Attention-Driven Multichannel Speech Enhancement in Moving Sound Source Scenarios

Current multichannel speech enhancement algorithms typically assume a stationary sound source, a common mismatch with reality that limits their performance in real-world scenarios. This paper focuses on attention-driven spatial filtering techniques designed for dynamic settings. Specifically, we study the application of linear and nonlinear attention-based methods for estimating time-varying spatial covariance matrices used to design the filters. We also investigate the direct estimation of spatial filters by attention-based methods without explicitly estimating spatial statistics. The clean speech clips from WSJ0 are employed for simulating speech signals of moving speakers in a reverberant environment. The experimental dataset is built by mixing the simulated speech signals with multichannel real noise from CHiME-3. Evaluation results show that the attention-driven approaches are robust and consistently outperform conventional spatial filtering approaches in both static and dynamic sound environments.

Multi-level Reasoning for Robotic Assembly: From Sequence Inference to Contact Selection

Automating the assembly of objects from their parts is a complex problem with innumerable applications in manufacturing, maintenance, and recycling. Unlike existing research, which is limited to target segmentation, pose regression, or using fixed target blueprints, our work presents a holistic multi-level framework for part assembly planning consisting of part assembly sequence inference, part motion planning, and robot contact optimization. We present the Part Assembly Sequence Transformer (PAST) -- a sequence-to-sequence neural network -- to infer assembly sequences recursively from a target blueprint. We then use a motion planner and optimization to generate part movements and contacts. To train PAST, we introduce D4PAS: a large-scale Dataset for Part Assembly Sequences (D4PAS) consisting of physically valid sequences for industrial objects. Experimental results show that our approach generalizes better than prior methods while needing significantly less computational time for inference.

Facial Emotion Recognition using CNN in PyTorch

In this project, we have implemented a model to recognize real-time facial emotions given the camera images. Current approaches would read all data and input it into their model, which has high space complexity. Our model is based on the Convolutional Neural Network utilizing the PyTorch library. We believe our implementation will significantly improve the space complexity and provide a useful contribution to facial emotion recognition. Our motivation is to understanding clearly about deep learning, particularly in CNNs, and analysis real-life scenarios. Therefore, we tunned the hyper parameter of model such as learning rate, batch size, and number of epochs to meet our needs. In addition, we also used techniques to optimize the networks, such as activation function, dropout and max pooling. Finally, we analyzed the result from two optimizer to observe the relationship between number of epochs and accuracy.

Sharable Clothoid-based Continuous Motion Planning for Connected Automated Vehicles

A continuous motion planning method for connected automated vehicles is considered for generating feasible trajectories in real-time using three consecutive clothoids. The proposed method reduces path planning to a small set of nonlinear algebraic equations such that the generated path can be efficiently checked for feasibility and collision. After path planning, velocity planning is executed while maintaining a parallel simple structure. Key strengths of this framework include its interpretability, shareability, and ability to specify boundary conditions. Its interpretability and shareability stem from the succinct representation of the resulting local motion plan using a handful of physically meaningful parameters. Vehicles may share these parameters via V2X communication so that the recipients can precisely reconstruct the planned trajectory of the senders and respond accordingly. The proposed local planner guarantees the satisfaction of boundary conditions, thus ensuring seamless integration with a wide array of higher-level global motion planners. The tunable nature of the method enables tailoring the local plans to specific maneuvers like turns at intersections, lane changes, and U-turns.

On-Device Recommender Systems: A Tutorial on The New-Generation Recommendation Paradigm

Given the sheer volume of contemporary e-commerce applications, recommender systems (RSs) have gained significant attention in both academia and industry. However, traditional cloud-based RSs face inevitable challenges, such as resource-intensive computation, reliance on network access, and privacy breaches. In response, a new paradigm called on-device recommender systems (ODRSs) has emerged recently in various industries like Taobao, Google, and Kuaishou. ODRSs unleash the computational capacity of user devices with lightweight recommendation models tailored for resource-constrained environments, enabling real-time inference with users' local data. This tutorial aims to systematically introduce methodologies of ODRSs, including (1) an overview of existing research on ODRSs; (2) a comprehensive taxonomy of ODRSs, where the core technical content to be covered span across three major ODRS research directions, including on-device deployment and inference, on-device training, and privacy/security of ODRSs; (3) limitations and future directions of ODRSs. This tutorial expects to lay the foundation and spark new insights for follow-up research and applications concerning this new recommendation paradigm.

Frequency Spectrum is More Effective for Multimodal Representation and Fusion: A Multimodal Spectrum Rumor Detector

Multimodal content, such as mixing text with images, presents significant challenges to rumor detection in social media. Existing multimodal rumor detection has focused on mixing tokens among spatial and sequential locations for unimodal representation or fusing clues of rumor veracity across modalities. However, they suffer from less discriminative unimodal representation and are vulnerable to intricate location dependencies in the time-consuming fusion of spatial and sequential tokens. This work makes the first attempt at multimodal rumor detection in the frequency domain, which efficiently transforms spatial features into the frequency spectrum and obtains highly discriminative spectrum features for multimodal representation and fusion. A novel Frequency Spectrum Representation and fUsion network (FSRU) with dual contrastive learning reveals the frequency spectrum is more effective for multimodal representation and fusion, extracting the informative components for rumor detection. FSRU involves three novel mechanisms: utilizing the Fourier transform to convert features in the spatial domain to the frequency domain, the unimodal spectrum compression, and the cross-modal spectrum co-selection module in the frequency domain. Substantial experiments show that FSRU achieves satisfactory multimodal rumor detection performance.

PlaNet-S: Automatic Semantic Segmentation of Placenta

[Purpose] To develop a fully automated semantic placenta segmentation model that integrates the U-Net and SegNeXt architectures through ensemble learning. [Methods] A total of 218 pregnant women with suspected placental anomalies who underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) were enrolled, yielding 1090 annotated images for developing a deep learning model for placental segmentation. The images were standardized and divided into training and test sets. The performance of PlaNet-S, which integrates U-Net and SegNeXt within an ensemble framework, was assessed using Intersection over Union (IoU) and counting connected components (CCC) against the U-Net model. [Results] PlaNet-S had significantly higher IoU (0.73 +/- 0.13) than that of U-Net (0.78 +/- 0.010) (p<0.01). The CCC for PlaNet-S was significantly higher than that for U-Net (p<0.01), matching the ground truth in 86.0\% and 56.7\% of the cases, respectively. [Conclusion]PlaNet-S performed better than the traditional U-Net in placental segmentation tasks. This model addresses the challenges of time-consuming physician-assisted manual segmentation and offers the potential for diverse applications in placental imaging analyses.

Animal-AI 3: What's New & Why You Should Care

The Animal-AI Environment is a unique game-based research platform designed to serve both the artificial intelligence and cognitive science research communities. In this paper, we present Animal-AI 3, the latest version of the environment, outlining several major new features that make the game more engaging for humans and more complex for AI systems. New features include interactive buttons, reward dispensers, and player notifications, as well as an overhaul of the environment's graphics and processing for significant increases in agent training time and quality of the human player experience. We provide detailed guidance on how to build computational and behavioural experiments with Animal-AI 3. We present results from a series of agents, including the state-of-the-art Deep Reinforcement Learning agent (dreamer-v3), on newly designed tests and the Animal-AI Testbed of 900 tasks inspired by research in comparative psychology. Animal-AI 3 is designed to facilitate collaboration between the cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence. This paper serves as a stand-alone document that motivates, describes, and demonstrates Animal-AI 3 for the end user.

DiffTune-MPC: Closed-Loop Learning for Model Predictive Control

Model predictive control (MPC) has been applied to many platforms in robotics and autonomous systems for its capability to predict a system's future behavior while incorporating constraints that a system may have. To enhance the performance of a system with an MPC controller, one can manually tune the MPC's cost function. However, it can be challenging due to the possibly high dimension of the parameter space as well as the potential difference between the open-loop cost function in MPC and the overall closed-loop performance metric function. This paper presents DiffTune-MPC, a novel learning method, to learn the cost function of an MPC in a closed-loop manner. The proposed framework is compatible with the scenario where the time interval for performance evaluation and MPC's planning horizon have different lengths. We show the auxiliary problem whose solution admits the analytical gradients of MPC and discuss its variations in different MPC settings. Simulation results demonstrate the capability of DiffTune-MPC and illustrate the influence of constraints (from actuation limits) on learning.

No-Skim: Towards Efficiency Robustness Evaluation on Skimming-based Language Models

To reduce the computation cost and the energy consumption in large language models (LLM), skimming-based acceleration dynamically drops unimportant tokens of the input sequence progressively along layers of the LLM while preserving the tokens of semantic importance. However, our work for the first time reveals the acceleration may be vulnerable to Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. In this paper, we propose No-Skim, a general framework to help the owners of skimming-based LLM to understand and measure the robustness of their acceleration scheme. Specifically, our framework searches minimal and unnoticeable perturbations at character-level and token-level to generate adversarial inputs that sufficiently increase the remaining token ratio, thus increasing the computation cost and energy consumption. We systematically evaluate the vulnerability of the skimming acceleration in various LLM architectures including BERT and RoBERTa on the GLUE benchmark. In the worst case, the perturbation found by No-Skim substantially increases the running cost of LLM by over 145% on average. Moreover, No-Skim extends the evaluation framework to various scenarios, making the evaluation conductible with different level of knowledge.