pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multi-party computation enables secure polynomial control based solely on secret-sharing
Authors: Sebastian Schlor, Michael Hertneck, Stefan Wildhagen, Frank Allgöwer
Date: 2021-03-30 00:00:00

Encrypted control systems allow to evaluate feedback laws on external servers without revealing private information about state and input data, the control law, or the plant. While there are a number of encrypted control schemes available for linear feedback laws, only few results exist for the evaluation of more general control laws. Recently, an approach to encrypted polynomial control was presented, relying on two-party secret sharing and an inter-server communication protocol using homomorphic encryption. As homomorphic encryptions are much more computationally demanding than secret sharing, they make up for a tremendous amount of the overall computational demand of this scheme. For this reason, in this paper, we demonstrate that multi-party computation enables secure polynomial control based solely on secret sharing. We introduce a novel secure three-party control scheme based on three-party computation. Further, we propose a novel $n$-party control scheme to securely evaluate polynomial feedback laws of arbitrary degree without inter-server communication. The latter property makes it easier to realize the necessary requirement regarding non-collusion of the servers, with which perfect security can be guaranteed. Simulations suggest that the presented control schemes are many times less computationally demanding than the two-party scheme mentioned above.
The Unfolding Structure of Arguments in Online Debates: The case of a No-Deal Brexit
Authors: Carlo Santagiustina, Massimo Warglien
Date: 2021-03-09 00:00:00

In the last decade, political debates have progressively shifted to social media. Rhetorical devices employed by online actors and factions that operate in these debating arenas can be captured and analysed to conduct a statistical reading of societal controversies and their argumentation dynamics. In this paper, we propose a five-step methodology, to extract, categorize and explore the latent argumentation structures of online debates. Using Twitter data about a "no-deal" Brexit, we focus on the expected effects in case of materialisation of this event. First, we extract cause-effect claims contained in tweets using RegEx that exploit verbs related to Creation, Destruction and Causation. Second, we categorise extracted "no-deal" effects using a Structural Topic Model estimated on unigrams and bigrams. Third, we select controversial effect topics and explore within-topic argumentation differences between self-declared partisan user factions. We hence type topics using estimated covariate effects on topic propensities, then, using the topics correlation network, we study the topological structure of the debate to identify coherent topical constellations. Finally, we analyse the debate time dynamics and infer lead/follow relations among factions. Results show that the proposed methodology can be employed to perform a statistical rhetorics analysis of debates, and map the architecture of controversies across time. In particular, the "no-deal" Brexit debate is shown to have an assortative argumentation structure heavily characterized by factional constellations of arguments, as well as by polarized narrative frames invoked through verbs related to Creation and Destruction. Our findings highlight the benefits of implementing a systemic approach to the analysis of debates, which allows the unveiling of topical and factional dependencies between arguments employed in online debates.
Target Speaker Verification with Selective Auditory Attention for Single and Multi-talker Speech
Authors: Chenglin Xu, Wei Rao, Jibin Wu, Haizhou Li
Date: 2021-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Speaker Verification, Target Speaker Extraction

Speaker verification has been studied mostly under the single-talker condition. It is adversely affected in the presence of interference speakers. Inspired by the study on target speaker extraction, e.g., SpEx, we propose a unified speaker verification framework for both single- and multi-talker speech, that is able to pay selective auditory attention to the target speaker. This target speaker verification (tSV) framework jointly optimizes a speaker attention module and a speaker representation module via multi-task learning. We study four different target speaker embedding schemes under the tSV framework. The experimental results show that all four target speaker embedding schemes significantly outperform other competitive solutions for multi-talker speech. Notably, the best tSV speaker embedding scheme achieves 76.0% and 55.3% relative improvements over the baseline system on the WSJ0-2mix-extr and Libri2Mix corpora in terms of equal-error-rate for 2-talker speech, while the performance of tSV for single-talker speech is on par with that of traditional speaker verification system, that is trained and evaluated under the same single-talker condition.
Symbol-Level Precoding Through the Lens of Zero Forcing and Vector Perturbation
Authors: Yatao Liu, Mingjie Shao, Wing-Kin Ma, Qiang Li
Date: 2021-03-30 00:00:00

Symbol-level precoding (SLP) has recently emerged as a new paradigm for physical-layer transmit precoding in multiuser multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) channels. It exploits the underlying symbol constellation structure, which the conventional paradigm of linear precoding does not, to enhance symbol-level performance such as symbol error probability (SEP). It also allows the precoder to take a more general form than linear precoding. This paper aims to better understand the relationships between SLP and linear precoding, subsequent design implications, and further connections beyond the existing SLP scope. Focused on the quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellations, our study is built on a basic signal observation, namely, that SLP can be equivalently represented by a zero-forcing (ZF) linear precoding scheme augmented with some appropriately chosen symbol-dependent perturbation terms, and that some extended form of SLP is equivalent to a vector perturbation (VP) nonlinear precoding scheme augmented with the above-noted perturbation terms. We examine how insights arising from this perturbed ZF and VP interpretations can be leveraged to i) substantially simplify the optimization of certain SLP design criteria, namely, total or peak power minimization subject to SEP quality guarantees; and ii) draw connections with some existing SLP designs. We also touch on the analysis side by showing that, under the total power minimization criterion, the basic ZF scheme is a near-optimal SLP scheme when the QAM order is very high -- which gives a vital implication that SLP is more useful for lower-order QAM cases. Numerical results further indicate the merits and limitations of the different SLP designs derived from the perturbed ZF and VP interpretations.
Collaborative Cloud and Edge Mobile Computing in C-RAN Systems with Minimal End-to-End Latency
Authors: Seok-Hwan Park, Seongah Jeong, Jinyeop Na, Osvaldo Simeone, Shlomo Shamai
Date: 2021-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing

Mobile cloud and edge computing protocols make it possible to offer computationally heavy applications to mobile devices via computational offloading from devices to nearby edge servers or more powerful, but remote, cloud servers. Previous work assumed that computational tasks can be fractionally offloaded at both cloud processor (CP) and at a local edge node (EN) within a conventional Distributed Radio Access Network (D-RAN) that relies on non-cooperative ENs equipped with one-way uplink fronthaul connection to the cloud. In this paper, we propose to integrate collaborative fractional computing across CP and ENs within a Cloud RAN (C-RAN) architecture with finite-capacity two-way fronthaul links. Accordingly, tasks offloaded by a mobile device can be partially carried out at an EN and the CP, with multiple ENs communicating with a common CP to exchange data and computational outcomes while allowing for centralized precoding and decoding. Unlike prior work, we investigate joint optimization of computing and communication resources, including wireless and fronthaul segments, to minimize the end-to-end latency by accounting for a two-way uplink and downlink transmission. The problem is tackled by using fractional programming (FP) and matrix FP. Extensive numerical results validate the performance gain of the proposed architecture as compared to the previously studied D-RAN solution.
FisherMob : a bioeconomic model of fishers' migrations
Authors: Timothée Brochier, Alassane Bah
Date: 2021-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, model

Sea fishing is a highly mobile activity, favoured by the vastness of the oceans, the absence of physical boundaries and the abstraction of legislative boundaries. Understanding and anticipating this mobility is a major challenge for fisheries management issues, both at the national and international levels. ''FisherMob'' is a free Gama tool designed to study the effect of economic and biological factors on the dynamics of connected fisheries. It incorporate the most important processes involved in fisheries dynamics: fish abundance variability, price of the fishing effort and ex-vessel fish market price that which depends on the ratio between offer and demand. The tool uses as input a scheme of a coastal area with delimited fishing sites, fish biological parameters and fisheries parameters. It runs with a userfriendly graphic interface and generates output files that can be post-processed easily using graphic and statistical software.
Modelling and Control of a Knuckle Boom Crane
Authors: M. Ambrosino, E. Garone
Date: 2021-03-30 00:00:00

Cranes come in various sizes and designs to perform different tasks. Depending on their dynamic properties, they can be classified as gantry cranes and rotary cranes. In this paper we will focus on the so called 'knuckle boom' cranes which are among the most common types of rotary cranes. Compared with the other kinds of cranes (e.g. boom cranes, tower cranes, overhead cranes, etc), the study of knuckle cranes is still at an early stage and very few control strategies for this kind of crane have been proposed in the literature. Although fairly simple mechanically, from the control viewpoint the knuckle cranes present several challenges. A first result of this paper is to present for the first time a complete mathematical model for this kind of crane where it is possible to control the three rotations of the crane (known as luff, slew, and jib movement), and the cable length. The only simplifying assumption of the model is that the cable is considered rigid. On the basis of this model, we propose a nonlinear control law based on energy considerations which is able to perform position control of the crane while actively damping the oscillations of the load. The corresponding stability and convergence analysis is carefully proved using the LaSalle's invariance principle. The effectiveness of the proposed control approach has been tested in simulation with realistic physical parameters and in the presence of model mismatch.
Event-Triggered Safety-Critical Control for Systems with Unknown Dynamics
Authors: Wei Xiao, Calin Belta, Christos G. Cassandras
Date: 2021-03-29 00:00:00

This paper addresses the problem of safety-critical control for systems with unknown dynamics. It has been shown that stabilizing affine control systems to desired (sets of) states while optimizing quadratic costs subject to state and control constraints can be reduced to a sequence of quadratic programs (QPs) by using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) and Control Lyapunov Functions (CLFs). Our recently proposed High Order CBFs (HOCBFs) can accommodate constraints of arbitrary relative degree. One of the main challenges in this approach is obtaining accurate system dynamics, which is especially difficult for systems that require online model identification given limited computational resources and system data. In order to approximate the real unmodelled system dynamics, we define adaptive affine control dynamics which are updated based on the error states obtained by real-time sensor measurements. We define a HOCBF for a safety requirement on the unmodelled system based on the adaptive dynamics and error states, and reformulate the safety-critical control problem as the above mentioned QP. Then, we determine the events required to solve the QP in order to guarantee safety. We also derive a condition that guarantees the satisfaction of the HOCBF constraint between events. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on an adaptive cruise control problem and compare it with the classical time-driven approach.
Enhancing Segment-Based Speech Emotion Recognition by Deep Self-Learning
Authors: Shuiyang Mao, P. C. Ching, Tan Lee
Date: 2021-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Self-Learning, Speech Emotion Recognition

Despite the widespread utilization of deep neural networks (DNNs) for speech emotion recognition (SER), they are severely restricted due to the paucity of labeled data for training. Recently, segment-based approaches for SER have been evolving, which train backbone networks on shorter segments instead of whole utterances, and thus naturally augments training examples without additional resources. However, one core challenge remains for segment-based approaches: most emotional corpora do not provide ground-truth labels at the segment level. To supervisely train a segment-based emotion model on such datasets, the most common way assigns each segment the corresponding utterance's emotion label. However, this practice typically introduces noisy (incorrect) labels as emotional information is not uniformly distributed across the whole utterance. On the other hand, DNNs have been shown to easily over-fit a dataset when being trained with noisy labels. To this end, this work proposes a simple and effective deep self-learning (DSL) framework, which comprises a procedure to progressively correct segment-level labels in an iterative learning manner. The DSL method produces dynamically-generated and soft emotion labels, leading to significant performance improvements. Experiments on three well-known emotional corpora demonstrate noticeable gains using the proposed method.
Lexical and syntactic gemination in Italian consonants -- Does a geminate Italian consonant consist of a repeated or a strengthened consonant?
Authors: Maria Gabriella Di Benedetto, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, Luca De Nardis, Sara Budoni, Javier Arango, Ian Chan, Alec DeCaprio
Date: 2021-01-25 00:00:00

Two types of consonant gemination characterize Italian: lexical and syntactic. Italian lexical gemination is contrastive, so that two words may differ by only one geminated consonant. In contrast, syntactic gemination occurs across word boundaries, and affects the initial consonant of a word in specific contexts, such as the presence of a monosyllabic morpheme before the word. This study investigates the acoustic correlates of Italian lexical and syntactic gemination, asking if the correlates for the two types are similar in the case of stop consonants. Results confirmed previous studies showing that duration is a prominent gemination cue, with a lengthened consonant closure and a shortened pre-consonant vowel for both types. Results also revealed the presence, in about 10-12% of instances, of a double stop-release burst, providing strong support for the biphonematic nature of Italian geminated stop consonants. Moreover, the timing of these bursts suggests a different planning process for lexical vs. syntactic geminates. The second burst, when present, is accommodated within the closure interval in syntactic geminates, while lexical geminates are lengthened by the extra burst. This suggests that syntactic gemination occurs during a post-lexical phase of production planning, after timing has already been established.
MediaSpeech: Multilanguage ASR Benchmark and Dataset
Authors: Rostislav Kolobov, Olga Okhapkina, Olga Omelchishina, Andrey Platunov, Roman Bedyakin, Vyacheslav Moshkin, Dmitry Menshikov, Nikolay Mikhaylovskiy
Date: 2021-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

The performance of automated speech recognition (ASR) systems is well known to differ for varied application domains. At the same time, vendors and research groups typically report ASR quality results either for limited use simplistic domains (audiobooks, TED talks), or proprietary datasets. To fill this gap, we provide an open-source 10-hour ASR system evaluation dataset NTR MediaSpeech for 4 languages: Spanish, French, Turkish and Arabic. The dataset was collected from the official youtube channels of media in the respective languages, and manually transcribed. We estimate that the WER of the dataset is under 5%. We have benchmarked many ASR systems available both commercially and freely, and provide the benchmark results. We also open-source baseline QuartzNet models for each language.
Online Policies for Real-Time Control Using MRAC-RL
Authors: Anubhav Guha, Anuradha Annaswamy
Date: 2021-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this paper, we propose the Model Reference Adaptive Control & Reinforcement Learning (MRAC-RL) approach to developing online policies for systems in which modeling errors occur in real-time. Although reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully used to develop control policies for dynamical systems, discrepancies between simulated dynamics and the true target dynamics can cause trained policies to fail to generalize and adapt appropriately when deployed in the real-world. The MRAC-RL framework generates online policies by utilizing an inner-loop adaptive controller together with a simulation-trained outer-loop RL policy. This structure allows MRAC-RL to adapt and operate effectively in a target environment, even when parametric uncertainties exists. We propose a set of novel MRAC algorithms, apply them to a class of nonlinear systems, derive the associated control laws, provide stability guarantees for the resulting closed-loop system, and show that the adaptive tracking objective is achieved. Using a simulation study of an automated quadrotor landing task, we demonstrate that the MRAC-RL approach improves upon state-of-the-art RL algorithms and techniques through the generation of online policies.
A Non-Conservative Stability Criterion for Networked Control Systems with time-varying Packet Delays
Authors: Martin Steinberger, Martin Horn
Date: 2021-03-30 00:00:00

A networked output feedback loop subject to packetized transmissions of the output signal is considered. Based on the small gain theorem, an easy-to-use stability criterion covering two important cases is presented. In the first case a packet numbering mechanism is employed whereas in the second case neither packet numbering nor synchronization between sender and receiver is assumed. The analysis makes use of acausal subsystems and deduces the optimal constant time delay that should be used in a nominal controller design such that additional packet delay variations introduced by the network are maximized. A simulation example of a networked control system with a filtered Smith predictor illustrates the application of the proposed criterion and compares the results to different approaches from literature.
Designing Experiments for Data-Driven Control of Nonlinear Systems
Authors: Claudio De Persis, Pietro Tesi
Date: 2021-03-30 00:00:00

In a recent paper we have shown that data collected from linear systems excited by persistently exciting inputs during low-complexity experiments, can be used to design state- and output-feedback controllers, including optimal Linear Quadratic Regulators (LQR), by solving linear matrix inequalities (LMI) and semidefinite programs. We have also shown how to stabilize in the first approximation unknown nonlinear systems using data. In contrast to the case of linear systems, however, in the case of nonlinear systems the conditions for learning a controller directly from data may not be fulfilled even when the data are collected in experiments performed using persistently exciting inputs. In this paper we show how to design experiments that lead to the fulfilment of these conditions.
Two-stage Robust Energy Storage Planning with Probabilistic Guarantees: A Data-driven Approach
Authors: Chao Yan, Xinbo Geng, Zhaohong Bie, Le Xie
Date: 2021-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

This paper addresses a central challenge of jointly considering shorter-term (e.g. hourly) and longer-term (e.g. yearly) uncertainties in power system planning with increasing penetration of renewable and storage resources. In conventional planning decision making, shorter-term (e.g., hourly) variations are not explicitly accounted for. However, given the deepening penetration of variable resources, it is becoming imperative to consider such shorter-term variation in the longer-term planning exercise. By leveraging the abundant amount of operational observation data, we propose a scenario-based robust planning framework that provides rigorous guarantees on the future operation risk of planning decisions considering a broad range of operational conditions, such as renewable generation fluctuations and load variations. By connecting two-stage robust optimization with the scenario approach theory, we show that with a carefully chosen number of scenarios, the operational risk level of the robust solution can be adaptive to the risk preference set by planners. The theoretical guarantees hold true for any distributions, and the proposed approach is scalable towards real-world power grids. Furthermore, the column-and-constraint generation algorithm is used to solve the two-stage robust planning problem and tighten theoretical guarantees. We substantiate this framework through a planning problem of energy storage in a power grid with deep renewable penetration. Case studies are performed on large-scale test systems (modified IEEE 118-bus system) to illustrate the theoretical bounds as well as the scalability of proposed algorithm.
Oscillations in Mixed-Feedback Systems
Authors: Amritam Das, Thomas Chaffey, Rodolphe Sepulchre
Date: 2021-03-30 00:00:00

A new method is presented for the analysis of limit cycle oscillations in mixed-feedback systems. The calculation of the limit cycle is reformulated as the zero finding of a mixed-monotone relation, that is, of the difference of two maximally monotone relations. The problem can then be solved efficiently by borrowing existing algorithms that minimize the difference of two convex functions. The potential of the method is illustrated on the classical Van der Pol oscillator.