pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ASRRL-TTS: Agile Speaker Representation Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-Speech Speaker Adaptation
Authors: Ruibo Fu, Xin Qi, Zhengqi Wen, JianHua Tao, Tao Wang, Chunyu Qiang, Zhiyong Wang, Yi Lu, Xiaopeng Wang, Shuchen Shi, Yukun Liu, Xuefei Liu, Shuai Zhang
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Speaker adaptation, which involves cloning voices from unseen speakers in the Text-to-Speech task, has garnered significant interest due to its numerous applications in multi-media fields. Despite recent advancements, existing methods often struggle with inadequate speaker representation accuracy and overfitting, particularly in limited reference speeches scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose an Agile Speaker Representation Reinforcement Learning strategy to enhance speaker similarity in speaker adaptation tasks. ASRRL is the first work to apply reinforcement learning to improve the modeling accuracy of speaker embeddings in speaker adaptation, addressing the challenge of decoupling voice content and timbre. Our approach introduces two action strategies tailored to different reference speeches scenarios. In the single-sentence scenario, a knowledge-oriented optimal routine searching RL method is employed to expedite the exploration and retrieval of refinement information on the fringe of speaker representations. In the few-sentence scenario, we utilize a dynamic RL method to adaptively fuse reference speeches, enhancing the robustness and accuracy of speaker modeling. To achieve optimal results in the target domain, a multi-scale fusion scoring mechanism based reward model that evaluates speaker similarity, speech quality, and intelligibility across three dimensions is proposed, ensuring that improvements in speaker similarity do not compromise speech quality or intelligibility. The experimental results on the LibriTTS and VCTK datasets within mainstream TTS frameworks demonstrate the extensibility and generalization capabilities of the proposed ASRRL method. The results indicate that the ASRRL method significantly outperforms traditional fine-tuning approaches, achieving higher speaker similarity and better overall speech quality with limited reference speeches.
Seed-ASR: Understanding Diverse Speech and Contexts with LLM-based Speech Recognition
Authors: Ye Bai, Jingping Chen, Jitong Chen, Wei Chen, Zhuo Chen, Chuang Ding, Linhao Dong, Qianqian Dong, Yujiao Du, Kepan Gao, Lu Gao, Yi Guo, Minglun Han, Ting Han, Wenchao Hu, Xinying Hu, Yuxiang Hu, Deyu Hua, Lu Huang, Mingkun Huang, Youjia Huang, Jishuo Jin, Fanliu Kong, Zongwei Lan, Tianyu Li, Xiaoyang Li, Zeyang Li, Zehua Lin, Rui Liu, Shouda Liu, Lu Lu, Yizhou Lu, Jingting Ma, Shengtao Ma, Yulin Pei, Chen Shen, Tian Tan, Xiaogang Tian, Ming Tu, Bo wang, Hao Wang, Yuping Wang, Yuxuan Wang, Hanzhang Xia, Rui Xia, Shuangyi Xie, Hongmin Xu, Meng Yang, Bihong Zhang, Jun Zhang, Wanyi Zhang, Yang Zhang, Yawei Zhang, Yijie Zheng, Ming Zou
Date: 2024-07-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Modern automatic speech recognition (ASR) model is required to accurately transcribe diverse speech signals (from different domains, languages, accents, etc) given the specific contextual information in various application scenarios. Classic end-to-end models fused with extra language models perform well, but mainly in data matching scenarios and are gradually approaching a bottleneck. In this work, we introduce Seed-ASR, a large language model (LLM) based speech recognition model. Seed-ASR is developed based on the framework of audio conditioned LLM (AcLLM), leveraging the capabilities of LLMs by inputting continuous speech representations together with contextual information into the LLM. Through stage-wise large-scale training and the elicitation of context-aware capabilities in LLM, Seed-ASR demonstrates significant improvement over end-to-end models on comprehensive evaluation sets, including multiple domains, accents/dialects and languages. Additionally, Seed-ASR can be further deployed to support specific needs in various scenarios without requiring extra language models. Compared to recently released large ASR models, Seed-ASR achieves 10%-40% reduction in word (or character, for Chinese) error rates on Chinese and English public test sets, further demonstrating its powerful performance.
Who Finds This Voice Attractive? A Large-Scale Experiment Using In-the-Wild Data
Authors: Hitoshi Suda, Aya Watanabe, Shinnosuke Takamichi
Date: 2024-07-05 00:00:00

This paper introduces CocoNut-Humoresque, an open-source large-scale speech likability corpus that includes speech segments and their per-listener likability scores. Evaluating voice likability is essential to designing preferable voices for speech systems, such as dialogue or announcement systems. In this study, we let 885 listeners rate 1800 speech segments of a wide range of speakers regarding their likability. When constructing the corpus, we also collected the multiple speaker attributes: genders, ages, and favorite YouTube videos. Therefore, the corpus enables the large-scale statistical analysis of voice likability regarding both speaker and listener factors. This paper describes the construction methodology and preliminary data analysis to reveal the gender and age biases in voice likability. In addition, the relationship between the likability and two acoustic features, the fundamental frequencies and the x-vectors of given utterances, is also investigated.
Where's That Voice Coming? Continual Learning for Sound Source Localization
Authors: Yang Xiao, Rohan Kumar Das
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Exemplar-Free, Incremental Learning, Sound Source Localization

Sound source localization (SSL) is essential for many speech-processing applications. Deep learning models have achieved high performance, but often fail when the training and inference environments differ. Adapting SSL models to dynamic acoustic conditions faces a major challenge: catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we propose an exemplar-free continual learning strategy for SSL (CL-SSL) to address such a forgetting phenomenon. CL-SSL applies task-specific sub-networks to adapt across diverse acoustic environments while retaining previously learned knowledge. It also uses a scaling mechanism to limit parameter growth, ensuring consistent performance across incremental tasks. We evaluated CL-SSL on simulated data with varying microphone distances and real-world data with different noise levels. The results demonstrate CL-SSL's ability to maintain high accuracy with minimal parameter increase, offering an efficient solution for SSL applications.
UCIL: An Unsupervised Class Incremental Learning Approach for Sound Event Detection
Authors: Yang Xiao, Rohan Kumar Das
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Continual Learning, Event Detection, Incremental Learning, Sound Event Detection, unsupervised class-incremental learning

This work explores class-incremental learning (CIL) for sound event detection (SED), advancing adaptability towards real-world scenarios. CIL's success in domains like computer vision inspired our SED-tailored method, addressing the unique challenges of diverse and complex audio environments. Our approach employs an independent unsupervised learning framework with a distillation loss function to integrate new sound classes while preserving the SED model consistency across incremental tasks. We further enhance this framework with a sample selection strategy for unlabeled data and a balanced exemplar update mechanism, ensuring varied and illustrative sound representations. Evaluating various continual learning methods on the DCASE 2023 Task 4 dataset, we find that our research offers insights into each method's applicability for real-world SED systems that can have newly added sound classes. The findings also delineate future directions of CIL in dynamic audio settings.
WildDESED: An LLM-Powered Dataset for Wild Domestic Environment Sound Event Detection System
Authors: Yang Xiao, Rohan Kumar Das
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Detection, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Sound Event Detection

This work aims to advance sound event detection (SED) research by presenting a new large language model (LLM)-powered dataset namely wild domestic environment sound event detection (WildDESED). It is crafted as an extension to the original DESED dataset to reflect diverse acoustic variability and complex noises in home settings. We leveraged LLMs to generate eight different domestic scenarios based on target sound categories of the DESED dataset. Then we enriched the scenarios with a carefully tailored mixture of noises selected from AudioSet and ensured no overlap with target sound. We consider widely popular convolutional neural recurrent network to study WildDESED dataset, which depicts its challenging nature. We then apply curriculum learning by gradually increasing noise complexity to enhance the model's generalization capabilities across various noise levels. Our results with this approach show improvements within the noisy environment, validating the effectiveness on the WildDESED dataset promoting noise-robust SED advancements.
On Simulation of Power Systems and Microgrid Components with SystemC-AMS
Authors: Rahul Bhadani, Satyaki Banik, Hao Tu, Srdjan Lukic, Gabor Karsai
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00

Cyber-physical systems such as microgrids consist of interconnected components, localized power systems, and distributed energy resources with clearly defined electrical boundaries. They can function independently but can also work in tandem with the main grid. Power system converters and their control loops play an essential role in stabilizing grids and interfacing a microgrid with the main grid. The optimal selection of microgrid components for installation is expensive. Simulation of microgrids provides a cost-effective solution. However, when studying the electromagnetic transient response, their simulation is slow. Furthermore, software packages facilitating electromagnetic transient response may be prohibitively expensive. This paper presents a faster method for simulating the electromagnetic transient response of microgrid components using SystemC-AMS. We present a use case of a photovoltaic grid-following inverter with a phase-locked loop to track reference active and reactive power. Our results demonstrate that the simulation performed using SystemC-AMS is roughly three times faster than the benchmark simulation conducted using Simulink. Our implementation of a photovoltaic grid-following inverter equipped with a phase-locked loop for monitoring reference active and reactive power reveals that the simulation executed using SystemC-AMS is approximately three times faster than the benchmark simulation carried out using Simulink. Our implementation adopts a model-based design and produces a library of components that can be used to construct increasingly complex grid architectures. Additionally, the C-based nature allows for the integration of external libraries for added real-time capability and optimization functionality. We also present a use case for real-time simulation using a DC microgrid with a constant resistive load.
An Outline of Prognostics and Health Management Large Model: Concepts, Paradigms, and Challenges
Authors: Laifa Tao, Shangyu Li, Haifei Liu, Qixuan Huang, Liang Ma, Guoao Ning, YiLing Chen, Yunlong Wu, Bin Li, Weiwei Zhang, Zhengduo Zhao, Wenchao Zhan, Wenyan Cao, Chao Wang, Hongmei Liu, Jian Ma, Mingliang Suo, Yujie Cheng, Yu Ding, Dengwei Song, Chen Lu
Date: 2024-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Prognosis

Prognosis and Health Management (PHM), critical for ensuring task completion by complex systems and preventing unexpected failures, is widely adopted in aerospace, manufacturing, maritime, rail, energy, etc. However, PHM's development is constrained by bottlenecks like generalization, interpretation and verification abilities. Presently, generative artificial intelligence (AI), represented by Large Model, heralds a technological revolution with the potential to fundamentally reshape traditional technological fields and human production methods. Its capabilities, including strong generalization, reasoning, and generative attributes, present opportunities to address PHM's bottlenecks. To this end, based on a systematic analysis of the current challenges and bottlenecks in PHM, as well as the research status and advantages of Large Model, we propose a novel concept and three progressive paradigms of Prognosis and Health Management Large Model (PHM-LM) through the integration of the Large Model with PHM. Subsequently, we provide feasible technical approaches for PHM-LM to bolster PHM's core capabilities within the framework of the three paradigms. Moreover, to address core issues confronting PHM, we discuss a series of technical challenges of PHM-LM throughout the entire process of construction and application. This comprehensive effort offers a holistic PHM-LM technical framework, and provides avenues for new PHM technologies, methodologies, tools, platforms and applications, which also potentially innovates design, research & development, verification and application mode of PHM. And furthermore, a new generation of PHM with AI will also capably be realized, i.e., from custom to generalized, from discriminative to generative, and from theoretical conditions to practical applications.
A GPT-based Code Review System for Programming Language Learning
Authors: Lee Dong-Kyu
Date: 2024-06-21 00:00:00

The increasing demand for programming language education and growing class sizes require immediate and personalized feedback. However, traditional code review methods have limitations in providing this level of feedback. As the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT for generating accurate solutions and timely code reviews are verified, this research proposes a system that employs GPT-4 to offer learner-friendly code reviews and minimize the risk of AI-assist cheating. To provide learner-friendly code reviews, a dataset was collected from an online judge system, and this dataset was utilized to develop and enhance the system's prompts. In addition, to minimize AI-assist cheating, the system flow was designed to provide code reviews only for code submitted by a learner, and a feature that highlights code lines to fix was added. After the initial system was deployed on the web, software education experts conducted usability test. Based on the results, improvement strategies were developed to improve code review and code correctness check module, thereby enhancing the system. The improved system underwent evaluation by software education experts based on four criteria: strict code correctness checks, response time, lower API call costs, and the quality of code reviews. The results demonstrated a performance to accurately identify error types, shorten response times, lower API call costs, and maintain high-quality code reviews without major issues. Feedback from participants affirmed the tool's suitability for teaching programming to primary and secondary school students. Given these benefits, the system is anticipated to be a efficient learning tool in programming language learning for educational settings.
Chronological Analysis of Rigvedic Mandalas using Social Networks
Authors: Shreekanth M Prabhu, Gopalpillai Radhakrishnan
Date: 2024-07-01 00:00:00

Establishing the chronology of the Vedas has interested scholars for the last two centuries. The oldest among them is Rig-Veda which has ten Mandalas, each composed separately. In this paper, we look at deciphering plausible pointers to the internal chronology of the Mandalas, by focusing on Gods and Goddesses worshiped in different Mandalas. We apply text analysis to the Mandalas using Clustering Techniques based on Cosine Similarity. Then we represent the association of deities with Mandalas using a grid-based Social Network that is amenable to chronological analysis and demonstrates the benefits of using Social Network Analysis for the problem at hand. Further, we analyze references to rivers to arrive at additional correlations. The approach used can be deployed generically to analyze other kinds of references and mentions and arrive at more substantive inferences.
Chance-Constrained Energy Storage Pricing for Social Welfare Maximization
Authors: Ning Qi, Ningkun Zheng, Bolun Xu
Date: 2024-07-09 00:00:00

This paper proposes a novel framework to price energy storage in economic dispatch with a social welfare maximization objective. This framework can be utilized by power system operators to generate default bids for storage or to benchmark market power in bids submitted by storage participants. We derive a theoretical framework based on a two-stage chance-constrained formulation which systematically incorporates system balance constraints and uncertainty considerations. We present tractable reformulations for the joint chance constraints. Analytical results show that the storage opportunity cost is convex and increases with greater net load uncertainty. We also show that the storage opportunity prices are bounded and are linearly coupled with future energy and reserve prices. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on an ISO-NE test system and compare it with a price-taker storage profit-maximizing bidding model. Simulation results show that the proposed market design reduces electricity payments by an average of 17.4% and system costs by 3.9% while reducing storage's profit margins, and these reductions scale up with the renewable and storage capacity.
Distribution System Reconfiguration to Mitigate Load Altering Attacks via Stackelberg Games
Authors: Sajjad Maleki, E. Veronica Belmaga, Charalambos Konstantinou, Subhash Lakshminarayana
Date: 2024-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization

The integration of IoT-controllable devices in power systems (such as smart electric vehicle charging stations, heat pumps, etc.), despite their benefits, raises novel cybersecurity concerns. Vulnerabilities in these devices can be leveraged to launch load-altering attacks (LAAs) that can potentially compromise the safety of power systems. In this paper, we analyze the impact of LAAs on the voltage profile of distribution networks (DNs). We first derive closed-form expressions to quantify the attacks' impact. Using the insights derived from this analysis, we then propose a reactive defense method to mitigate LAAs based on reconfiguring the DNs. We also study optimal defense strategies that are robust to LAAs by exploiting non-cooperative sequential game theory. The proposed solution takes into account the potential uncertainties in the attack localization. Furthermore, we propose a Bayesian optimization (BO) approach to compute the equilibrium of the game, which reduces the computational burden. Our results show that attacks launched on the deepest nodes in the DN have the most detrimental effect on the grid voltage profile. Furthermore, the proposed game-theoretic strategy successfully mitigates the effect of the attack while ensuring minimum system reconfiguration.
Detection-Triggered Recursive Impact Mitigation against Secondary False Data Injection Attacks in Microgrids
Authors: Mengxiang Liu, Xin Zhang, Rui Zhang, Zhuoran Zhou, Zhenyong Zhang, Ruilong Deng
Date: 2024-07-09 00:00:00

The cybersecurity of microgrid has received widespread attentions due to the frequently reported attack accidents against distributed energy resource (DER) manufactures. Numerous impact mitigation schemes have been proposed to reduce or eliminate the impacts of false data injection attacks (FDIAs). Nevertheless, the existing methods either requires at least one neighboring trustworthy agent or may bring in unacceptable cost burdens. This paper aims to propose a detection-triggered recursive impact mitigation scheme that can timely and precisely counter the secondary FDIAs (SFDIAs) against the communication links among DERs. Once triggering attack alarms, the power line current readings will be utilised to observe the voltage bias injections through the physical interconnections among DERs, based on which the current bias injections can be recursively reconstructed from the residuals generated by unknown input observers (UIOs). The attack impacts are eliminated by subtracting the reconstructed bias from the incoming compromised data. The proposed mitigation method can work even in the worst case where all communication links are under SFDIAs and only require extra current sensors. The bias reconstruction performance under initial errors and system noises is theoretically analysed and the reconstruction error is proved to be bounded regardless of the electrical parameters. To avoid deploying current sensors on all power lines, a cost-effective deployment strategy is presented to secure a spanning tree set of communication links that can guarantee the secondary control performance. Extensive validation studies are conducted in MATLAB/SIMULINK and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbeds to validate the proposed method's effectiveness against single/multiple and continuous/discontinuous SFDIAs.
Enhanced Battery Degradation-Aware Scheduling for Distribution Network with Electric Vehicle Load
Authors: Vijay Babu Pamshetti, Wei zhang, Andy Man-Fai Ng, Qingyu Yan, Kuan Tak Tan
Date: 2024-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Batteries play a key role in today's power grid. In this paper, we investigate the impact of battery degradation on the distribution network. We formulate a multi-objective framework for optimizing battery scheduling with the goals of minimizing monetary costs and improving network performance. Our framework incorporates energy purchase and battery degradation into the costs and measures the network performance through energy losses and voltage deviation. We propose Bach for battery degradation-aware cheduling based on e-constraint and fuzzy logic methods. Bach is implemented for the IEEE 33-bus network for an experimental study. The results show the effectiveness of Bach in optimizing costs and performance simultaneously with battery degradation awareness and demonstrate the flexibility of further customization.
Real-time Tracking in a Status Update System with an Imperfect Feedback Channel
Authors: Saeid Sadeghi Vilni, Abolfazl Zakeri, Mohammad Moltafet, Marian Codreanu
Date: 2024-07-09 00:00:00

We consider a status update system consisting of a finite-state Markov source, an energy-harvesting-enabled transmitter, and a sink. The forward and feedback channels between the transmitter and the sink are error-prone. We study the problem of minimizing the long-term time average of a (generic) distortion function subject to an energy causality constraint. Since the feedback channel is error-prone, the transmitter has only partial knowledge about the transmission results and, consequently, about the estimate of the source state at the sink. Therefore, we model the problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), which is then cast as a belief-MDP problem. The infinite belief space makes solving the belief-MDP difficult. Thus, by exploiting a specific property of the belief evolution, we truncate the state space and formulate a finite-state MDP problem, which is then solved using the relative value iteration algorithm (RVIA). Furthermore, we propose a low-complexity transmission policy in which the belief-MDP problem is transformed into a sequence of per-slot optimization problems. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed policies and their superiority compared to a baseline policy. Moreover, we numerically show that the proposed policies have switching-type structures.