pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Speech Emotion Recognition with Multiscale Area Attention and Data Augmentation
Authors: Mingke Xu, Fan Zhang, Xiaodong Cui, Wei zhang
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Emotion Recognition, Speech Emotion Recognition

In Speech Emotion Recognition (SER), emotional characteristics often appear in diverse forms of energy patterns in spectrograms. Typical attention neural network classifiers of SER are usually optimized on a fixed attention granularity. In this paper, we apply multiscale area attention in a deep convolutional neural network to attend emotional characteristics with varied granularities and therefore the classifier can benefit from an ensemble of attentions with different scales. To deal with data sparsity, we conduct data augmentation with vocal tract length perturbation (VTLP) to improve the generalization capability of the classifier. Experiments are carried out on the Interactive Emotional Dyadic Motion Capture (IEMOCAP) dataset. We achieved 79.34% weighted accuracy (WA) and 77.54% unweighted accuracy (UA), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the state of the art on this dataset.
Analyzing the barren plateau phenomenon in training quantum neural networks with the ZX-calculus
Authors: Chen Zhao, Xiao-Shan Gao
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose a general scheme to analyze the gradient vanishing phenomenon, also known as the barren plateau phenomenon, in training quantum neural networks with the ZX-calculus. More precisely, we extend the barren plateaus theorem from unitary 2-design circuits to any parameterized quantum circuits under certain reasonable assumptions. The main technical contribution of this paper is representing certain integrations as ZX-diagrams and computing them with the ZX-calculus. The method is used to analyze four concrete quantum neural networks with different structures. It is shown that, for the hardware efficient ansatz and the MPS-inspired ansatz, there exist barren plateaus, while for the QCNN ansatz and the tree tensor network ansatz, there exists no barren plateau.
Provably Secure Federated Learning against Malicious Clients
Authors: Xiaoyu Cao, Jinyuan Jia, Neil Zhenqiang Gong
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Federated Learning, Human Activity Recognition

Federated learning enables clients to collaboratively learn a shared global model without sharing their local training data with a cloud server. However, malicious clients can corrupt the global model to predict incorrect labels for testing examples. Existing defenses against malicious clients leverage Byzantine-robust federated learning methods. However, these methods cannot provably guarantee that the predicted label for a testing example is not affected by malicious clients. We bridge this gap via ensemble federated learning. In particular, given any base federated learning algorithm, we use the algorithm to learn multiple global models, each of which is learnt using a randomly selected subset of clients. When predicting the label of a testing example, we take majority vote among the global models. We show that our ensemble federated learning with any base federated learning algorithm is provably secure against malicious clients. Specifically, the label predicted by our ensemble global model for a testing example is provably not affected by a bounded number of malicious clients. Moreover, we show that our derived bound is tight. We evaluate our method on MNIST and Human Activity Recognition datasets. For instance, our method can achieve a certified accuracy of 88% on MNIST when 20 out of 1,000 clients are malicious.
Edge-Detect: Edge-centric Network Intrusion Detection using Deep Neural Network
Authors: Praneet Singh, Jishnu Jaykumar, Akhil Pankaj, Reshmi Mitra
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Edge-computing, Intrusion Detection, Network Intrusion Detection

Edge nodes are crucial for detection against multitudes of cyber attacks on Internet-of-Things endpoints and is set to become part of a multi-billion industry. The resource constraints in this novel network infrastructure tier constricts the deployment of existing Network Intrusion Detection System with Deep Learning models (DLM). We address this issue by developing a novel light, fast and accurate 'Edge-Detect' model, which detects Distributed Denial of Service attack on edge nodes using DLM techniques. Our model can work within resource restrictions i.e. low power, memory and processing capabilities, to produce accurate results at a meaningful pace. It is built by creating layers of Long Short-Term Memory or Gated Recurrent Unit based cells, which are known for their excellent representation of sequential data. We designed a practical data science pipeline with Recurring Neural Network to learn from the network packet behavior in order to identify whether it is normal or attack-oriented. The model evaluation is from deployment on actual edge node represented by Raspberry Pi using current cybersecurity dataset (UNSW2015). Our results demonstrate that in comparison to conventional DLM techniques, our model maintains a high testing accuracy of 99% even with lower resource utilization in terms of cpu and memory. In addition, it is nearly 3 times smaller in size than the state-of-art model and yet requires a much lower testing time.
Length Learning for Planar Euclidean Curves
Authors: Barak Or, Liam Hazan
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00

In this work, we used deep neural networks (DNNs) to solve a fundamental problem in differential geometry. One can find many closed-form expressions for calculating curvature, length, and other geometric properties in the literature. As we know these concepts, we are highly motivated to reconstruct them by using deep neural networks. In this framework, our goal is to learn geometric properties from examples. The simplest geometric object is a curve. Therefore, this work focuses on learning the length of planar sampled curves created by a sine waves dataset. For this reason, the fundamental length axioms were reconstructed using a supervised learning approach. Following these axioms a simplified DNN model, we call ArcLengthNet, was established. The robustness to additive noise and discretization errors were tested.
LinkLouvain: Link-Aware A/B Testing and Its Application on Online Marketing Campaign
Authors: Tianchi Cai, Daxi Cheng, Chen Liang, Ziqi Liu, Lihong Gu, Huizhi Xie, Zhiqiang Zhang, Xiaodong Zeng, Jinjie Gu
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Link Prediction, Marketing

A lot of online marketing campaigns aim to promote user interaction. The average treatment effect (ATE) of campaign strategies need to be monitored throughout the campaign. A/B testing is usually conducted for such needs, whereas the existence of user interaction can introduce interference to normal A/B testing. With the help of link prediction, we design a network A/B testing method LinkLouvain to minimize graph interference and it gives an accurate and sound estimate of the campaign's ATE. In this paper, we analyze the network A/B testing problem under a real-world online marketing campaign, describe our proposed LinkLouvain method, and evaluate it on real-world data. Our method achieves significant performance compared with others and is deployed in the online marketing campaign.
General-Purpose Speech Representation Learning through a Self-Supervised Multi-Granularity Framework
Authors: Yucheng Zhao, Dacheng Yin, Chong Luo, Zhiyuan Zhao, Chuanxin Tang, Wenjun Zeng, Zheng-Jun Zha
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Emotion Classification, General Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech Representation Learning

This paper presents a self-supervised learning framework, named MGF, for general-purpose speech representation learning. In the design of MGF, speech hierarchy is taken into consideration. Specifically, we propose to use generative learning approaches to capture fine-grained information at small time scales and use discriminative learning approaches to distill coarse-grained or semantic information at large time scales. For phoneme-scale learning, we borrow idea from the masked language model but tailor it for the continuous speech signal by replacing classification loss with a contrastive loss. We corroborate our design by evaluating MGF representation on various downstream tasks, including phoneme classification, speaker classification, speech recognition, and emotion classification. Experiments verify that training at different time scales needs different training targets and loss functions, which in general complement each other and lead to a better performance.
You Cannot Do That Ben Stokes: Dynamically Predicting Shot Type in Cricket Using a Personalized Deep Neural Network
Authors: Will Gürpınar-Morgan, Daniel Dinsdale, Joe Gallagher, Aditya Cherukumudi, Patrick Lucey
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

The ability to predict what shot a batsman will attempt given the type of ball and match situation is both one of the most challenging and strategically important tasks in cricket. The goal of the batsman is to score as many runs without being dismissed, whilst for bowlers their goal is to stem the flow of runs and ideally to dismiss their opponent. Getting the best batsman vs bowler match-up is of paramount importance. For example, for the fielding team, the choice of bowler against the opposition star batsman could be the key difference between winning or losing. Therefore, the ability to have a predefined playbook (as in the NFL) which would allow a team to predict how best to set their fielders given the context of the game, the batsman they are bowling to and bowlers at their disposal would give them a significant strategic advantage. To this end, we present a personalized deep neural network approach which can predict the probabilities of where a specific batsman will hit a specific bowler and bowl type, in a specific game-scenario. We demonstrate how our personalized predictions provide vital information to inform the decision-making of coaches and captains, both in terms of pre-match and in-game tactical choices, using the 2019 World Cup final between England and New Zealand as a case study example.
AttentionFlow: Visualising Influence in Networks of Time Series
Authors: Minjeong Shin, Alasdair Tran, Siqi Wu, Alexander Mathews, Rong Wang, Georgiana Lyall, Lexing Xie
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

The collective attention on online items such as web pages, search terms, and videos reflects trends that are of social, cultural, and economic interest. Moreover, attention trends of different items exhibit mutual influence via mechanisms such as hyperlinks or recommendations. Many visualisation tools exist for time series, network evolution, or network influence; however, few systems connect all three. In this work, we present AttentionFlow, a new system to visualise networks of time series and the dynamic influence they have on one another. Centred around an ego node, our system simultaneously presents the time series on each node using two visual encodings: a tree ring for an overview and a line chart for details. AttentionFlow supports interactions such as overlaying time series of influence and filtering neighbours by time or flux. We demonstrate AttentionFlow using two real-world datasets, VevoMusic and WikiTraffic. We show that attention spikes in songs can be explained by external events such as major awards, or changes in the network such as the release of a new song. Separate case studies also demonstrate how an artist's influence changes over their career, and that correlated Wikipedia traffic is driven by cultural interests. More broadly, AttentionFlow can be generalised to visualise networks of time series on physical infrastructures such as road networks, or natural phenomena such as weather and geological measurements.
Towards Natural and Controllable Cross-Lingual Voice Conversion Based on Neural TTS Model and Phonetic Posteriorgram
Authors: Shengkui Zhao, Hao Wang, Trung Hieu Nguyen, Bin Ma
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Voice Conversion

Cross-lingual voice conversion (VC) is an important and challenging problem due to significant mismatches of the phonetic set and the speech prosody of different languages. In this paper, we build upon the neural text-to-speech (TTS) model, i.e., FastSpeech, and LPCNet neural vocoder to design a new cross-lingual VC framework named FastSpeech-VC. We address the mismatches of the phonetic set and the speech prosody by applying Phonetic PosteriorGrams (PPGs), which have been proved to bridge across speaker and language boundaries. Moreover, we add normalized logarithm-scale fundamental frequency (Log-F0) to further compensate for the prosodic mismatches and significantly improve naturalness. Our experiments on English and Mandarin languages demonstrate that with only mono-lingual corpus, the proposed FastSpeech-VC can achieve high quality converted speech with mean opinion score (MOS) close to the professional records while maintaining good speaker similarity. Compared to the baselines using Tacotron2 and Transformer TTS models, the FastSpeech-VC can achieve controllable converted speech rate and much faster inference speed. More importantly, the FastSpeech-VC can easily be adapted to a speaker with limited training utterances.
Monaural Speech Enhancement with Complex Convolutional Block Attention Module and Joint Time Frequency Losses
Authors: Shengkui Zhao, Trung Hieu Nguyen, Bin Ma
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Speech Denoising, Speech Enhancement

Deep complex U-Net structure and convolutional recurrent network (CRN) structure achieve state-of-the-art performance for monaural speech enhancement. Both deep complex U-Net and CRN are encoder and decoder structures with skip connections, which heavily rely on the representation power of the complex-valued convolutional layers. In this paper, we propose a complex convolutional block attention module (CCBAM) to boost the representation power of the complex-valued convolutional layers by constructing more informative features. The CCBAM is a lightweight and general module which can be easily integrated into any complex-valued convolutional layers. We integrate CCBAM with the deep complex U-Net and CRN to enhance their performance for speech enhancement. We further propose a mixed loss function to jointly optimize the complex models in both time-frequency (TF) domain and time domain. By integrating CCBAM and the mixed loss, we form a new end-to-end (E2E) complex speech enhancement framework. Ablation experiments and objective evaluations show the superior performance of the proposed approaches (https://github.com/modelscope/ClearerVoice-Studio).
Acoustic Structure Inverse Design and Optimization Using Deep Learning
Authors: Xuecong Sun, Han Jia, Yuzhen Yang, Han Zhao, Yafeng Bi, Zhaoyong Sun, Jun Yang
Date: 2021-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Speech Enhancement

From ancient to modern times, acoustic structures have been used to control the propagation of acoustic waves. However, the design of the acoustic structures has remained widely a time-consuming and computational resource-consuming iterative process. In recent years, Deep Learning has attracted unprecedented attention for its ability to tackle hard problems with huge datasets, which has achieved state-of-the-art results in various tasks. In this work, an acoustic structure design method is proposed based on deep learning. Taking the design of multi-order Helmholtz resonator for instance, we experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our method is not only able to give a very accurate prediction of the geometry of the acoustic structures with multiple strong-coupling parameters, but also capable of improving the performance of evolutionary approaches in optimization for a desired property. Compared with the conventional numerical methods, our method is more efficient, universal and automatic, which has a wide range of potential applications, such as speech enhancement, sound absorption and insulation.
Data Generation Using Pass-phrase-dependent Deep Auto-encoders for Text-Dependent Speaker Verification
Authors: Achintya Kumar Sarkar, Md Sahidullah, Zheng-Hua Tan
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Speaker Verification, Text-Dependent Speaker Verification, Transfer Learning

In this paper, we propose a novel method that trains pass-phrase specific deep neural network (PP-DNN) based auto-encoders for creating augmented data for text-dependent speaker verification (TD-SV). Each PP-DNN auto-encoder is trained using the utterances of a particular pass-phrase available in the target enrollment set with two methods: (i) transfer learning and (ii) training from scratch. Next, feature vectors of a given utterance are fed to the PP-DNNs and the output from each PP-DNN at frame-level is considered one new set of generated data. The generated data from each PP-DNN is then used for building a TD-SV system in contrast to the conventional method that considers only the evaluation data available. The proposed approach can be considered as the transformation of data to the pass-phrase specific space using a non-linear transformation learned by each PP-DNN. The method develops several TD-SV systems with the number equal to the number of PP-DNNs separately trained for each pass-phrases for the evaluation. Finally, the scores of the different TD-SV systems are fused for decision making. Experiments are conducted on the RedDots challenge 2016 database for TD-SV using short utterances. Results show that the proposed method improves the performance for both conventional cepstral feature and deep bottleneck feature using both Gaussian mixture model - universal background model (GMM-UBM) and i-vector framework.
Multi-UAV Mobile Edge Computing and Path Planning Platform based on Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Huan Chang, Yicheng Chen, Baochang Zhang, David Doermann
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Unmanned Aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used as network processors in mobile networks, but more recently, UAVs have been used in Mobile Edge Computing as mobile servers. However, there are significant challenges to use UAVs in complex environments with obstacles and cooperation between UAVs. We introduce a new multi-UAV Mobile Edge Computing platform, which aims to provide better Quality-of-Service and path planning based on reinforcement learning to address these issues. The contributions of our work include: 1) optimizing the quality of service for mobile edge computing and path planning in the same reinforcement learning framework; 2) using a sigmoid-like function to depict the terminal users' demand to ensure a higher quality of service; 3) applying synthetic considerations of the terminal users' demand, risk and geometric distance in reinforcement learning reward matrix to ensure the quality of service, risk avoidance, and the cost-savings. Simulations have shown the effectiveness and feasibility of our platform, which can help advance related researches.
The Pitfall of More Powerful Autoencoders in Lidar-Based Navigation
Authors: Christopher Gebauer, Maren Bennewitz
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The benefit of pretrained autoencoders for reinforcement learning in comparison to training on raw observations is already known [1]. In this paper, we address the generation of a compact and information-rich state representation. In particular, we train a variational autoencoder for 2D-lidar scans to use its latent state for reinforcement learning of navigation tasks. To achieve high reconstruction power of our autoencoding pipeline, we propose an - in the context of autoencoding 2D-lidar scans - novel preprocessing into a local binary occupancy image. This has no additional requirements, neither self-localization nor robust mapping, and therefore can be applied in any setting and easily transferred from simulation in real-world. In a second stage, we show the usage of the compact state representation generated by our autoencoding pipeline in a simplistic navigation task and expose the pitfall that increased reconstruction power will always lead to an improved performance. We implemented our approach in python using tensorflow. Our datasets are simulated with pybullet as well as recorded using a slamtec rplidar A3. The experiments show the significantly improved reconstruction capabilities of our approach for 2D-lidar scans w.r.t. the state of the art. However, as we demonstrate in the experiments the impact on reinforcement learning in lidar-based navigation tasks is non-predictable when improving the latent state representation generated by an autoencoding pipeline. This is surprising and needs to be taken into account during the process of optimizing a pretrained autoencoder for reinforcement learning tasks.
Session-based Recommendation with Self-Attention Networks
Authors: Jun Fang
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Session-Based Recommendations

Session-based recommendation aims to predict user's next behavior from current session and previous anonymous sessions. Capturing long-range dependencies between items is a vital challenge in session-based recommendation. A novel approach is proposed for session-based recommendation with self-attention networks (SR-SAN) as a remedy. The self-attention networks (SAN) allow SR-SAN capture the global dependencies among all items of a session regardless of their distance. In SR-SAN, a single item latent vector is used to capture both current interest and global interest instead of session embedding which is composed of current interest embedding and global interest embedding. Some experiments have been performed on some open benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms some state-of-the-arts by comparisons.
A Dataset of Journalists' Interactions with Their Readership: When Should Article Authors Reply to Reader Comments?
Authors: Julian Risch, Ralf Krestel
Date: 2020-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

The comment sections of online news platforms are an important space to indulge in political conversations and to discuss opinions. Although primarily meant as forums where readers discuss amongst each other, they can also spark a dialog with the journalists who authored the article. A small but important fraction of comments address the journalists directly, e.g., with questions, recommendations for future topics, thanks and appreciation, or article corrections. However, the sheer number of comments makes it infeasible for journalists to follow discussions around their articles in extenso. A better understanding of this data could support journalists in gaining insights into their audience and fostering engaging and respectful discussions. To this end, we present a dataset of dialogs in which journalists of The Guardian replied to reader comments and identify the reasons why. Based on this data, we formulate the novel task of recommending reader comments to journalists that are worth reading or replying to, i.e., ranking comments in such a way that the top comments are most likely to require the journalists' reaction. As a baseline, we trained a neural network model with the help of a pair-wise comment ranking task. Our experiment reveals the challenges of this task and we outline promising paths for future work. The data and our code are available for research purposes from: hpi.de/naumann/projects/repeatability/text-mining.html