Screening method for early dementia using sound objects as voice biomarkers

Introduction: We present a screening method for early dementia using features based on sound objects as voice biomarkers. Methods: The final dataset used for machine learning models consisted of 266 observations, with a distribution of 186 healthy individuals, 46 diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and 34 with MCI. This method is based on six-second recordings of the sustained vowel /a/ spoken by the subject. The main original contribution of this work is the use of carefully crafted features based on sound objects. This approach allows one to first represent the sound spectrum in a more accurate way than the standard spectrum, and then build interpretable features containing relevant information about subjects' control over their voice. Results: ROC AUC obtained in this work for distinguishing healthy subjects from those with MCI was 0.85, while accuracy was 0.76. For distinguishing between healthy subjects and those with either MCI or Alzheimer's the results were 0.84, 0.77, respectively. Conclusion: The use of features based on sound objects enables screening for early dementia even on very short recordings of language-independent voice samples.

A Concise but Effective Network for Image Guided Depth Completion in Autonomous Driving

Depth completion is a crucial task in autonomous driving, aiming to convert a sparse depth map into a dense depth prediction. Due to its potentially rich semantic information, RGB image is commonly fused to enhance the completion effect. Image-guided depth completion involves three key challenges: 1) how to effectively fuse the two modalities; 2) how to better recover depth information; and 3) how to achieve real-time prediction for practical autonomous driving. To solve the above problems, we propose a concise but effective network, named CENet, to achieve high-performance depth completion with a simple and elegant structure. Firstly, we use a fast guidance module to fuse the two sensor features, utilizing abundant auxiliary features extracted from the color space. Unlike other commonly used complicated guidance modules, our approach is intuitive and low-cost. In addition, we find and analyze the optimization inconsistency problem for observed and unobserved positions, and a decoupled depth prediction head is proposed to alleviate the issue. The proposed decoupled head can better output the depth of valid and invalid positions with very few extra inference time. Based on the simple structure of dual-encoder and single-decoder, our CENet can achieve superior balance between accuracy and efficiency. In the KITTI depth completion benchmark, our CENet attains competitive performance and inference speed compared with the state-of-the-art methods. To validate the generalization of our method, we also evaluate on indoor NYUv2 dataset, and our CENet still achieve impressive results. The code of this work will be available at https://github.com/lmomoy/CENet.

One for all: A novel Dual-space Co-training baseline for Large-scale Multi-View Clustering

In this paper, we propose a novel multi-view clustering model, named Dual-space Co-training Large-scale Multi-view Clustering (DSCMC). The main objective of our approach is to enhance the clustering performance by leveraging co-training in two distinct spaces. In the original space, we learn a projection matrix to obtain latent consistent anchor graphs from different views. This process involves capturing the inherent relationships and structures between data points within each view. Concurrently, we employ a feature transformation matrix to map samples from various views to a shared latent space. This transformation facilitates the alignment of information from multiple views, enabling a comprehensive understanding of the underlying data distribution. We jointly optimize the construction of the latent consistent anchor graph and the feature transformation to generate a discriminative anchor graph. This anchor graph effectively captures the essential characteristics of the multi-view data and serves as a reliable basis for subsequent clustering analysis. Moreover, the element-wise method is proposed to avoid the impact of diverse information between different views. Our algorithm has an approximate linear computational complexity, which guarantees its successful application on large-scale datasets. Through experimental validation, we demonstrate that our method significantly reduces computational complexity while yielding superior clustering performance compared to existing approaches.

Tiered approach for rapid damage characterisation of infrastructure enabled by remote sensing and deep learning technologies

Critical infrastructure such as bridges are systematically targeted during wars and conflicts. This is because critical infrastructure is vital for enabling connectivity and transportation of people and goods, and hence, underpinning the national and international defence planning and economic growth. Mass destruction of bridges, along with minimal or no accessibility to these assets during natural and anthropogenic disasters, prevents us from delivering rapid recovery. As a result, systemic resilience is drastically reduced. A solution to this challenge is to use technology for stand-off observations. Yet, no method exists to characterise damage at different scales, i.e. regional, asset, and structural (component), and more so there is little or no systematic correlation between assessments at scale. We propose an integrated three-level tiered approach to fill this capability gap, and we demonstrate the methods for damage characterisation enabled by fit-for-purpose digital technologies. Next, this method is applied and validated to a case study in Ukraine that includes 17 bridges. From macro to micro, we deploy technology at scale, from Sentinel-1 SAR images, crowdsourced information, and high-resolution images to deep learning for damaged infrastructure. For the first time, the interferometric coherence difference and semantic segmentation of images were deployed to improve the reliability of damage characterisations from regional to infrastructure component level, when enhanced assessment accuracy is required. This integrated method improves the speed of decision-making, and thus, enhances resilience. Keywords: critical infrastructure, damage characterisation, targeted attacks, restoration

360-GS: Layout-guided Panoramic Gaussian Splatting For Indoor Roaming

3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has recently attracted great attention with real-time and photo-realistic renderings. This technique typically takes perspective images as input and optimizes a set of 3D elliptical Gaussians by splatting them onto the image planes, resulting in 2D Gaussians. However, applying 3D-GS to panoramic inputs presents challenges in effectively modeling the projection onto the spherical surface of ${360^\circ}$ images using 2D Gaussians. In practical applications, input panoramas are often sparse, leading to unreliable initialization of 3D Gaussians and subsequent degradation of 3D-GS quality. In addition, due to the under-constrained geometry of texture-less planes (e.g., walls and floors), 3D-GS struggles to model these flat regions with elliptical Gaussians, resulting in significant floaters in novel views. To address these issues, we propose 360-GS, a novel $360^{\circ}$ Gaussian splatting for a limited set of panoramic inputs. Instead of splatting 3D Gaussians directly onto the spherical surface, 360-GS projects them onto the tangent plane of the unit sphere and then maps them to the spherical projections. This adaptation enables the representation of the projection using Gaussians. We guide the optimization of 360-GS by exploiting layout priors within panoramas, which are simple to obtain and contain strong structural information about the indoor scene. Our experimental results demonstrate that 360-GS allows panoramic rendering and outperforms state-of-the-art methods with fewer artifacts in novel view synthesis, thus providing immersive roaming in indoor scenarios.

UV-SAM: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Urban Village Identification

Urban villages, defined as informal residential areas in or around urban centers, are characterized by inadequate infrastructures and poor living conditions, closely related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on poverty, adequate housing, and sustainable cities. Traditionally, governments heavily depend on field survey methods to monitor the urban villages, which however are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and possibly delayed. Thanks to widely available and timely updated satellite images, recent studies develop computer vision techniques to detect urban villages efficiently. However, existing studies either focus on simple urban village image classification or fail to provide accurate boundary information. To accurately identify urban village boundaries from satellite images, we harness the power of the vision foundation model and adapt the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to urban village segmentation, named UV-SAM. Specifically, UV-SAM first leverages a small-sized semantic segmentation model to produce mixed prompts for urban villages, including mask, bounding box, and image representations, which are then fed into SAM for fine-grained boundary identification. Extensive experimental results on two datasets in China demonstrate that UV-SAM outperforms existing baselines, and identification results over multiple years show that both the number and area of urban villages are decreasing over time, providing deeper insights into the development trends of urban villages and sheds light on the vision foundation models for sustainable cities. The dataset and codes of this study are available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/UV-SAM.

Taking Action Towards Graceful Interaction: The Effects of Performing Actions on Modelling Policies for Instruction Clarification Requests

Clarification requests are a mechanism to help solve communication problems, e.g. due to ambiguity or underspecification, in instruction-following interactions. Despite their importance, even skilful models struggle with producing or interpreting such repair acts. In this work, we test three hypotheses concerning the effects of action taking as an auxiliary task in modelling iCR policies. Contrary to initial expectations, we conclude that its contribution to learning an iCR policy is limited, but some information can still be extracted from prediction uncertainty. We present further evidence that even well-motivated, Transformer-based models fail to learn good policies for when to ask Instruction CRs (iCRs), while the task of determining what to ask about can be more successfully modelled. Considering the implications of these findings, we further discuss the shortcomings of the data-driven paradigm for learning meta-communication acts.

Efficient Gesture Recognition on Spiking Convolutional Networks Through Sensor Fusion of Event-Based and Depth Data

As intelligent systems become increasingly important in our daily lives, new ways of interaction are needed. Classical user interfaces pose issues for the physically impaired and are partially not practical or convenient. Gesture recognition is an alternative, but often not reactive enough when conventional cameras are used. This work proposes a Spiking Convolutional Neural Network, processing event- and depth data for gesture recognition. The network is simulated using the open-source neuromorphic computing framework LAVA for offline training and evaluation on an embedded system. For the evaluation three open source data sets are used. Since these do not represent the applied bi-modality, a new data set with synchronized event- and depth data was recorded. The results show the viability of temporal encoding on depth information and modality fusion, even on differently encoded data, to be beneficial to network performance and generalization capabilities.

Few-shot Image Generation via Information Transfer from the Built Geodesic Surface

Images generated by most of generative models trained with limited data often exhibit deficiencies in either fidelity, diversity, or both. One effective solution to address the limitation is few-shot generative model adaption. However, the type of approaches typically rely on a large-scale pre-trained model, serving as a source domain, to facilitate information transfer to the target domain. In this paper, we propose a method called Information Transfer from the Built Geodesic Surface (ITBGS), which contains two module: Feature Augmentation on Geodesic Surface (FAGS); Interpolation and Regularization (I\&R). With the FAGS module, a pseudo-source domain is created by projecting image features from the training dataset into the Pre-Shape Space, subsequently generating new features on the Geodesic surface. Thus, no pre-trained models is needed for the adaption process during the training of generative models with FAGS. I\&R module are introduced for supervising the interpolated images and regularizing their relative distances, respectively, to further enhance the quality of generated images. Through qualitative and quantitative experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method consistently achieves optimal or comparable results across a diverse range of semantically distinct datasets, even in extremely few-shot scenarios.

Quantum Private Membership Aggregation

We consider the problem of private set membership aggregation of $N$ parties by using an entangled quantum state. In this setting, the $N$ parties, which share an entangled state, aim to \emph{privately} know the number of times each element (message) is repeated among the $N$ parties, with respect to a universal set $\mathcal{K}$. This problem has applications in private comparison, ranking, voting, etc. We propose an encoding algorithm that maps the classical information into distinguishable quantum states, along with a decoding algorithm that exploits the distinguishability of the mapped states. The proposed scheme can also be used to calculate the $N$ party private summation modulo $P$.