverage pre-trained LMs, such as BERT and GPT2, to improve CTC-based models. The first method is based on representation learning, in which the CTC-based models use the representation produced by BERT as an auxiliary learning target. The second method is based on joint classification learning, which combines GPT2 for text modeling with a hybrid CTC/attention architecture. Experiment on AISHELL-1 corpus yields a character error rate (CER) of 4.2% on the test set. When compared to the vanilla CTC-based models fine-tuned from the wav2vec2.0 models, our knowledge transferring method reduces CER by 16.1% relatively without external LMs.
Korean Tokenization for Beam Search Rescoring in Speech Recognition
Authors: Kyuhong Shim, Hyewon Bae, Wonyong Sung
Date: 2022-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Language Modeling, Language Modelling, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

The performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) models can be greatly improved by proper beam-search decoding with external language model (LM). There has been an increasing interest in Korean speech recognition, but not many studies have been focused on the decoding procedure. In this paper, we propose a Korean tokenization method for neural network-based LM used for Korean ASR. Although the common approach is to use the same tokenization method for external LM as the ASR model, we show that it may not be the best choice for Korean. We propose a new tokenization method that inserts a special token, SkipTC, when there is no trailing consonant in a Korean syllable. By utilizing the proposed SkipTC token, the input sequence for LM becomes very regularly patterned so that the LM can better learn the linguistic characteristics. Our experiments show that the proposed approach achieves a lower word error rate compared to the same LM model without SkipTC. In addition, we are the first to report the ASR performance for the recently introduced large-scale 7,600h Korean speech dataset.
Optimal Lockdown Management using Short Term COVID-19 Prediction Model
Authors: Shuvrangshu Jana, Debasish Ghose
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

This paper proposes optimal lockdown management policies based on short-term prediction of active COVID-19 confirmed cases to ensure the availability of critical medical resources. The optimal time to start the lockdown from the current time is obtained after maximizing a cost function considering economic value subject to constraints of availability of medical resources, and maximum allowable value of daily growth rate and Test Positive Ratio. The estimated value of required medical resources is calculated as a function of total active cases. The predicted value of active cases is calculated using an adaptive short-term prediction model. The proposed approach can be easily implementable by a local authority. An optimal lockdown case study for Delhi during the second wave in the month of April 2021 is presented using the proposed formulation.