pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
StarGAN-VC++: Towards Emotion Preserving Voice Conversion Using Deep Embeddings
Authors: Arnab Das, Suhita Ghosh, Tim Polzehl, Sebastian Stober
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Voice Conversion

Voice conversion (VC) transforms an utterance to sound like another person without changing the linguistic content. A recently proposed generative adversarial network-based VC method, StarGANv2-VC is very successful in generating natural-sounding conversions. However, the method fails to preserve the emotion of the source speaker in the converted samples. Emotion preservation is necessary for natural human-computer interaction. In this paper, we show that StarGANv2-VC fails to disentangle the speaker and emotion representations, pertinent to preserve emotion. Specifically, there is an emotion leakage from the reference audio used to capture the speaker embeddings while training. To counter the problem, we propose novel emotion-aware losses and an unsupervised method which exploits emotion supervision through latent emotion representations. The objective and subjective evaluations prove the efficacy of the proposed strategy over diverse datasets, emotions, gender, etc.
Emo-StarGAN: A Semi-Supervised Any-to-Many Non-Parallel Emotion-Preserving Voice Conversion
Authors: Suhita Ghosh, Arnab Das, Yamini Sinha, Ingo Siegert, Tim Polzehl, Sebastian Stober
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Voice Conversion

Speech anonymisation prevents misuse of spoken data by removing any personal identifier while preserving at least linguistic content. However, emotion preservation is crucial for natural human-computer interaction. The well-known voice conversion technique StarGANv2-VC achieves anonymisation but fails to preserve emotion. This work presents an any-to-many semi-supervised StarGANv2-VC variant trained on partially emotion-labelled non-parallel data. We propose emotion-aware losses computed on the emotion embeddings and acoustic features correlated to emotion. Additionally, we use an emotion classifier to provide direct emotion supervision. Objective and subjective evaluations show that the proposed approach significantly improves emotion preservation over the vanilla StarGANv2-VC. This considerable improvement is seen over diverse datasets, emotions, target speakers, and inter-group conversions without compromising intelligibility and anonymisation.
Compressed Real Numbers for AI: a case-study using a RISC-V CPU
Authors: Federico Rossi, Marco Cococcioni, Roger Ferrer Ibàñez, Jesùs Labarta, Filippo Mantovani, Marc Casas, Emanuele Ruffaldi, Sergio Saponara
Date: 2023-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU

As recently demonstrated, Deep Neural Networks (DNN), usually trained using single precision IEEE 754 floating point numbers (binary32), can also work using lower precision. Therefore, 16-bit and 8-bit compressed format have attracted considerable attention. In this paper, we focused on two families of formats that have already achieved interesting results in compressing binary32 numbers in machine learning applications, without sensible degradation of the accuracy: bfloat and posit. Even if 16-bit and 8-bit bfloat/posit are routinely used for reducing the storage of the weights/biases of trained DNNs, the inference still often happens on the 32-bit FPU of the CPU (especially if GPUs are not available). In this paper we propose a way to decompress a tensor of bfloat/posits just before computations, i.e., after the compressed operands have been loaded within the vector registers of a vector capable CPU, in order to save bandwidth usage and increase cache efficiency. Finally, we show the architectural parameters and considerations under which this solution is advantageous with respect to the uncompressed one.
DiffAug: Enhance Unsupervised Contrastive Learning with Domain-Knowledge-Free Diffusion-based Data Augmentation
Authors: Zelin Zang, Hao Luo, Kai Wang, Panpan Zhang, Fan Wang, Stan. Z Li, Yang You
Date: 2023-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Image Classification, Representation Learning

Unsupervised Contrastive learning has gained prominence in fields such as vision, and biology, leveraging predefined positive/negative samples for representation learning. Data augmentation, categorized into hand-designed and model-based methods, has been identified as a crucial component for enhancing contrastive learning. However, hand-designed methods require human expertise in domain-specific data while sometimes distorting the meaning of the data. In contrast, generative model-based approaches usually require supervised or large-scale external data, which has become a bottleneck constraining model training in many domains. To address the problems presented above, this paper proposes DiffAug, a novel unsupervised contrastive learning technique with diffusion mode-based positive data generation. DiffAug consists of a semantic encoder and a conditional diffusion model; the conditional diffusion model generates new positive samples conditioned on the semantic encoding to serve the training of unsupervised contrast learning. With the help of iterative training of the semantic encoder and diffusion model, DiffAug improves the representation ability in an uninterrupted and unsupervised manner. Experimental evaluations show that DiffAug outperforms hand-designed and SOTA model-based augmentation methods on DNA sequence, visual, and bio-feature datasets. The code for review is released at \url{https://github.com/zangzelin/code_diffaug}.
SHIELD: Secure Haplotype Imputation Employing Local Differential Privacy
Authors: Marc Harary
Date: 2023-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Imputation

We introduce Secure Haplotype Imputation Employing Local Differential privacy (SHIELD), a program for accurately estimating the genotype of target samples at markers that are not directly assayed by array-based genotyping platforms while preserving the privacy of donors to public reference panels. At the core of SHIELD is the Li-Stephens model of genetic recombination, according to which genomic information is comprised of mosaics of ancestral haplotype fragments that coalesce via a Markov random field. We use the standard forward-backward algorithm for inferring the ancestral haplotypes of target genomes, and hence the most likely genotype at unobserved sites, using a reference panel of template haplotypes whose privacy is guaranteed by the randomized response technique from differential privacy.
Ontologies for increasing the FAIRness of plant research data
Authors: Kathryn Dumschott, Hannah Dörpholz, Marie-Angélique Laporte, Dominik Brilhaus, Andrea Schrader, Björn Usadel, Steffen Neumann, Elizabeth Arnaud, Angela Kranz
Date: 2023-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

The importance of improving the FAIRness (findability, accessibility, interoperability, reusability) of research data is undeniable, especially in the face of large, complex datasets currently being produced by omics technologies. Facilitating the integration of a dataset with other types of data increases the likelihood of reuse, and the potential of answering novel research questions. Ontologies are a useful tool for semantically tagging datasets as adding relevant metadata increases the understanding of how data was produced and increases its interoperability. Ontologies provide concepts for a particular domain as well as the relationships between concepts. By tagging data with ontology terms, data becomes both human and machine interpretable, allowing for increased reuse and interoperability. However, the task of identifying ontologies relevant to a particular research domain or technology is challenging, especially within the diverse realm of fundamental plant research. In this review, we outline the ontologies most relevant to the fundamental plant sciences and how they can be used to annotate data related to plant-specific experiments within metadata frameworks, such as Investigation-Study-Assay (ISA). We also outline repositories and platforms most useful for identifying applicable ontologies or finding ontology terms.
DGSD: Dynamical Graph Self-Distillation for EEG-Based Auditory Spatial Attention Detection
Authors: Cunhang Fan, Hongyu Zhang, Wei Huang, Jun Xue, JianHua Tao, Jiangyan Yi, Zhao Lv, Xiaopei Wu
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG

Auditory Attention Detection (AAD) aims to detect target speaker from brain signals in a multi-speaker environment. Although EEG-based AAD methods have shown promising results in recent years, current approaches primarily rely on traditional convolutional neural network designed for processing Euclidean data like images. This makes it challenging to handle EEG signals, which possess non-Euclidean characteristics. In order to address this problem, this paper proposes a dynamical graph self-distillation (DGSD) approach for AAD, which does not require speech stimuli as input. Specifically, to effectively represent the non-Euclidean properties of EEG signals, dynamical graph convolutional networks are applied to represent the graph structure of EEG signals, which can also extract crucial features related to auditory spatial attention in EEG signals. In addition, to further improve AAD detection performance, self-distillation, consisting of feature distillation and hierarchical distillation strategies at each layer, is integrated. These strategies leverage features and classification results from the deepest network layers to guide the learning of shallow layers. Our experiments are conducted on two publicly available datasets, KUL and DTU. Under a 1-second time window, we achieve results of 90.0\% and 79.6\% accuracy on KUL and DTU, respectively. We compare our DGSD method with competitive baselines, and the experimental results indicate that the detection performance of our proposed DGSD method is not only superior to the best reproducible baseline but also significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters by approximately 100 times.
VCD: A Video Conferencing Dataset for Video Compression
Authors: Babak Naderi, Ross Cutler, Nabakumar Singh Khongbantabam, Yasaman Hosseinkashi, Henrik Turbell, Albert Sadovnikov, Quan Zhou
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Compression

Commonly used datasets for evaluating video codecs are all very high quality and not representative of video typically used in video conferencing scenarios. We present the Video Conferencing Dataset (VCD) for evaluating video codecs for real-time communication, the first such dataset focused on video conferencing. VCD includes a wide variety of camera qualities and spatial and temporal information. It includes both desktop and mobile scenarios and two types of video background processing. We report the compression efficiency of H.264, H.265, H.266, and AV1 in low-delay settings on VCD and compare it with the non-video conferencing datasets UVC, MLC-JVC, and HEVC. The results show the source quality and the scenarios have a significant effect on the compression efficiency of all the codecs. VCD enables the evaluation and tuning of codecs for this important scenario. The VCD is publicly available as an open-source dataset at https://github.com/microsoft/VCD.
Bringing PDEs to JAX with forward and reverse modes automatic differentiation
Authors: Ivan Yashchuk
Date: 2023-08-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR Workshop DeepDiffEq 2019 12

Partial differential equations (PDEs) are used to describe a variety of physical phenomena. Often these equations do not have analytical solutions and numerical approximations are used instead. One of the common methods to solve PDEs is the finite element method. Computing derivative information of the solution with respect to the input parameters is important in many tasks in scientific computing. We extend JAX automatic differentiation library with an interface to Firedrake finite element library. High-level symbolic representation of PDEs allows bypassing differentiating through low-level possibly many iterations of the underlying nonlinear solvers. Differentiating through Firedrake solvers is done using tangent-linear and adjoint equations. This enables the efficient composition of finite element solvers with arbitrary differentiable programs. The code is available at github.com/IvanYashchuk/jax-firedrake.
Solving Recurrence Relations using Machine Learning, with Application to Cost Analysis
Authors: Maximiliano Klemen, Miguel Á. Carreira-Perpiñán, Pedro Lopez-Garcia
Date: 2023-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Form

Automatic static cost analysis infers information about the resources used by programs without actually running them with concrete data, and presents such information as functions of input data sizes. Most of the analysis tools for logic programs (and other languages) are based on setting up recurrence relations representing (bounds on) the computational cost of predicates, and solving them to find closed-form functions that are equivalent to (or a bound on) them. Such recurrence solving is a bottleneck in current tools: many of the recurrences that arise during the analysis cannot be solved with current solvers, such as Computer Algebra Systems (CASs), so that specific methods for different classes of recurrences need to be developed. We address such a challenge by developing a novel, general approach for solving arbitrary, constrained recurrence relations, that uses machine-learning sparse regression techniques to guess a candidate closed-form function, and a combination of an SMT-solver and a CAS to check whether such function is actually a solution of the recurrence. We have implemented a prototype and evaluated it with recurrences generated by a cost analysis system (the one in CiaoPP). The experimental results are quite promising, showing that our approach can find closed-form solutions, in a reasonable time, for classes of recurrences that cannot be solved by such a system, nor by current CASs.
Optimally Controlling the Timing of Energy Transfer in Elastic Joints: Experimental Validation of the Bi-Stiffness Actuation Concept
Authors: Edmundo Pozo Fortunić, Mehmet C. Yildirim, Dennis Ossadnik, Abdalla Swikir, Saeed Abdolshah, Sami Haddadin
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00

Elastic actuation taps into elastic elements' energy storage for dynamic motions beyond rigid actuation. While Series Elastic Actuators (SEA) and Variable Stiffness Actuators (VSA) are highly sophisticated, they do not fully provide control over energy transfer timing. To overcome this problem on the basic system level, the Bi-Stiffness Actuation (BSA) concept was recently proposed. Theoretically, it allows for full link decoupling, while simultaneously being able to lock the spring in the drive train via a switch-and-hold mechanism. Thus, the user would be in full control of the potential energy storage and release timing. In this work, we introduce an initial proof-of-concept of Bi-Stiffness-Actuation in the form of a 1-DoF physical prototype, which is implemented using a modular testbed. We present a hybrid system model, as well as the mechatronic implementation of the actuator. We corroborate the feasibility of the concept by conducting a series of hardware experiments using an open-loop control signal obtained by trajectory optimization. Here, we compare the performance of the prototype with a comparable SEA implementation. We show that BSA outperforms SEA 1) in terms of maximum velocity at low final times and 2) in terms of the movement strategy itself: The clutch mechanism allows the BSA to generate consistent launch sequences while the SEA has to rely on lengthy and possibly dangerous oscillatory swing-up motions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that providing full control authority over the energy transfer timing and link decoupling allows the user to synchronously release both elastic joint and gravitational energy. This facilitates the optimal exploitation of elastic and gravitational potentials in a synergistic manner.
EMOCONV-DIFF: Diffusion-based Speech Emotion Conversion for Non-parallel and In-the-wild Data
Authors: Navin Raj Prabhu, Bunlong Lay, Simon Welker, Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, Timo Gerkmann
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00

Speech emotion conversion is the task of converting the expressed emotion of a spoken utterance to a target emotion while preserving the lexical content and speaker identity. While most existing works in speech emotion conversion rely on acted-out datasets and parallel data samples, in this work we specifically focus on more challenging in-the-wild scenarios and do not rely on parallel data. To this end, we propose a diffusion-based generative model for speech emotion conversion, the EmoConv-Diff, that is trained to reconstruct an input utterance while also conditioning on its emotion. Subsequently, at inference, a target emotion embedding is employed to convert the emotion of the input utterance to the given target emotion. As opposed to performing emotion conversion on categorical representations, we use a continuous arousal dimension to represent emotions while also achieving intensity control. We validate the proposed methodology on a large in-the-wild dataset, the MSP-Podcast v1.10. Our results show that the proposed diffusion model is indeed capable of synthesizing speech with a controllable target emotion. Crucially, the proposed approach shows improved performance along the extreme values of arousal and thereby addresses a common challenge in the speech emotion conversion literature.
SnakeGAN: A Universal Vocoder Leveraging DDSP Prior Knowledge and Periodic Inductive Bias
Authors: Sipan Li, Songxiang Liu, Luwen Zhang, Xiang Li, Yanyao Bian, Chao Weng, Zhiyong Wu, Helen Meng
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Synthesis, Generative Adversarial Network, Inductive Bias

Generative adversarial network (GAN)-based neural vocoders have been widely used in audio synthesis tasks due to their high generation quality, efficient inference, and small computation footprint. However, it is still challenging to train a universal vocoder which can generalize well to out-of-domain (OOD) scenarios, such as unseen speaking styles, non-speech vocalization, singing, and musical pieces. In this work, we propose SnakeGAN, a GAN-based universal vocoder, which can synthesize high-fidelity audio in various OOD scenarios. SnakeGAN takes a coarse-grained signal generated by a differentiable digital signal processing (DDSP) model as prior knowledge, aiming at recovering high-fidelity waveform from a Mel-spectrogram. We introduce periodic nonlinearities through the Snake activation function and anti-aliased representation into the generator, which further brings the desired inductive bias for audio synthesis and significantly improves the extrapolation capacity for universal vocoding in unseen scenarios. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we train SnakeGAN with only speech data and evaluate its performance for various OOD distributions with both subjective and objective metrics. Experimental results show that SnakeGAN significantly outperforms the compared approaches and can generate high-fidelity audio samples including unseen speakers with unseen styles, singing voices, instrumental pieces, and nonverbal vocalization.
Complexity Scaling for Speech Denoising
Authors: Hangting Chen, Jianwei Yu, Chao Weng
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Speech Denoising

Computational complexity is critical when deploying deep learning-based speech denoising models for on-device applications. Most prior research focused on optimizing model architectures to meet specific computational cost constraints, often creating distinct neural network architectures for different complexity limitations. This study conducts complexity scaling for speech denoising tasks, aiming to consolidate models with various complexities into a unified architecture. We present a Multi-Path Transform-based (MPT) architecture to handle both low- and high-complexity scenarios. A series of MPT networks present high performance covering a wide range of computational complexities on the DNS challenge dataset. Moreover, inspired by the scaling experiments in natural language processing, we explore the empirical relationship between model performance and computational cost on the denoising task. As the complexity number of multiply-accumulate operations (MACs) is scaled from 50M/s to 15G/s on MPT networks, we observe a linear increase in the values of PESQ-WB and SI-SNR, proportional to the logarithm of MACs, which might contribute to the understanding and application of complexity scaling in speech denoising tasks.
Hierarchical Metadata Information Constrained Self-Supervised Learning for Anomalous Sound Detection Under Domain Shift
Authors: Haiyan Lan, Qiaoxi Zhu, Jian Guan, Yuming Wei, Wenwu Wang
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Self-Supervised Learning, Task 2

Self-supervised learning methods have achieved promising performance for anomalous sound detection (ASD) under domain shift, where the type of domain shift is considered in feature learning by incorporating section IDs. However, the attributes accompanying audio files under each section, such as machine operating conditions and noise types, have not been considered, although they are also crucial for characterizing domain shifts. In this paper, we present a hierarchical metadata information constrained self-supervised (HMIC) ASD method, where the hierarchical relation between section IDs and attributes is constructed, and used as constraints to obtain finer feature representation. In addition, we propose an attribute-group-center (AGC)-based method for calculating the anomaly score under the domain shift condition. Experiments are performed to demonstrate its improved performance over the state-of-the-art self-supervised methods in DCASE 2022 challenge Task 2.
Codec Data Augmentation for Time-domain Heart Sound Classification
Authors: Ansh Mishra, Jia Qi Yip, Eng Siong Chng
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Data Augmentation, Sound Classification

Heart auscultations are a low-cost and effective way of detecting valvular heart diseases early, which can save lives. Nevertheless, it has been difficult to scale this screening method since the effectiveness of auscultations is dependent on the skill of doctors. As such, there has been increasing research interest in the automatic classification of heart sounds using deep learning algorithms. However, it is currently difficult to develop good heart sound classification models due to the limited data available for training. In this work, we propose a simple time domain approach, to the heart sound classification problem with a base classification error rate of 0.8 and show that augmentation of the data through codec simulation can improve the classification error rate to 0.2. With data augmentation, our approach outperforms the existing time-domain CNN-BiLSTM baseline model. Critically, our experiments show that codec data augmentation is effective in getting around the data limitation.
Multi-dimensional Speech Quality Assessment in Crowdsourcing
Authors: Babak Naderi, Ross Cutler, Nicolae-Catalin Ristea
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

Subjective speech quality assessment is the gold standard for evaluating speech enhancement processing and telecommunication systems. The commonly used standard ITU-T Rec. P.800 defines how to measure speech quality in lab environments, and ITU-T Rec.~P.808 extended it for crowdsourcing. ITU-T Rec. P.835 extends P.800 to measure the quality of speech in the presence of noise. ITU-T Rec. P.804 targets the conversation test and introduces perceptual speech quality dimensions which are measured during the listening phase of the conversation. The perceptual dimensions are noisiness, coloration, discontinuity, and loudness. We create a crowdsourcing implementation of a multi-dimensional subjective test following the scales from P.804 and extend it to include reverberation, the speech signal, and overall quality. We show the tool is both accurate and reproducible. The tool has been used in the ICASSP 2023 Speech Signal Improvement challenge and we show the utility of these speech quality dimensions in this challenge. The tool will be publicly available as open-source at https://github.com/microsoft/P.808.