A Dual-Path Framework with Frequency-and-Time Excited Network for Anomalous Sound Detection

In contrast to human speech, machine-generated sounds of the same type often exhibit consistent frequency characteristics and discernible temporal periodicity. However, leveraging these dual attributes in anomaly detection remains relatively under-explored. In this paper, we propose an automated dual-path framework that learns prominent frequency and temporal patterns for diverse machine types. One pathway uses a novel Frequency-and-Time Excited Network (FTE-Net) to learn the salient features across frequency and time axes of the spectrogram. It incorporates a Frequency-and-Time Chunkwise Encoder (FTC-Encoder) and an excitation network. The other pathway uses a 1D convolutional network for utterance-level spectrum. Experimental results on the DCASE 2023 task 2 dataset show the state-of-the-art performance of our proposed method. Moreover, visualizations of the intermediate feature maps in the excitation network are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of our method.

FR-SLAM: A SLAM Improvement Method Based on Floor Plan Registration

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technology enables the construction of environmental maps and localization, serving as a key technique for indoor autonomous navigation of mobile robots. Traditional SLAM methods typically require exhaustive traversal of all rooms during indoor navigation to obtain a complete map, resulting in lengthy path planning times and prolonged time to reach target points. Moreover, cumulative errors during motion lead to inaccurate robot localization, impacting navigation efficiency.This paper proposes an improved SLAM method, FR-SLAM, based on floor plan registration, utilizing a morphology-based floor plan registration algorithm to align and transform original floor plans. This approach facilitates the rapid acquisition of comprehensive motion maps and efficient path planning, enabling swift navigation to target positions within a shorter timeframe. To enhance registration and robot motion localization accuracy, a real-time update strategy is employed, comparing the current position's building structure with the map and dynamically updating floor plan registration results for precise localization. Comparative tests conducted on real and simulated datasets demonstrate that, compared to other benchmark algorithms, this method achieves higher floor plan registration accuracy and shorter time consumption to reach target positions.

Perceiver-Prompt: Flexible Speaker Adaptation in Whisper for Chinese Disordered Speech Recognition

Disordered speech recognition profound implications for improving the quality of life for individuals afflicted with, for example, dysarthria. Dysarthric speech recognition encounters challenges including limited data, substantial dissimilarities between dysarthric and non-dysarthric speakers, and significant speaker variations stemming from the disorder. This paper introduces Perceiver-Prompt, a method for speaker adaptation that utilizes P-Tuning on the Whisper large-scale model. We first fine-tune Whisper using LoRA and then integrate a trainable Perceiver to generate fixed-length speaker prompts from variable-length inputs, to improve model recognition of Chinese dysarthric speech. Experimental results from our Chinese dysarthric speech dataset demonstrate consistent improvements in recognition performance with Perceiver-Prompt. Relative reduction up to 13.04% in CER is obtained over the fine-tuned Whisper.

Automatic Assessment of Dysarthria Using Audio-visual Vowel Graph Attention Network

Automatic assessment of dysarthria remains a highly challenging task due to high variability in acoustic signals and the limited data. Currently, research on the automatic assessment of dysarthria primarily focuses on two approaches: one that utilizes expert features combined with machine learning, and the other that employs data-driven deep learning methods to extract representations. Research has demonstrated that expert features are effective in representing pathological characteristics, while deep learning methods excel at uncovering latent features. Therefore, integrating the advantages of expert features and deep learning to construct a neural network architecture based on expert knowledge may be beneficial for interpretability and assessment performance. In this context, the present paper proposes a vowel graph attention network based on audio-visual information, which effectively integrates the strengths of expert knowledges and deep learning. Firstly, various features were combined as inputs, including knowledge based acoustical features and deep learning based pre-trained representations. Secondly, the graph network structure based on vowel space theory was designed, allowing for a deep exploration of spatial correlations among vowels. Finally, visual information was incorporated into the model to further enhance its robustness and generalizability. The method exhibited superior performance in regression experiments targeting Frenchay scores compared to existing approaches.

Unsupervised Deep Probabilistic Approach for Partial Point Cloud Registration

Deep point cloud registration methods face challenges to partial overlaps and rely on labeled data. To address these issues, we propose UDPReg, an unsupervised deep probabilistic registration framework for point clouds with partial overlaps. Specifically, we first adopt a network to learn posterior probability distributions of Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) from point clouds. To handle partial point cloud registration, we apply the Sinkhorn algorithm to predict the distribution-level correspondences under the constraint of the mixing weights of GMMs. To enable unsupervised learning, we design three distribution consistency-based losses: self-consistency, cross-consistency, and local contrastive. The self-consistency loss is formulated by encouraging GMMs in Euclidean and feature spaces to share identical posterior distributions. The cross-consistency loss derives from the fact that the points of two partially overlapping point clouds belonging to the same clusters share the cluster centroids. The cross-consistency loss allows the network to flexibly learn a transformation-invariant posterior distribution of two aligned point clouds. The local contrastive loss facilitates the network to extract discriminative local features. Our UDPReg achieves competitive performance on the 3DMatch/3DLoMatch and ModelNet/ModelLoNet benchmarks.

Deeply Supervised Layer Selective Attention Network: Towards Label-Efficient Learning for Medical Image Classification

Labeling medical images depends on professional knowledge, making it difficult to acquire large amount of annotated medical images with high quality in a short time. Thus, making good use of limited labeled samples in a small dataset to build a high-performance model is the key to medical image classification problem. In this paper, we propose a deeply supervised Layer Selective Attention Network (LSANet), which comprehensively uses label information in feature-level and prediction-level supervision. For feature-level supervision, in order to better fuse the low-level features and high-level features, we propose a novel visual attention module, Layer Selective Attention (LSA), to focus on the feature selection of different layers. LSA introduces a weight allocation scheme which can dynamically adjust the weighting factor of each auxiliary branch during the whole training process to further enhance deeply supervised learning and ensure its generalization. For prediction-level supervision, we adopt the knowledge synergy strategy to promote hierarchical information interactions among all supervision branches via pairwise knowledge matching. Using the public dataset, MedMNIST, which is a large-scale benchmark for biomedical image classification covering diverse medical specialties, we evaluate LSANet on multiple mainstream CNN architectures and various visual attention modules. The experimental results show the substantial improvements of our proposed method over its corresponding counterparts, demonstrating that LSANet can provide a promising solution for label-efficient learning in the field of medical image classification.

StoryTrans: Non-Parallel Story Author-Style Transfer with Discourse Representations and Content Enhancing

Non-parallel text style transfer is an important task in natural language generation. However, previous studies concentrate on the token or sentence level, such as sentence sentiment and formality transfer, but neglect long style transfer at the discourse level. Long texts usually involve more complicated author linguistic preferences such as discourse structures than sentences. In this paper, we formulate the task of non-parallel story author-style transfer, which requires transferring an input story into a specified author style while maintaining source semantics. To tackle this problem, we propose a generation model, named StoryTrans, which leverages discourse representations to capture source content information and transfer them to target styles with learnable style embeddings. We use an additional training objective to disentangle stylistic features from the learned discourse representation to prevent the model from degenerating to an auto-encoder. Moreover, to enhance content preservation, we design a mask-and-fill framework to explicitly fuse style-specific keywords of source texts into generation. Furthermore, we constructed new datasets for this task in Chinese and English, respectively. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms strong baselines in overall performance of style transfer and content preservation.

Artificial Intelligence-Based Image Enhancement in PET Imaging: Noise Reduction and Resolution Enhancement

High noise and low spatial resolution are two key confounding factors that limit the qualitative and quantitative accuracy of PET images. AI models for image denoising and deblurring are becoming increasingly popular for post-reconstruction enhancement of PET images. We present here a detailed review of recent efforts for AI-based PET image enhancement with a focus on network architectures, data types, loss functions, and evaluation metrics. We also highlight emerging areas in this field that are quickly gaining popularity, identify barriers to large-scale adoption of AI models for PET image enhancement, and discuss future directions.

Improved Padding in CNNs for Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping

Recently, deep learning methods have been proposed for quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) data processing: background field removal, field-to-source inversion, and single-step QSM reconstruction. However, the conventional padding mechanism used in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can introduce spatial artifacts, especially in QSM background field removal and single-step QSM which requires inference from total fields with extreme large values at the edge boundaries of volume of interest. To address this issue, we propose an improved padding technique which utilizes the neighboring valid voxels to estimate the invalid voxels of feature maps at volume boundaries in the neural networks. Studies using simulated and in-vivo data show that the proposed padding greatly improves estimation accuracy and reduces artifacts in the results in the tasks of background field removal, field-to-source inversion, and single-step QSM reconstruction.

Holographic Maxwellian near-eye display with adjustable and continuous eye-box replication

The Maxwellian display presents always-focused images to the viewer, alleviating the vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC) in near-eye displays (NEDs). However, the limited eyebox of the typical Maxwellian display prevents it from wider applications. We propose a holographic Maxwellian near-eye display with adjustable and continuous eye-box replication. Holographic display provides a way to match the human pupil size with the interval of the replicated eyeboxes, making it possible to eliminate or alleviate double image or blind area problem, which exists long in eyebox expansion for Maxwellian display. Besides, seamless image conversion between viewing points has been achieved through hologram pre-processing. Optical experiment confirms that the interval between replicated eyeboxes is dynamically adjustable, ranging from 2mm to 6mm. The proposed display can present always-focused images and seamless conversion among viewpoints with 5.32$^\circ$ horizontal field of view, and 9mmH * 3mmV eyebox.