pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Approaches to Generative Artificial Intelligence, A Social Justice Perspective
Authors: Myke Healy
Date: 2023-08-17 00:00:00

In the 2023-2024 academic year, the widespread availability of generative artificial intelligence, exemplified by ChatGPT's 1.6 billion monthly visits, is set to impact academic integrity. With 77% of high school students previously reporting engagement in dishonest behaviour, the rise of AI-driven writing assistance, dubbed 'AI-giarism' by Chan (arXiv:2306.03358v2), will make plagiarism more accessible and less detectable. While these concerns are urgent, they also raise broader questions about the revolutionary nature of this technology, including autonomy, data privacy, copyright, and equity. This paper aims to explore generative AI from a social justice perspective, examining the training of these models, the inherent biases, and the potential injustices in detecting AI-generated writing.
Ground Truth Or Dare: Factors Affecting The Creation Of Medical Datasets For Training AI
Authors: Hubert D. Zając, Natalia R. Avlona, Tariq O. Andersen, Finn Kensing, Irina Shklovski
Date: 2023-08-12 00:00:00

One of the core goals of responsible AI development is ensuring high-quality training datasets. Many researchers have pointed to the importance of the annotation step in the creation of high-quality data, but less attention has been paid to the work that enables data annotation. We define this work as the design of ground truth schema and explore the challenges involved in the creation of datasets in the medical domain even before any annotations are made. Based on extensive work in three health-tech organisations, we describe five external and internal factors that condition medical dataset creation processes. Three external factors include regulatory constraints, the context of creation and use, and commercial and operational pressures. These factors condition medical data collection and shape the ground truth schema design. Two internal factors include epistemic differences and limits of labelling. These directly shape the design of the ground truth schema. Discussions of what constitutes high-quality data need to pay attention to the factors that shape and constrain what is possible to be created, to ensure responsible AI design.
Aviation Safety Risk Analysis and Flight Technology Assessment Issues
Authors: Shuanghe Liu
Date: 2023-08-10 00:00:00

This text highlights the significance of flight safety in China's civil aviation industry and emphasizes the need for comprehensive research. It focuses on two main areas: analyzing exceedance events and statistically evaluating non-exceedance data. The challenges of current approaches lie in insufficient cause analysis for exceedances. The proposed solutions involve data preprocessing, reliability assessment, quantifying flight control using neural networks, exploratory data analysis, flight personnel skill evaluation with machine learning, and establishing real-time automated warnings. These endeavors aim to enhance flight safety, personnel assessment, and warning mechanisms, contributing to a safer and more efficient civil aviation sector.
Incentivizing Private Data Sharing in Vehicular Networks: A Game-Theoretic Approach
Authors: Yousef AlSaqabi, Bhaskar Krishnamachari
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00

In the context of evolving smart cities and autonomous transportation systems, Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) and the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) are growing in significance. Vehicles are becoming more than just a means of transportation; they are collecting, processing, and transmitting massive amounts of data to make driving safer and more convenient. However, this advancement ushers in complex issues concerning the centralized structure of traditional vehicular networks and the privacy and security concerns around vehicular data. This paper offers a novel, game-theoretic network architecture to address these challenges. Our approach decentralizes data collection through distributed servers across the network, aggregating vehicular data into spatio-temporal maps via secure multi-party computation (SMPC). This strategy effectively reduces the chances of adversaries reconstructing a vehicle's complete path, increasing privacy. We also introduce an economic model grounded in game theory that incentivizes vehicle owners to participate in the network, balancing the owners' privacy concerns with the monetary benefits of data sharing. This model aims to maximize the data consumer's utility from the gathered sensor data by determining the most suitable payment to participating vehicles, the frequency in which these vehicles share their data, and the total number of servers in the network. We explore the interdependencies among these parameters and present our findings accordingly. To define meaningful utility and loss functions for our study, we utilize a real dataset of vehicular movement traces.
Rethinking Human-AI Collaboration in Complex Medical Decision Making: A Case Study in Sepsis Diagnosis
Authors: Shao Zhang, Jianing Yu, Xuhai Xu, Changchang Yin, Yuxuan Lu, Bingsheng Yao, Melanie Tory, Lace M. Padilla, Jeffrey Caterino, Ping Zhang, Dakuo Wang
Date: 2023-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Today's AI systems for medical decision support often succeed on benchmark datasets in research papers but fail in real-world deployment. This work focuses on the decision making of sepsis, an acute life-threatening systematic infection that requires an early diagnosis with high uncertainty from the clinician. Our aim is to explore the design requirements for AI systems that can support clinical experts in making better decisions for the early diagnosis of sepsis. The study begins with a formative study investigating why clinical experts abandon an existing AI-powered Sepsis predictive module in their electrical health record (EHR) system. We argue that a human-centered AI system needs to support human experts in the intermediate stages of a medical decision-making process (e.g., generating hypotheses or gathering data), instead of focusing only on the final decision. Therefore, we build SepsisLab based on a state-of-the-art AI algorithm and extend it to predict the future projection of sepsis development, visualize the prediction uncertainty, and propose actionable suggestions (i.e., which additional laboratory tests can be collected) to reduce such uncertainty. Through heuristic evaluation with six clinicians using our prototype system, we demonstrate that SepsisLab enables a promising human-AI collaboration paradigm for the future of AI-assisted sepsis diagnosis and other high-stakes medical decision making.
Knowledge Base Aware Semantic Communication in Vehicular Networks
Authors: Le Xia, Yao Sun, Dusit Niyato, Kairong Ma, Jiawen Kang, Muhammad Ali Imran
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Base Construction, Semantic Communication

Semantic communication (SemCom) has recently been considered a promising solution for the inevitable crisis of scarce communication resources. This trend stimulates us to explore the potential of applying SemCom to vehicular networks, which normally consume a tremendous amount of resources to achieve stringent requirements on high reliability and low latency. Unfortunately, the unique background knowledge matching mechanism in SemCom makes it challenging to realize efficient vehicle-to-vehicle service provisioning for multiple users at the same time. To this end, this paper identifies and jointly addresses two fundamental problems of knowledge base construction (KBC) and vehicle service pairing (VSP) inherently existing in SemCom-enabled vehicular networks. Concretely, we first derive the knowledge matching based queuing latency specific for semantic data packets, and then formulate a latency-minimization problem subject to several KBC and VSP related reliability constraints. Afterward, a SemCom-empowered Service Supplying Solution (S$^{\text{4}}$) is proposed along with the theoretical analysis of its optimality guarantee. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of S$^{\text{4}}$ in terms of average queuing latency, semantic data packet throughput, and user knowledge preference satisfaction compared with two different benchmarks.
Wordification: A New Way of Teaching English Spelling Patterns
Authors: Lexington Whalen, Nathan Bickel, Shash Comandur, Dalton Craven, Stanley Dubinsky, Homayoun Valafar
Date: 2023-08-29 00:00:00

Literacy, or the ability to read and write, is a crucial indicator of success in life and greater society. It is estimated that 85% of people in juvenile delinquent systems cannot adequately read or write, that more than half of those with substance abuse issues have complications in reading or writing and that two-thirds of those who do not complete high school lack proper literacy skills. Furthermore, young children who do not possess reading skills matching grade level by the fourth grade are approximately 80% likely to not catch up at all. Many may believe that in a developed country such as the United States, literacy fails to be an issue; however, this is a dangerous misunderstanding. Globally an estimated 1.19 trillion dollars are lost every year due to issues in literacy; in the USA, the loss is an estimated 300 billion. To put it in more shocking terms, one in five American adults still fail to comprehend basic sentences. Making matters worse, the only tools available now to correct a lack of reading and writing ability are found in expensive tutoring or other programs that oftentimes fail to be able to reach the required audience. In this paper, our team puts forward a new way of teaching English spelling and word recognitions to grade school students in the United States: Wordification. Wordification is a web application designed to teach English literacy using principles of linguistics applied to the orthographic and phonological properties of words in a manner not fully utilized previously in any computer-based teaching application.
Automatically Testing Functional Properties of Code Translation Models
Authors: Hasan Ferit Eniser, Valentin Wüstholz, Maria Christakis
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Translation, Translation

Large language models are becoming increasingly practical for translating code across programming languages, a process known as $transpiling$. Even though automated transpilation significantly boosts developer productivity, a key concern is whether the generated code is correct. Existing work initially used manually crafted test suites to test the translations of a small corpus of programs; these test suites were later automated. In contrast, we devise the first approach for automated, functional, property-based testing of code translation models. Our general, user-provided specifications about the transpiled code capture a range of properties, from purely syntactic to purely semantic ones. As shown by our experiments, this approach is very effective in detecting property violations in popular code translation models, and therefore, in evaluating model quality with respect to given properties. We also go a step further and explore the usage scenario where a user simply aims to obtain a correct translation of some code with respect to certain properties without necessarily being concerned about the overall quality of the model. To this purpose, we develop the first property-guided search procedure for code translation models, where a model is repeatedly queried with slightly different parameters to produce alternative and potentially more correct translations. Our results show that this search procedure helps to obtain significantly better code translations.
Characterizing Smooth Safety Filters via the Implicit Function Theorem
Authors: Max H. Cohen, Pio Ong, Gilbert Bahati, Aaron D. Ames
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00

Optimization-based safety filters, such as control barrier function (CBF) based quadratic programs (QPs), have demonstrated success in controlling autonomous systems to achieve complex goals. These CBF-QPs can be shown to be continuous, but are generally not smooth, let alone continuously differentiable. In this paper, we present a general characterization of smooth safety filters -- smooth controllers that guarantee safety in a minimally invasive fashion -- based on the Implicit Function Theorem. This characterization leads to families of smooth universal formulas for safety-critical controllers that quantify the conservatism of the resulting safety filter, the utility of which is demonstrated through illustrative examples.
Massive End-to-end Models for Short Search Queries
Authors: Weiran Wang, Rohit Prabhavalkar, Dongseong Hwang, Qiujia Li, Khe Chai Sim, Bo Li, James Qin, Xingyu Cai, Adam Stooke, Zhong Meng, CJ Zheng, Yanzhang He, Tara Sainath, Pedro Moreno Mengibar
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

In this work, we investigate two popular end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, namely Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and RNN-Transducer (RNN-T), for offline recognition of voice search queries, with up to 2B model parameters. The encoders of our models use the neural architecture of Google's universal speech model (USM), with additional funnel pooling layers to significantly reduce the frame rate and speed up training and inference. We perform extensive studies on vocabulary size, time reduction strategy, and its generalization performance on long-form test sets. Despite the speculation that, as the model size increases, CTC can be as good as RNN-T which builds label dependency into the prediction, we observe that a 900M RNN-T clearly outperforms a 1.8B CTC and is more tolerant to severe time reduction, although the WER gap can be largely removed by LM shallow fusion.
VIC-KD: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Knowledge Distillation to Make Keyword Spotting More Robust Against Adversarial Attacks
Authors: Heitor R. Guimarães, Arthur Pimentel, Anderson Avila, Tiago H. Falk
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Keyword Spotting, Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression

Keyword spotting (KWS) refers to the task of identifying a set of predefined words in audio streams. With the advances seen recently with deep neural networks, it has become a popular technology to activate and control small devices, such as voice assistants. Relying on such models for edge devices, however, can be challenging due to hardware constraints. Moreover, as adversarial attacks have increased against voice-based technologies, developing solutions robust to such attacks has become crucial. In this work, we propose VIC-KD, a robust distillation recipe for model compression and adversarial robustness. Using self-supervised speech representations, we show that imposing geometric priors to the latent representations of both Teacher and Student models leads to more robust target models. Experiments on the Google Speech Commands datasets show that the proposed methodology improves upon current state-of-the-art robust distillation methods, such as ARD and RSLAD, by 12% and 8% in robust accuracy, respectively.
DurIAN-E: Duration Informed Attention Network For Expressive Text-to-Speech Synthesis
Authors: Yu Gu, Yianrao Bian, Guangzhi Lei, Chao Weng, Dan Su
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis

This paper introduces an improved duration informed attention neural network (DurIAN-E) for expressive and high-fidelity text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. Inherited from the original DurIAN model, an auto-regressive model structure in which the alignments between the input linguistic information and the output acoustic features are inferred from a duration model is adopted. Meanwhile the proposed DurIAN-E utilizes multiple stacked SwishRNN-based Transformer blocks as linguistic encoders. Style-Adaptive Instance Normalization (SAIN) layers are exploited into frame-level encoders to improve the modeling ability of expressiveness. A denoiser incorporating both denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) for mel-spectrograms and SAIN modules is conducted to further improve the synthetic speech quality and expressiveness. Experimental results prove that the proposed expressive TTS model in this paper can achieve better performance than the state-of-the-art approaches in both subjective mean opinion score (MOS) and preference tests.
A Study on Incorporating Whisper for Robust Speech Assessment
Authors: Ryandhimas E. Zezario, Yu-Wen Chen, Szu-Wei Fu, Yu Tsao, Hsin-Min Wang, Chiou-Shann Fuh
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

This research introduces an enhanced version of the multi-objective speech assessment model--MOSA-Net+, by leveraging the acoustic features from Whisper, a large-scaled weakly supervised model. We first investigate the effectiveness of Whisper in deploying a more robust speech assessment model. After that, we explore combining representations from Whisper and SSL models. The experimental results reveal that Whisper's embedding features can contribute to more accurate prediction performance. Moreover, combining the embedding features from Whisper and SSL models only leads to marginal improvement. As compared to intrusive methods, MOSA-Net, and other SSL-based speech assessment models, MOSA-Net+ yields notable improvements in estimating subjective quality and intelligibility scores across all evaluation metrics in Taiwan Mandarin Hearing In Noise test - Quality & Intelligibility (TMHINT-QI) dataset. To further validate its robustness, MOSA-Net+ was tested in the noisy-and-enhanced track of the VoiceMOS Challenge 2023, where it obtained the top-ranked performance among nine systems.
NTT speaker diarization system for CHiME-7: multi-domain, multi-microphone End-to-end and vector clustering diarization
Authors: Naohiro Tawara, Marc Delcroix, Atsushi Ando, Atsunori Ogawa
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, speaker-diarization, Speaker Diarization, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This paper details our speaker diarization system designed for multi-domain, multi-microphone casual conversations. The proposed diarization pipeline uses weighted prediction error (WPE)-based dereverberation as a front end, then applies end-to-end neural diarization with vector clustering (EEND-VC) to each channel separately. It integrates the diarization result obtained from each channel using diarization output voting error reduction plus overlap (DOVER-LAP). To harness the knowledge from the target domain and results integrated across all channels, we apply self-supervised adaptation for each session by retraining the EEND-VC with pseudo-labels derived from DOVER-LAP. The proposed system was incorporated into NTT's submission for the distant automatic speech recognition task in the CHiME-7 challenge. Our system achieved 65 % and 62 % relative improvements on development and eval sets compared to the organizer-provided VC-based baseline diarization system, securing third place in diarization performance.
SPGM: Prioritizing Local Features for enhanced speech separation performance
Authors: Jia Qi Yip, Shengkui Zhao, Yukun Ma, Chongjia Ni, Chong Zhang, Hao Wang, Trung Hieu Nguyen, Kun Zhou, Dianwen Ng, Eng Siong Chng, Bin Ma
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Separation

Dual-path is a popular architecture for speech separation models (e.g. Sepformer) which splits long sequences into overlapping chunks for its intra- and inter-blocks that separately model intra-chunk local features and inter-chunk global relationships. However, it has been found that inter-blocks, which comprise half a dual-path model's parameters, contribute minimally to performance. Thus, we propose the Single-Path Global Modulation (SPGM) block to replace inter-blocks. SPGM is named after its structure consisting of a parameter-free global pooling module followed by a modulation module comprising only 2% of the model's total parameters. The SPGM block allows all transformer layers in the model to be dedicated to local feature modelling, making the overall model single-path. SPGM achieves 22.1 dB SI-SDRi on WSJ0-2Mix and 20.4 dB SI-SDRi on Libri2Mix, exceeding the performance of Sepformer by 0.5 dB and 0.3 dB respectively and matches the performance of recent SOTA models with up to 8 times fewer parameters. Model and weights are available at huggingface.co/yipjiaqi/spgm
ICASSP 2023 Acoustic Echo Cancellation Challenge
Authors: Ross Cutler, Ando Saabas, Tanel Parnamaa, Marju Purin, Evgenii Indenbom, Nicolae-Catalin Ristea, Jegor Gužvin, Hannes Gamper, Sebastian Braun, Robert Aichner
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Acoustic echo cancellation, Speech Enhancement

The ICASSP 2023 Acoustic Echo Cancellation Challenge is intended to stimulate research in acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), which is an important area of speech enhancement and is still a top issue in audio communication. This is the fourth AEC challenge and it is enhanced by adding a second track for personalized acoustic echo cancellation, reducing the algorithmic + buffering latency to 20ms, as well as including a full-band version of AECMOS. We open source two large datasets to train AEC models under both single talk and double talk scenarios. These datasets consist of recordings from more than 10,000 real audio devices and human speakers in real environments, as well as a synthetic dataset. We open source an online subjective test framework and provide an objective metric for researchers to quickly test their results. The winners of this challenge were selected based on the average mean opinion score (MOS) achieved across all scenarios and the word accuracy (WAcc) rate.
Robust Stability Analysis of a Class of LTV Systems
Authors: Shahzad Ahmed, Hafiz Zeeshan Iqbal Khan, Jamshed Riaz
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00

Many physical systems are inherently time-varying in nature. When these systems are linearized around a trajectory, generally, the resulting system is Linear Time-Varying (LTV). LTV systems describe an important class of linear systems and can be thought of as a natural extension of LTI systems. However, it is well known that, unlike LTI systems, the eigenvalues of an LTV system do not determine its stability. In this paper, the stability conditions for a class of LTV systems are derived. This class is composed of piecewise LTV systems, i.e. LTV systems that are piecewise linear in time. Sufficient conditions of stability are derived in the form of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) by using the Lyapunov stability criterion. The feasibility of LMIs guarantees the stability of a given piecewise LTV system. Furthermore, uncertain piecewise LTV systems with scalar parametric uncertainty are also considered. Sufficient conditions for robust stability of this case are also presented, which come out to be quasi-LMIs, which can be optimized using a bisection algorithm to find the bounds of uncertainty for which the system is stable. The proposed method is applied to the problem of pitch angle control of a space launch vehicle, and the results are presented.