pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ZSVC: Zero-shot Style Voice Conversion with Disentangled Latent Diffusion Models and Adversarial Training
Authors: Xinfa Zhu, Lei He, Yujia Xiao, Xi Wang, Xu Tan, Sheng Zhao, Lei Xie
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Voice Conversion

Style voice conversion aims to transform the speaking style of source speech into a desired style while keeping the original speaker's identity. However, previous style voice conversion approaches primarily focus on well-defined domains such as emotional aspects, limiting their practical applications. In this study, we present ZSVC, a novel Zero-shot Style Voice Conversion approach that utilizes a speech codec and a latent diffusion model with speech prompting mechanism to facilitate in-context learning for speaking style conversion. To disentangle speaking style and speaker timbre, we introduce information bottleneck to filter speaking style in the source speech and employ Uncertainty Modeling Adaptive Instance Normalization (UMAdaIN) to perturb the speaker timbre in the style prompt. Moreover, we propose a novel adversarial training strategy to enhance in-context learning and improve style similarity. Experiments conducted on 44,000 hours of speech data demonstrate the superior performance of ZSVC in generating speech with diverse speaking styles in zero-shot scenarios.
Artifact-free Sound Quality in DNN-based Closed-loop Systems for Audio Processing
Authors: Chuan Wen, Guy Torfs, Sarah Verhulst
Date: 2025-01-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

Recent advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) have significantly improved various audio processing applications, including speech enhancement, synthesis, and hearing aid algorithms. DNN-based closed-loop systems have gained popularity in these applications due to their robust performance and ability to adapt to diverse conditions. Despite their effectiveness, current DNN-based closed-loop systems often suffer from sound quality degradation caused by artifacts introduced by suboptimal sampling methods. To address this challenge, we introduce dCoNNear, a novel DNN architecture designed for seamless integration into closed-loop frameworks. This architecture specifically aims to prevent the generation of spurious artifacts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of dCoNNear through a proof-of-principle example within a closed-loop framework that employs biophysically realistic models of auditory processing for both normal and hearing-impaired profiles to design personalized hearing aid algorithms. Our results show that dCoNNear not only accurately simulates all processing stages of existing non-DNN biophysical models but also eliminates audible artifacts, thereby enhancing the sound quality of the resulting hearing aid algorithms. This study presents a novel, artifact-free closed-loop framework that improves the sound quality of audio processing systems, offering a promising solution for high-fidelity applications in audio and hearing technologies.
Spectral-Aware Low-Rank Adaptation for Speaker Verification
Authors: Zhe Li, Man-Wai Mak, Mert Pilanci, Hung-Yi Lee, Helen Meng
Date: 2025-01-07 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Speaker Verification

Previous research has shown that the principal singular vectors of a pre-trained model's weight matrices capture critical knowledge. In contrast, those associated with small singular values may contain noise or less reliable information. As a result, the LoRA-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approach, which does not constrain the use of the spectral space, may not be effective for tasks that demand high representation capacity. In this study, we enhance existing PEFT techniques by incorporating the spectral information of pre-trained weight matrices into the fine-tuning process. We investigate spectral adaptation strategies with a particular focus on the additive adjustment of top singular vectors. This is accomplished by applying singular value decomposition (SVD) to the pre-trained weight matrices and restricting the fine-tuning within the top spectral space. Extensive speaker verification experiments on VoxCeleb1 and CN-Celeb1 demonstrate enhanced tuning performance with the proposed approach. Code is released at https://github.com/lizhepolyu/SpectralFT.
Universal Speaker Embedding Free Target Speaker Extraction and Personal Voice Activity Detection
Authors: Bang Zeng, Ming Li
Date: 2025-01-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, Activity Detection, Automatic Speech Recognition, Multi-Task Learning, speaker-diarization, Speaker Diarization, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Target Speaker Extraction

Determining 'who spoke what and when' remains challenging in real-world applications. In typical scenarios, Speaker Diarization (SD) is employed to address the problem of 'who spoke when,' while Target Speaker Extraction (TSE) or Target Speaker Automatic Speech Recognition (TSASR) techniques are utilized to resolve the issue of 'who spoke what.' Although some works have achieved promising results by combining SD and TSE systems, inconsistencies remain between SD and TSE regarding both output inconsistency and scenario mismatch. To address these limitations, we propose a Universal Speaker Embedding Free Target Speaker Extraction and Personal Voice Activity Detection (USEF-TP) model that jointly performs TSE and Personal Voice Activity Detection (PVAD). USEF-TP leverages frame-level features obtained through a cross-attention mechanism as speaker-related features instead of using speaker embeddings as in traditional approaches. Additionally, a multi-task learning algorithm with a scenario-aware differentiated loss function is applied to ensure robust performance across various levels of speaker overlap. The experimental results show that our proposed USEF-TP model achieves superior performance in TSE and PVAD tasks on the LibriMix and SparseLibriMix datasets. The results on the CALLHOME dataset demonstrate the competitive performance of our model on real recordings.
Towards a Generalizable Speech Marker for Parkinson's Disease Diagnosis
Authors: Maksim Siniukov, Ellie Xing, Sanaz Attaripour Isfahani, Mohammad Soleymani
Date: 2025-01-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Domain Adaptation, Self-Supervised Learning, Specificity, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by motor symptoms, including altered voice production in the early stages. Early diagnosis is crucial not only to improve PD patients' quality of life but also to enhance the efficacy of potential disease-modifying therapies during early neurodegeneration, a window often missed by current diagnostic tools. In this paper, we propose a more generalizable approach to PD recognition through domain adaptation and self-supervised learning. We demonstrate the generalization capabilities of the proposed approach across diverse datasets in different languages. Our approach leverages HuBERT, a large deep neural network originally trained for speech recognition and further trains it on unlabeled speech data from a population that is similar to the target group, i.e., the elderly, in a self-supervised manner. The model is then fine-tuned and adapted for use across different datasets in multiple languages, including English, Italian, and Spanish. Evaluations on four publicly available PD datasets demonstrate the model's efficacy, achieving an average specificity of 92.1% and an average sensitivity of 91.2%. This method offers objective and consistent evaluations across large populations, addressing the variability inherent in human assessments and providing a non-invasive, cost-effective and accessible diagnostic option.
Breaking Through the Spike: Spike Window Decoding for Accelerated and Precise Automatic Speech Recognition
Authors: Wei zhang, Tian-Hao Zhang, Chao Luo, Hui Zhou, Chao Yang, Xinyuan Qian, Xu-Cheng Yin
Date: 2025-01-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Recently, end-to-end automatic speech recognition has become the mainstream approach in both industry and academia. To optimize system performance in specific scenarios, the Weighted Finite-State Transducer (WFST) is extensively used to integrate acoustic and language models, leveraging its capacity to implicitly fuse language models within static graphs, thereby ensuring robust recognition while also facilitating rapid error correction. However, WFST necessitates a frame-by-frame search of CTC posterior probabilities through autoregression, which significantly hampers inference speed. In this work, we thoroughly investigate the spike property of CTC outputs and further propose the conjecture that adjacent frames to non-blank spikes carry semantic information beneficial to the model. Building on this, we propose the Spike Window Decoding algorithm, which greatly improves the inference speed by making the number of frames decoded in WFST linearly related to the number of spiking frames in the CTC output, while guaranteeing the recognition performance. Our method achieves SOTA recognition accuracy with significantly accelerates decoding speed, proven across both AISHELL-1 and large-scale In-House datasets, establishing a pioneering approach for integrating CTC output with WFST.
Bridging Auditory Perception and Language Comprehension through MEG-Driven Encoding Models
Authors: Matteo Ciferri, Matteo Ferrante, Nicola Toschi
Date: 2024-12-22 00:00:00

Understanding the neural mechanisms behind auditory and linguistic processing is key to advancing cognitive neuroscience. In this study, we use Magnetoencephalography (MEG) data to analyze brain responses to spoken language stimuli. We develop two distinct encoding models: an audio-to-MEG encoder, which uses time-frequency decompositions (TFD) and wav2vec2 latent space representations, and a text-to-MEG encoder, which leverages CLIP and GPT-2 embeddings. Both models successfully predict neural activity, demonstrating significant correlations between estimated and observed MEG signals. However, the text-to-MEG model outperforms the audio-based model, achieving higher Pearson Correlation (PC) score. Spatially, we identify that auditory-based embeddings (TFD and wav2vec2) predominantly activate lateral temporal regions, which are responsible for primary auditory processing and the integration of auditory signals. In contrast, textual embeddings (CLIP and GPT-2) primarily engage the frontal cortex, particularly Broca's area, which is associated with higher-order language processing, including semantic integration and language production, especially in the 8-30 Hz frequency range. The strong involvement of these regions suggests that auditory stimuli are processed through more direct sensory pathways, while linguistic information is encoded via networks that integrate meaning and cognitive control. Our results reveal distinct neural pathways for auditory and linguistic information processing, with higher encoding accuracy for text representations in the frontal regions. These insights refine our understanding of the brain's functional architecture in processing auditory and textual information, offering quantitative advancements in the modelling of neural responses to complex language stimuli.
The Intraday Bitcoin Response to Tether Minting and Burning Events: Asymmetry, Investor Sentiment, And "Whale Alerts" On Twitter
Authors: Aman Saggu
Date: 2025-01-09 00:00:00

Tether Limited has the sole authority to create (mint) and destroy (burn) Tether stablecoins (USDT). This paper investigates Bitcoin's response to USDT supply change events between 2014 and 2021 and identifies an interesting asymmetry between Bitcoin's responses to USDT minting and burning events. Bitcoin responds positively to USDT minting events over 5- to 30-minute event windows, but this response begins declining after 60 minutes. State-dependence is also demonstrated, with Bitcoin prices exhibiting a greater increase when the corresponding USDT minting event coincides with positive investor sentiment and is announced to the public by data service provider, Whale Alert, on Twitter.
Pitch Plane Trajectory Tracking Control for Sounding Rockets via Adaptive Feedback Linearization
Authors: Pedro dos Santos, Paulo Oliveira
Date: 2025-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Pitch control, Position

This paper proposes a pitch plane trajectory tacking control solution for suborbital launch vehicles relying on adaptive feedback linearization. Initially, the 2D dynamics and kinematics for a single-engine, thrust-vector-controlled sounding rocket are obtained for control design purposes. Then, an inner-outer control strategy, which simultaneously tackles attitude and position control, is adopted, with the inner-loop comprising the altitude and pitch control and the outer-loop addressing the horizontal (downrange) position control. Feedback linearization is used to cancel out the non-linearities in both the inner and outer dynamics. Making use of Lyapunov stability theory, an adaptation law, which provides online estimates on the inner-loop aerodynamic uncertainty, is jointly designed with the output tracking controller via adaptive backstepping, ensuring global reference tracking in the region where the feedback linearization is well-defined. The zero dynamics of the inner-stabilized system are then exploited to obtain the outerloop dynamics and derive a Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) with integral action, which can stabilize them as well as reject external disturbances. In the outermost loop, the estimate on the correspondent aerodynamic uncertainty is indirectly obtained by using the inner loop estimates together with known aerodynamics relations. The resulting inner-outer position control solution is proven to be asymptotically stable in the region of interest. Using a single-stage sounding rocket, propelled by a liquid engine, as reference vehicle, different mission scenarios are tested in a simulation environment to verify the adaptability of the proposed control strategy. The system is able to track the requested trajectories while rejecting external wind disturbances. Furthermore, the need to re-tune the control gains in between different mission scenarios is minimal to none.
Coordinated Control of Deformation and Flight for Morphing Aircraft via Meta-Learning and Coupled State-Dependent Riccati Equations
Authors: Hao-Chi Che, Huai-Ning Wu
Date: 2025-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning

In this paper, the coordinated control problem of deformation and flight for morphing aircraft (MA) is studied by using meta-learning (ML) and coupled state-dependent Riccati equations (CSDREs). Our method is built on two principal observations that dynamic models of MA under varying morphing conditions share a morphing condition independent representation function and that the specific morphing condition part lies in a set of linear coefficients. To that end, the domain adversarially invariant meta-learning (DAIML) is employed to learn the shared representation with offline flight data. Based on the learned representation function, the coordinated control of the deformation and flight for MA is formulated as a non-cooperative differential game. The state-dependent feedback control solutions can be derived by addressing a pair of CSDREs. For this purpose, Lyapunov iterations are extended to obtain the positive semidefinite (definite) stabilizing solutions of the CSDREs, and the convergence proof of the proposed algorithm is provided. Finally, a simulation study is carried out to validate the efficacy of the developed coordinated game control strategies.
Promoting Shared Energy Storage Aggregation among High Price-Tolerance Prosumer: An Incentive Deposit and Withdrawal Service
Authors: Xin Lu, Jing Qiu, Cuo Zhang, Gang Lei, Jianguo Zhu
Date: 2025-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning

Many residential prosumers exhibit a high price-tolerance for household electricity bills and a low response to price incentives. This is because the household electricity bills are not inherently high, and the potential for saving on electricity bills through participation in conventional Shared Energy Storage (SES) is limited, which diminishes their motivation to actively engage in SES. Additionally, existing SES models often require prosumers to take additional actions, such as optimizing rental capacity and bidding prices, which happen to be capabilities that typical household prosumers do not possess. To incentivize these high price-tolerance residential prosumers to participate in SES, a novel SES aggregation framework is proposed, which does not require prosumers to take additional actions and allows them to maintain existing energy storage patterns. Compared to conventional long-term operation of SES, the proposed framework introduces an additional short-term construction step during which the energy service provider (ESP) acquires control of the energy storage systems (ESS) and offers electricity deposit and withdrawal services (DWS) with dynamic coefficients, enabling prosumers to withdraw more electricity than they deposit without additional actions. Additionally, a matching mechanism is proposed to align prosumers' electricity consumption behaviors with ESP's optimization strategies. Finally, the dynamic coefficients in DWS and trading strategies are optimized by an improved deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm. Case studies are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed SES aggregation framework with DWS and the matching mechanism.
Collaborative Spacecraft Servicing under Partial Feedback using Lyapunov-based Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Cristian F. Nino, Omkar Sudhir Patil, Christopher D. Petersen, Sean Phillips, Warren E. Dixon
Date: 2025-01-07 00:00:00
Tasks: State Estimation

Multi-agent systems are increasingly applied in space missions, including distributed space systems, resilient constellations, and autonomous rendezvous and docking operations. A critical emerging application is collaborative spacecraft servicing, which encompasses on-orbit maintenance, space debris removal, and swarm-based satellite repositioning. These missions involve servicing spacecraft interacting with malfunctioning or defunct spacecraft under challenging conditions, such as limited state information, measurement inaccuracies, and erratic target behaviors. Existing approaches often rely on assumptions of full state knowledge or single-integrator dynamics, which are impractical for real-world applications involving second-order spacecraft dynamics. This work addresses these challenges by developing a distributed state estimation and tracking framework that requires only relative position measurements and operates under partial state information. A novel $\rho$-filter is introduced to reconstruct unknown states using locally available information, and a Lyapunov-based deep neural network adaptive controller is developed that adaptively compensates for uncertainties stemming from unknown spacecraft dynamics. To ensure the collaborative spacecraft regulation problem is well-posed, a trackability condition is defined. A Lyapunov-based stability analysis is provided to ensure exponential convergence of errors in state estimation and spacecraft regulation to a neighborhood of the origin under the trackability condition. The developed method eliminates the need for expensive velocity sensors or extensive pre-training, offering a practical and robust solution for spacecraft servicing in complex, dynamic environments.
DRL-Based Medium-Term Planning of Renewable-Integrated Self-Scheduling Cascaded Hydropower to Guide Wholesale Market Participation
Authors: Xianbang Chen, Yikui Liu, Neng Fan, Lei Wu
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Scheduling

For self-scheduling cascaded hydropower (S-CHP) facilities, medium-term planning is a critical step that coordinates water availability over the medium-term horizon, providing water usage guidance for their short-term operations in wholesale market participation. Typically, medium-term planning strategies (e.g., reservoir storage targets at the end of each short-term period) are determined by either optimization methods or rules of thumb. However, with the integration of variable renewable energy sources (VRESs), optimization-based methods suffer from deviations between the anticipated and actual reservoir storage, while rules of thumb could be financially conservative, thereby compromising short-term operating profitability in wholesale market participation. This paper presents a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based framework to derive medium-term planning policies for VRES-integrated S-CHPs (VS-CHPs), which can leverage contextual information underneath individual short-term periods and train planning policies by their induced short-term operating profits in wholesale market participation. The proposed DRL-based framework offers two practical merits. First, its planning strategies consider both seasonal requirements of reservoir storage and needs for short-term operating profits. Second, it adopts a multi-parametric programming-based strategy to accelerate the expensive training process associated with multi-step short-term operations. Finally, the DRL-based framework is evaluated on a real-world VS-CHP, demonstrating its advantages over current practice.
A Deep Learning-Based Method for Power System Resilience Evaluation
Authors: Xuesong Wang, Caisheng Wang
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Power systems are critical infrastructure in modern society, and power outages can cause significant disruptions to communities and individuals' daily lives. The resilience of a power system measures its ability to maintain power supply during highly disruptive events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and thunderstorms. Traditional methods for quantifying power system resilience include statistics-based and simulation-based approaches. Statistics-based methods offer a retrospective analysis of system performance without requiring a physical model, while simulation-based methods necessitate detailed physical system information and often simplify real-world scenarios. This paper introduces a deep learning-based method for evaluating power system resilience using historical power outage data. The method leverages the generalization capabilities of deep learning models and incorporates socio-economic and demographic factors as weighting terms to highlight the impacts on vulnerable demographic groups. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through two case studies: one with real historical outage data and the other with simulated outage records. This approach provides valuable insights into measuring power system resilience against hazardous weather events without requiring a physical model of the target systems. The evaluation results can further guide the planning of distributed energy resources for resilience enhancement.
A Novel Observer Design for LuGre Friction Estimation and Control
Authors: Caner Odabaş, Ömer Morgül
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Friction

Dynamic components of the friction may directly impact the stability and performance of the motion control systems. The LuGre model is a prevalent friction model utilized to express this dynamic behavior. Since the LuGre model is very comprehensive, friction compensation based on it might be challenging. Inspired by this, we develop a novel observer to estimate and compensate for LuGre friction. Furthermore, we present a Lyapunov stability analysis to show that observer dynamics are asymptotically stable under certain conditions. Compared to its counterparts, the proposed observer constitutes a simple and standalone scheme that can be utilized with arbitrary control inputs in a straightforward way. As a primary difference, the presented observer estimates velocity and uses the velocity error to estimate friction in addition to control input. The extensive simulations revealed that the introduced observer enhances position and velocity tracking performance in the presence of friction.