Resource-constrained stereo singing voice cancellation

We study the problem of stereo singing voice cancellation, a subtask of music source separation, whose goal is to estimate an instrumental background from a stereo mix. We explore how to achieve performance similar to large state-of-the-art source separation networks starting from a small, efficient model for real-time speech separation. Such a model is useful when memory and compute are limited and singing voice processing has to run with limited look-ahead. In practice, this is realised by adapting an existing mono model to handle stereo input. Improvements in quality are obtained by tuning model parameters and expanding the training set. Moreover, we highlight the benefits a stereo model brings by introducing a new metric which detects attenuation inconsistencies between channels. Our approach is evaluated using objective offline metrics and a large-scale MUSHRA trial, confirming the effectiveness of our techniques in stringent listening tests.

Class Conditional Time Series Generation with Structured Noise Space GAN

This paper introduces Structured Noise Space GAN (SNS-GAN), a novel approach in the field of generative modeling specifically tailored for class-conditional generation in both image and time series data. It addresses the challenge of effectively integrating class labels into generative models without requiring structural modifications to the network. The SNS-GAN method embeds class conditions within the generator's noise space, simplifying the training process and enhancing model versatility. The model's efficacy is demonstrated through qualitative validations in the image domain and superior performance in time series generation compared to baseline models. This research opens new avenues for the application of GANs in various domains, including but not limited to time series and image data generation.

RSCNet: Dynamic CSI Compression for Cloud-based WiFi Sensing

WiFi-enabled Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are evolving from mere communication devices to sensing instruments, leveraging Channel State Information (CSI) extraction capabilities. Nevertheless, resource-constrained IoT devices and the intricacies of deep neural networks necessitate transmitting CSI to cloud servers for sensing. Although feasible, this leads to considerable communication overhead. In this context, this paper develops a novel Real-time Sensing and Compression Network (RSCNet) which enables sensing with compressed CSI; thereby reducing the communication overheads. RSCNet facilitates optimization across CSI windows composed of a few CSI frames. Once transmitted to cloud servers, it employs Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) units to harness data from prior windows, thus bolstering both the sensing accuracy and CSI reconstruction. RSCNet adeptly balances the trade-off between CSI compression and sensing precision, thus streamlining real-time cloud-based WiFi sensing with reduced communication costs. Numerical findings demonstrate the gains of RSCNet over the existing benchmarks like SenseFi, showcasing a sensing accuracy of 97.4% with minimal CSI reconstruction error. Numerical results also show a computational analysis of the proposed RSCNet as a function of the number of CSI frames.

Simultaneous Gesture Classification and Localization with an Automatic Gesture Annotation Model

Training a real-time gesture recognition model heavily relies on annotated data. However, manual data annotation is costly and demands substantial human effort. In order to address this challenge, we propose a novel annotation model that can automatically annotate gesture classes and identify their temporal ranges. Our ablation study demonstrates that our annotation model design surpasses the baseline in terms of both gesture classification accuracy (3-4\% improvement) and localization accuracy (71-75\% improvement). We believe that this annotation model has immense potential to improve the training of downstream gesture recognition models using unlabeled datasets.

APT: Adaptive Pruning and Tuning Pretrained Language Models for Efficient Training and Inference

Fine-tuning and inference with large Language Models (LM) are generally known to be expensive. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning over pretrained LMs reduces training memory by updating a small number of LM parameters but does not improve inference efficiency. Structured pruning improves LM inference efficiency by removing consistent parameter blocks, yet often increases training memory and time. To improve both training and inference efficiency, we introduce APT that adaptively prunes and tunes parameters for the LMs. At the early stage of fine-tuning, APT dynamically adds salient tuning parameters for fast and accurate convergence while discarding unimportant parameters for efficiency. Compared to baselines, our experiments show that APT maintains up to 98% task performance when pruning RoBERTa and T5 models with 40% parameters left while keeping 86.4% LLaMA models' performance with 70% parameters remained. Furthermore, APT speeds up LMs fine-tuning by up to 8x and reduces large LMs memory training footprint by up to 70%.

How to Forget Clients in Federated Online Learning to Rank?

Data protection legislation like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) establishes the \textit{right to be forgotten}: a user (client) can request contributions made using their data to be removed from learned models. In this paper, we study how to remove the contributions made by a client participating in a Federated Online Learning to Rank (FOLTR) system. In a FOLTR system, a ranker is learned by aggregating local updates to the global ranking model. Local updates are learned in an online manner at a client-level using queries and implicit interactions that have occurred within that specific client. By doing so, each client's local data is not shared with other clients or with a centralised search service, while at the same time clients can benefit from an effective global ranking model learned from contributions of each client in the federation. In this paper, we study an effective and efficient unlearning method that can remove a client's contribution without compromising the overall ranker effectiveness and without needing to retrain the global ranker from scratch. A key challenge is how to measure whether the model has unlearned the contributions from the client $c^*$ that has requested removal. For this, we instruct $c^*$ to perform a poisoning attack (add noise to this client updates) and then we measure whether the impact of the attack is lessened when the unlearning process has taken place. Through experiments on four datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the unlearning strategy under different combinations of parameter settings.

EfficientRec an unlimited user-item scale recommendation system based on clustering and users interaction embedding profile

Recommendation systems are highly interested in technology companies nowadays. The businesses are constantly growing users and products, causing the number of users and items to continuously increase over time, to very large numbers. Traditional recommendation algorithms with complexity dependent on the number of users and items make them difficult to adapt to the industrial environment. In this paper, we introduce a new method applying graph neural networks with a contrastive learning framework in extracting user preferences. We incorporate a soft clustering architecture that significantly reduces the computational cost of the inference process. Experiments show that the model is able to learn user preferences with low computational cost in both training and prediction phases. At the same time, the model gives a very good accuracy. We call this architecture EfficientRec with the implication of model compactness and the ability to scale to unlimited users and products.

Digital Twin-Based Network Management for Better QoE in Multicast Short Video Streaming

Multicast short video streaming can enhance bandwidth utilization by enabling simultaneous video transmission to multiple users over shared wireless channels. The existing network management schemes mainly rely on the sequential buffering principle and general quality of experience (QoE) model, which may deteriorate QoE when users' swipe behaviors exhibit distinct spatiotemporal variation. In this paper, we propose a digital twin (DT)-based network management scheme to enhance QoE. Firstly, user status emulated by the DT is utilized to estimate the transmission capabilities and watching probability distributions of sub-multicast groups (SMGs) for an adaptive segment buffering. The SMGs' buffers are aligned to the unique virtual buffers managed by the DT for a fine-grained buffer update. Then, a multicast QoE model consisting of rebuffering time, video quality, and quality variation is developed, by considering the mutual influence of segment buffering among SMGs. Finally, a joint optimization problem of segment version selection and slot division is formulated to maximize QoE. To efficiently solve the problem, a data-model-driven algorithm is proposed by integrating a convex optimization method and a deep reinforcement learning algorithm. Simulation results based on the real-world dataset demonstrate that the proposed DT-based network management scheme outperforms benchmark schemes in terms of QoE improvement.

Seed-Guided Fine-Grained Entity Typing in Science and Engineering Domains

Accurately typing entity mentions from text segments is a fundamental task for various natural language processing applications. Many previous approaches rely on massive human-annotated data to perform entity typing. Nevertheless, collecting such data in highly specialized science and engineering domains (e.g., software engineering and security) can be time-consuming and costly, without mentioning the domain gaps between training and inference data if the model needs to be applied to confidential datasets. In this paper, we study the task of seed-guided fine-grained entity typing in science and engineering domains, which takes the name and a few seed entities for each entity type as the only supervision and aims to classify new entity mentions into both seen and unseen types (i.e., those without seed entities). To solve this problem, we propose SEType which first enriches the weak supervision by finding more entities for each seen type from an unlabeled corpus using the contextualized representations of pre-trained language models. It then matches the enriched entities to unlabeled text to get pseudo-labeled samples and trains a textual entailment model that can make inferences for both seen and unseen types. Extensive experiments on two datasets covering four domains demonstrate the effectiveness of SEType in comparison with various baselines.

On the Utility of Probing Trajectories for Algorithm-Selection

Machine-learning approaches to algorithm-selection typically take data describing an instance as input. Input data can take the form of features derived from the instance description or fitness landscape, or can be a direct representation of the instance itself, i.e. an image or textual description. Regardless of the choice of input, there is an implicit assumption that instances that are similar will elicit similar performance from algorithm, and that a model is capable of learning this relationship. We argue that viewing algorithm-selection purely from an instance perspective can be misleading as it fails to account for how an algorithm `views' similarity between instances. We propose a novel `algorithm-centric' method for describing instances that can be used to train models for algorithm-selection: specifically, we use short probing trajectories calculated by applying a solver to an instance for a very short period of time. The approach is demonstrated to be promising, providing comparable or better results to computationally expensive landscape-based feature-based approaches. Furthermore, projecting the trajectories into a 2-dimensional space illustrates that functions that are similar from an algorithm-perspective do not necessarily correspond to the accepted categorisation of these functions from a human perspective.