Continuous Diffusion for Mixed-Type Tabular Data

Score-based generative models (or diffusion models for short) have proven successful across many domains in generating text and image data. However, the consideration of mixed-type tabular data with this model family has fallen short so far. Existing research mainly combines different diffusion processes without explicitly accounting for the feature heterogeneity inherent to tabular data. In this paper, we combine score matching and score interpolation to ensure a common type of continuous noise distribution that affects both continuous and categorical features alike. Further, we investigate the impact of distinct noise schedules per feature or per data type. We allow for adaptive, learnable noise schedules to ensure optimally allocated model capacity and balanced generative capability. Results show that our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art benchmark models and that accounting for heterogeneity within the noise schedule design boosts the sample quality.

Linguistic unit discovery from multi-modal inputs in unwritten languages: Summary of the "Speaking Rosetta" JSALT 2017 Workshop

We summarize the accomplishments of a multi-disciplinary workshop exploring the computational and scientific issues surrounding the discovery of linguistic units (subwords and words) in a language without orthography. We study the replacement of orthographic transcriptions by images and/or translated text in a well-resourced language to help unsupervised discovery from raw speech.