pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
How Does Momentum Benefit Deep Neural Networks Architecture Design? A Few Case Studies
Authors: Bao Wang, Hedi Xia, Tan Nguyen, Stanley Osher
Date: 2021-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

We present and review an algorithmic and theoretical framework for improving neural network architecture design via momentum. As case studies, we consider how momentum can improve the architecture design for recurrent neural networks (RNNs), neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs), and transformers. We show that integrating momentum into neural network architectures has several remarkable theoretical and empirical benefits, including 1) integrating momentum into RNNs and neural ODEs can overcome the vanishing gradient issues in training RNNs and neural ODEs, resulting in effective learning long-term dependencies. 2) momentum in neural ODEs can reduce the stiffness of the ODE dynamics, which significantly enhances the computational efficiency in training and testing. 3) momentum can improve the efficiency and accuracy of transformers.
Modeling and Analysis of Intermittent Federated Learning Over Cellular-Connected UAV Networks
Authors: Chun-Hung Liu, Di-Chun Liang, Rung-Hung Gau, Lu Wei
Date: 2021-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a promising distributed learning technique particularly suitable for wireless learning scenarios since it can accomplish a learning task without raw data transportation so as to preserve data privacy and lower network resource consumption. However, current works on FL over wireless networks do not profoundly study the fundamental performance of FL over wireless networks that suffers from communication outage due to channel impairment and network interference. To accurately exploit the performance of FL over wireless networks, this paper proposes a novel intermittent FL model over a cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network, which characterizes communication outage from UAV (clients) to their server and data heterogeneity among the datasets at UAVs. We propose an analytically tractable framework to derive the uplink outage probability and use it to devise a simulation-based approach so as to evaluate the performance of the proposed intermittent FL model. Our findings reveal how the intermittent FL model is impacted by uplink communication outage and UAV deployment. Extensive numerical simulations are provided to show the consistency between the simulated and analytical performances of the proposed intermittent FL model.
Human-robot collaboration and machine learning: a systematic review of recent research
Authors: Francesco Semeraro, Alexander Griffiths, Angelo Cangelosi
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Technological progress increasingly envisions the use of robots interacting with people in everyday life. Human-robot collaboration (HRC) is the approach that explores the interaction between a human and a robot, during the completion of a common objective, at the cognitive and physical level. In HRC works, a cognitive model is typically built, which collects inputs from the environment and from the user, elaborates and translates these into information that can be used by the robot itself. Machine learning is a recent approach to build the cognitive model and behavioural block, with high potential in HRC. Consequently, this paper proposes a thorough literature review of the use of machine learning techniques in the context of human-robot collaboration. 45 key papers were selected and analysed, and a clustering of works based on the type of collaborative tasks, evaluation metrics and cognitive variables modelled is proposed. Then, a deep analysis on different families of machine learning algorithms and their properties, along with the sensing modalities used, is carried out. Among the observations, it is outlined the importance of the machine learning algorithms to incorporate time dependencies. The salient features of these works are then cross-analysed to show trends in HRC and give guidelines for future works, comparing them with other aspects of HRC not appeared in the review.
Modeling dynamic target deformation in camera calibration
Authors: Annika Hagemann, Moritz Knorr, Christoph Stiller
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Camera Calibration

Most approaches to camera calibration rely on calibration targets of well-known geometry. During data acquisition, calibration target and camera system are typically moved w.r.t. each other, to allow image coverage and perspective versatility. We show that moving the target can lead to small temporary deformations of the target, which can introduce significant errors into the calibration result. While static inaccuracies of calibration targets have been addressed in previous works, to our knowledge, none of the existing approaches can capture time-varying, dynamic deformations. To achieve high-accuracy calibrations despite moving the target, we propose a way to explicitly model dynamic target deformations in camera calibration. This is achieved by using a low-dimensional deformation model with only few parameters per image, which can be optimized jointly with target poses and intrinsics. We demonstrate the effectiveness of modeling dynamic deformations using different calibration targets and show its significance in a structure-from-motion application.
Task-Driven Deep Image Enhancement Network for Autonomous Driving in Bad Weather
Authors: Younkwan Lee, Jihyo Jeon, YeongMin Ko, Byunggwan Jeon, Moongu Jeon
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, Depth Estimation, Image Enhancement, Navigate, object-detection, Object Detection

Visual perception in autonomous driving is a crucial part of a vehicle to navigate safely and sustainably in different traffic conditions. However, in bad weather such as heavy rain and haze, the performance of visual perception is greatly affected by several degrading effects. Recently, deep learning-based perception methods have addressed multiple degrading effects to reflect real-world bad weather cases but have shown limited success due to 1) high computational costs for deployment on mobile devices and 2) poor relevance between image enhancement and visual perception in terms of the model ability. To solve these issues, we propose a task-driven image enhancement network connected to the high-level vision task, which takes in an image corrupted by bad weather as input. Specifically, we introduce a novel low memory network to reduce most of the layer connections of dense blocks for less memory and computational cost while maintaining high performance. We also introduce a new task-driven training strategy to robustly guide the high-level task model suitable for both high-quality restoration of images and highly accurate perception. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method improves the performance among lane and 2D object detection, and depth estimation largely under adverse weather in terms of both low memory and accuracy.
Self-Supervised Domain Adaptation for Visual Navigation with Global Map Consistency
Authors: Eun Sun Lee, Junho Kim, Young Min Kim
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, GPU, Test-time Adaptation, Visual Navigation

We propose a light-weight, self-supervised adaptation for a visual navigation agent to generalize to unseen environment. Given an embodied agent trained in a noiseless environment, our objective is to transfer the agent to a noisy environment where actuation and odometry sensor noise is present. Our method encourages the agent to maximize the consistency between the global maps generated at different time steps in a round-trip trajectory. The proposed task is completely self-supervised, not requiring any supervision from ground-truth pose data or explicit noise model. In addition, optimization of the task objective is extremely light-weight, as training terminates within a few minutes on a commodity GPU. Our experiments show that the proposed task helps the agent to successfully transfer to new, noisy environments. The transferred agent exhibits improved localization and mapping accuracy, further leading to enhanced performance in downstream visual navigation tasks. Moreover, we demonstrate test-time adaptation with our self-supervised task to show its potential applicability in real-world deployment.
SGoLAM: Simultaneous Goal Localization and Mapping for Multi-Object Goal Navigation
Authors: Junho Kim, Eun Sun Lee, MinGi Lee, Donsu Zhang, Young Min Kim
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, Visual Navigation

We present SGoLAM, short for simultaneous goal localization and mapping, which is a simple and efficient algorithm for Multi-Object Goal navigation. Given an agent equipped with an RGB-D camera and a GPS/Compass sensor, our objective is to have the agent navigate to a sequence of target objects in realistic 3D environments. Our pipeline fully leverages the strength of classical approaches for visual navigation, by decomposing the problem into two key components: mapping and goal localization. The mapping module converts the depth observations into an occupancy map, and the goal localization module marks the locations of goal objects. The agent's policy is determined using the information provided by the two modules: if a current goal is found, plan towards the goal and otherwise, perform exploration. As our approach does not require any training of neural networks, it could be used in an off-the-shelf manner, and amenable for fast generalization in new, unseen environments. Nonetheless, our approach performs on par with the state-of-the-art learning-based approaches. SGoLAM is ranked 2nd in the CVPR 2021 MultiON (Multi-Object Goal Navigation) challenge. We have made our code publicly available at \emph{https://github.com/eunsunlee/SGoLAM}.
A Robotic Antenna Alignment and Tracking System for Millimeter Wave Propagation Modeling
Authors: Bharath Keshavamurthy, Yaguang Zhang, Christopher R. Anderson, Nicolo Michelusi, James V. Krogmeier, David J. Love
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00

In this paper, we discuss the design of a sliding-correlator channel sounder for 28 GHz propagation modeling on the NSF POWDER testbed in Salt Lake City, UT. Beam-alignment is mechanically achieved via a fully autonomous robotic antenna tracking platform, designed using commercial off-the-shelf components. Equipped with an Apache Zookeeper/Kafka managed fault-tolerant publish-subscribe framework, we demonstrate tracking response times of 27.8 ms, in addition to superior scalability over state-of-the-art mechanical beam-steering systems. Enhanced with real-time kinematic correction streams, our geo-positioning subsystem achieves a 3D accuracy of 17 cm, while our principal axes positioning subsystem achieves an average accuracy of 1.1 degrees across yaw and pitch movements. Finally, by facilitating remote orchestration (via managed containers), uninhibited rotation (via encapsulation), and real-time positioning visualization (via Dash/MapBox), we exhibit a proven prototype well-suited for V2X measurements.
DeToxy: A Large-Scale Multimodal Dataset for Toxicity Classification in Spoken Utterances
Authors: Sreyan Ghosh, Samden Lepcha, S Sakshi, Rajiv Ratn Shah, S. Umesh
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00

Toxic speech, also known as hate speech, is regarded as one of the crucial issues plaguing online social media today. Most recent work on toxic speech detection is constrained to the modality of text and written conversations with very limited work on toxicity detection from spoken utterances or using the modality of speech. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset DeToxy, the first publicly available toxicity annotated dataset for the English language. DeToxy is sourced from various openly available speech databases and consists of over 2 million utterances. We believe that our dataset would act as a benchmark for the relatively new and un-explored Spoken Language Processing task of detecting toxicity from spoken utterances and boost further research in this space. Finally, we also provide strong unimodal baselines for our dataset and compare traditional two-step and E2E approaches. Our experiments show that in the case of spoken utterances, text-based approaches are largely dependent on gold human-annotated transcripts for their performance and also suffer from the problem of keyword bias. However, the presence of speech files in DeToxy helps facilitates the development of E2E speech models which alleviate both the above-stated problems by better capturing speech clues.
Toward Degradation-Robust Voice Conversion
Authors: Chien-yu Huang, Kai-Wei Chang, Hung-Yi Lee
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Speech Enhancement, Voice Conversion

Any-to-any voice conversion technologies convert the vocal timbre of an utterance to any speaker even unseen during training. Although there have been several state-of-the-art any-to-any voice conversion models, they were all based on clean utterances to convert successfully. However, in real-world scenarios, it is difficult to collect clean utterances of a speaker, and they are usually degraded by noises or reverberations. It thus becomes highly desired to understand how these degradations affect voice conversion and build a degradation-robust model. We report in this paper the first comprehensive study on the degradation robustness of any-to-any voice conversion. We show that the performance of state-of-the-art models nowadays was severely hampered given degraded utterances. To this end, we then propose speech enhancement concatenation and denoising training to improve the robustness. In addition to common degradations, we also consider adversarial noises, which alter the model output significantly yet are human-imperceptible. It was shown that both concatenations with off-the-shelf speech enhancement models and denoising training on voice conversion models could improve the robustness, while each of them had pros and cons.
Student-t Networks for Melody Estimation
Authors: Udhav Gupta, Avi, Bhavesh Jain
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Melody Extraction

Melody estimation or melody extraction refers to the extraction of the primary or fundamental dominant frequency in a melody. This sequence of frequencies obtained represents the pitch of the dominant melodic line from recorded music audio signals. The music signal may be monophonic or polyphonic. The melody extraction problem from audio signals gets complicated when we start dealing with polyphonic audio data. This is because in generalized audio signals,the sounds are highly correlated over both frequency and time domains. This complex overlap of many sounds, makes identification of predominant frequency challenging.
Evaluating Off-the-Shelf Machine Listening and Natural Language Models for Automated Audio Captioning
Authors: Benno Weck, Xavier Favory, Konstantinos Drossos, Xavier Serra
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio captioning, Word Embeddings

Automated audio captioning (AAC) is the task of automatically generating textual descriptions for general audio signals. A captioning system has to identify various information from the input signal and express it with natural language. Existing works mainly focus on investigating new methods and try to improve their performance measured on existing datasets. Having attracted attention only recently, very few works on AAC study the performance of existing pre-trained audio and natural language processing resources. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of off-the-shelf models with a Transformer-based captioning approach. We utilize the freely available Clotho dataset to compare four different pre-trained machine listening models, four word embedding models, and their combinations in many different settings. Our evaluation suggests that YAMNet combined with BERT embeddings produces the best captions. Moreover, in general, fine-tuning pre-trained word embeddings can lead to better performance. Finally, we show that sequences of audio embeddings can be processed using a Transformer encoder to produce higher-quality captions.
Conformer-Based Self-Supervised Learning for Non-Speech Audio Tasks
Authors: Sangeeta Srivastava, Yun Wang, Andros Tjandra, Anurag Kumar, Chunxi Liu, Kritika Singh, Yatharth Saraf
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Classification, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, Speech Representation Learning

Representation learning from unlabeled data has been of major interest in artificial intelligence research. While self-supervised speech representation learning has been popular in the speech research community, very few works have comprehensively analyzed audio representation learning for non-speech audio tasks. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised audio representation learning method and apply it to a variety of downstream non-speech audio tasks. We combine the well-known wav2vec 2.0 framework, which has shown success in self-supervised learning for speech tasks, with parameter-efficient conformer architectures. Our self-supervised pre-training can reduce the need for labeled data by two-thirds. On the AudioSet benchmark, we achieve a mean average precision (mAP) score of 0.415, which is a new state-of-the-art on this dataset through audio-only self-supervised learning. Our fine-tuned conformers also surpass or match the performance of previous systems pre-trained in a supervised way on several downstream tasks. We further discuss the important design considerations for both pre-training and fine-tuning.
SpecSinGAN: Sound Effect Variation Synthesis Using Single-Image GANs
Authors: Adrián Barahona-Ríos, Tom Collins
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00

Single-image generative adversarial networks learn from the internal distribution of a single training example to generate variations of it, removing the need of a large dataset. In this paper we introduce SpecSinGAN, an unconditional generative architecture that takes a single one-shot sound effect (e.g., a footstep; a character jump) and produces novel variations of it, as if they were different takes from the same recording session. We explore the use of multi-channel spectrograms to train the model on the various layers that comprise a single sound effect. A listening study comparing our model to real recordings and to digital signal processing procedural audio models in terms of sound plausibility and variation revealed that SpecSinGAN is more plausible and varied than the procedural audio models considered, when using multi-channel spectrograms. Sound examples can be found at the project website: https://www.adrianbarahonarios.com/specsingan/
An Approach to Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis with Acoustic, Phonetic and Linguistic (APL) Embeddings
Authors: Wenxuan Ye, Shaoguang Mao, Frank Soong, Wenshan Wu, Yan Xia, Jonathan Tien, Zhiyong Wu
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00

Many mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MD&D) research approaches try to exploit both the acoustic and linguistic features as input. Yet the improvement of the performance is limited, partially due to the shortage of large amount annotated training data at the phoneme level. Phonetic embeddings, extracted from ASR models trained with huge amount of word level annotations, can serve as a good representation of the content of input speech, in a noise-robust and speaker-independent manner. These embeddings, when used as implicit phonetic supplementary information, can alleviate the data shortage of explicit phoneme annotations. We propose to utilize Acoustic, Phonetic and Linguistic (APL) embedding features jointly for building a more powerful MD&D system. Experimental results obtained on the L2-ARCTIC database show the proposed approach outperforms the baseline by 9.93%, 10.13% and 6.17% on the detection accuracy, diagnosis error rate and the F-measure, respectively.
FedSpeech: Federated Text-to-Speech with Continual Learning
Authors: Ziyue Jiang, Yi Ren, Ming Lei, Zhou Zhao
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Federated Learning, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Federated learning enables collaborative training of machine learning models under strict privacy restrictions and federated text-to-speech aims to synthesize natural speech of multiple users with a few audio training samples stored in their devices locally. However, federated text-to-speech faces several challenges: very few training samples from each speaker are available, training samples are all stored in local device of each user, and global model is vulnerable to various attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel federated learning architecture based on continual learning approaches to overcome the difficulties above. Specifically, 1) we use gradual pruning masks to isolate parameters for preserving speakers' tones; 2) we apply selective masks for effectively reusing knowledge from tasks; 3) a private speaker embedding is introduced to keep users' privacy. Experiments on a reduced VCTK dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of FedSpeech: it nearly matches multi-task training in terms of multi-speaker speech quality; moreover, it sufficiently retains the speakers' tones and even outperforms the multi-task training in the speaker similarity experiment.
Improve Cross-lingual Voice Cloning Using Low-quality Code-switched Data
Authors: Haitong Zhang, Yue Lin
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Voice Cloning

Recently, sequence-to-sequence (seq-to-seq) models have been successfully applied in text-to-speech (TTS) to synthesize speech for single-language text. To synthesize speech for multiple languages usually requires multi-lingual speech from the target speaker. However, it is both laborious and expensive to collect high-quality multi-lingual TTS data for the target speakers. In this paper, we proposed to use low-quality code-switched found data from the non-target speakers to achieve cross-lingual voice cloning for the target speakers. Experiments show that our proposed method can generate high-quality code-switched speech in the target voices in terms of both naturalness and speaker consistency. More importantly, we find that our method can achieve a comparable result to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in cross-lingual voice cloning.
SpeechT5: Unified-Modal Encoder-Decoder Pre-Training for Spoken Language Processing
Authors: Junyi Ao, Rui Wang, Long Zhou, Chengyi Wang, Shuo Ren, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu, Tom Ko, Qing Li, Yu Zhang, Zhihua Wei, Yao Qian, Jinyu Li, Furu Wei
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Decoder, Quantization, Representation Learning, Speaker Identification, Speech Enhancement, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis, Voice Conversion

Motivated by the success of T5 (Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer) in pre-trained natural language processing models, we propose a unified-modal SpeechT5 framework that explores the encoder-decoder pre-training for self-supervised speech/text representation learning. The SpeechT5 framework consists of a shared encoder-decoder network and six modal-specific (speech/text) pre/post-nets. After preprocessing the input speech/text through the pre-nets, the shared encoder-decoder network models the sequence-to-sequence transformation, and then the post-nets generate the output in the speech/text modality based on the output of the decoder. Leveraging large-scale unlabeled speech and text data, we pre-train SpeechT5 to learn a unified-modal representation, hoping to improve the modeling capability for both speech and text. To align the textual and speech information into this unified semantic space, we propose a cross-modal vector quantization approach that randomly mixes up speech/text states with latent units as the interface between encoder and decoder. Extensive evaluations show the superiority of the proposed SpeechT5 framework on a wide variety of spoken language processing tasks, including automatic speech recognition, speech synthesis, speech translation, voice conversion, speech enhancement, and speaker identification. We release our code and model at https://github.com/microsoft/SpeechT5.