pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Binaural Speech Enhancement Using STOI-Optimal Masks
Authors: Vikas Tokala, Mike Brookes, Patrick A. Naylor
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

STOI-optimal masking has been previously proposed and developed for single-channel speech enhancement. In this paper, we consider the extension to the task of binaural speech enhancement in which spatial information is known to be important to speech understanding and therefore should be preserved by the enhancement processing. Masks are estimated for each of the binaural channels individually and a `better-ear listening' mask is computed by choosing the maximum of the two masks. The estimated mask is used to supply probability information about the speech presence in each time-frequency bin to an Optimally-modified Log Spectral Amplitude (OM-LSA) enhancer. We show that using the proposed method for binaural signals with a directional noise not only improves the SNR of the noisy signal but also preserves the binaural cues and intelligibility.
Detection of Prosodic Boundaries in Speech Using Wav2Vec 2.0
Authors: Marie Kunešová, Markéta Řezáčková
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Speech Synthesis

Prosodic boundaries in speech are of great relevance to both speech synthesis and audio annotation. In this paper, we apply the wav2vec 2.0 framework to the task of detecting these boundaries in speech signal, using only acoustic information. We test the approach on a set of recordings of Czech broadcast news, labeled by phonetic experts, and compare it to an existing text-based predictor, which uses the transcripts of the same data. Despite using a relatively small amount of labeled data, the wav2vec2 model achieves an accuracy of 94% and F1 measure of 83% on within-sentence prosodic boundaries (or 95% and 89% on all prosodic boundaries), outperforming the text-based approach. However, by combining the outputs of the two different models we can improve the results even further.
Sweet Streams are Made of This: The System Engineer's View on Energy Efficiency in Video Communications
Authors: Christian Herglotz, Matthias Kränzler, Robert Schober, André Kaup
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00

In recent years, the global use of online video services has increased rapidly. Today, a manifold of applications, such as video streaming, video conferencing, live broadcasting, and social networks, make use of this technology. A recent study found that the development and the success of these services had as a consequence that, nowadays, more than 1% of the global greenhouse-gas emissions are related to online video, with growth rates close to 10% per year. This article reviews the latest findings concerning energy consumption of online video from the system engineer's perspective, where the system engineer is the designer and operator of a typical online video service. We discuss all relevant energy sinks, highlight dependencies with quality-of-service variables as well as video properties, review energy consumption models for different devices from the literature, and aggregate these existing models into a global model for the overall energy consumption of a generic online video service. Analyzing this model and its implications, we find that end-user devices and video encoding have the largest potential for energy savings. Finally, we provide an overview of recent advances in energy efficiency improvement for video streaming and propose future research directions for energy-efficient video streaming services.
Goal-Oriented Quantization: Analysis, Design, and Application to Resource Allocation
Authors: Hang Zou, Chao Zhang, Samson Lasaulce, Lucas Saludjian, Vincent Poor
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

In this paper, the situation in which a receiver has to execute a task from a quantized version of the information source of interest is considered. The task is modeled by the minimization problem of a general goal function $f(x;g)$ for which the decision $x$ has to be taken from a quantized version of the parameters $g$. This problem is relevant in many applications e.g., for radio resource allocation (RA), high spectral efficiency communications, controlled systems, or data clustering in the smart grid. By resorting to high resolution (HR) analysis, it is shown how to design a quantizer that minimizes the gap between the minimum of $f$ (which would be reached by knowing $g$ perfectly) and what is effectively reached with a quantized $g$. The conducted formal analysis both provides quantization strategies in the HR regime and insights for the general regime and allows a practical algorithm to be designed. The analysis also allows one to provide some elements to the new and fundamental problem of the relationship between the goal function regularity properties and the hardness to quantize its parameters. The derived results are discussed and supported by a rich numerical performance analysis in which known RA goal functions are studied and allows one to exhibit very significant improvements by tailoring the quantization operation to the final task.
Preliminary Analysis of Skywave Effects on MF DGNSS R-Mode Signals During Daytime and Nighttime
Authors: Suhui Jeong, Pyo-Woong Son
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00

Accurate positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) performance are prerequisites for several technologies today. In a marine environment, it is difficult to visually identify one's position accurately, leading to safety concerns. Currently, PNT information is provided mainly from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS); however, it is vulnerable to radio frequency interference, spoofing, and ionospheric anomaly. Therefore, research on a backup system is needed. Ranging Mode (R-Mode), a terrestrial integrated navigation system, is being investigated for use in a marine environment. R-Mode is a positioning technology that integrates terrestrial signals of opportunity such as medium frequency (MF) differential GNSS (DGNSS), very high frequency (VHF) automatic identification system (AIS), and enhanced long-range navigation (eLoran) signals. Previous studies in Europe show that signals in the MF band differ greatly in accuracy between daytime and nighttime. This difference is primarily caused by skywave. In this study, the MF DGNSS R-Mode signal transmitted from Chungju, Korea was received in Daesan and Daejeon, Korea. The skywave effect during daytime and nighttime was compared and investigated. In addition, the continuous wave intensity of the R-Mode signal was increased during the nighttime to compare its effect on the measurement accuracy.
Compressed sensing radar detectors under the row-orthogonal design model: a statistical mechanics perspective
Authors: Siqi Na, Tianyao Huang, Yimin Liu, Takashi Takahashi, Yoshiyuki Kabashima, Xiqin Wang
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: compressed sensing

Compressed sensing (CS) model of complex-valued data can represent the signal recovery process of a large amount types of radar systems, especially when the measurement matrix is row-orthogonal. Based on debiased least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), detection problem under Gaussian random design model, i.e. the elements of measurement matrix are drawn from Gaussian distribution, is studied by literature. However, we find that these approaches are not suitable for row-orthogonal measurement matrices, which are of more practical relevance. In view of statistical mechanics approaches, we provide derivations of more accurate test statistics and thresholds (or p-values) under the row-orthogonal design model, and theoretically analyze the detection performance of the present detector. Such detector can analytically provide the threshold according to given false alarm rate, which is not possible with the conventional CS detector, and the detection performance is proved to be better than that of the traditional LASSO detector. Comparing with other debiased LASSO based detectors, simulation results indicate that the proposed approach can achieve more accurate probability of false alarm when the measurement matrix is row-orthogonal, leading to better detection performance under Neyman-Pearson principle.
Low PAPR Pilot for Delay-Doppler Domain Modulation
Authors: Pu Yuan
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00

This paper studies the low PAPR pilot design in delay-Doppler domain modulation. We adopt a sequence based pilot design instead of the conventional pulse pilot, to mitigate the PAPR issue. We develop simple channel estimation algorithm composes of two-stages which are path identification and channel coefficient estimation. The quantitative analysis on the channel estimation error model is provided. Based on which the principle of pilot sequence design in delay-Doppler domain is revealed. Experiment results shows that the proposed scheme maintains a relatively low PAPR in time domain samples, while the channel estimation performance approaches the ideal channel estimation in limited-Doppler-Shift channel model.
Cardiotocography Signal Abnormality Detection based on Deep Unsupervised Models
Authors: Julien Bertieaux, Mohammadhadi Shateri, Fabrice Labeau, Thierry Dutoit
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Cardiotocography (CTG) is a key element when it comes to monitoring fetal well-being. Obstetricians use it to observe the fetal heart rate (FHR) and the uterine contraction (UC). The goal is to determine how the fetus reacts to the contraction and whether it is receiving adequate oxygen. If a problem occurs, the physician can then respond with an intervention. Unfortunately, the interpretation of CTGs is highly subjective and there is a low inter- and intra-observer agreement rate among practitioners. This can lead to unnecessary medical intervention that represents a risk for both the mother and the fetus. Recently, computer-assisted diagnosis techniques, especially based on artificial intelligence models (mostly supervised), have been proposed in the literature. But, many of these models lack generalization to unseen/test data samples due to overfitting. Moreover, the unsupervised models were applied to a very small portion of the CTG samples where the normal and abnormal classes are highly separable. In this work, deep unsupervised learning approaches, trained in a semi-supervised manner, are proposed for anomaly detection in CTG signals. The GANomaly framework, modified to capture the underlying distribution of data samples, is used as our main model and is applied to the CTU-UHB dataset. Unlike the recent studies, all the CTG data samples, without any specific preferences, are used in our work. The experimental results show that our modified GANomaly model outperforms state-of-the-arts. This study admit the superiority of the deep unsupervised models over the supervised ones in CTG abnormality detection.
DynImp: Dynamic Imputation for Wearable Sensing Data Through Sensory and Temporal Relatedness
Authors: Zepeng Huo, Taowei Ji, Yifei Liang, Shuai Huang, Zhangyang Wang, Xiaoning Qian, Bobak Mortazavi
Date: 2022-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Denoising, Imputation, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

In wearable sensing applications, data is inevitable to be irregularly sampled or partially missing, which pose challenges for any downstream application. An unique aspect of wearable data is that it is time-series data and each channel can be correlated to another one, such as x, y, z axis of accelerometer. We argue that traditional methods have rarely made use of both times-series dynamics of the data as well as the relatedness of the features from different sensors. We propose a model, termed as DynImp, to handle different time point's missingness with nearest neighbors along feature axis and then feeding the data into a LSTM-based denoising autoencoder which can reconstruct missingness along the time axis. We experiment the model on the extreme missingness scenario ($>50\%$ missing rate) which has not been widely tested in wearable data. Our experiments on activity recognition show that the method can exploit the multi-modality features from related sensors and also learn from history time-series dynamics to reconstruct the data under extreme missingness.
A sensitivity analysis of a gonorrhoea dynamics and control model
Authors: Louis Omenyi, Aloysius Ezaka, Henry O. Adagba, Gerald Ozoigbo, Kafayat Elebute
Date: 2022-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensitivity

We formulate and analyse a robust mathematical model of the dynamics of gonorrhoea incorporating passive immunity and control. Our results show that the disease-free and endemic equilibria of the model are both locally and globally asymptotically stable. A sensitivity analysis of the model shows that the dynamics of the model is variable and dependent on waning rate, control parameters and interaction of the latent and infected classes. In particular, the lower the waning rate, the more the exponential decrease in the passive immunity but the susceptible population increases to the equilibrium and wanes asymptotically due to the presence of the control parameters and restricted interaction of the latent and infected classes.
Ensemble-based gradient inference for particle methods in optimization and sampling
Authors: Claudia Schillings, Claudia Totzeck, Philipp Wacker
Date: 2022-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

We propose an approach based on function evaluations and Bayesian inference to extract higher-order differential information of objective functions {from a given ensemble of particles}. Pointwise evaluation $\{V(x^i)\}_i$ of some potential $V$ in an ensemble $\{x^i\}_i$ contains implicit information about first or higher order derivatives, which can be made explicit with little computational effort (ensemble-based gradient inference -- EGI). We suggest to use this information for the improvement of established ensemble-based numerical methods for optimization and sampling such as Consensus-based optimization and Langevin-based samplers. Numerical studies indicate that the augmented algorithms are often superior to their gradient-free variants, in particular the augmented methods help the ensembles to escape their initial domain, to explore multimodal, non-Gaussian settings and to speed up the collapse at the end of optimization dynamics.} The code for the numerical examples in this manuscript can be found in the paper's Github repository (https://github.com/MercuryBench/ensemble-based-gradient.git).
Actionable Neural Representations: Grid Cells from Minimal Constraints
Authors: William Dorrell, Peter E. Latham, Timothy E. J. Behrens, James C. R. Whittington
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

To afford flexible behaviour, the brain must build internal representations that mirror the structure of variables in the external world. For example, 2D space obeys rules: the same set of actions combine in the same way everywhere (step north, then south, and you won't have moved, wherever you start). We suggest the brain must represent this consistent meaning of actions across space, as it allows you to find new short-cuts and navigate in unfamiliar settings. We term this representation an `actionable representation'. We formulate actionable representations using group and representation theory, and show that, when combined with biological and functional constraints - non-negative firing, bounded neural activity, and precise coding - multiple modules of hexagonal grid cells are the optimal representation of 2D space. We support this claim with intuition, analytic justification, and simulations. Our analytic results normatively explain a set of surprising grid cell phenomena, and make testable predictions for future experiments. Lastly, we highlight the generality of our approach beyond just understanding 2D space. Our work characterises a new principle for understanding and designing flexible internal representations: they should be actionable, allowing animals and machines to predict the consequences of their actions, rather than just encode.
Quantitative Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing
Authors: Beatrice Acciaio, Julio Backhoff, Gudmund Pammer
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00

In this paper we provide a quantitative analysis to the concept of arbitrage, that allows to deal with model uncertainty without imposing the no-arbitrage condition. In markets that admit ``small arbitrage", we can still make sense of the problems of pricing and hedging. The pricing measures here will be such that asset price processes are close to being martingales, and the hedging strategies will need to cover some additional cost. We show a quantitative version of the Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing and of the Super-Replication Theorem. Finally, we study robustness of the amount of arbitrage and existence of respective pricing measures, showing stability of these concepts with respect to a strong adapted Wasserstein distance.
MANCaLog: A Logic for Multi-Attribute Network Cascades (Technical Report)
Authors: Paulo Shakarian, Gerardo I. Simari, Robert Schroeder
Date: 2013-01-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

The modeling of cascade processes in multi-agent systems in the form of complex networks has in recent years become an important topic of study due to its many applications: the adoption of commercial products, spread of disease, the diffusion of an idea, etc. In this paper, we begin by identifying a desiderata of seven properties that a framework for modeling such processes should satisfy: the ability to represent attributes of both nodes and edges, an explicit representation of time, the ability to represent non-Markovian temporal relationships, representation of uncertain information, the ability to represent competing cascades, allowance of non-monotonic diffusion, and computational tractability. We then present the MANCaLog language, a formalism based on logic programming that satisfies all these desiderata, and focus on algorithms for finding minimal models (from which the outcome of cascades can be obtained) as well as how this formalism can be applied in real world scenarios. We are not aware of any other formalism in the literature that meets all of the above requirements.
Siamese-NAS: Using Trained Samples Efficiently to Find Lightweight Neural Architecture by Prior Knowledge
Authors: Yu-Ming Zhang, Jun-Wei Hsieh, Chun-Chieh Lee, Kuo-Chin Fan
Date: 2022-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

In the past decade, many architectures of convolution neural networks were designed by handcraft, such as Vgg16, ResNet, DenseNet, etc. They all achieve state-of-the-art level on different tasks in their time. However, it still relies on human intuition and experience, and it also takes so much time consumption for trial and error. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) focused on this issue. In recent works, the Neural Predictor has significantly improved with few training architectures as training samples. However, the sampling efficiency is already considerable. In this paper, our proposed Siamese-Predictor is inspired by past works of predictor-based NAS. It is constructed with the proposed Estimation Code, which is the prior knowledge about the training procedure. The proposed Siamese-Predictor gets significant benefits from this idea. This idea causes it to surpass the current SOTA predictor on NASBench-201. In order to explore the impact of the Estimation Code, we analyze the relationship between it and accuracy. We also propose the search space Tiny-NanoBench for lightweight CNN architecture. This well-designed search space is easier to find better architecture with few FLOPs than NASBench-201. In summary, the proposed Siamese-Predictor is a predictor-based NAS. It achieves the SOTA level, especially with limited computation budgets. It applied to the proposed Tiny-NanoBench can just use a few trained samples to find extremely lightweight CNN architecture.
A Non-monotonic Self-terminating Language Model
Authors: Eugene Choi, Kyunghyun Cho, Cheolhyoung Lee
Date: 2022-10-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model, Text Generation

Recent large-scale neural autoregressive sequence models have shown impressive performances on a variety of natural language generation tasks. However, their generated sequences often exhibit degenerate properties such as non-termination, undesirable repetition, and premature termination, when generated with decoding algorithms such as greedy search, beam search, top-$k$ sampling, and nucleus sampling. In this paper, we focus on the problem of non-terminating sequences resulting from an incomplete decoding algorithm. We first define an incomplete probable decoding algorithm which includes greedy search, top-$k$ sampling, and nucleus sampling, beyond the incomplete decoding algorithm originally put forward by Welleck et al. (2020). We then propose a non-monotonic self-terminating language model, which significantly relaxes the constraint of monotonically increasing termination probability in the originally proposed self-terminating language model by Welleck et al. (2020), to address the issue of non-terminating sequences when using incomplete probable decoding algorithms. We prove that our proposed model prevents non-terminating sequences when using not only incomplete probable decoding algorithms but also beam search. We empirically validate our model on sequence completion tasks with various architectures.
Combined Dynamic Virtual Spatiotemporal Graph Mapping for Traffic Prediction
Authors: Yingming Pu
Date: 2022-10-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting, Traffic Prediction

The continuous expansion of the urban construction scale has recently contributed to the demand for the dynamics of traffic intersections that are managed, making adaptive modellings become a hot topic. Existing deep learning methods are powerful to fit complex heterogeneous graphs. However, they still have drawbacks, which can be roughly classified into two categories, 1) spatiotemporal async-modelling approaches separately consider temporal and spatial dependencies, resulting in weak generalization and large instability while aggregating; 2) spatiotemporal sync-modelling is hard to capture long-term temporal dependencies because of the local receptive field. In order to overcome above challenges, a \textbf{C}ombined \textbf{D}ynamic \textbf{V}irtual spatiotemporal \textbf{G}raph \textbf{M}apping \textbf{(CDVGM)} is proposed in this work. The contributions are the following: 1) a dynamic virtual graph Laplacian ($DVGL$) is designed, which considers both the spatial signal passing and the temporal features simultaneously; 2) the Long-term Temporal Strengthen model ($LT^2S$) for improving the stability of time series forecasting; Extensive experiments demonstrate that CDVGM has excellent performances of fast convergence speed and low resource consumption and achieves the current SOTA effect in terms of both accuracy and generalization. The code is available at \hyperlink{https://github.com/Dandelionym/CDVGM.}{https://github.com/Dandelionym/CDVGM.}