pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Active Restoration of Lost Audio Signals Using Machine Learning and Latent Information
Authors: Zohra Adila Cheddad, Abbas Cheddad
Date: 2021-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio inpainting, Deep Learning, Image Reconstruction

Digital audio signal reconstruction of a lost or corrupt segment using deep learning algorithms has been explored intensively in recent years. Nevertheless, prior traditional methods with linear interpolation, phase coding and tone insertion techniques are still in vogue. However, we found no research work on reconstructing audio signals with the fusion of dithering, steganography, and machine learning regressors. Therefore, this paper proposes the combination of steganography, halftoning (dithering), and state-of-the-art shallow and deep learning methods. The results (including comparing the SPAIN, Autoregressive, deep learning-based, graph-based, and other methods) are evaluated with three different metrics. The observations from the results show that the proposed solution is effective and can enhance the reconstruction of audio signals performed by the side information (e.g., Latent representation) steganography provides. Moreover, this paper proposes a novel framework for reconstruction from heavily compressed embedded audio data using halftoning (i.e., dithering) and machine learning, which we termed the HCR (halftone-based compression and reconstruction). This work may trigger interest in optimising this approach and/or transferring it to different domains (i.e., image reconstruction). Compared to existing methods, we show improvement in the inpainting performance in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the objective difference grade (ODG) and Hansen's audio quality metric. In particular, our proposed framework outperformed the learning-based methods (D2WGAN and SG) and the traditional statistical algorithms (e.g., SPAIN, TDC, WCP).
Bilevel learning of l1-regularizers with closed-form gradients(BLORC)
Authors: Avrajit Ghosh, Michael T. McCann, Saiprasad Ravishankar
Date: 2021-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Bilevel Optimization, Denoising, Form

We present a method for supervised learning of sparsity-promoting regularizers, a key ingredient in many modern signal reconstruction problems. The parameters of the regularizer are learned to minimize the mean squared error of reconstruction on a training set of ground truth signal and measurement pairs. Training involves solving a challenging bilevel optimization problem with a nonsmooth lower-level objective. We derive an expression for the gradient of the training loss using the implicit closed-form solution of the lower-level variational problem given by its dual problem, and provide an accompanying gradient descent algorithm (dubbed BLORC) to minimize the loss. Our experiments on simple natural images and for denoising 1D signals show that the proposed method can learn meaningful operators and the analytical gradients calculated are faster than standard automatic differentiation methods. While the approach we present is applied to denoising, we believe that it can be adapted to a wide-variety of inverse problems with linear measurement models, thus giving it applicability in a wide range of scenarios.
Accretionary Learning with Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Xinyu Wei, Biing-Hwang Fred Juang, Ouya Wang, Shenglong Zhou, Geoffrey Ye Li
Date: 2021-11-21 00:00:00

One of the fundamental limitations of Deep Neural Networks (DNN) is its inability to acquire and accumulate new cognitive capabilities. When some new data appears, such as new object classes that are not in the prescribed set of objects being recognized, a conventional DNN would not be able to recognize them due to the fundamental formulation that it takes. The current solution is typically to re-design and re-learn the entire network, perhaps with a new configuration, from a newly expanded dataset to accommodate new knowledge. This process is quite different from that of a human learner. In this paper, we propose a new learning method named Accretionary Learning (AL) to emulate human learning, in that the set of objects to be recognized may not be pre-specified. The corresponding learning structure is modularized, which can dynamically expand to register and use new knowledge. During accretionary learning, the learning process does not require the system to be totally re-designed and re-trained as the set of objects grows in size. The proposed DNN structure does not forget previous knowledge when learning to recognize new data classes. We show that the new structure and the design methodology lead to a system that can grow to cope with increased cognitive complexity while providing stable and superior overall performance.
Differentiable Projection for Constrained Deep Learning
Authors: Dou Huang, Haoran Zhang, Xuan Song, Ryosuke Shibasaki
Date: 2021-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved extraordinary performance in solving different tasks in various fields. However, the conventional DNN model is steadily approaching the ground-truth value through loss backpropagation. In some applications, some prior knowledge could be easily obtained, such as constraints which the ground truth observation follows. Here, we try to give a general approach to incorporate information from these constraints to enhance the performance of the DNNs. Theoretically, we could formulate these kinds of problems as constrained optimization problems that KKT conditions could solve. In this paper, we propose to use a differentiable projection layer in DNN instead of directly solving time-consuming KKT conditions. The proposed projection method is differentiable, and no heavy computation is required. Finally, we also conducted some experiments using a randomly generated synthetic dataset and image segmentation task using the PASCAL VOC dataset to evaluate the performance of the proposed projection method. Experimental results show that the projection method is sufficient and outperforms baseline methods.
A Case Study on the Independence of Speech Emotion Recognition in Bangla and English Languages using Language-Independent Prosodic Features
Authors: Fardin Saad, Hasan Mahmud, Mohammad Ridwan Kabir, Md. Alamin Shaheen, Paresha Farastu, Md. Kamrul Hasan
Date: 2021-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Speech Emotion Recognition

A language agnostic approach to recognizing emotions from speech remains an incomplete and challenging task. In this paper, we performed a step-by-step comparative analysis of Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) using Bangla and English languages to assess whether distinguishing emotions from speech is independent of language. Six emotions were categorized for this study, such as - happy, angry, neutral, sad, disgust, and fear. We employed three Emotional Speech Sets (ESS), of which the first two were developed by native Bengali speakers in Bangla and English languages separately. The third was a subset of the Toronto Emotional Speech Set (TESS), which was developed by native English speakers from Canada. We carefully selected language-independent prosodic features, adopted a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model, and conducted three experiments to carry out our proposition. In the first experiment, we measured the performance of the three speech sets individually, followed by the second experiment, where different ESS pairs were integrated to analyze the impact on SER. Finally, we measured the recognition rate by training and testing the model with different speech sets in the third experiment. Although this study reveals that SER in Bangla and English languages is mostly language-independent, some disparities were observed while recognizing emotional states like disgust and fear in these two languages. Moreover, our investigations revealed that non-native speakers convey emotions through speech, much like expressing themselves in their native tongue.
Design of an Novel Spectrum Sensing Scheme Based on Long Short-Term Memory and Experimental Validation
Authors: Nupur Choudhury, Kandarpa Kumar Sarma, Chinmoy Kalita, Aradhana Misra
Date: 2021-11-21 00:00:00

Spectrum sensing allows cognitive radio systems to detect relevant signals in despite the presence of severe interference. Most of the existing spectrum sensing techniques use a particular signal-noise model with certain assumptions and derive certain detection performance. To deal with this uncertainty, learning based approaches are being adopted and more recently deep learning based tools have become popular. Here, we propose an approach of spectrum sensing which is based on long short term memory (LSTM) which is a critical element of deep learning networks (DLN). Use of LSTM facilitates implicit feature learning from spectrum data. The DLN is trained using several features and the performance of the proposed sensing technique is validated with the help of an empirical testbed setup using Adalm Pluto. The testbed is trained to acquire the primary signal of a real world radio broadcast taking place using FM. Experimental data show that even at low signal to noise ratio, our approach performs well in terms of detection and classification accuracies, as compared to current spectrum sensing methods.
Local Linearity and Double Descent in Catastrophic Overfitting
Authors: Varun Sivashankar, Nikil Selvam
Date: 2021-11-21 00:00:00

Catastrophic overfitting is a phenomenon observed during Adversarial Training (AT) with the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) where the test robustness steeply declines over just one epoch in the training stage. Prior work has attributed this loss in robustness to a sharp decrease in $\textit{local linearity}$ of the neural network with respect to the input space, and has demonstrated that introducing a local linearity measure as a regularization term prevents catastrophic overfitting. Using a simple neural network architecture, we experimentally demonstrate that maintaining high local linearity might be $\textit{sufficient}$ to prevent catastrophic overfitting but is not $\textit{necessary.}$ Further, inspired by Parseval networks, we introduce a regularization term to AT with FGSM to make the weight matrices of the network orthogonal and study the connection between orthogonality of the network weights and local linearity. Lastly, we identify the $\textit{double descent}$ phenomenon during the adversarial training process.
Correlation Clustering via Strong Triadic Closure Labeling: Fast Approximation Algorithms and Practical Lower Bounds
Authors: Nate Veldt
Date: 2021-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Correlation clustering is a widely studied framework for clustering based on pairwise similarity and dissimilarity scores, but its best approximation algorithms rely on impractical linear programming relaxations. We present faster approximation algorithms that avoid these relaxations, for two well-studied special cases: cluster editing and cluster deletion. We accomplish this by drawing new connections to edge labeling problems related to the principle of strong triadic closure. This leads to faster and more practical linear programming algorithms, as well as extremely scalable combinatorial techniques, including the first combinatorial approximation algorithm for cluster deletion. In practice, our algorithms produce approximate solutions that nearly match the best algorithms in quality, while scaling to problems that are orders of magnitude larger.
Image-Like Graph Representations for Improved Molecular Property Prediction
Authors: Toni Sagayaraj, Carsten Eickhoff
Date: 2021-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Molecular Property Prediction, molecular representation, Property Prediction

Research into deep learning models for molecular property prediction has primarily focused on the development of better Graph Neural Network (GNN) architectures. Though new GNN variants continue to improve performance, their modifications share a common theme of alleviating problems intrinsic to their fundamental graph-to-graph nature. In this work, we examine these limitations and propose a new molecular representation that bypasses the need for GNNs entirely, dubbed CubeMol. Our fixed-dimensional stochastic representation, when paired with a transformer model, exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art GNN models and provides a path for scalability.
Doing More by Doing Less: How Structured Partial Backpropagation Improves Deep Learning Clusters
Authors: Adarsh Kumar, Kausik Subramanian, Shivaram Venkataraman, Aditya Akella
Date: 2021-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Scheduling

Many organizations employ compute clusters equipped with accelerators such as GPUs and TPUs for training deep learning models in a distributed fashion. Training is resource-intensive, consuming significant compute, memory, and network resources. Many prior works explore how to reduce training resource footprint without impacting quality, but their focus on a subset of the bottlenecks (typically only the network) limits their ability to improve overall cluster utilization. In this work, we exploit the unique characteristics of deep learning workloads to propose Structured Partial Backpropagation(SPB), a technique that systematically controls the amount of backpropagation at individual workers in distributed training. This simultaneously reduces network bandwidth, compute utilization, and memory footprint while preserving model quality. To efficiently leverage the benefits of SPB at cluster level, we introduce JigSaw, a SPB aware scheduler, which does scheduling at the iteration level for Deep Learning Training(DLT) jobs. We find that JigSaw can improve large scale cluster efficiency by as high as 28\%.
Implicit Acoustic Echo Cancellation for Keyword Spotting and Device-Directed Speech Detection
Authors: Samuele Cornell, Thomas Balestri, Thibaud Sénéchal
Date: 2021-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Acoustic echo cancellation, Keyword Spotting

In many speech-enabled human-machine interaction scenarios, user speech can overlap with the device playback audio. In these instances, the performance of tasks such as keyword-spotting (KWS) and device-directed speech detection (DDD) can degrade significantly. To address this problem, we propose an implicit acoustic echo cancellation (iAEC) framework where a neural network is trained to exploit the additional information from a reference microphone channel to learn to ignore the interfering signal and improve detection performance. We study this framework for the tasks of KWS and DDD on, respectively, an augmented version of Google Speech Commands v2 and a real-world Alexa device dataset. Notably, we show a 56% reduction in false-reject rate for the DDD task during device playback conditions. We also show comparable or superior performance over a strong end-to-end neural echo cancellation + KWS baseline for the KWS task with an order of magnitude less computational requirements.
Learning algorithms versus automatability of Frege systems
Authors: Ján Pich, Rahul Santhanam
Date: 2021-11-20 00:00:00

We connect learning algorithms and algorithms automating proof search in propositional proof systems: for every sufficiently strong, well-behaved propositional proof system $P$, we prove that the following statements are equivalent, 1. Provable learning: $P$ proves efficiently that p-size circuits are learnable by subexponential-size circuits over the uniform distribution with membership queries. 2. Provable automatability: $P$ proves efficiently that $P$ is automatable by non-uniform circuits on propositional formulas expressing p-size circuit lower bounds. Here, $P$ is sufficiently strong and well-behaved if I.-III. holds: I. $P$ p-simulates Je\v{r}\'abek's system $WF$ (which strengthens the Extended Frege system $EF$ by a surjective weak pigeonhole principle); II. $P$ satisfies some basic properties of standard proof systems which p-simulate $WF$; III. $P$ proves efficiently for some Boolean function $h$ that $h$ is hard on average for circuits of subexponential size. For example, if III. holds for $P=WF$, then Items 1 and 2 are equivalent for $P=WF$. If there is a function $h\in NE\cap coNE$ which is hard on average for circuits of size $2^{n/4}$, for each sufficiently big $n$, then there is an explicit propositional proof system $P$ satisfying properties I.-III., i.e. the equivalence of Items 1 and 2 holds for $P$.
Reasonable Effectiveness of Random Weighting: A Litmus Test for Multi-Task Learning
Authors: Baijiong Lin, Feiyang Ye, Yu Zhang, Ivor W. Tsang
Date: 2021-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) has achieved success in various fields. However, how to balance different tasks to achieve good performance is a key problem. To achieve the task balancing, there are many works to carefully design dynamical loss/gradient weighting strategies but the basic random experiments are ignored to examine their effectiveness. In this paper, we propose the Random Weighting (RW) methods, including Random Loss Weighting (RLW) and Random Gradient Weighting (RGW), where an MTL model is trained with random loss/gradient weights sampled from a distribution. To show the effectiveness and necessity of RW methods, theoretically we analyze the convergence of RW and reveal that RW has a higher probability to escape local minima, resulting in better generalization ability. Empirically, we extensively evaluate the proposed RW methods to compare with twelve state-of-the-art methods on five image datasets and two multilingual problems from the XTREME benchmark to show RW methods can achieve comparable performance with state-of-the-art baselines. Therefore, we think that the RW methods are important baselines for MTL and should attract more attentions.
Deep Safe Multi-Task Learning
Authors: Zhixiong Yue, Feiyang Ye, Yu Zhang, Christy Liang, Ivor W. Tsang
Date: 2021-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

In recent years, Multi-Task Learning (MTL) has attracted much attention due to its good performance in many applications. However, many existing MTL models cannot guarantee that their performance is no worse than their single-task counterparts on each task. Though some works have empirically observed this phenomenon, little work aims to handle the resulting problem. In this paper, we formally define this phenomenon as negative sharing and define safe multi-task learning where no negative sharing occurs. To achieve safe multi-task learning, we propose a Deep Safe Multi-Task Learning (DSMTL) model with two learning strategies: individual learning and joint learning. We theoretically study the safeness of both learning strategies in the DSMTL model to show that the proposed methods can achieve some versions of safe multi-task learning. Moreover, to improve the scalability of the DSMTL model, we propose an extension, which automatically learns a compact architecture and empirically achieves safe multi-task learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets verify the safeness of the proposed methods.
Semi-supervised Impedance Inversion by Bayesian Neural Network Based on 2-d CNN Pre-training
Authors: Muyang Ge, Wenlong Wang, Wangxiangming Zheng
Date: 2021-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

Seismic impedance inversion can be performed with a semi-supervised learning algorithm, which only needs a few logs as labels and is less likely to get overfitted. However, classical semi-supervised learning algorithm usually leads to artifacts on the predicted impedance image. In this artical, we improve the semi-supervised learning from two aspects. First, by replacing 1-d convolutional neural network (CNN) layers in deep learning structure with 2-d CNN layers and 2-d maxpooling layers, the prediction accuracy is improved. Second, prediction uncertainty can also be estimated by embedding the network into a Bayesian inference framework. Local reparameterization trick is used during forward propagation of the network to reduce sampling cost. Tests with Marmousi2 model and SEAM model validate the feasibility of the proposed strategy.
Deep Spoken Keyword Spotting: An Overview
Authors: Iván López-Espejo, Zheng-Hua Tan, John Hansen, Jesper Jensen
Date: 2021-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Keyword Spotting, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Spoken keyword spotting (KWS) deals with the identification of keywords in audio streams and has become a fast-growing technology thanks to the paradigm shift introduced by deep learning a few years ago. This has allowed the rapid embedding of deep KWS in a myriad of small electronic devices with different purposes like the activation of voice assistants. Prospects suggest a sustained growth in terms of social use of this technology. Thus, it is not surprising that deep KWS has become a hot research topic among speech scientists, who constantly look for KWS performance improvement and computational complexity reduction. This context motivates this paper, in which we conduct a literature review into deep spoken KWS to assist practitioners and researchers who are interested in this technology. Specifically, this overview has a comprehensive nature by covering a thorough analysis of deep KWS systems (which includes speech features, acoustic modeling and posterior handling), robustness methods, applications, datasets, evaluation metrics, performance of deep KWS systems and audio-visual KWS. The analysis performed in this paper allows us to identify a number of directions for future research, including directions adopted from automatic speech recognition research and directions that are unique to the problem of spoken KWS.
Vehicular Visible Light Communications Noise Analysis and Autoencoder Based Denoising
Authors: Bugra Turan, O. Nuri Koc, Emrah Kar, Sinem Coleri
Date: 2021-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Vehicular visible light communications (V-VLC) is a promising intelligent transportation systems (ITS) technology for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications with the utilization of light-emitting diodes (LEDs). The main degrading factor for the performance of V-VLC systems is noise. Unlike traditional radio frequency (RF) based systems, V-VLC systems include many noise sources: solar radiation, background lighting from vehicles, streets, parking garages, and tunnel lights. Traditional V-VLC system noise modeling is based on the additive white Gaussian noise assumption in the form of shot and thermal noise. In this paper, to investigate both time-correlated and white noise components of the V-VLC channel, we propose a noise analysis based on Allan variance (AVAR), which provides a time-series analysis method to identify noise from the data. We also propose a generalized Wiener process-based V-VLC channel noise synthesis methodology to generate different noise components. We further propose a convolutional autoencoder(CAE) based denoising scheme to reduce V-VLC signal noise, which achieves reconstruction root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.0442 and 0.0474 for indoor and outdoor channels, respectively.