pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Improving Prosody for Cross-Speaker Style Transfer by Semi-Supervised Style Extractor and Hierarchical Modeling in Speech Synthesis
Authors: Chunyu Qiang, Peng Yang, Hao Che, Ying Zhang, Xiaorui Wang, Zhongyuan Wang
Date: 2023-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Prosody Prediction, Speech Synthesis, Style Transfer

Cross-speaker style transfer in speech synthesis aims at transferring a style from source speaker to synthesized speech of a target speaker's timbre. In most previous methods, the synthesized fine-grained prosody features often represent the source speaker's average style, similar to the one-to-many problem(i.e., multiple prosody variations correspond to the same text). In response to this problem, a strength-controlled semi-supervised style extractor is proposed to disentangle the style from content and timbre, improving the representation and interpretability of the global style embedding, which can alleviate the one-to-many mapping and data imbalance problems in prosody prediction. A hierarchical prosody predictor is proposed to improve prosody modeling. We find that better style transfer can be achieved by using the source speaker's prosody features that are easily predicted. Additionally, a speaker-transfer-wise cycle consistency loss is proposed to assist the model in learning unseen style-timbre combinations during the training phase. Experimental results show that the method outperforms the baseline. We provide a website with audio samples.
Adaptive Policy Learning for Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Han Zheng, Xufang Luo, Pengfei Wei, Xuan Song, Dongsheng Li, Jing Jiang
Date: 2023-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Offline RL, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) needs an environment to collect fresh data, which is impractical when online interactions are costly. Offline RL provides an alternative solution by directly learning from the previously collected dataset. However, it will yield unsatisfactory performance if the quality of the offline datasets is poor. In this paper, we consider an offline-to-online setting where the agent is first learned from the offline dataset and then trained online, and propose a framework called Adaptive Policy Learning for effectively taking advantage of offline and online data. Specifically, we explicitly consider the difference between the online and offline data and apply an adaptive update scheme accordingly, that is, a pessimistic update strategy for the offline dataset and an optimistic/greedy update scheme for the online dataset. Such a simple and effective method provides a way to mix the offline and online RL and achieve the best of both worlds. We further provide two detailed algorithms for implementing the framework through embedding value or policy-based RL algorithms into it. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on popular continuous control tasks, and results show that our algorithm can learn the expert policy with high sample efficiency even when the quality of offline dataset is poor, e.g., random dataset.
Dual-Attention Model for Aspect-Level Sentiment Classification
Authors: Mengfei Ye
Date: 2023-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Classification, Dependency Parsing, model, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

I propose a novel dual-attention model(DAM) for aspect-level sentiment classification. Many methods have been proposed, such as support vector machines for artificial design features, long short-term memory networks based on attention mechanisms, and graph neural networks based on dependency parsing. While these methods all have decent performance, I think they all miss one important piece of syntactic information: dependency labels. Based on this idea, this paper proposes a model using dependency labels for the attention mechanism to do this task. We evaluate the proposed approach on three datasets: laptop and restaurant are from SemEval 2014, and the last one is a twitter dataset. Experimental results show that the dual attention model has good performance on all three datasets.
FPTN: Fast Pure Transformer Network for Traffic Flow Forecasting
Authors: Junhao Zhang, Junjie Tang, Juncheng Jin, Zehui Qu
Date: 2023-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Traffic flow forecasting is challenging due to the intricate spatio-temporal correlations in traffic flow data. Existing Transformer-based methods usually treat traffic flow forecasting as multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting. However, too many sensors can cause a vector with a dimension greater than 800, which is difficult to process without information loss. In addition, these methods design complex mechanisms to capture spatial dependencies in MTS, resulting in slow forecasting speed. To solve the abovementioned problems, we propose a Fast Pure Transformer Network (FPTN) in this paper. First, the traffic flow data are divided into sequences along the sensor dimension instead of the time dimension. Then, to adequately represent complex spatio-temporal correlations, Three types of embeddings are proposed for projecting these vectors into a suitable vector space. After that, to capture the complex spatio-temporal correlations simultaneously in these vectors, we utilize Transformer encoder and stack it with several layers. Extensive experiments are conducted with 4 real-world datasets and 13 baselines, which demonstrate that FPTN outperforms the state-of-the-art on two metrics. Meanwhile, the computational time of FPTN spent is less than a quarter of other state-of-the-art Transformer-based models spent, and the requirements for computing resources are significantly reduced.
Context Normalization Layer with Applications
Authors: Bilal Faye, Mohamed-djallel Dilmi, Hanane Azzag, Mustapha Lebbah, Djamel Bouchaffra
Date: 2023-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Image Classification

Normalization is a pre-processing step that converts the data into a more usable representation. As part of the deep neural networks (DNNs), the batch normalization (BN) technique uses normalization to address the problem of internal covariate shift. It can be packaged as general modules, which have been extensively integrated into various DNNs, to stabilize and accelerate training, presumably leading to improved generalization. However, the effect of BN is dependent on the mini-batch size and it does not take into account any groups or clusters that may exist in the dataset when estimating population statistics. This study proposes a new normalization technique, called context normalization, for image data. This approach adjusts the scaling of features based on the characteristics of each sample, which improves the model's convergence speed and performance by adapting the data values to the context of the target task. The effectiveness of context normalization is demonstrated on various datasets, and its performance is compared to other standard normalization techniques.
Feature-Rich Audio Model Inversion for Data-Free Knowledge Distillation Towards General Sound Classification
Authors: Zuheng Kang, Yayun He, Jianzong Wang, Junqing Peng, Xiaoyang Qu, Jing Xiao
Date: 2023-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Data-free Knowledge Distillation, Knowledge Distillation, Sound Classification

Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (DFKD) has recently attracted growing attention in the academic community, especially with major breakthroughs in computer vision. Despite promising results, the technique has not been well applied to audio and signal processing. Due to the variable duration of audio signals, it has its own unique way of modeling. In this work, we propose feature-rich audio model inversion (FRAMI), a data-free knowledge distillation framework for general sound classification tasks. It first generates high-quality and feature-rich Mel-spectrograms through a feature-invariant contrastive loss. Then, the hidden states before and after the statistics pooling layer are reused when knowledge distillation is performed on these feature-rich samples. Experimental results on the Urbansound8k, ESC-50, and audioMNIST datasets demonstrate that FRAMI can generate feature-rich samples. Meanwhile, the accuracy of the student model is further improved by reusing the hidden state and significantly outperforms the baseline method.
I$^2$-SDF: Intrinsic Indoor Scene Reconstruction and Editing via Raytracing in Neural SDFs
Authors: Jingsen Zhu, Yuchi Huo, Qi Ye, Fujun Luan, Jifan Li, Dianbing Xi, Lisha Wang, Rui Tang, Wei Hua, Hujun Bao, Rui Wang
Date: 2023-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Indoor Scene Reconstruction, Novel View Synthesis

In this work, we present I$^2$-SDF, a new method for intrinsic indoor scene reconstruction and editing using differentiable Monte Carlo raytracing on neural signed distance fields (SDFs). Our holistic neural SDF-based framework jointly recovers the underlying shapes, incident radiance and materials from multi-view images. We introduce a novel bubble loss for fine-grained small objects and error-guided adaptive sampling scheme to largely improve the reconstruction quality on large-scale indoor scenes. Further, we propose to decompose the neural radiance field into spatially-varying material of the scene as a neural field through surface-based, differentiable Monte Carlo raytracing and emitter semantic segmentations, which enables physically based and photorealistic scene relighting and editing applications. Through a number of qualitative and quantitative experiments, we demonstrate the superior quality of our method on indoor scene reconstruction, novel view synthesis, and scene editing compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
RE-MOVE: An Adaptive Policy Design for Robotic Navigation Tasks in Dynamic Environments via Language-Based Feedback
Authors: Souradip Chakraborty, Kasun Weerakoon, Prithvi Poddar, Mohamed Elnoor, Priya Narayanan, Carl Busart, Pratap Tokekar, Amrit Singh Bedi, Dinesh Manocha
Date: 2023-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Zero-Shot Learning

Reinforcement learning-based policies for continuous control robotic navigation tasks often fail to adapt to changes in the environment during real-time deployment, which may result in catastrophic failures. To address this limitation, we propose a novel approach called RE-MOVE (REquest help and MOVE on) to adapt already trained policy to real-time changes in the environment without re-training via utilizing a language-based feedback. The proposed approach essentially boils down to addressing two main challenges of (1) when to ask for feedback and, if received, (2) how to incorporate feedback into trained policies. RE-MOVE incorporates an epistemic uncertainty-based framework to determine the optimal time to request instructions-based feedback. For the second challenge, we employ a zero-shot learning natural language processing (NLP) paradigm with efficient, prompt design and leverage state-of-the-art GPT-3.5, Llama-2 language models. To show the efficacy of the proposed approach, we performed extensive synthetic and real-world evaluations in several test-time dynamic navigation scenarios. Utilizing RE-MOVE result in up to 80% enhancement in the attainment of successful goals, coupled with a reduction of 13.50% in the normalized trajectory length, as compared to alternative approaches, particularly in demanding real-world environments with perceptual challenges.
Redrawing attendance boundaries to promote racial and ethnic diversity in elementary schools
Authors: Nabeel Gillani, Doug Beeferman, Christine Vega-Pourheydarian, Cassandra Overney, Pascal Van Hentenryck, Deb Roy
Date: 2023-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Diversity

Most US school districts draw "attendance boundaries" to define catchment areas that assign students to schools near their homes, often recapitulating neighborhood demographic segregation in schools. Focusing on elementary schools, we ask: how much might we reduce school segregation by redrawing attendance boundaries? Combining parent preference data with methods from combinatorial optimization, we simulate alternative boundaries for 98 US school districts serving over 3 million elementary-aged students, minimizing White/non-White segregation while mitigating changes to travel times and school sizes. Across districts, we observe a median 14% relative decrease in segregation, which we estimate would require approximately 20\% of students to switch schools and, surprisingly, a slight reduction in travel times. We release a public dashboard depicting these alternative boundaries (https://www.schooldiversity.org/) and invite both school boards and their constituents to evaluate their viability. Our results show the possibility of greater integration without significant disruptions for families.
Forecasting COVID-19 Infections in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Countries using Machine Learning
Authors: Leila Ismail, Huned Materwala, Alain Hennebelle
Date: 2023-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

COVID-19 has infected more than 68 million people worldwide since it was first detected about a year ago. Machine learning time series models have been implemented to forecast COVID-19 infections. In this paper, we develop time series models for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries using the public COVID-19 dataset from Johns Hopkins. The dataset set includes the one-year cumulative COVID-19 cases between 22/01/2020 to 22/01/2021. We developed different models for the countries under study based on the spatial distribution of the infection data. Our experimental results show that the developed models can forecast COVID-19 infections with high precision.
Teacher-Student Knowledge Distillation for Radar Perception on Embedded Accelerators
Authors: Steven Shaw, Kanishka Tyagi, Shan Zhang
Date: 2023-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, object-detection, Object Detection

Many radar signal processing methodologies are being developed for critical road safety perception tasks. Unfortunately, these signal processing algorithms are often poorly suited to run on embedded hardware accelerators used in automobiles. Conversely, end-to-end machine learning (ML) approaches better exploit the performance gains brought by specialized accelerators. In this paper, we propose a teacher-student knowledge distillation approach for low-level radar perception tasks. We utilize a hybrid model for stationary object detection as a teacher to train an end-to-end ML student model. The student can efficiently harness embedded compute for real-time deployment. We demonstrate that the proposed student model runs at speeds 100x faster than the teacher model.
Diffusion Models in NLP: A Survey
Authors: Yuansong Zhu, Yu Zhao
Date: 2023-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Survey, Text Generation

Diffusion models have become a powerful family of deep generative models, with record-breaking performance in many applications. This paper first gives an overview and derivation of the basic theory of diffusion models, then reviews the research results of diffusion models in the field of natural language processing, from text generation, text-driven image generation and other four aspects, and analyzes and summarizes the relevant literature materials sorted out, and finally records the experience and feelings of this topic literature review research.
Lifelong Continual Learning for Anomaly Detection: New Challenges, Perspectives, and Insights
Authors: Kamil Faber, Roberto Corizzo, Bartlomiej Sniezynski, Nathalie Japkowicz
Date: 2023-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Continual Learning, Lifelong learning

Anomaly detection is of paramount importance in many real-world domains, characterized by evolving behavior. Lifelong learning represents an emerging trend, answering the need for machine learning models that continuously adapt to new challenges in dynamic environments while retaining past knowledge. However, limited efforts are dedicated to building foundations for lifelong anomaly detection, which provides intrinsically different challenges compared to the more widely explored classification setting. In this paper, we face this issue by exploring, motivating, and discussing lifelong anomaly detection, trying to build foundations for its wider adoption. First, we explain why lifelong anomaly detection is relevant, defining challenges and opportunities to design anomaly detection methods that deal with lifelong learning complexities. Second, we characterize learning settings and a scenario generation procedure that enables researchers to experiment with lifelong anomaly detection using existing datasets. Third, we perform experiments with popular anomaly detection methods on proposed lifelong scenarios, emphasizing the gap in performance that could be gained with the adoption of lifelong learning. Overall, we conclude that the adoption of lifelong anomaly detection is important to design more robust models that provide a comprehensive view of the environment, as well as simultaneous adaptation and knowledge retention.
Merging Decision Transformers: Weight Averaging for Forming Multi-Task Policies
Authors: Daniel Lawson, Ahmed H. Qureshi
Date: 2023-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, MuJoCo, Sequential Decision Making

Recent work has shown the promise of creating generalist, transformer-based, models for language, vision, and sequential decision-making problems. To create such models, we generally require centralized training objectives, data, and compute. It is of interest if we can more flexibly create generalist policies by merging together multiple, task-specific, individually trained policies. In this work, we take a preliminary step in this direction through merging, or averaging, subsets of Decision Transformers in parameter space trained on different MuJoCo locomotion problems, forming multi-task models without centralized training. We also demonstrate the importance of various methodological choices when merging policies, such as utilizing common pre-trained initializations, increasing model capacity, and utilizing Fisher information for weighting parameter importance. In general, we believe research in this direction could help democratize and distribute the process that forms multi-task robotics policies. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/daniellawson9999/merging-decision-transformers.
WDiscOOD: Out-of-Distribution Detection via Whitened Linear Discriminant Analysis
Authors: Yiye Chen, Yunzhi Lin, Ruinian Xu, Patricio A. Vela
Date: 2023-03-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Novel Concepts, Out-of-Distribution Detection

Deep neural networks are susceptible to generating overconfident yet erroneous predictions when presented with data beyond known concepts. This challenge underscores the importance of detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples in the open world. In this work, we propose a novel feature-space OOD detection score based on class-specific and class-agnostic information. Specifically, the approach utilizes Whitened Linear Discriminant Analysis to project features into two subspaces - the discriminative and residual subspaces - for which the in-distribution (ID) classes are maximally separated and closely clustered, respectively. The OOD score is then determined by combining the deviation from the input data to the ID pattern in both subspaces. The efficacy of our method, named WDiscOOD, is verified on the large-scale ImageNet-1k benchmark, with six OOD datasets that cover a variety of distribution shifts. WDiscOOD demonstrates superior performance on deep classifiers with diverse backbone architectures, including CNN and vision transformer. Furthermore, we also show that WDiscOOD more effectively detects novel concepts in representation spaces trained with contrastive objectives, including supervised contrastive loss and multi-modality contrastive loss.
Path Planning using Reinforcement Learning: A Policy Iteration Approach
Authors: Saumil Shivdikar, Jagannath Nirmal
Date: 2023-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

With the impact of real-time processing being realized in the recent past, the need for efficient implementations of reinforcement learning algorithms has been on the rise. Albeit the numerous advantages of Bellman equations utilized in RL algorithms, they are not without the large search space of design parameters. This research aims to shed light on the design space exploration associated with reinforcement learning parameters, specifically that of Policy Iteration. Given the large computational expenses of fine-tuning the parameters of reinforcement learning algorithms, we propose an auto-tuner-based ordinal regression approach to accelerate the process of exploring these parameters and, in return, accelerate convergence towards an optimal policy. Our approach provides 1.82x peak speedup with an average of 1.48x speedup over the previous state-of-the-art.
Audio Visual Language Maps for Robot Navigation
Authors: Chenguang Huang, Oier Mees, Andy Zeng, Wolfram Burgard
Date: 2023-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, Robot Navigation

While interacting in the world is a multi-sensory experience, many robots continue to predominantly rely on visual perception to map and navigate in their environments. In this work, we propose Audio-Visual-Language Maps (AVLMaps), a unified 3D spatial map representation for storing cross-modal information from audio, visual, and language cues. AVLMaps integrate the open-vocabulary capabilities of multimodal foundation models pre-trained on Internet-scale data by fusing their features into a centralized 3D voxel grid. In the context of navigation, we show that AVLMaps enable robot systems to index goals in the map based on multimodal queries, e.g., textual descriptions, images, or audio snippets of landmarks. In particular, the addition of audio information enables robots to more reliably disambiguate goal locations. Extensive experiments in simulation show that AVLMaps enable zero-shot multimodal goal navigation from multimodal prompts and provide 50% better recall in ambiguous scenarios. These capabilities extend to mobile robots in the real world - navigating to landmarks referring to visual, audio, and spatial concepts. Videos and code are available at: https://avlmaps.github.io.
Loss of Plasticity in Continual Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Zaheer Abbas, Rosie Zhao, Joseph Modayil, Adam White, Marlos C. Machado
Date: 2023-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Atari Games, Continual Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The ability to learn continually is essential in a complex and changing world. In this paper, we characterize the behavior of canonical value-based deep reinforcement learning (RL) approaches under varying degrees of non-stationarity. In particular, we demonstrate that deep RL agents lose their ability to learn good policies when they cycle through a sequence of Atari 2600 games. This phenomenon is alluded to in prior work under various guises -- e.g., loss of plasticity, implicit under-parameterization, primacy bias, and capacity loss. We investigate this phenomenon closely at scale and analyze how the weights, gradients, and activations change over time in several experiments with varying dimensions (e.g., similarity between games, number of games, number of frames per game), with some experiments spanning 50 days and 2 billion environment interactions. Our analysis shows that the activation footprint of the network becomes sparser, contributing to the diminishing gradients. We investigate a remarkably simple mitigation strategy -- Concatenated ReLUs (CReLUs) activation function -- and demonstrate its effectiveness in facilitating continual learning in a changing environment.