pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Taming under isoperimetry
Authors: Iosif Lytras, Sotirios Sabanis
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00

In this article we propose a novel taming Langevin-based scheme called $\mathbf{sTULA}$ to sample from distributions with superlinearly growing log-gradient which also satisfy a Log-Sobolev inequality. We derive non-asymptotic convergence bounds in $KL$ and consequently total variation and Wasserstein-$2$ distance from the target measure. Non-asymptotic convergence guarantees are provided for the performance of the new algorithm as an optimizer. Finally, some theoretical results on isoperimertic inequalities for distributions with superlinearly growing gradients are provided. Key findings are a Log-Sobolev inequality with constant independent of the dimension, in the presence of a higher order regularization and a Poincare inequality with constant independent of temperature and dimension under a novel non-convex theoretical framework.
Structured Estimation of Heterogeneous Time Series
Authors: Zachary F. Fisher, Younghoon Kim, Vladas Pipiras, Christopher Crawford, Daniel J. Petrie, Michael D. Hunter, Charles F. Geier
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series

How best to model structurally heterogeneous processes is a foundational question in the social, health and behavioral sciences. Recently, Fisher et al., (2022) introduced the multi-VAR approach for simultaneously estimating multiple-subject multivariate time series characterized by common and individualizing features using penalized estimation. This approach differs from many popular modeling approaches for multiple-subject time series in that qualitative and quantitative differences in a large number of individual dynamics are well-accommodated. The current work extends the multi-VAR framework to include new adaptive weighting schemes that greatly improve estimation performance. In a small set of simulation studies we compare adaptive multi-VAR with these new penalty weights to common alternative estimators in terms of path recovery and bias. Furthermore, we provide toy examples and code demonstrating the utility of multi-VAR under different heterogeneity regimes using the multivar package for R (Fisher, 2022).
Recursive random binning to detect and display pairwise dependence
Authors: Chris Salahub, Wayne Oldford
Date: 2023-11-14 00:00:00

Random binnings generated via recursive binary splits are introduced as a way to detect, measure the strength of, and to display the pattern of association between any two variates, whether one or both are continuous or categorical. This provides a single approach to ordering large numbers of variate pairs by their measure of dependence and then to examine any pattern of dependence via a common display, the departure display (colouring bins by a standardized Pearson residual). Continuous variates are first ranked and their rank pairs binned. The Pearson's goodness of fit statistic is applicable but the classic $\chi^2$ approximation to its null distribution is not. Theoretical and empirical investigations motivate several approximations, including a simple $\chi^2$ approximation with real-valued, yet intuitive, degrees of freedom. Alternatively, applying an inverse probability transform from the ranks before binning returns a simple Pearson statistic with the classic degrees of freedom. Recursive random binning with different approximations is compared to recent grid-based methods on a variety of non-null dependence patterns; the method with any of these approximations is found to be well-calibrated and relatively powerful against common test alternatives. Method and displays are illustrated by applying the screening methodology to a publicly available data set having several continuous and categorical measurements of each of 6,497 Portuguese wines. The software is publicly available as the R package AssocBin.
Scalable and Effective Generative Information Retrieval
Authors: Hansi Zeng, Chen Luo, Bowen Jin, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Tianxin Wei, Hamed Zamani
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Recent research has shown that transformer networks can be used as differentiable search indexes by representing each document as a sequences of document ID tokens. These generative retrieval models cast the retrieval problem to a document ID generation problem for each given query. Despite their elegant design, existing generative retrieval models only perform well on artificially-constructed and small-scale collections. This has led to serious skepticism in the research community on their real-world impact. This paper represents an important milestone in generative retrieval research by showing, for the first time, that generative retrieval models can be trained to perform effectively on large-scale standard retrieval benchmarks. For doing so, we propose RIPOR- an optimization framework for generative retrieval that can be adopted by any encoder-decoder architecture. RIPOR is designed based on two often-overlooked fundamental design considerations in generative retrieval. First, given the sequential decoding nature of document ID generation, assigning accurate relevance scores to documents based on the whole document ID sequence is not sufficient. To address this issue, RIPOR introduces a novel prefix-oriented ranking optimization algorithm. Second, initial document IDs should be constructed based on relevance associations between queries and documents, instead of the syntactic and semantic information in the documents. RIPOR addresses this issue using a relevance-based document ID construction approach that quantizes relevance-based representations learned for documents. Evaluation on MSMARCO and TREC Deep Learning Track reveals that RIPOR surpasses state-of-the-art generative retrieval models by a large margin (e.g., 30.5% MRR improvements on MS MARCO Dev Set), and perform better on par with popular dense retrieval models.
Explainable Text Classification Techniques in Legal Document Review: Locating Rationales without Using Human Annotated Training Text Snippets
Authors: Christian Mahoney, Peter Gronvall, Nathaniel Huber-Fliflet, Jianping Zhang
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

US corporations regularly spend millions of dollars reviewing electronically-stored documents in legal matters. Recently, attorneys apply text classification to efficiently cull massive volumes of data to identify responsive documents for use in these matters. While text classification is regularly used to reduce the discovery costs of legal matters, it also faces a perception challenge: amongst lawyers, this technology is sometimes looked upon as a "black box". Put simply, no extra information is provided for attorneys to understand why documents are classified as responsive. In recent years, explainable machine learning has emerged as an active research area. In an explainable machine learning system, predictions or decisions made by a machine learning model are human understandable. In legal 'document review' scenarios, a document is responsive, because one or more of its small text snippets are deemed responsive. In these scenarios, if these responsive snippets can be located, then attorneys could easily evaluate the model's document classification decisions - this is especially important in the field of responsible AI. Our prior research identified that predictive models created using annotated training text snippets improved the precision of a model when compared to a model created using all of a set of documents' text as training. While interesting, manually annotating training text snippets is not generally practical during a legal document review. However, small increases in precision can drastically decrease the cost of large document reviews. Automating the identification of training text snippets without human review could then make the application of training text snippet-based models a practical approach.
Adapting Large Language Models by Integrating Collaborative Semantics for Recommendation
Authors: Bowen Zheng, Yupeng Hou, Hongyu Lu, Yu Chen, Wayne Xin Zhao, Ming Chen, Ji-Rong Wen
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization, Recommendation Systems

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in recommender systems, either improving existing recommendation models or serving as the backbone. However, there exists a large semantic gap between LLMs and recommender systems, since items to be recommended are often indexed by discrete identifiers (item ID) out of the LLM's vocabulary. In essence, LLMs capture language semantics while recommender systems imply collaborative semantics, making it difficult to sufficiently leverage the model capacity of LLMs for recommendation. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a new LLM-based recommendation model called LC-Rec, which can better integrate language and collaborative semantics for recommender systems. Our approach can directly generate items from the entire item set for recommendation, without relying on candidate items. Specifically, we make two major contributions in our approach. For item indexing, we design a learning-based vector quantization method with uniform semantic mapping, which can assign meaningful and non-conflicting IDs (called item indices) for items. For alignment tuning, we propose a series of specially designed tuning tasks to enhance the integration of collaborative semantics in LLMs. Our fine-tuning tasks enforce LLMs to deeply integrate language and collaborative semantics (characterized by the learned item indices), so as to achieve an effective adaptation to recommender systems. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showing that our approach can outperform a number of competitive baselines including traditional recommenders and existing LLM-based recommenders. Our code is available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LC-Rec/.
Enhancing Recommender System Performance by Histogram Equalization
Authors: Hao Wang
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Recommendation Systems

Recommender system has been researched for decades with millions of different versions of algorithms created in the industry. In spite of the huge amount of work spent on the field, there are many basic questions to be answered in the field. The most fundamental question to be answered is the accuracy problem, and in recent years, fairness becomes the new buzz word for researchers. In this paper, we borrow an idea from image processing, namely, histogram equalization. As a preprocessing step to recommender system algorithms, histogram equalization could enhance both the accuracy and fairness metrics of the recommender system algorithms. In the experiment section, we prove that our new approach could improve vanilla algorithms by a large margin in accuracy metric and stay competitive on fairness metrics.
Stopping Methods for Technology Assisted Reviews based on Point Processes
Authors: Mark Stevenson, Reem Bin-Hezam
Date: 2023-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Processes, TAR

Technology Assisted Review (TAR), which aims to reduce the effort required to screen collections of documents for relevance, is used to develop systematic reviews of medical evidence and identify documents that must be disclosed in response to legal proceedings. Stopping methods are algorithms which determine when to stop screening documents during the TAR process, helping to ensure that workload is minimised while still achieving a high level of recall. This paper proposes a novel stopping method based on point processes, which are statistical models that can be used to represent the occurrence of random events. The approach uses rate functions to model the occurrence of relevant documents in the ranking and compares four candidates, including one that has not previously been used for this purpose (hyperbolic). Evaluation is carried out using standard datasets (CLEF e-Health, TREC Total Recall, TREC Legal), and this work is the first to explore stopping method robustness by reporting performance on a range of rankings of varying effectiveness. Results show that the proposed method achieves the desired level of recall without requiring an excessive number of documents to be examined in the majority of cases and also compares well against multiple alternative approaches.
Low Complexity High Speed Deep Neural Network Augmented Wireless Channel Estimation
Authors: Syed Asrar ul haq, Varun Singh, Bhanu Teja Tanaji, Sumit Darak
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00

The channel estimation (CE) in wireless receivers is one of the most critical and computationally complex signal processing operations. Recently, various works have shown that the deep learning (DL) based CE outperforms conventional minimum mean square error (MMSE) based CE, and it is hardware-friendly. However, DL-based CE has higher complexity and latency than popularly used least square (LS) based CE. In this work, we propose a novel low complexity high-speed Deep Neural Network-Augmented Least Square (LC-LSDNN) algorithm for IEEE 802.11p wireless physical layer and efficiently implement it on Zynq system on chip (ZSoC). The novelty of the LC-LSDNN is to use different DNNs for real and imaginary values of received complex symbols. This helps reduce the size of DL by 59% and optimize the critical path, allowing it to operate at 60% higher clock frequency. We also explore three different architectures for MMSE-based CE. We show that LC-LSDNN significantly outperforms MMSE and state-of-the-art DL-based CE for a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) and different wireless channels. Also, it is computationally efficient, with around 50% lower resources than existing DL-based CE.
Crowdsearch
Authors: Hans Gersbach, Akaki Mamageishvili, Fikri Pitsuwan
Date: 2023-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

A common economic process is crowdsearch, wherein a group of agents is invited to search for a valuable physical or virtual object, e.g. creating and patenting an invention, solving an open scientific problem, or identifying vulnerabilities in software. We study a binary model of crowdsearch in which agents have different abilities to find the object. We characterize the types of equilibria and identify which type of crowd maximizes the likelihood of finding the object. Sometimes, however, an unlimited crowd is not sufficient to guarantee that the object is found. It even can happen that inviting more agents lowers the probability of finding the object. We characterize the optimal prize and show that offering only one prize (winner-takes-all) maximizes the probability of finding the object but is not necessarily optimal for the crowdsearch designer.
Neurophysiological Response Based on Auditory Sense for Brain Modulation Using Monaural Beat
Authors: Ha-Na Jo, Young-Seok Kweon, Gi-Hwan Shin, Heon-Gyu Kwak, Seong-Whan Lee
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG)

Brain modulation is a modification process of brain activity through external stimulations. However, which condition can induce the activation is still unclear. Therefore, we aimed to identify brain activation conditions using 40 Hz monaural beat (MB). Under this stimulation, auditory sense status which is determined by frequency and power range is the condition to consider. Hence, we designed five sessions to compare; no stimulation, audible (AB), inaudible in frequency, inaudible in power, and inaudible in frequency and power. Ten healthy participants underwent each stimulation session for ten minutes with electroencephalogram (EEG) recording. For analysis, we calculated the power spectral density (PSD) of EEG for each session and compared them in frequency, time, and five brain regions. As a result, we observed the prominent power peak at 40 Hz in only AB. The induced EEG amplitude increase started at one minute and increased until the end of the session. These results of AB had significant differences in frontal, central, temporal, parietal, and occipital regions compared to other stimulations. From the statistical analysis, the PSD of the right temporal region was significantly higher than the left. We figure out the role that the auditory sense is important to lead brain activation. These findings help to understand the neurophysiological principle and effects of auditory stimulation.
Impact of Nap on Performance in Different Working Memory Tasks Using EEG
Authors: Gi-Hwan Shin, Young-Seok Kweon, Heon-Gyu Kwak, Ha-Na Jo, Seong-Whan Lee
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG

Electroencephalography (EEG) has been widely used to study the relationship between naps and working memory, yet the effects of naps on distinct working memory tasks remain unclear. Here, participants performed word-pair and visuospatial working memory tasks pre- and post-nap sessions. We found marked differences in accuracy and reaction time between tasks performed pre- and post-nap. In order to identify the impact of naps on performance in each working memory task, we employed clustering to classify participants as high- or low-performers. Analysis of sleep architecture revealed significant variations in sleep onset latency and rapid eye movement (REM) proportion. In addition, the two groups exhibited prominent differences, especially in the delta power of the Non-REM 3 stage linked to memory. Our results emphasize the interplay between nap-related neural activity and working memory, underlining specific EEG markers associated with cognitive performance.
Phase retrieval with semi-algebraic and ReLU neural network priors
Authors: Tamir Bendory, Nadav Dym, Dan Edidin, Arun Suresh
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

The key ingredient to retrieving a signal from its Fourier magnitudes, namely, to solve the phase retrieval problem, is an effective prior on the sought signal. In this paper, we study the phase retrieval problem under the prior that the signal lies in a semi-algebraic set. This is a very general prior as semi-algebraic sets include linear models, sparse models, and ReLU neural network generative models. The latter is the main motivation of this paper, due to the remarkable success of deep generative models in a variety of imaging tasks, including phase retrieval. We prove that almost all signals in R^N can be determined from their Fourier magnitudes, up to a sign, if they lie in a (generic) semi-algebraic set of dimension N/2. The same is true for all signals if the semi-algebraic set is of dimension N/4. We also generalize these results to the problem of signal recovery from the second moment in multi-reference alignment models with multiplicity free representations of compact groups. This general result is then used to derive improved sample complexity bounds for recovering band-limited functions on the sphere from their noisy copies, each acted upon by a random element of SO(3).
AI-based soundscape analysis: Jointly identifying sound sources and predicting annoyance
Authors: Yuanbo Hou, Qiaoqiao Ren, Huizhong Zhang, Andrew Mitchell, Francesco Aletta, Jian Kang, Dick Botteldooren
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00

Soundscape studies typically attempt to capture the perception and understanding of sonic environments by surveying users. However, for long-term monitoring or assessing interventions, sound-signal-based approaches are required. To this end, most previous research focused on psycho-acoustic quantities or automatic sound recognition. Few attempts were made to include appraisal (e.g., in circumplex frameworks). This paper proposes an artificial intelligence (AI)-based dual-branch convolutional neural network with cross-attention-based fusion (DCNN-CaF) to analyze automatic soundscape characterization, including sound recognition and appraisal. Using the DeLTA dataset containing human-annotated sound source labels and perceived annoyance, the DCNN-CaF is proposed to perform sound source classification (SSC) and human-perceived annoyance rating prediction (ARP). Experimental findings indicate that (1) the proposed DCNN-CaF using loudness and Mel features outperforms the DCNN-CaF using only one of them. (2) The proposed DCNN-CaF with cross-attention fusion outperforms other typical AI-based models and soundscape-related traditional machine learning methods on the SSC and ARP tasks. (3) Correlation analysis reveals that the relationship between sound sources and annoyance is similar for humans and the proposed AI-based DCNN-CaF model. (4) Generalization tests show that the proposed model's ARP in the presence of model-unknown sound sources is consistent with expert expectations and can explain previous findings from the literature on sound-scape augmentation.
Multi-objective Non-intrusive Hearing-aid Speech Assessment Model
Authors: Hsin-Tien Chiang, Szu-Wei Fu, Hsin-Min Wang, Yu Tsao, John H. L. Hansen
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00

Without the need for a clean reference, non-intrusive speech assessment methods have caught great attention for objective evaluations. While deep learning models have been used to develop non-intrusive speech assessment methods with promising results, there is limited research on hearing-impaired subjects. This study proposes a multi-objective non-intrusive hearing-aid speech assessment model, called HASA-Net Large, which predicts speech quality and intelligibility scores based on input speech signals and specified hearing-loss patterns. Our experiments showed the utilization of pre-trained SSL models leads to a significant boost in speech quality and intelligibility predictions compared to using spectrograms as input. Additionally, we examined three distinct fine-tuning approaches that resulted in further performance improvements. Furthermore, we demonstrated that incorporating SSL models resulted in greater transferability to OOD dataset. Finally, this study introduces HASA-Net Large, which is a non-invasive approach for evaluating speech quality and intelligibility. HASA-Net Large utilizes raw waveforms and hearing-loss patterns to accurately predict speech quality and intelligibility levels for individuals with normal and impaired hearing and demonstrates superior prediction performance and transferability.
Multi-channel Conversational Speaker Separation via Neural Diarization
Authors: Hassan Taherian, DeLiang Wang
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speaker Separation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

When dealing with overlapped speech, the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems substantially degrades as they are designed for single-talker speech. To enhance ASR performance in conversational or meeting environments, continuous speaker separation (CSS) is commonly employed. However, CSS requires a short separation window to avoid many speakers inside the window and sequential grouping of discontinuous speech segments. To address these limitations, we introduce a new multi-channel framework called "speaker separation via neural diarization" (SSND) for meeting environments. Our approach utilizes an end-to-end diarization system to identify the speech activity of each individual speaker. By leveraging estimated speaker boundaries, we generate a sequence of embeddings, which in turn facilitate the assignment of speakers to the outputs of a multi-talker separation model. SSND addresses the permutation ambiguity issue of talker-independent speaker separation during the diarization phase through location-based training, rather than during the separation process. This unique approach allows multiple non-overlapped speakers to be assigned to the same output stream, making it possible to efficiently process long segments-a task impossible with CSS. Additionally, SSND is naturally suitable for speaker-attributed ASR. We evaluate our proposed diarization and separation methods on the open LibriCSS dataset, advancing state-of-the-art diarization and ASR results by a large margin.