Description on IEEE ICME 2024 Grand Challenge: Semi-supervised Acoustic Scene Classification under Domain Shift

Acoustic scene classification (ASC) is a crucial research problem in computational auditory scene analysis, and it aims to recognize the unique acoustic characteristics of an environment. One of the challenges of the ASC task is domain shift caused by a distribution gap between training and testing data. Since 2018, ASC challenges have focused on the generalization of ASC models across different recording devices. Although this task in recent years has achieved substantial progress in device generalization, the challenge of domain shift between different regions, involving characteristics such as time, space, culture, and language, remains insufficiently explored at present. In addition, considering the abundance of unlabeled acoustic scene data in the real world, it is important to study the possible ways to utilize these unlabelled data. Therefore, we introduce the task Semi-supervised Acoustic Scene Classification under Domain Shift in the ICME 2024 Grand Challenge. We encourage participants to innovate with semi-supervised learning techniques, aiming to develop more robust ASC models under domain shift.

Improving Autoencoder-based Outlier Detection with Adjustable Probabilistic Reconstruction Error and Mean-shift Outlier Scoring

Autoencoders were widely used in many machine learning tasks thanks to their strong learning ability which has drawn great interest among researchers in the field of outlier detection. However, conventional autoencoder-based methods lacked considerations in two aspects. This limited their performance in outlier detection. First, the mean squared error used in conventional autoencoders ignored the judgment uncertainty of the autoencoder, which limited their representation ability. Second, autoencoders suffered from the abnormal reconstruction problem: some outliers can be unexpectedly reconstructed well, making them difficult to identify from the inliers. To mitigate the aforementioned issues, two novel methods were proposed in this paper. First, a novel loss function named Probabilistic Reconstruction Error (PRE) was constructed to factor in both reconstruction bias and judgment uncertainty. To further control the trade-off of these two factors, two weights were introduced in PRE producing Adjustable Probabilistic Reconstruction Error (APRE), which benefited the outlier detection in different applications. Second, a conceptually new outlier scoring method based on mean-shift (MSS) was proposed to reduce the false inliers caused by the autoencoder. Experiments on 32 real-world outlier detection datasets proved the effectiveness of the proposed methods. The combination of the proposed methods achieved 41% of the relative performance improvement compared to the best baseline. The MSS improved the performance of multiple autoencoder-based outlier detectors by an average of 20%. The proposed two methods have the potential to advance autoencoder's development in outlier detection. The code is available on www.OutlierNet.com for reproducibility.

Neighborhood Averaging for Improving Outlier Detectors

We hypothesize that similar objects should have similar outlier scores. To our knowledge, all existing outlier detectors calculate the outlier score for each object independently regardless of the outlier scores of the other objects. Therefore, they do not guarantee that similar objects have similar outlier scores. To verify our proposed hypothesis, we propose an outlier score post-processing technique for outlier detectors, called neighborhood averaging(NA), which pays attention to objects and their neighbors and guarantees them to have more similar outlier scores than their original scores. Given an object and its outlier score from any outlier detector, NA modifies its outlier score by combining it with its k nearest neighbors' scores. We demonstrate the effectivity of NA by using the well-known k-nearest neighbors (k-NN). Experimental results show that NA improves all 10 tested baseline detectors by 13% (from 0.70 to 0.79 AUC) on average evaluated on nine real-world datasets. Moreover, even outlier detectors that are already based on k-NN are also improved. The experiments also show that in some applications, the choice of detector is no more significant when detectors are jointly used with NA, which may pose a challenge to the generally considered idea that the data model is the most important factor. We open our code on www.outlierNet.com for reproducibility.

Randomized Rank-Revealing QLP for Low-Rank Matrix Decomposition

The pivoted QLP decomposition is computed through two consecutive pivoted QR decompositions, and provides an approximation to the singular value decomposition. This work is concerned with a partial QLP decomposition of low-rank matrices computed through randomization, termed Randomized Unpivoted QLP (RU-QLP). Like pivoted QLP, RU-QLP is rank-revealing and yet it utilizes random column sampling and the unpivoted QR decomposition. The latter modifications allow RU-QLP to be highly parallelizable on modern computational platforms. We provide an analysis for RU-QLP, deriving bounds in spectral and Frobenius norms on: i) the rank-revealing property; ii) principal angles between approximate subspaces and exact singular subspaces and vectors; and iii) low-rank approximation errors. Effectiveness of the bounds is illustrated through numerical tests. We further use a modern, multicore machine equipped with a GPU to demonstrate the efficiency of RU-QLP. Our results show that compared to the randomized SVD, RU-QLP achieves a speedup of up to 7.1 times on the CPU and up to 2.3 times with the GPU.

USLN: A statistically guided lightweight network for underwater image enhancement via dual-statistic white balance and multi-color space stretch

Underwater images are inevitably affected by color distortion and reduced contrast. Traditional statistic-based methods such as white balance and histogram stretching attempted to adjust the imbalance of color channels and narrow distribution of intensities a priori thus with limited performance. Recently, deep-learning-based methods have achieved encouraging results. However, the involved complicate architecture and high computational costs may hinder their deployment in practical constrained platforms. Inspired by above works, we propose a statistically guided lightweight underwater image enhancement network (USLN). Concretely, we first develop a dual-statistic white balance module which can learn to use both average and maximum of images to compensate the color distortion for each specific pixel. Then this is followed by a multi-color space stretch module to adjust the histogram distribution in RGB, HSI, and Lab color spaces adaptively. Extensive experiments show that, with the guidance of statistics, USLN significantly reduces the required network capacity (over98%) and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code and relevant resources are available at https://github.com/deepxzy/USLN.

Integration of Physics-Based and Data-Driven Models for Hyperspectral Image Unmixing

Spectral unmixing is one of the most important quantitative analysis tasks in hyperspectral data processing. Conventional physics-based models are characterized by clear interpretation. However, due to the complex mixture mechanism and limited nonlinearity modeling capacity, these models may not be accurate, especially, in analyzing scenes with unknown physical characteristics. Data-driven methods have developed rapidly in recent years, in particular deep learning methods as they possess superior capability in modeling complex and nonlinear systems. Simply transferring these methods as black-boxes to conduct unmixing may lead to low physical interpretability and generalization ability. Consequently, several contributions have been dedicated to integrating advantages of both physics-based models and data-driven methods. In this article, we present an overview of recent advances on this topic from several aspects, including deep neural network (DNN) structures design, prior capturing and loss design, and summarise these methods in a common mathematical optimization framework. In addition, relevant remarks and discussions are conducted made for providing further understanding and prospective improvement of the methods. The related source codes and data are collected and made available at http://github.com/xiuheng-wang/awesome-hyperspectral-image-unmixing.

Sparse Linear Spectral Unmixing of Hyperspectral images using Expectation-Propagation

This paper presents a novel Bayesian approach for hyperspectral image unmixing. The observed pixels are modeled by a linear combination of material signatures weighted by their corresponding abundances. A spike-and-slab abundance prior is adopted to promote sparse mixtures and an Ising prior model is used to capture spatial correlation of the mixture support across pixels. We approximate the posterior distribution of the abundances using the expectation-propagation (EP) method. We show that it can significantly reduce the computational complexity of the unmixing stage and meanwhile provide uncertainty measures, compared to expensive Monte Carlo strategies traditionally considered for uncertainty quantification. Moreover, many variational parameters within each EP factor can be updated in a parallel manner, which enables mapping of efficient algorithmic architectures based on graphics processing units (GPU). Under the same approximate Bayesian framework, we then extend the proposed algorithm to semi-supervised unmixing, whereby the abundances are viewed as latent variables and the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is used to refine the endmember matrix. Experimental results on synthetic data and real hyperspectral data illustrate the benefits of the proposed framework over state-of-art linear unmixing methods.

Indoor Sound Source Localization with Probabilistic Neural Network

It is known that adverse environments such as high reverberation and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) pose a great challenge to indoor sound source localization. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a sound source localization algorithm based on probabilistic neural network, namely Generalized cross correlation Classification Algorithm (GCA). Experimental results for adverse environments with high reverberation time T60 up to 600ms and low SNR such as -10dB show that, the average azimuth angle error and elevation angle error by GCA are only 4.6 degrees and 3.1 degrees respectively. Compared with three recently published algorithms, GCA has increased the success rate on direction of arrival estimation significantly with good robustness to environmental changes. These results show that the proposed GCA can localize accurately and robustly for diverse indoor applications where the site acoustic features can be studied prior to the localization stage.

Distributed Private Online Learning for Social Big Data Computing over Data Center Networks

With the rapid growth of Internet technologies, cloud computing and social networks have become ubiquitous. An increasing number of people participate in social networks and massive online social data are obtained. In order to exploit knowledge from copious amounts of data obtained and predict social behavior of users, we urge to realize data mining in social networks. Almost all online websites use cloud services to effectively process the large scale of social data, which are gathered from distributed data centers. These data are so large-scale, high-dimension and widely distributed that we propose a distributed sparse online algorithm to handle them. Additionally, privacy-protection is an important point in social networks. We should not compromise the privacy of individuals in networks, while these social data are being learned for data mining. Thus we also consider the privacy problem in this article. Our simulations shows that the appropriate sparsity of data would enhance the performance of our algorithm and the privacy-preserving method does not significantly hurt the performance of the proposed algorithm.