pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
An Energy-Aware Approach to Design Self-Adaptive AI-based Applications on the Edge
Authors: Alessandro Tundo, Marco Mobilio, Shashikant Ilager, Ivona Brandić, Ezio Bartocci, Leonardo Mariani
Date: 2023-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Heuristic Search, object-detection, Object Detection, Pedestrian Detection

The advent of edge devices dedicated to machine learning tasks enabled the execution of AI-based applications that efficiently process and classify the data acquired by the resource-constrained devices populating the Internet of Things. The proliferation of such applications (e.g., critical monitoring in smart cities) demands new strategies to make these systems also sustainable from an energetic point of view. In this paper, we present an energy-aware approach for the design and deployment of self-adaptive AI-based applications that can balance application objectives (e.g., accuracy in object detection and frames processing rate) with energy consumption. We address the problem of determining the set of configurations that can be used to self-adapt the system with a meta-heuristic search procedure that only needs a small number of empirical samples. The final set of configurations are selected using weighted gray relational analysis, and mapped to the operation modes of the self-adaptive application. We validate our approach on an AI-based application for pedestrian detection. Results show that our self-adaptive application can outperform non-adaptive baseline configurations by saving up to 81\% of energy while loosing only between 2% and 6% in accuracy.
Physics-Based Trajectory Design for Cellular-Connected UAV in Rainy Environments Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Hao Qin, Zhaozhou Wu, Xingqi Zhang
Date: 2023-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning, Weather Forecasting

Cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained increasing attention due to their potential to enhance conventional UAV capabilities by leveraging existing cellular infrastructure for reliable communications between UAVs and base stations. They have been used for various applications, including weather forecasting and search and rescue operations. However, under extreme weather conditions such as rainfall, it is challenging for the trajectory design of cellular UAVs, due to weak coverage regions in the sky, limitations of UAV flying time, and signal attenuation caused by raindrops. To this end, this paper proposes a physics-based trajectory design approach for cellular-connected UAVs in rainy environments. A physics-based electromagnetic simulator is utilized to take into account detailed environment information and the impact of rain on radio wave propagation. The trajectory optimization problem is formulated to jointly consider UAV flying time and signal-to-interference ratio, and is solved through a Markov decision process using deep reinforcement learning algorithms based on multi-step learning and double Q-learning. Optimal UAV trajectories are compared in examples with homogeneous atmosphere medium and rain medium. Additionally, a thorough study of varying weather conditions on trajectory design is provided, and the impact of weight coefficients in the problem formulation is discussed. The proposed approach has demonstrated great potential for UAV trajectory design under rainy weather conditions.
Satisfiability Checking of Multi-Variable TPTL with Unilateral Intervals Is PSPACE-Complete
Authors: Shankara Narayanan Krishna, Khushraj Nanik Madnani, Rupak Majumdar, Paritosh K. Pandya
Date: 2023-09-01 00:00:00

We investigate the decidability of the ${0,\infty}$ fragment of Timed Propositional Temporal Logic (TPTL). We show that the satisfiability checking of TPTL$^{0,\infty}$ is PSPACE-complete. Moreover, even its 1-variable fragment (1-TPTL$^{0,\infty}$) is strictly more expressive than Metric Interval Temporal Logic (MITL) for which satisfiability checking is EXPSPACE complete. Hence, we have a strictly more expressive logic with computationally easier satisfiability checking. To the best of our knowledge, TPTL$^{0,\infty}$ is the first multi-variable fragment of TPTL for which satisfiability checking is decidable without imposing any bounds/restrictions on the timed words (e.g. bounded variability, bounded time, etc.). The membership in PSPACE is obtained by a reduction to the emptiness checking problem for a new "non-punctual" subclass of Alternating Timed Automata with multiple clocks called Unilateral Very Weak Alternating Timed Automata (VWATA$^{0,\infty}$) which we prove to be in PSPACE. We show this by constructing a simulation equivalent non-deterministic timed automata whose number of clocks is polynomial in the size of the given VWATA$^{0,\infty}$.
BatchPrompt: Accomplish more with less
Authors: Jianzhe Lin, Maurice Diesendruck, Liang Du, Robin Abraham
Date: 2023-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: 8k, Language Modelling, Natural Language Inference, QQP, Question Answering, RTE

As the ever-increasing token limits of large language models (LLMs) have enabled long context as input, prompting with single data samples might no longer an efficient way. A straightforward strategy improving efficiency is to batch data within the token limit (e.g., 8k for gpt-3.5-turbo; 32k for GPT-4), which we call BatchPrompt. We have two initial observations for prompting with batched data. First, we find that prompting with batched data in longer contexts will inevitably lead to worse performance, compared to single-data prompting. Second, the performance of the language model is significantly correlated with the positions and order of the batched data, due to the corresponding change in decoder context. To retain efficiency and overcome performance loss, we propose Batch Permutation and Ensembling (BPE), and a novel Self-reflection-guided EArly Stopping (SEAS) technique. Our comprehensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that BPE can boost the performance of BatchPrompt with a striking margin on a range of popular NLP tasks, including question answering (Boolq), textual entailment (RTE), and duplicate questions identification (QQP). These performances are even competitive with/higher than single-data prompting(SinglePrompt), while BatchPrompt requires much fewer LLM calls and input tokens (For SinglePrompt v.s. BatchPrompt with batch size 32, using just 9%-16% the number of LLM calls, Boolq accuracy 90.6% to 90.9% with 27.4% tokens, QQP accuracy 87.2% to 88.4% with 18.6% tokens, RTE accuracy 91.5% to 91.1% with 30.8% tokens). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to technically improve prompting efficiency of large language models. We hope our simple yet effective approach will shed light on the future research of large language models. The code will be released.
When Do Discourse Markers Affect Computational Sentence Understanding?
Authors: RuiQi Li, Liesbeth Allein, Damien Sileo, Marie-Francine Moens
Date: 2023-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

The capabilities and use cases of automatic natural language processing (NLP) have grown significantly over the last few years. While much work has been devoted to understanding how humans deal with discourse connectives, this phenomenon is understudied in computational systems. Therefore, it is important to put NLP models under the microscope and examine whether they can adequately comprehend, process, and reason within the complexity of natural language. In this chapter, we introduce the main mechanisms behind automatic sentence processing systems step by step and then focus on evaluating discourse connective processing. We assess nine popular systems in their ability to understand English discourse connectives and analyze how context and language understanding tasks affect their connective comprehension. The results show that NLP systems do not process all discourse connectives equally well and that the computational processing complexity of different connective kinds is not always consistently in line with the presumed complexity order found in human processing. In addition, while humans are more inclined to be influenced during the reading procedure but not necessarily in the final comprehension performance, discourse connectives have a significant impact on the final accuracy of NLP systems. The richer knowledge of connectives a system learns, the more negative effect inappropriate connectives have on it. This suggests that the correct explicitation of discourse connectives is important for computational natural language processing.
Insights Into the Nutritional Prevention of Macular Degeneration based on a Comparative Topic Modeling Approach
Authors: Lucas Cassiel Jacaruso
Date: 2023-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Specificity

Topic modeling and text mining are subsets of Natural Language Processing (NLP) with relevance for conducting meta-analysis (MA) and systematic review (SR). For evidence synthesis, the above NLP methods are conventionally used for topic-specific literature searches or extracting values from reports to automate essential phases of SR and MA. Instead, this work proposes a comparative topic modeling approach to analyze reports of contradictory results on the same general research question. Specifically, the objective is to identify topics exhibiting distinct associations with significant results for an outcome of interest by ranking them according to their proportional occurrence in (and consistency of distribution across) reports of significant effects. The proposed method was tested on broad-scope studies addressing whether supplemental nutritional compounds significantly benefit macular degeneration (MD). Four of these were further supported in terms of effectiveness upon conducting a follow-up literature search for validation (omega-3 fatty acids, copper, zeaxanthin, and nitrates). The two not supported by the follow-up literature search (niacin and molybdenum) also had scores in the lowest range under the proposed scoring system, suggesting that the proposed methods score for a given topic may be a viable proxy for its degree of association with the outcome of interest and can be helpful in the search for potentially causal relationships. These results underpin the proposed methods potential to add specificity in understanding effects from broad-scope reports, elucidate topics of interest for future research, and guide evidence synthesis in a systematic and scalable way. All of this is accomplished while yielding valuable insights into the prevention of MD.
Enhancing the vocal range of single-speaker singing voice synthesis with melody-unsupervised pre-training
Authors: Shaohuan Zhou, Xu Li, Zhiyong Wu, Ying Shan, Helen Meng
Date: 2023-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Rhythm, Singing Voice Synthesis, Unsupervised Pre-training

The single-speaker singing voice synthesis (SVS) usually underperforms at pitch values that are out of the singer's vocal range or associated with limited training samples. Based on our previous work, this work proposes a melody-unsupervised multi-speaker pre-training method conducted on a multi-singer dataset to enhance the vocal range of the single-speaker, while not degrading the timbre similarity. This pre-training method can be deployed to a large-scale multi-singer dataset, which only contains audio-and-lyrics pairs without phonemic timing information and pitch annotation. Specifically, in the pre-training step, we design a phoneme predictor to produce the frame-level phoneme probability vectors as the phonemic timing information and a speaker encoder to model the timbre variations of different singers, and directly estimate the frame-level f0 values from the audio to provide the pitch information. These pre-trained model parameters are delivered into the fine-tuning step as prior knowledge to enhance the single speaker's vocal range. Moreover, this work also contributes to improving the sound quality and rhythm naturalness of the synthesized singing voices. It is the first to introduce a differentiable duration regulator to improve the rhythm naturalness of the synthesized voice, and a bi-directional flow model to improve the sound quality. Experimental results verify that the proposed SVS system outperforms the baseline on both sound quality and naturalness.
Detecting Suicidality in Arabic Tweets Using Machine Learning and Deep Learning Techniques
Authors: Asma Abdulsalam, Areej Alhothali, Saleh Al-Ghamdi
Date: 2023-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Social media platforms have revolutionized traditional communication techniques by enabling people globally to connect instantaneously, openly, and frequently. People use social media to share personal stories and express their opinion. Negative emotions such as thoughts of death, self-harm, and hardship are commonly expressed on social media, particularly among younger generations. As a result, using social media to detect suicidal thoughts will help provide proper intervention that will ultimately deter others from self-harm and committing suicide and stop the spread of suicidal ideation on social media. To investigate the ability to detect suicidal thoughts in Arabic tweets automatically, we developed a novel Arabic suicidal tweets dataset, examined several machine learning models, including Na\"ive Bayes, Support Vector Machine, K-Nearest Neighbor, Random Forest, and XGBoost, trained on word frequency and word embedding features, and investigated the ability of pre-trained deep learning models, AraBert, AraELECTRA, and AraGPT2, to identify suicidal thoughts in Arabic tweets. The results indicate that SVM and RF models trained on character n-gram features provided the best performance in the machine learning models, with 86% accuracy and an F1 score of 79%. The results of the deep learning models show that AraBert model outperforms other machine and deep learning models, achieving an accuracy of 91\% and an F1-score of 88%, which significantly improves the detection of suicidal ideation in the Arabic tweets dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to develop an Arabic suicidality detection dataset from Twitter and to use deep-learning approaches in detecting suicidality in Arabic posts.
JoTR: A Joint Transformer and Reinforcement Learning Framework for Dialog Policy Learning
Authors: Wai-Chung Kwan, Huimin Wang, Hongru Wang, Zezhong Wang, Xian Wu, Yefeng Zheng, Kam-Fai Wong
Date: 2023-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Generation, Diversity

Dialogue policy learning (DPL) is a crucial component of dialogue modelling. Its primary role is to determine the appropriate abstract response, commonly referred to as the "dialogue action". Traditional DPL methodologies have treated this as a sequential decision problem, using pre-defined action candidates extracted from a corpus. However, these incomplete candidates can significantly limit the diversity of responses and pose challenges when dealing with edge cases, which are scenarios that occur only at extreme operating parameters. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel framework, JoTR. This framework is unique as it leverages a text-to-text Transformer-based model to generate flexible dialogue actions. Unlike traditional methods, JoTR formulates a word-level policy that allows for a more dynamic and adaptable dialogue action generation, without the need for any action templates. This setting enhances the diversity of responses and improves the system's ability to handle edge cases effectively. In addition, JoTR employs reinforcement learning with a reward-shaping mechanism to efficiently finetune the word-level dialogue policy, which allows the model to learn from its interactions, improving its performance over time. We conducted an extensive evaluation of JoTR to assess its effectiveness. Our extensive evaluation shows that JoTR achieves state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark dialogue modelling tasks, as assessed by both user simulators and human evaluators.
The FruitShell French synthesis system at the Blizzard 2023 Challenge
Authors: Xin Qi, Xiaopeng Wang, Zhiyong Wang, Wang Liu, Mingming Ding, Shuchen Shi
Date: 2023-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis

This paper presents a French text-to-speech synthesis system for the Blizzard Challenge 2023. The challenge consists of two tasks: generating high-quality speech from female speakers and generating speech that closely resembles specific individuals. Regarding the competition data, we conducted a screening process to remove missing or erroneous text data. We organized all symbols except for phonemes and eliminated symbols that had no pronunciation or zero duration. Additionally, we added word boundary and start/end symbols to the text, which we have found to improve speech quality based on our previous experience. For the Spoke task, we performed data augmentation according to the competition rules. We used an open-source G2P model to transcribe the French texts into phonemes. As the G2P model uses the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), we applied the same transcription process to the provided competition data for standardization. However, due to compiler limitations in recognizing special symbols from the IPA chart, we followed the rules to convert all phonemes into the phonetic scheme used in the competition data. Finally, we resampled all competition audio to a uniform sampling rate of 16 kHz. We employed a VITS-based acoustic model with the hifigan vocoder. For the Spoke task, we trained a multi-speaker model and incorporated speaker information into the duration predictor, vocoder, and flow layers of the model. The evaluation results of our system showed a quality MOS score of 3.6 for the Hub task and 3.4 for the Spoke task, placing our system at an average level among all participating teams.
Exploring the law of text geographic information
Authors: Zhenhua Wang, Daiyu Zhang, Ming Ren, Guang Xu
Date: 2023-09-01 00:00:00

Textual geographic information is indispensable and heavily relied upon in practical applications. The absence of clear distribution poses challenges in effectively harnessing geographic information, thereby driving our quest for exploration. We contend that geographic information is influenced by human behavior, cognition, expression, and thought processes, and given our intuitive understanding of natural systems, we hypothesize its conformity to the Gamma distribution. Through rigorous experiments on a diverse range of 24 datasets encompassing different languages and types, we have substantiated this hypothesis, unearthing the underlying regularities governing the dimensions of quantity, length, and distance in geographic information. Furthermore, theoretical analyses and comparisons with Gaussian distributions and Zipf's law have refuted the contingency of these laws. Significantly, we have estimated the upper bounds of human utilization of geographic information, pointing towards the existence of uncharted territories. Also, we provide guidance in geographic information extraction. Hope we peer its true countenance uncovering the veil of geographic information.
Will sentiment analysis need subculture? A new data augmentation approach
Authors: Zhenhua Wang, Simin He, Guang Xu, Ming Ren
Date: 2023-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Sentiment Analysis

Nowadays, the omnipresence of the Internet has fostered a subculture that congregates around the contemporary milieu. The subculture artfully articulates the intricacies of human feelings by ardently pursuing the allure of novelty, a fact that cannot be disregarded in the sentiment analysis. This paper aims to enrich data through the lens of subculture, to address the insufficient training data faced by sentiment analysis. To this end, a new approach of subculture-based data augmentation (SCDA) is proposed, which engenders enhanced texts for each training text by leveraging the creation of specific subcultural expression generators. The extensive experiments attest to the effectiveness and potential of SCDA. The results also shed light on the phenomenon that disparate subcultural expressions elicit varying degrees of sentiment stimulation. Moreover, an intriguing conjecture arises, suggesting the linear reversibility of certain subcultural expressions.
QS-TTS: Towards Semi-Supervised Text-to-Speech Synthesis via Vector-Quantized Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning
Authors: Haohan Guo, Fenglong Xie, Jiawen Kang, Yujia Xiao, Xixin Wu, Helen Meng
Date: 2023-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Speech Representation Learning, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis, Transfer Learning

This paper proposes a novel semi-supervised TTS framework, QS-TTS, to improve TTS quality with lower supervised data requirements via Vector-Quantized Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning (VQ-S3RL) utilizing more unlabeled speech audio. This framework comprises two VQ-S3R learners: first, the principal learner aims to provide a generative Multi-Stage Multi-Codebook (MSMC) VQ-S3R via the MSMC-VQ-GAN combined with the contrastive S3RL, while decoding it back to the high-quality audio; then, the associate learner further abstracts the MSMC representation into a highly-compact VQ representation through a VQ-VAE. These two generative VQ-S3R learners provide profitable speech representations and pre-trained models for TTS, significantly improving synthesis quality with the lower requirement for supervised data. QS-TTS is evaluated comprehensively under various scenarios via subjective and objective tests in experiments. The results powerfully demonstrate the superior performance of QS-TTS, winning the highest MOS over supervised or semi-supervised baseline TTS approaches, especially in low-resource scenarios. Moreover, comparing various speech representations and transfer learning methods in TTS further validates the notable improvement of the proposed VQ-S3RL to TTS, showing the best audio quality and intelligibility metrics. The trend of slower decay in the synthesis quality of QS-TTS with decreasing supervised data further highlights its lower requirements for supervised data, indicating its great potential in low-resource scenarios.
Spiking based Cellular Learning Automata (SCLA) algorithm for mobile robot motion formulation
Authors: Vahid Pashaei Rad, Vahid Azimi Rad, Saleh Valizadeh Sotubadi
Date: 2023-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

In this paper a new method called SCLA which stands for Spiking based Cellular Learning Automata is proposed for a mobile robot to get to the target from any random initial point. The proposed method is a result of the integration of both cellular automata and spiking neural networks. The environment consists of multiple squares of the same size and the robot only observes the neighboring squares of its current square. It should be stated that the robot only moves either up and down or right and left. The environment returns feedback to the learning automata to optimize its decision making in the next steps resulting in cellular automata training. Simultaneously a spiking neural network is trained to implement long term improvements and reductions on the paths. The results show that the integration of both cellular automata and spiking neural network ends up in reinforcing the proper paths and training time reduction at the same time.