In this paper, we introduce a kNN-based regression method that synergizes the scalability and adaptability of traditional non-parametric kNN models with a novel variable selection technique. This method focuses on accurately estimating the conditional mean and variance of random response variables, thereby effectively characterizing conditional distributions across diverse scenarios.Our approach incorporates a robust uncertainty quantification mechanism, leveraging our prior estimation work on conditional mean and variance. The employment of kNN ensures scalable computational efficiency in predicting intervals and statistical accuracy in line with optimal non-parametric rates. Additionally, we introduce a new kNN semi-parametric algorithm for estimating ROC curves, accounting for covariates. For selecting the smoothing parameter k, we propose an algorithm with theoretical guarantees.Incorporation of variable selection enhances the performance of the method significantly over conventional kNN techniques in various modeling tasks. We validate the approach through simulations in low, moderate, and high-dimensional covariate spaces. The algorithm's effectiveness is particularly notable in biomedical applications as demonstrated in two case studies. Concluding with a theoretical analysis, we highlight the consistency and convergence rate of our method over traditional kNN models, particularly when the underlying regression model takes values in a low-dimensional space.
In this paper, we study the individual preference (IP) stability, which is an notion capturing individual fairness and stability in clustering. Within this setting, a clustering is $\alpha$-IP stable when each data point's average distance to its cluster is no more than $\alpha$ times its average distance to any other cluster. In this paper, we study the natural local search algorithm for IP stable clustering. Our analysis confirms a $O(\log n)$-IP stability guarantee for this algorithm, where $n$ denotes the number of points in the input. Furthermore, by refining the local search approach, we show it runs in an almost linear time, $\tilde{O}(nk)$.
In this work, we consider the problem of localizing multiple signal sources based on time-difference of arrival (TDOA) measurements. In the blind setting, in which the source signals are not known, the localization task is challenging due to the data association problem. That is, it is not known which of the TDOA measurements correspond to the same source. Herein, we propose to perform joint localization and data association by means of an optimal transport formulation. The method operates by finding optimal groupings of TDOA measurements and associating these with candidate source locations. To allow for computationally feasible localization in three-dimensional space, an efficient set of candidate locations is constructed using a minimal multilateration solver based on minimal sets of receiver pairs. In numerical simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed method is robust both to measurement noise and TDOA detection errors. Furthermore, it is shown that the data association provided by the proposed method allows for statistically efficient estimates of the source locations.
This paper presents a proof-of-concept study that examines the utilization of generative AI and mobile robotics for autonomous laboratory monitoring in the pharmaceutical R&D laboratory. The study investigates the potential advantages of anomaly detection and automated reporting by multi-modal model and Vision Foundation Model (VFM), which have the potential to enhance compliance and safety in laboratory environments. Additionally, the paper discusses the current limitations of the generative AI approach and proposes future directions for its application in lab monitoring.
In this paper, we introduce an improved approach of speculative decoding aimed at enhancing the efficiency of serving large language models. Our method capitalizes on the strengths of two established techniques: the classic two-model speculative decoding approach, and the more recent single-model approach, Medusa. Drawing inspiration from Medusa, our approach adopts a single-model strategy for speculative decoding. However, our method distinguishes itself by employing a single, lightweight draft head with a recurrent dependency design, akin in essence to the small, draft model uses in classic speculative decoding, but without the complexities of the full transformer architecture. And because of the recurrent dependency, we can use beam search to swiftly filter out undesired candidates with the draft head. The outcome is a method that combines the simplicity of single-model design and avoids the need to create a data-dependent tree attention structure only for inference in Medusa. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on several popular open source language models, along with a comprehensive analysis of the trade-offs involved in adopting this approach.
We propose EmoDistill, a novel speech emotion recognition (SER) framework that leverages cross-modal knowledge distillation during training to learn strong linguistic and prosodic representations of emotion from speech. During inference, our method only uses a stream of speech signals to perform unimodal SER thus reducing computation overhead and avoiding run-time transcription and prosodic feature extraction errors. During training, our method distills information at both embedding and logit levels from a pair of pre-trained Prosodic and Linguistic teachers that are fine-tuned for SER. Experiments on the IEMOCAP benchmark demonstrate that our method outperforms other unimodal and multimodal techniques by a considerable margin, and achieves state-of-the-art performance of 77.49% unweighted accuracy and 78.91% weighted accuracy. Detailed ablation studies demonstrate the impact of each component of our method.
This paper proposes a method for the automatic creation of variables (in the case of regression) that complement the information contained in the initial input vector. The method works as a pre-processing step in which the continuous values of the variable to be regressed are discretized into a set of intervals which are then used to define value thresholds. Then classifiers are trained to predict whether the value to be regressed is less than or equal to each of these thresholds. The different outputs of the classifiers are then concatenated in the form of an additional vector of variables that enriches the initial vector of the regression problem. The implemented system can thus be considered as a generic pre-processing tool. We tested the proposed enrichment method with 5 types of regressors and evaluated it in 33 regression datasets. Our experimental results confirm the interest of the approach.
Current disfluency detection methods heavily rely on costly and scarce human-annotated data. To tackle this issue, some approaches employ heuristic or statistical features to generate disfluent sentences, partially improving detection performance. However, these sentences often deviate from real-life scenarios, constraining overall model enhancement. In this study, we propose a lightweight data augmentation approach for disfluency detection, utilizing the superior generative and semantic understanding capabilities of large language model (LLM) to generate disfluent sentences as augmentation data. We leverage LLM to generate diverse and more realistic sentences guided by specific prompts, without the need for fine-tuning the LLM. Subsequently, we apply an uncertainty-aware data filtering approach to improve the quality of the generated sentences, utilized in training a small detection model for improved performance. Experiments using enhanced data yielded state-of-the-art results. The results showed that using a small amount of LLM-generated enhanced data can significantly improve performance, thereby further enhancing cost-effectiveness.
In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning (FDRL) method for effective facial expression recognition. We view the expression information as the combination of the shared information (expression similarities) across different expressions and the unique information (expression-specific variations) for each expression. More specifically, FDRL mainly consists of two crucial networks: a Feature Decomposition Network (FDN) and a Feature Reconstruction Network (FRN). In particular, FDN first decomposes the basic features extracted from a backbone network into a set of facial action-aware latent features to model expression similarities. Then, FRN captures the intra-feature and inter-feature relationships for latent features to characterize expression-specific variations, and reconstructs the expression feature. To this end, two modules including an intra-feature relation modeling module and an inter-feature relation modeling module are developed in FRN. Experimental results on both the in-the-lab databases (including CK+, MMI, and Oulu-CASIA) and the in-the-wild databases (including RAF-DB and SFEW) show that the proposed FDRL method consistently achieves higher recognition accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods. This clearly highlights the benefit of feature decomposition and reconstruction for classifying expressions.
In this paper, we proposed to apply meta learning approach for low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR). We formulated ASR for different languages as different tasks, and meta-learned the initialization parameters from many pretraining languages to achieve fast adaptation on unseen target language, via recently proposed model-agnostic meta learning algorithm (MAML). We evaluated the proposed approach using six languages as pretraining tasks and four languages as target tasks. Preliminary results showed that the proposed method, MetaASR, significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art multitask pretraining approach on all target languages with different combinations of pretraining languages. In addition, since MAML's model-agnostic property, this paper also opens new research direction of applying meta learning to more speech-related applications.
In this paper, we propose the joint learning attention and recurrent neural network (RNN) models for multi-label classification. While approaches based on the use of either model exist (e.g., for the task of image captioning), training such existing network architectures typically require pre-defined label sequences. For multi-label classification, it would be desirable to have a robust inference process, so that the prediction error would not propagate and thus affect the performance. Our proposed model uniquely integrates attention and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models, which not only addresses the above problem but also allows one to identify visual objects of interests with varying sizes without the prior knowledge of particular label ordering. More importantly, label co-occurrence information can be jointly exploited by our LSTM model. Finally, by advancing the technique of beam search, prediction of multiple labels can be efficiently achieved by our proposed network model.