Mitigating Audiovisual Mismatch in Visual-Guide Audio Captioning

Current vision-guided audio captioning systems frequently fail to address audiovisual misalignment in real-world scenarios, such as dubbed content or off-screen sounds. To bridge this critical gap, we present an entropy-aware gated fusion framework that dynamically modulates visual information flow through cross-modal uncertainty quantification. Our novel approach employs attention entropy analysis in cross-attention layers to automatically identify and suppress misleading visual cues during modal fusion. Complementing this architecture, we develop a batch-wise audiovisual shuffling technique that generates synthetic mismatched training pairs, greatly enhancing model resilience against alignment noise. Evaluations on the AudioCaps benchmark demonstrate our system's superior performance over existing baselines, especially in mismatched modality scenarios. Furthermore, our solution demonstrates an approximately 6x improvement in inference speed compared to the baseline.

Hearing from Silence: Reasoning Audio Descriptions from Silent Videos via Vision-Language Model

Humans can intuitively infer sounds from silent videos, but whether multimodal large language models can perform modal-mismatch reasoning without accessing target modalities remains relatively unexplored. Current text-assisted-video-to-audio (VT2A) methods excel in video foley tasks but struggle to acquire audio descriptions during inference. We introduce the task of Reasoning Audio Descriptions from Silent Videos (SVAD) to address this challenge and investigate vision-language models' (VLMs) capabilities on this task. To further enhance the VLMs' reasoning capacity for the SVAD task, we construct a CoT-AudioCaps dataset and propose a Chain-of-Thought-based supervised fine-tuning strategy. Experiments on SVAD and subsequent VT2A tasks demonstrate our method's effectiveness in two key aspects: significantly improving VLMs' modal-mismatch reasoning for SVAD and effectively addressing the challenge of acquiring audio descriptions during VT2A inference.

DynamicDTA: Drug-Target Binding Affinity Prediction Using Dynamic Descriptors and Graph Representation

Predicting drug-target binding affinity (DTA) is essential for identifying potential therapeutic candidates in drug discovery. However, most existing models rely heavily on static protein structures, often overlooking the dynamic nature of proteins, which is crucial for capturing conformational flexibility that will be beneficial for protein binding interactions. We introduce DynamicDTA, an innovative deep learning framework that incorporates static and dynamic protein features to enhance DTA prediction. The proposed DynamicDTA takes three types of inputs, including drug sequence, protein sequence, and dynamic descriptors. A molecular graph representation of the drug sequence is generated and subsequently processed through graph convolutional network, while the protein sequence is encoded using dilated convolutions. Dynamic descriptors, such as root mean square fluctuation, are processed through a multi-layer perceptron. These embedding features are fused with static protein features using cross-attention, and a tensor fusion network integrates all three modalities for DTA prediction. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that DynamicDTA achieves by at least 3.4% improvement in RMSE score with comparison to seven state-of-the-art baseline methods. Additionally, predicting novel drugs for Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 and visualizing the docking complexes further demonstrates the reliability and biological relevance of DynamicDTA.

ASMR: Activation-sharing Multi-resolution Coordinate Networks For Efficient Inference

Coordinate network or implicit neural representation (INR) is a fast-emerging method for encoding natural signals (such as images and videos) with the benefits of a compact neural representation. While numerous methods have been proposed to increase the encoding capabilities of an INR, an often overlooked aspect is the inference efficiency, usually measured in multiply-accumulate (MAC) count. This is particularly critical in use cases where inference throughput is greatly limited by hardware constraints. To this end, we propose the Activation-Sharing Multi-Resolution (ASMR) coordinate network that combines multi-resolution coordinate decomposition with hierarchical modulations. Specifically, an ASMR model enables the sharing of activations across grids of the data. This largely decouples its inference cost from its depth which is directly correlated to its reconstruction capability, and renders a near O(1) inference complexity irrespective of the number of layers. Experiments show that ASMR can reduce the MAC of a vanilla SIREN model by up to 500x while achieving an even higher reconstruction quality than its SIREN baseline.

MOSEL: Inference Serving Using Dynamic Modality Selection

Rapid advancements over the years have helped machine learning models reach previously hard-to-achieve goals, sometimes even exceeding human capabilities. However, to attain the desired accuracy, the model sizes and in turn their computational requirements have increased drastically. Thus, serving predictions from these models to meet any target latency and cost requirements of applications remains a key challenge, despite recent work in building inference-serving systems as well as algorithmic approaches that dynamically adapt models based on inputs. In this paper, we introduce a form of dynamism, modality selection, where we adaptively choose modalities from inference inputs while maintaining the model quality. We introduce MOSEL, an automated inference serving system for multi-modal ML models that carefully picks input modalities per request based on user-defined performance and accuracy requirements. MOSEL exploits modality configurations extensively, improving system throughput by 3.6$\times$ with an accuracy guarantee and shortening job completion times by 11$\times$.

Controllable Residual Speaker Representation for Voice Conversion

Recently, there have been significant advancements in voice conversion, resulting in high-quality performance. However, there are still two critical challenges in this field. Firstly, current voice conversion methods have limited robustness when encountering unseen speakers. Secondly, they also have limited ability to control timbre representation. To address these challenges, this paper presents a novel approach leverages tokens of multi-layer residual approximations to enhance robustness when dealing with unseen speakers, called the residual speaker module. The introduction of multi-layer approximations facilitates the separation of information from the timbre, enabling effective control over timbre in voice conversion. The proposed method outperforms baselines in both subjective and objective evaluations, demonstrating superior performance and increased robustness. Our demo page is publicly available.

Leveraging Cloud Computing to Make Autonomous Vehicles Safer

The safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs) depends on their ability to perform complex computations on high-volume sensor data in a timely manner. Their ability to run these computations with state-of-the-art models is limited by the processing power and slow update cycles of their onboard hardware. In contrast, cloud computing offers the ability to burst computation to vast amounts of the latest generation of hardware. However, accessing these cloud resources requires traversing wireless networks that are often considered to be too unreliable for real-time AV driving applications. Our work seeks to harness this unreliable cloud to enhance the accuracy of an AV's decisions, while ensuring that it can always fall back to its on-board computational capabilities. We identify three mechanisms that can be used by AVs to safely leverage the cloud for accuracy enhancements, and elaborate why current execution systems fail to enable these mechanisms. To address these limitations, we provide a system design based on the speculative execution of an AV's pipeline in the cloud, and show the efficacy of this approach in simulations of complex real-world scenarios that apply these mechanisms.

Adversarial Self-Attack Defense and Spatial-Temporal Relation Mining for Visible-Infrared Video Person Re-Identification

In visible-infrared video person re-identification (re-ID), extracting features not affected by complex scenes (such as modality, camera views, pedestrian pose, background, etc.) changes, and mining and utilizing motion information are the keys to solving cross-modal pedestrian identity matching. To this end, the paper proposes a new visible-infrared video person re-ID method from a novel perspective, i.e., adversarial self-attack defense and spatial-temporal relation mining. In this work, the changes of views, posture, background and modal discrepancy are considered as the main factors that cause the perturbations of person identity features. Such interference information contained in the training samples is used as an adversarial perturbation. It performs adversarial attacks on the re-ID model during the training to make the model more robust to these unfavorable factors. The attack from the adversarial perturbation is introduced by activating the interference information contained in the input samples without generating adversarial samples, and it can be thus called adversarial self-attack. This design allows adversarial attack and defense to be integrated into one framework. This paper further proposes a spatial-temporal information-guided feature representation network to use the information in video sequences. The network cannot only extract the information contained in the video-frame sequences but also use the relation of the local information in space to guide the network to extract more robust features. The proposed method exhibits compelling performance on large-scale cross-modality video datasets. The source code of the proposed method will be released at https://github.com/lhf12278/xxx.

Overcoming Beam Squint in Dual-Wideband mmWave MIMO Channel Estimation: A Bayesian Multi-Band Sparsity Approach

The beam squint effect, which manifests in different steering matrices in different sub-bands, has been widely considered a challenge in millimeter wave (mmWave) multiinput multi-output (MIMO) channel estimation. Existing methods either require specific forms of the precoding/combining matrix, which restrict their general practicality, or simply ignore the beam squint effect by only making use of a single sub-band for channel estimation. Recognizing that different steering matrices are coupled by the same set of unknown channel parameters, this paper proposes to exploit the common sparsity structure of the virtual channel model so that signals from different subbands can be jointly utilized to enhance the performance of channel estimation. A probabilistic model is built to induce the common sparsity in the spatial domain, and the first-order Taylor expansion is adopted to get rid of the grid mismatch in the dictionaries. To learn the model parameters, a variational expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is derived, which automatically obtains the balance between the likelihood function and the common sparsity prior information, and is applicable to arbitrary forms of precoding/combining matrices. Simulation results show the superior estimation accuracy of the proposed algorithm over existing methods under different noise powers and system configurations.

To Fold or Not to Fold: Graph Regularized Tensor Train for Visual Data Completion

Tensor train (TT) representation has achieved tremendous success in visual data completion tasks, especially when it is combined with tensor folding. However, folding an image or video tensor breaks the original data structure, leading to local information loss as nearby pixels may be assigned into different dimensions and become far away from each other. In this paper, to fully preserve the local information of the original visual data, we explore not folding the data tensor, and at the same time adopt graph information to regularize local similarity between nearby entries. To overcome the high computational complexity introduced by the graph-based regularization in the TT completion problem, we propose to break the original problem into multiple sub-problems with respect to each TT core fiber, instead of each TT core as in traditional methods. Furthermore, to avoid heavy parameter tuning, a sparsity promoting probabilistic model is built based on the generalized inverse Gaussian (GIG) prior, and an inference algorithm is derived under the mean-field approximation. Experiments on both synthetic data and real-world visual data show the superiority of the proposed methods.