Pre-training for low resource speech-to-intent applications

Designing a speech-to-intent (S2I) agent which maps the users' spoken commands to the agents' desired task actions can be challenging due to the diverse grammatical and lexical preference of different users. As a remedy, we discuss a user-taught S2I system in this paper. The user-taught system learns from scratch from the users' spoken input with action demonstration, which ensure it is fully matched to the users' way of formulating intents and their articulation habits. The main issue is the scarce training data due to the user effort involved. Existing state-of-art approaches in this setting are based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and capsule networks. In this paper we combine the encoder of an end-to-end ASR system with the prior NMF/capsule network-based user-taught decoder, and investigate whether pre-training methodology can reduce training data requirements for the NMF and capsule network. Experimental results show the pre-trained ASR-NMF framework significantly outperforms other models, and also, we discuss limitations of pre-training with different types of command-and-control(C&C) applications.

AST-GCN: Attribute-Augmented Spatiotemporal Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Forecasting

Traffic forecasting is a fundamental and challenging task in the field of intelligent transportation. Accurate forecasting not only depends on the historical traffic flow information but also needs to consider the influence of a variety of external factors, such as weather conditions and surrounding POI distribution. Recently, spatiotemporal models integrating graph convolutional networks and recurrent neural networks have become traffic forecasting research hotspots and have made significant progress. However, few works integrate external factors. Therefore, based on the assumption that introducing external factors can enhance the spatiotemporal accuracy in predicting traffic and improving interpretability, we propose an attribute-augmented spatiotemporal graph convolutional network (AST-GCN). We model the external factors as dynamic attributes and static attributes and design an attribute-augmented unit to encode and integrate those factors into the spatiotemporal graph convolution model. Experiments on real datasets show the effectiveness of considering external information on traffic forecasting tasks when compared to traditional traffic prediction methods. Moreover, under different attribute-augmented schemes and prediction horizon settings, the forecasting accuracy of the AST-GCN is higher than that of the baselines.

Deep CSI Learning for Gait Biometric Sensing and Recognition

Gait is a person's natural walking style and a complex biological process that is unique to each person. Recently, the channel state information (CSI) of WiFi devices have been exploited to capture human gait biometrics for user identification. However, the performance of existing CSI-based gait identification systems is far from satisfactory. They can only achieve limited identification accuracy (maximum $93\%$) only for a very small group of people (i.e., between 2 to 10). To address such challenge, an end-to-end deep CSI learning system is developed, which exploits deep neural networks to automatically learn the salient gait features in CSI data that are discriminative enough to distinguish different people Firstly, the raw CSI data are sanitized through window-based denoising, mean centering and normalization. The sanitized data is then passed to a residual deep convolutional neural network (DCNN), which automatically extracts the hierarchical features of gait-signatures embedded in the CSI data. Finally, a softmax classifier utilizes the extracted features to make the final prediction about the identity of the user. In a typical indoor environment, a top-1 accuracy of $97.12 \pm 1.13\%$ is achieved for a dataset of 30 people.

Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Urban Traffic Flow Prediction Method

Accurate and real-time traffic forecasting plays an important role in the Intelligent Traffic System (ITS) and is of great significance for urban traffic planning, traffic management, and traffic control. However, traffic forecasting has always been considered an open scientific issue, owing to the constraints of urban road network topological structure and the law of dynamic change with time, namely, spatial dependence and temporal dependence. To capture the spatial and temporal dependences simultaneously, we propose a novel neural network-based traffic forecasting method, the temporal graph convolutional network (T-GCN) model, which is in combination with the graph convolutional network (GCN) and gated recurrent unit (GRU). Specifically, the graph convolutional network is used to learn complex topological structures to capture the spatial dependence and the gated recurrent unit is used to learn dynamic changes of traffic flow to capture the temporal dependence. Then, the T-GCN model is employed to forecast traffic based on the urban road network. Experiments demonstrate that our T-GCN model can obtain the spatiotemporal correlation from traffic data and the predictions outperform state-of-art baselines on real-world traffic datasets. Our tensorflow implementation of T-GCN is available at https://github.com/lehaifeng/T-GCN.

Pattern-Coupled Sparse Bayesian Learning for Recovery of Block-Sparse Signals

We consider the problem of recovering block-sparse signals whose structures are unknown \emph{a priori}. Block-sparse signals with nonzero coefficients occurring in clusters arise naturally in many practical scenarios. However, the knowledge of the block structure is usually unavailable in practice. In this paper, we develop a new sparse Bayesian learning method for recovery of block-sparse signals with unknown cluster patterns. Specifically, a pattern-coupled hierarchical Gaussian prior model is introduced to characterize the statistical dependencies among coefficients, in which a set of hyperparameters are employed to control the sparsity of signal coefficients. Unlike the conventional sparse Bayesian learning framework in which each individual hyperparameter is associated independently with each coefficient, in this paper, the prior for each coefficient not only involves its own hyperparameter, but also the hyperparameters of its immediate neighbors. In doing this way, the sparsity patterns of neighboring coefficients are related to each other and the hierarchical model has the potential to encourage structured-sparse solutions. The hyperparameters, along with the sparse signal, are learned by maximizing their posterior probability via an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm presents uniform superiority over other existing methods in a series of experiments.

Convex Hull-Based Multi-objective Genetic Programming for Maximizing ROC Performance

ROC is usually used to analyze the performance of classifiers in data mining. ROC convex hull (ROCCH) is the least convex major-ant (LCM) of the empirical ROC curve, and covers potential optima for the given set of classifiers. Generally, ROC performance maximization could be considered to maximize the ROCCH, which also means to maximize the true positive rate (tpr) and minimize the false positive rate (fpr) for each classifier in the ROC space. However, tpr and fpr are conflicting with each other in the ROCCH optimization process. Though ROCCH maximization problem seems like a multi-objective optimization problem (MOP), the special characters make it different from traditional MOP. In this work, we will discuss the difference between them and propose convex hull-based multi-objective genetic programming (CH-MOGP) to solve ROCCH maximization problems. Convex hull-based sort is an indicator based selection scheme that aims to maximize the area under convex hull, which serves as a unary indicator for the performance of a set of points. A selection procedure is described that can be efficiently implemented and follows similar design principles than classical hyper-volume based optimization algorithms. It is hypothesized that by using a tailored indicator-based selection scheme CH-MOGP gets more efficient for ROC convex hull approximation than algorithms which compute all Pareto optimal points. To test our hypothesis we compare the new CH-MOGP to MOGP with classical selection schemes, including NSGA-II, MOEA/D) and SMS-EMOA. Meanwhile, CH-MOGP is also compared with traditional machine learning algorithms such as C4.5, Naive Bayes and Prie. Experimental results based on 22 well-known UCI data sets show that CH-MOGP outperforms significantly traditional EMOAs.