pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
User-specific Adaptive Fine-tuning for Cross-domain Recommendations
Authors: Lei Chen, Fajie Yuan, Jiaxi Yang, Xiangnan He, Chengming Li, Min Yang
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems, Transfer Learning

Making accurate recommendations for cold-start users has been a longstanding and critical challenge for recommender systems (RS). Cross-domain recommendations (CDR) offer a solution to tackle such a cold-start problem when there is no sufficient data for the users who have rarely used the system. An effective approach in CDR is to leverage the knowledge (e.g., user representations) learned from a related but different domain and transfer it to the target domain. Fine-tuning works as an effective transfer learning technique for this objective, which adapts the parameters of a pre-trained model from the source domain to the target domain. However, current methods are mainly based on the global fine-tuning strategy: the decision of which layers of the pre-trained model to freeze or fine-tune is taken for all users in the target domain. In this paper, we argue that users in RS are personalized and should have their own fine-tuning policies for better preference transfer learning. As such, we propose a novel User-specific Adaptive Fine-tuning method (UAF), selecting which layers of the pre-trained network to fine-tune, on a per-user basis. Specifically, we devise a policy network with three alternative strategies to automatically decide which layers to be fine-tuned and which layers to have their parameters frozen for each user. Extensive experiments show that the proposed UAF exhibits significantly better and more robust performance for user cold-start recommendation.
Does your robot know? Enhancing children's information retrieval through spoken conversation with responsible robots
Authors: T. Beelen, E. Velner, R. Ordelman, K. P. Truong, V. Evers, T. Huibers
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

In this paper, we identify challenges in children's current information retrieval process, and propose conversational robots as an opportunity to ease this process in a responsible way. Tools children currently use in this process, such as search engines on a computer or voice agents, do not always meet their specific needs. The conversational robot we propose maintains context, asks clarifying questions, and gives suggestions in order to better meet children's needs. Since children are often too trusting of robots, we propose to have the robot measure, monitor and adapt to the trust the child has in the robot. This way, we hope to induce a critical attitude with the children during their information retrieval process.
Towards Axiomatic Explanations for Neural Ranking Models
Authors: Michael Völske, Alexander Bondarenko, Maik Fröbe, Matthias Hagen, Benno Stein, Jaspreet Singh, Avishek Anand
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Ranking, Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Recently, neural networks have been successfully employed to improve upon state-of-the-art performance in ad-hoc retrieval tasks via machine-learned ranking functions. While neural retrieval models grow in complexity and impact, little is understood about their correspondence with well-studied IR principles. Recent work on interpretability in machine learning has provided tools and techniques to understand neural models in general, yet there has been little progress towards explaining ranking models. We investigate whether one can explain the behavior of neural ranking models in terms of their congruence with well understood principles of document ranking by using established theories from axiomatic IR. Axiomatic analysis of information retrieval models has formalized a set of constraints on ranking decisions that reasonable retrieval models should fulfill. We operationalize this axiomatic thinking to reproduce rankings based on combinations of elementary constraints. This allows us to investigate to what extent the ranking decisions of neural rankers can be explained in terms of retrieval axioms, and which axioms apply in which situations. Our experimental study considers a comprehensive set of axioms over several representative neural rankers. While the existing axioms can already explain the particularly confident ranking decisions rather well, future work should extend the axiom set to also cover the other still "unexplainable" neural IR rank decisions.
Full Bitcoin Blockchain Data Made Easy
Authors: Jules Azad Emery, Matthieu Latapy
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Despite the fact that it is publicly available, collecting and processing the full bitcoin blockchain data is not trivial. Its mere size, history, and other features indeed raise quite specific challenges, that we address in this paper. The strengths of our approach are the following: it relies on very basic and standard tools, which makes the procedure reliable and easily reproducible; it is a purely lossless procedure ensuring that we catch and preserve all existing data; it provides additional indexing that makes it easy to further process the whole data and select appropriate subsets of it. We present our procedure in details and illustrate its added value on large-scale use cases, like address clustering. We provide an implementation online, as well as the obtained dataset.
MLP Singer: Towards Rapid Parallel Singing Voice Synthesis
Authors: Jaesung Tae, Hyeongju Kim, Younggun Lee
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: arXiv 2021 6
Tasks: image-classification, Singing Voice Synthesis

Recent developments in deep learning have significantly improved the quality of synthesized singing voice audio. However, prominent neural singing voice synthesis systems suffer from slow inference speed due to their autoregressive design. Inspired by MLP-Mixer, a novel architecture introduced in the vision literature for attention-free image classification, we propose MLP Singer, a parallel Korean singing voice synthesis system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses an entirely MLP-based architecture for voice synthesis. Listening tests demonstrate that MLP Singer outperforms a larger autoregressive GAN-based system, both in terms of audio quality and synthesis speed. In particular, MLP Singer achieves a real-time factor of up to 200 and 3400 on CPUs and GPUs respectively, enabling order of magnitude faster generation on both environments.
Global and Local Information Adjustment for Semantic Similarity Evaluation
Authors: Tak-Sung Heo, Jong-Dae Kim, Chan-Young Park, and Yu-Seop Kim
Date: 2021-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: Applied Sciences 2021 5
Tasks: Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Sentence

Semantic similarity evaluation is used in various fields such as question-and-answering and plagiarism testing, and many studies have been conducted into this problem. In previous studies using neural networks to evaluate semantic similarity, similarity has been measured using global information of sentence pairs. However, since sentences do not only have one meaning but a variety of meanings, using only global information can have a negative effect on performance improvement. Therefore, in this study, we propose a model that uses global information and local information simultaneously to evaluate the semantic similarity of sentence pairs. The proposed model can adjust whether to focus more on global information or local information through a weight parameter. As a result of the experiment, the proposed model can show that the accuracy is higher than existing models that use only global information.
Elasticity Based Demand Forecasting and Price Optimization for Online Retail
Authors: Chengcheng Liu, Mátyás A. Sustik
Date: 2021-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Demand Forecasting, Management

We study a problem of an online retailer who observes the unit sales of a product, and dynamically changes the retail price, in order to maximize the expected revenue. Assuming the demand of the product is price sensitive, we are interested in the optimal pricing policy when future demand is uncertain. We build a system to investigate the relationship between retail price and demand and estimate the demand function. The system predicts demand and revenue at a given retail price. We formulate a revenue maximization problem over a discrete finite time horizon with discrete retail price. The optimal pricing policy is solved based on the predicted demand and revenue values. With computational experiments, we investigate the effect of optimal pricing policy to inventory management.
CeFi vs. DeFi -- Comparing Centralized to Decentralized Finance
Authors: Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Yaroslav Afonin, Ludovico Lazzaretti, Arthur Gervais
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00

To non-experts, the traditional Centralized Finance (CeFi) ecosystem may seem obscure, because users are typically not aware of the underlying rules or agreements of financial assets and products. Decentralized Finance (DeFi), however, is making its debut as an ecosystem claiming to offer transparency and control, which are partially attributable to the underlying integrity-protected blockchain, as well as currently higher financial asset yields than CeFi. Yet, the boundaries between CeFi and DeFi may not be always so clear cut. In this work, we systematically analyze the differences between CeFi and DeFi, covering legal, economic, security, privacy and market manipulation. We provide a structured methodology to differentiate between a CeFi and a DeFi service. Our findings show that certain DeFi assets (such as USDC or USDT stablecoins) do not necessarily classify as DeFi assets, and may endanger the economic security of intertwined DeFi protocols. We conclude this work with the exploration of possible synergies between CeFi and DeFi.
MetaCache-GPU: Ultra-Fast Metagenomic Classification
Authors: Robin Kobus, André Müller, Daniel Jünger, Christian Hundt, Bertil Schmidt
Date: 2021-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, CPU, GPU

The cost of DNA sequencing has dropped exponentially over the past decade, making genomic data accessible to a growing number of scientists. In bioinformatics, localization of short DNA sequences (reads) within large genomic sequences is commonly facilitated by constructing index data structures which allow for efficient querying of substrings. Recent metagenomic classification pipelines annotate reads with taxonomic labels by analyzing their $k$-mer histograms with respect to a reference genome database. CPU-based index construction is often performed in a preprocessing phase due to the relatively high cost of building irregular data structures such as hash maps. However, the rapidly growing amount of available reference genomes establishes the need for index construction and querying at interactive speeds. In this paper, we introduce MetaCache-GPU -- an ultra-fast metagenomic short read classifier specifically tailored to fit the characteristics of CUDA-enabled accelerators. Our approach employs a novel hash table variant featuring efficient minhash fingerprinting of reads for locality-sensitive hashing and their rapid insertion using warp-aggregated operations. Our performance evaluation shows that MetaCache-GPU is able to build large reference databases in a matter of seconds, enabling instantaneous operability, while popular CPU-based tools such as Kraken2 require over an hour for index construction on the same data. In the context of an ever-growing number of reference genomes, MetaCache-GPU is the first metagenomic classifier that makes analysis pipelines with on-demand composition of large-scale reference genome sets practical. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/muellan/metacache .
PhyMask: Robust Sensing of Brain Activity and Physiological Signals During Sleep with an All-textile Eye Mask
Authors: Soha Rostaminia, S. Zohreh Homayounfar, Ali Kiaghadi, Trisha L. Andrew, Deepak Ganesan
Date: 2021-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: All

Clinical-grade wearable sleep monitoring is a challenging problem since it requires concurrently monitoring brain activity, eye movement, muscle activity, cardio-respiratory features and gross body movements. This requires multiple sensors to be worn at different locations as well as uncomfortable adhesives and discrete electronic components to be placed on the head. As a result, existing wearables either compromise comfort or compromise accuracy in tracking sleep variables. We propose PhyMask, an all-textile sleep monitoring solution that is practical and comfortable for continuous use and that acquires all signals of interest to sleep solely using comfortable textile sensors placed on the head. We show that PhyMask can be used to accurately measure sleep stages and advanced sleep markers such as spindles and k-complexes robustly in the real-world setting. We validate PhyMask against polysomnography and show that it significantly outperforms two commercially-available sleep tracking wearables, Fitbit and Oura Ring.
Jamming Detection With Subcarrier Blanking for 5G and Beyond in Industry 4.0 Scenarios
Authors: Leonardo Chiarello, Paolo Baracca, Karthik Upadhya, Saeed R. Khosravirad, Thorsten Wild
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00

Security attacks at the physical layer, in the form of radio jamming for denial of service, are an increasing threat in the Industry 4.0 scenarios. In this paper, we consider the problem of jamming detection in 5G-and-beyond communication systems and propose a defense mechanism based on pseudo-random blanking of subcarriers with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). We then design a detector by applying the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) on those subcarriers. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed technique against a smart jammer, which is pursuing one of the following objectives: maximize stealthiness, minimize spectral efficiency (SE) with mobile broadband (MBB) type of traffic, and maximize block error rate (BLER) with ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). Numerical results show that a smart jammer a) needs to compromise between missed detection (MD) probability and SE reduction with MBB and b) can achieve low detectability and high system performance degradation with URLLC only if it has sufficiently high power.
Multi-channel Opus compression for far-field automatic speech recognition with a fixed bitrate budget
Authors: Lukas Drude, Jahn Heymann, Andreas Schwarz, Jean-Marc Valin
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) in the cloud allows the use of larger models and more powerful multi-channel signal processing front-ends compared to on-device processing. However, it also adds an inherent latency due to the transmission of the audio signal, especially when transmitting multiple channels of a microphone array. One way to reduce the network bandwidth requirements is client-side compression with a lossy codec such as Opus. However, this compression can have a detrimental effect especially on multi-channel ASR front-ends, due to the distortion and loss of spatial information introduced by the codec. In this publication, we propose an improved approach for the compression of microphone array signals based on Opus, using a modified joint channel coding approach and additionally introducing a multi-channel spatial decorrelating transform to reduce redundancy in the transmission. We illustrate the effect of the proposed approach on the spatial information retained in multi-channel signals after compression, and evaluate the performance on far-field ASR with a multi-channel beamforming front-end. We demonstrate that our approach can lead to a 37.5 % bitrate reduction or a 5.1 % relative word error rate reduction for a fixed bitrate budget in a seven channel setup.
SRIB Submission to Interspeech 2021 DiCOVA Challenge
Authors: Vishwanath Pratap Singh, Shashi Kumar, Ravi Shekhar Jha, Abhishek Pandey
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Open-Ended Question Answering

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in more than 125 million infections and more than 2.7 million casualties. In this paper, we attempt to classify covid vs non-covid cough sounds using signal processing and deep learning methods. Air turbulence, the vibration of tissues, movement of fluid through airways, opening, and closure of glottis are some of the causes for the production of the acoustic sound signals during cough. Does the COVID-19 alter the acoustic characteristics of breath, cough, and speech sounds produced through the respiratory system? This is an open question waiting for answers. In this paper, we incorporated novel data augmentation methods for cough sound augmentation and multiple deep neural network architectures and methods along with handcrafted features. Our proposed system gives 14% absolute improvement in area under the curve (AUC). The proposed system is developed as part of Interspeech 2021 special sessions and challenges viz. diagnosing of COVID-19 using acoustics (DiCOVA). Our proposed method secured the 5th position on the leaderboard among 29 participants.
Attention-based distributed speech enhancement for unconstrained microphone arrays with varying number of nodes
Authors: Nicolas Furnon, Romain Serizel, Slim Essid, Irina Illina
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

Speech enhancement promises higher efficiency in ad-hoc microphone arrays than in constrained microphone arrays thanks to the wide spatial coverage of the devices in the acoustic scene. However, speech enhancement in ad-hoc microphone arrays still raises many challenges. In particular, the algorithms should be able to handle a variable number of microphones, as some devices in the array might appear or disappear. In this paper, we propose a solution that can efficiently process the spatial information captured by the different devices of the microphone array, while being robust to a link failure. To do this, we use an attention mechanism in order to put more weight on the relevant signals sent throughout the array and to neglect the redundant or empty channels.
UnivNet: A Neural Vocoder with Multi-Resolution Spectrogram Discriminators for High-Fidelity Waveform Generation
Authors: Won Jang, Dan Lim, Jaesam Yoon, BongWan Kim, Juntae Kim
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Most neural vocoders employ band-limited mel-spectrograms to generate waveforms. If full-band spectral features are used as the input, the vocoder can be provided with as much acoustic information as possible. However, in some models employing full-band mel-spectrograms, an over-smoothing problem occurs as part of which non-sharp spectrograms are generated. To address this problem, we propose UnivNet, a neural vocoder that synthesizes high-fidelity waveforms in real time. Inspired by works in the field of voice activity detection, we added a multi-resolution spectrogram discriminator that employs multiple linear spectrogram magnitudes computed using various parameter sets. Using full-band mel-spectrograms as input, we expect to generate high-resolution signals by adding a discriminator that employs spectrograms of multiple resolutions as the input. In an evaluation on a dataset containing information on hundreds of speakers, UnivNet obtained the best objective and subjective results among competing models for both seen and unseen speakers. These results, including the best subjective score for text-to-speech, demonstrate the potential for fast adaptation to new speakers without a need for training from scratch.
A stochastic metapopulation state-space approach to modeling and estimating Covid-19 spread
Authors: Yukun Tan, Durward Cator III, Martial Ndeffo-Mbah, Ulisses Braga-Neto
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Metaheuristic Optimization, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Mathematical models are widely recognized as an important tool for analyzing and understanding the dynamics of infectious disease outbreaks, predict their future trends, and evaluate public health intervention measures for disease control and elimination. We propose a novel stochastic metapopulation state-space model for COVID-19 transmission, based on a discrete-time spatio-temporal susceptible/exposed/infected/recovered/deceased (SEIRD) model. The proposed framework allows the hidden SEIRD states and unknown transmission parameters to be estimated from noisy, incomplete time series of reported epidemiological data, by application of unscented Kalman filtering (UKF), maximum-likelihood adaptive filtering, and metaheuristic optimization. Experiments using both synthetic data and real data from the Fall 2020 Covid-19 wave in the state of Texas demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.
Fuel-Economical Distributed Model Predictive Control for Heavy-Duty Truck Platoon
Authors: Mehmet Fatih Ozkan, Yao Ma
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Predictive Control

This paper proposes a fuel-economical distributed model predictive control design (Eco-DMPC) for a homogenous heavy-duty truck platoon. The proposed control strategy integrates a fuel-optimal control strategy for the leader truck with a distributed formation control for the following trucks in the heavy-duty truck platoon. The fuel-optimal control strategy is implemented by a nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) design with an instantaneous fuel consumption model. The proposed fuel-optimal control strategy utilizes the preview information of the preceding traffic to achieve the fuel-economical speed planning by avoiding energy-inefficient maneuvers, particularly under transient traffic conditions. The distributed formation control is designed with a serial distributed model predictive control (DMPC) strategy with guaranteed local and string stability. In the DMPC strategy, each following truck acquires the future predicted state information of its predecessor through vehicle connectivity and then applies local optimal control to maintain constant spacing. Simulation studies are conducted to investigate the fuel economy performance of the proposed control strategy and to validate the local and string stability of the platoon under a realistic traffic scenario. Compared with a human-operated platoon and a benchmark formation-controlled platoon, the proposed Eco-DMPC significantly improves the fuel economy and road utilization.
How to Determine an Optimal Noise Subspace?
Authors: Kaijie Xu
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00

The Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) algorithm based on the orthogonality between the signal subspace and noise subspace is one of the most frequently used method in the estimation of Direction Of Arrival (DOA), and its performance of DOA estimation mainly depends on the accuracy of the noise subspace. In the most existing researches, the noise subspace is formed by (defined as) the eigenvectors corresponding to all small eigenvalues of the array output covariance matrix. However, we found that the estimation of DOA through the noise subspace in the traditional formation is not optimal in almost all cases, and using a partial noise subspace can always obtain optimal estimation results. In other words, the subspace spanned by the eigenvectors corresponding to a part of the small eigenvalues is more representative of the noise subspace. We demonstrate this conclusion through a number of experiments. Thus, it seems that which and how many eigenvectors should be selected to form the partial noise subspace would be an interesting issue. In addition, this research poses a much general problem: how to select eigenvectors to determine an optimal noise subspace?