Graph Neural Networks in EEG-based Emotion Recognition: A Survey

Compared to other modalities, EEG-based emotion recognition can intuitively respond to the emotional patterns in the human brain and, therefore, has become one of the most concerning tasks in the brain-computer interfaces field. Since dependencies within brain regions are closely related to emotion, a significant trend is to develop Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for EEG-based emotion recognition. However, brain region dependencies in emotional EEG have physiological bases that distinguish GNNs in this field from those in other time series fields. Besides, there is neither a comprehensive review nor guidance for constructing GNNs in EEG-based emotion recognition. In the survey, our categorization reveals the commonalities and differences of existing approaches under a unified framework of graph construction. We analyze and categorize methods from three stages in the framework to provide clear guidance on constructing GNNs in EEG-based emotion recognition. In addition, we discuss several open challenges and future directions, such as Temporal full-connected graph and Graph condensation.

Learning Which Side to Scan: Multi-View Informed Active Perception with Side Scan Sonar for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Autonomous underwater vehicles often perform surveys that capture multiple views of targets in order to provide more information for human operators or automatic target recognition algorithms. In this work, we address the problem of choosing the most informative views that minimize survey time while maximizing classifier accuracy. We introduce a novel active perception framework for multi-view adaptive surveying and reacquisition using side scan sonar imagery. Our framework addresses this challenge by using a graph formulation for the adaptive survey task. We then use Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to both classify acquired sonar views and to choose the next best view based on the collected data. We evaluate our method using simulated surveys in a high-fidelity side scan sonar simulator. Our results demonstrate that our approach is able to surpass the state-of-the-art in classification accuracy and survey efficiency. This framework is a promising approach for more efficient autonomous missions involving side scan sonar, such as underwater exploration, marine archaeology, and environmental monitoring.

Optimal Projection for 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting has garnered extensive attention and application in real-time neural rendering. Concurrently, concerns have been raised about the limitations of this technology in aspects such as point cloud storage, performance , and robustness in sparse viewpoints , leading to various improvements. However, there has been a notable lack of attention to the projection errors introduced by the local affine approximation inherent in the splatting itself, and the consequential impact of these errors on the quality of photo-realistic rendering. This paper addresses the projection error function of 3D Gaussian Splatting, commencing with the residual error from the first-order Taylor expansion of the projection function $\phi$. The analysis establishes a correlation between the error and the Gaussian mean position. Subsequently, leveraging function optimization theory, this paper analyzes the function's minima to provide an optimal projection strategy for Gaussian Splatting referred to Optimal Gaussian Splatting. Experimental validation further confirms that this projection methodology reduces artifacts, resulting in a more convincingly realistic rendering.

Towards Stable Preferences for Stakeholder-aligned Machine Learning

In response to the pressing challenge of kidney allocation, characterized by growing demands for organs, this research sets out to develop a data-driven solution to this problem, which also incorporates stakeholder values. The primary objective of this study is to create a method for learning both individual and group-level preferences pertaining to kidney allocations. Drawing upon data from the 'Pairwise Kidney Patient Online Survey.' Leveraging two distinct datasets and evaluating across three levels - Individual, Group and Stability - we employ machine learning classifiers assessed through several metrics. The Individual level model predicts individual participant preferences, the Group level model aggregates preferences across participants, and the Stability level model, an extension of the Group level, evaluates the stability of these preferences over time. By incorporating stakeholder preferences into the kidney allocation process, we aspire to advance the ethical dimensions of organ transplantation, contributing to more transparent and equitable practices while promoting the integration of moral values into algorithmic decision-making.

StreamVC: Real-Time Low-Latency Voice Conversion

We present StreamVC, a streaming voice conversion solution that preserves the content and prosody of any source speech while matching the voice timbre from any target speech. Unlike previous approaches, StreamVC produces the resulting waveform at low latency from the input signal even on a mobile platform, making it applicable to real-time communication scenarios like calls and video conferencing, and addressing use cases such as voice anonymization in these scenarios. Our design leverages the architecture and training strategy of the SoundStream neural audio codec for lightweight high-quality speech synthesis. We demonstrate the feasibility of learning soft speech units causally, as well as the effectiveness of supplying whitened fundamental frequency information to improve pitch stability without leaking the source timbre information.

SynthDST: Synthetic Data is All You Need for Few-Shot Dialog State Tracking

In-context learning with Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising avenue of research in Dialog State Tracking (DST). However, the best-performing in-context learning methods involve retrieving and adding similar examples to the prompt, requiring access to labeled training data. Procuring such training data for a wide range of domains and applications is time-consuming, expensive, and, at times, infeasible. While zero-shot learning requires no training data, it significantly lags behind the few-shot setup. Thus, `\textit{Can we efficiently generate synthetic data for any dialogue schema to enable few-shot prompting?}' Addressing this question, we propose \method, a data generation framework tailored for DST, utilizing LLMs. Our approach only requires the dialogue schema and a few hand-crafted dialogue templates to synthesize natural, coherent, and free-flowing dialogues with DST annotations. Few-shot learning using data from {\method} results in $4-5%$ improvement in Joint Goal Accuracy over the zero-shot baseline on MultiWOZ 2.1 and 2.4. Remarkably, our few-shot learning approach recovers nearly $98%$ of the performance compared to the few-shot setup using human-annotated training data. Our synthetic data and code can be accessed at https://github.com/apple/ml-synthdst

Image Fusion via Vision-Language Model

Image fusion integrates essential information from multiple source images into a single composite, emphasizing the highlighting structure and textures, and refining imperfect areas. Existing methods predominantly focus on pixel-level and semantic visual features for recognition. However, they insufficiently explore the deeper semantic information at a text-level beyond vision. Therefore, we introduce a novel fusion paradigm named image Fusion via vIsion-Language Model (FILM), for the first time, utilizing explicit textual information in different source images to guide image fusion. In FILM, input images are firstly processed to generate semantic prompts, which are then fed into ChatGPT to obtain rich textual descriptions. These descriptions are fused in the textual domain and guide the extraction of crucial visual features from the source images through cross-attention, resulting in a deeper level of contextual understanding directed by textual semantic information. The final fused image is created by vision feature decoder. This paradigm achieves satisfactory results in four image fusion tasks: infrared-visible, medical, multi-exposure, and multi-focus image fusion. We also propose a vision-language dataset containing ChatGPT-based paragraph descriptions for the ten image fusion datasets in four fusion tasks, facilitating future research in vision-language model-based image fusion. Code and dataset will be released.

Panacea: Pareto Alignment via Preference Adaptation for LLMs

Current methods for large language model alignment typically use scalar human preference labels. However, this convention tends to oversimplify the multi-dimensional and heterogeneous nature of human preferences, leading to reduced expressivity and even misalignment. This paper presents Panacea, an innovative approach that reframes alignment as a multi-dimensional preference optimization problem. Panacea trains a single model capable of adapting online and Pareto-optimally to diverse sets of preferences without the need for further tuning. A major challenge here is using a low-dimensional preference vector to guide the model's behavior, despite it being governed by an overwhelmingly large number of parameters. To address this, Panacea is designed to use singular value decomposition (SVD)-based low-rank adaptation, which allows the preference vector to be simply injected online as singular values. Theoretically, we prove that Panacea recovers the entire Pareto front with common loss aggregation methods under mild conditions. Moreover, our experiments demonstrate, for the first time, the feasibility of aligning a single LLM to represent a spectrum of human preferences through various optimization methods. Our work marks a step forward in effectively and efficiently aligning models to diverse and intricate human preferences in a controllable and Pareto-optimal manner.

A Plug-in Tiny AI Module for Intelligent and Selective Sensor Data Transmission

Applications in the Internet of Things (IoT) utilize machine learning to analyze sensor-generated data. However, a major challenge lies in the lack of targeted intelligence in current sensing systems, leading to vast data generation and increased computational and communication costs. To address this challenge, we propose a novel sensing module to equip sensing frameworks with intelligent data transmission capabilities by integrating a highly efficient machine learning model placed near the sensor. This model provides prompt feedback for the sensing system to transmit only valuable data while discarding irrelevant information by regulating the frequency of data transmission. The near-sensor model is quantized and optimized for real-time sensor control. To enhance the framework's performance, the training process is customized and a "lazy" sensor deactivation strategy utilizing temporal information is introduced. The suggested method is orthogonal to other IoT frameworks and can be considered as a plugin for selective data transmission. The framework is implemented, encompassing both software and hardware components. The experiments demonstrate that the framework utilizing the suggested module achieves over 85% system efficiency in terms of energy consumption and storage, with negligible impact on performance. This methodology has the potential to significantly reduce data output from sensors, benefiting a wide range of IoT applications.

M2-RAAP: A Multi-Modal Recipe for Advancing Adaptation-based Pre-training towards Effective and Efficient Zero-shot Video-text Retrieval

We present a Multi-Modal Recipe for Advancing Adaptation-based Pre-training towards effective and efficient zero-shot video-text retrieval, dubbed M2-RAAP. Upon popular image-text models like CLIP, most current adaptation-based video-text pre-training methods are confronted by three major issues, i.e., noisy data corpus, time-consuming pre-training, and limited performance gain. Towards this end, we conduct a comprehensive study including four critical steps in video-text pre-training. Specifically, we investigate 1) data filtering and refinement, 2) video input type selection, 3) temporal modeling, and 4) video feature enhancement. We then summarize this empirical study into the M2-RAAP recipe, where our technical contributions lie in 1) the data filtering and text re-writing pipeline resulting in 1M high-quality bilingual video-text pairs, 2) the replacement of video inputs with key-frames to accelerate pre-training, and 3) the Auxiliary-Caption-Guided (ACG) strategy to enhance video features. We conduct extensive experiments by adapting three image-text foundation models on two refined video-text datasets from different languages, validating the robustness and reproducibility of M2-RAAP for adaptation-based pre-training. Results demonstrate that M2-RAAP yields superior performance with significantly reduced data (-90%) and time consumption (-95%), establishing a new SOTA on four English zero-shot retrieval datasets and two Chinese ones. We are preparing our refined bilingual data annotations and codebase, which will be available at https://github.com/alipay/Ant-Multi-Modal-Framework/tree/main/prj/M2_RAAP.