Advanced Unstructured Data Processing for ESG Reports: A Methodology for Structured Transformation and Enhanced Analysis

In the evolving field of corporate sustainability, analyzing unstructured Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reports is a complex challenge due to their varied formats and intricate content. This study introduces an innovative methodology utilizing the "Unstructured Core Library", specifically tailored to address these challenges by transforming ESG reports into structured, analyzable formats. Our approach significantly advances the existing research by offering high-precision text cleaning, adept identification and extraction of text from images, and standardization of tables within these reports. Emphasizing its capability to handle diverse data types, including text, images, and tables, the method adeptly manages the nuances of differing page layouts and report styles across industries. This research marks a substantial contribution to the fields of industrial ecology and corporate sustainability assessment, paving the way for the application of advanced NLP technologies and large language models in the analysis of corporate governance and sustainability. Our code is available at https://github.com/linancn/TianGong-AI-Unstructure.git.

Empowering Working Memory for Large Language Model Agents

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive linguistic capabilities. However, a key limitation persists in their lack of human-like memory faculties. LLMs exhibit constrained memory retention across sequential interactions, hindering complex reasoning. This paper explores the potential of applying cognitive psychology's working memory frameworks, to enhance LLM architecture. The limitations of traditional LLM memory designs are analyzed, including their isolation of distinct dialog episodes and lack of persistent memory links. To address this, an innovative model is proposed incorporating a centralized Working Memory Hub and Episodic Buffer access to retain memories across episodes. This architecture aims to provide greater continuity for nuanced contextual reasoning during intricate tasks and collaborative scenarios. While promising, further research is required into optimizing episodic memory encoding, storage, prioritization, retrieval, and security. Overall, this paper provides a strategic blueprint for developing LLM agents with more sophisticated, human-like memory capabilities, highlighting memory mechanisms as a vital frontier in artificial general intelligence.

Multi-Modal Automatic Prosody Annotation with Contrastive Pretraining of SSWP

In the realm of expressive Text-to-Speech (TTS), explicit prosodic boundaries significantly advance the naturalness and controllability of synthesized speech. While human prosody annotation contributes a lot to the performance, it is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process, often resulting in inconsistent outcomes. Despite the availability of extensive supervised data, the current benchmark model still faces performance setbacks. To address this issue, a two-stage automatic annotation pipeline is novelly proposed in this paper. Specifically, in the first stage, we propose contrastive text-speech pretraining of Speech-Silence and Word-Punctuation (SSWP) pairs. The pretraining procedure hammers at enhancing the prosodic space extracted from joint text-speech space. In the second stage, we build a multi-modal prosody annotator, which consists of pretrained encoders, a straightforward yet effective text-speech feature fusion scheme, and a sequence classifier. Extensive experiments conclusively demonstrate that our proposed method excels at automatically generating prosody annotation and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Furthermore, our novel model has exhibited remarkable resilience when tested with varying amounts of data.

Outage Performance of Multi-tier UAV Communication with Random Beam Misalignment

By exploiting the degree of freedom on the altitude, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication can provide ubiquitous communication for future wireless networks. In the case of concurrent transmission of multiple UAVs, the directional beamforming formed by multiple antennas is an effective way to reduce co-channel interference. However, factors such as airflow disturbance or estimation error for UAV communications can cause the occurrence of beam misalignment. In this paper, we investigate the system performance of a multi-tier UAV communication network with the consideration of unstable beam alignment. In particular, we propose a tractable random model to capture the impacts of beam misalignment in the 3D space. Based on this, by utilizing stochastic geometry, an analytical framework for obtaining the outage probability in the downlink of a multi-tier UAV communication network for the closest distance association scheme and the maximum average power association scheme is established. The accuracy of the analysis is verified by Monte-Carlo simulations. The results indicate that in the presence of random beam misalignment, the optimal number of UAV antennas needs to be adjusted to be relatively larger when the density of UAVs increases or the altitude of UAVs becomes higher.

OTFS-based Robust MMSE Precoding Design in Over-the-air Computation

Over-the-air computation (AirComp), as a data aggregation method that can improve network efficiency by exploiting the superposition characteristics of wireless channels, has received much attention recently. Meanwhile, the orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation can provide a strong Doppler resilience and facilitates reliable transmission for high-mobility communications. Hence, in this work, we investigate an OTFS-based AirComp system in the presence of time-frequency dual-selective channels. In particular, we commence from the development of a novel transmission framework for the considered system, where the pilot signal is sent together with data and the channel estimation is implemented according to the echo from the access point to the sensor, thereby reducing the overhead of channel state information (CSI) feedback. Hereafter, based on the CSI estimated from the previous frame, a robust precoding matrix aiming at minimizing mean square error in the current frame is designed, which takes into account the estimation error from the receiver noise and the outdated CSI. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed robust precoding scheme by comparing it with the non-robust precoding. The performance gain is more obvious in high signal-to-noise ratio in case of large channel estimation errors.

Nonparametric Decentralized Detection and Sparse Sensor Selection via Multi-Sensor Online Kernel Scalar Quantization

Signal classification problems arise in a wide variety of applications, and their demand is only expected to grow. In this paper, we focus on the wireless sensor network signal classification setting, where each sensor forwards quantized signals to a fusion center to be classified. Our primary goal is to train a decision function and quantizers across the sensors to maximize the classification performance in an online manner. Moreover, we are interested in sparse sensor selection using a marginalized weighted kernel approach to improve network resource efficiency by disabling less reliable sensors with minimal effect on classification performance.To achieve our goals, we develop a multi-sensor online kernel scalar quantization (MSOKSQ) learning strategy that operates on the sensor outputs at the fusion center. Our theoretical analysis reveals how the proposed algorithm affects the quantizers across the sensors. Additionally, we provide a convergence analysis of our online learning approach by studying its relationship to batch learning. We conduct numerical studies under different classification and sensor network settings which demonstrate the accuracy gains from optimizing different components of MSOKSQ and robustness to reduction in the number of sensors selected.

RefineGAN: Universally Generating Waveform Better than Ground Truth with Highly Accurate Pitch and Intensity Responses

Most GAN(Generative Adversarial Network)-based approaches towards high-fidelity waveform generation heavily rely on discriminators to improve their performance. However, the over-use of this GAN method introduces much uncertainty into the generation process and often result in mismatches of pitch and intensity, which is fatal when it comes to sensitive using cases such as singing voice synthesis(SVS). To address this problem, we propose RefineGAN, a high-fidelity neural vocoder with faster-than-real-time generation capability, and focused on the robustness, pitch and intensity accuracy, and full-band audio generation. We employed a pitch-guided refine architecture with a multi-scale spectrogram-based loss function to help stabilize the training process and maintain the robustness of the neural vocoder while using the GAN-based training method. Audio generated using this method shows a better performance in subjective tests when compared with the ground-truth audio. This result shows that the fidelity is even improved during the waveform reconstruction by eliminating defects produced by the speaker and the recording procedure. Moreover, a further study shows that models trained on a specified type of data can perform on totally unseen language and unseen speaker identically well. Generated sample pairs are provided on https://timedomain-tech.github.io/refinegan/.

Image Denoising by Gaussian Patch Mixture Model and Low Rank Patches

Non-local self-similarity based low rank algorithms are the state-of-the-art methods for image denoising. In this paper, a new method is proposed by solving two issues: how to improve similar patches matching accuracy and build an appropriate low rank matrix approximation model for Gaussian noise. For the first issue, similar patches can be found locally or globally. Local patch matching is to find similar patches in a large neighborhood which can alleviate noise effect, but the number of patches may be insufficient. Global patch matching is to determine enough similar patches but the error rate of patch matching may be higher. Based on this, we first use local patch matching method to reduce noise and then use Gaussian patch mixture model to achieve global patch matching. The second issue is that there is no low rank matrix approximation model to adapt to Gaussian noise. We build a new model according to the characteristics of Gaussian noise, then prove that there is a globally optimal solution of the model. By solving the two issues, experimental results are reported to show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art denoising methods includes several deep learning ones in both PSNR / SSIM values and visual quality.