Perceptual modification of voice is an elusive goal. While non-experts can modify an image or sentence perceptually with available tools, it is not clear how to similarly modify speech along perceptual axes. Voice conversion does make it possible to convert one voice to another, but these modifications are handled by black box models, and the specifics of what perceptual qualities to modify and how to modify them are unclear. Towards allowing greater perceptual control over voice, we introduce PerMod, a conditional latent diffusion model that takes in an input voice and a perceptual qualities vector, and produces a voice with the matching perceptual qualities. Unlike prior work, PerMod generates a new voice corresponding to specific perceptual modifications. Evaluating perceptual quality vectors with RMSE from both human and predicted labels, we demonstrate that PerMod produces voices with the desired perceptual qualities for typical voices, but performs poorly on atypical voices.
Existing evaluation benchmarks of language models of code (code LMs) focus almost exclusively on whether the LMs can generate functionally-correct code. In real-world software engineering, developers think beyond functional correctness. They have requirements on "how" a functionality should be implemented to meet overall system design objectives like efficiency, security, and maintainability. They would also trust the code LMs more if the LMs demonstrate robust understanding of requirements and code semantics. We propose a new benchmark NoFunEval to evaluate code LMs on non-functional requirements and simple classification instances for both functional and non-functional requirements. We propose a prompting method, Coding Concepts (CoCo), as a way for a developer to communicate the domain knowledge to the LMs. We conduct an extensive evaluation of twenty-two code LMs. Our finding is that they generally falter when tested on our benchmark, hinting at fundamental blindspots in their training setups. Surprisingly, even the classification accuracy on functional-correctness instances derived from the popular HumanEval benchmark is low, calling in question the depth of their comprehension and the source of their success in generating functionally-correct code in the first place. We will release our benchmark and evaluation scripts publicly at //aka.ms/NoFunEval.
Extremely large aperture arrays can enable unprecedented spatial multiplexing in beyond 5G systems due to their extremely narrow beamfocusing capabilities. However, acquiring the spatial correlation matrix to enable efficient channel estimation is a complex task due to the vast number of antenna dimensions. Recently, a new estimation method called the "reduced-subspace least squares (RS-LS) estimator" has been proposed for densely packed arrays. This method relies solely on the geometry of the array to limit the estimation resources. In this paper, we address a gap in the existing literature by deriving the average spectral efficiency for a certain distribution of user equipments (UEs) and a lower bound on it when using the RS-LS estimator. This bound is determined by the channel gain and the statistics of the normalized spatial correlation matrices of potential UEs but, importantly, does not require knowledge of a specific UE's spatial correlation matrix. We establish that there exists a pilot length that maximizes this expression. Additionally, we derive an approximate expression for the optimal pilot length under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions. Simulation results validate the tightness of the derived lower bound and the effectiveness of using the optimized pilot length.
Artificial Intelligence techniques can be used to classify a patient's physical activities and predict vital signs for remote patient monitoring. Regression analysis based on non-linear models like deep learning models has limited explainability due to its black-box nature. This can require decision-makers to make blind leaps of faith based on non-linear model results, especially in healthcare applications. In non-invasive monitoring, patient data from tracking sensors and their predisposing clinical attributes act as input features for predicting future vital signs. Explaining the contributions of various features to the overall output of the monitoring application is critical for a clinician's decision-making. In this study, an Explainable AI for Quantitative analysis (QXAI) framework is proposed with post-hoc model explainability and intrinsic explainability for regression and classification tasks in a supervised learning approach. This was achieved by utilizing the Shapley values concept and incorporating attention mechanisms in deep learning models. We adopted the artificial neural networks (ANN) and attention-based Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) models for the prediction of heart rate and classification of physical activities based on sensor data. The deep learning models achieved state-of-the-art results in both prediction and classification tasks. Global explanation and local explanation were conducted on input data to understand the feature contribution of various patient data. The proposed QXAI framework was evaluated using PPG-DaLiA data to predict heart rate and mobile health (MHEALTH) data to classify physical activities based on sensor data. Monte Carlo approximation was applied to the framework to overcome the time complexity and high computation power requirements required for Shapley value calculations.
Combining the strengths of many existing predictors to obtain a Mixture of Experts which is superior to its individual components is an effective way to improve the performance without having to develop new architectures or train a model from scratch. However, surprisingly, we find that na\"ively combining expert object detectors in a similar way to Deep Ensembles, can often lead to degraded performance. We identify that the primary cause of this issue is that the predictions of the experts do not match their performance, a term referred to as miscalibration. Consequently, the most confident detector dominates the final predictions, preventing the mixture from leveraging all the predictions from the experts appropriately. To address this, when constructing the Mixture of Experts, we propose to combine their predictions in a manner which reflects the individual performance of the experts; an objective we achieve by first calibrating the predictions before filtering and refining them. We term this approach the Mixture of Calibrated Experts and demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments on 5 different detection tasks using a variety of detectors, showing that it: (i) improves object detectors on COCO and instance segmentation methods on LVIS by up to $\sim 2.5$ AP; (ii) reaches state-of-the-art on COCO test-dev with $65.1$ AP and on DOTA with $82.62$ $\mathrm{AP_{50}}$; (iii) outperforms single models consistently on recent detection tasks such as Open Vocabulary Object Detection.
Recent advancements in language models have significantly enhanced performance in multiple speech-related tasks. Existing speech language models typically utilize task-dependent prompt tokens to unify various speech tasks in a single model. However, this design omits the intrinsic connections between different speech tasks, which can potentially boost the performance of each task. In this work, we propose a novel decoder-only speech language model, SpeechComposer, that can unify common speech tasks by composing a fixed set of prompt tokens. Built upon four primary tasks -- speech synthesis, speech recognition, speech language modeling, and text language modeling -- SpeechComposer can easily extend to more speech tasks via compositions of well-designed prompt tokens, like voice conversion and speech enhancement. The unification of prompt tokens also makes it possible for knowledge sharing among different speech tasks in a more structured manner. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed SpeechComposer can improve the performance of both primary tasks and composite tasks, showing the effectiveness of the shared prompt tokens. Remarkably, the unified decoder-only model achieves a comparable and even better performance than the baselines which are expert models designed for single tasks.
In the realm of robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery, dynamic scene reconstruction can significantly enhance downstream tasks and improve surgical outcomes. Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based methods have recently risen to prominence for their exceptional ability to reconstruct scenes. Nonetheless, these methods are hampered by slow inference, prolonged training, and substantial computational demands. Additionally, some rely on stereo depth estimation, which is often infeasible due to the high costs and logistical challenges associated with stereo cameras. Moreover, the monocular reconstruction quality for deformable scenes is currently inadequate. To overcome these obstacles, we present Endo-4DGS, an innovative, real-time endoscopic dynamic reconstruction approach that utilizes 4D Gaussian Splatting (GS) and requires no ground truth depth data. This method extends 3D GS by incorporating a temporal component and leverages a lightweight MLP to capture temporal Gaussian deformations. This effectively facilitates the reconstruction of dynamic surgical scenes with variable conditions. We also integrate Depth-Anything to generate pseudo-depth maps from monocular views, enhancing the depth-guided reconstruction process. Our approach has been validated on two surgical datasets, where it can effectively render in real-time, compute efficiently, and reconstruct with remarkable accuracy. These results underline the vast potential of Endo-4DGS to improve surgical assistance.
Transformers have demonstrated tremendous success not only in the natural language processing (NLP) domain but also the field of computer vision, igniting various creative approaches and applications. Yet, the superior performance and modeling flexibility of transformers came with a severe increase in computation costs, and hence several works have proposed methods to reduce this burden. Inspired by a cost-cutting method originally proposed for language models, Data Multiplexing (DataMUX), we propose a novel approach for efficient visual recognition that employs additional dim1 batching (i.e., concatenation) that greatly improves the throughput with little compromise in the accuracy. We first introduce a naive adaptation of DataMux for vision models, Image Multiplexer, and devise novel components to overcome its weaknesses, rendering our final model, ConcatPlexer, at the sweet spot between inference speed and accuracy. The ConcatPlexer was trained on ImageNet1K and CIFAR100 dataset and it achieved 23.5% less GFLOPs than ViT-B/16 with 69.5% and 83.4% validation accuracy, respectively.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.
We propose a novel single shot object detection network named Detection with Enriched Semantics (DES). Our motivation is to enrich the semantics of object detection features within a typical deep detector, by a semantic segmentation branch and a global activation module. The segmentation branch is supervised by weak segmentation ground-truth, i.e., no extra annotation is required. In conjunction with that, we employ a global activation module which learns relationship between channels and object classes in a self-supervised manner. Comprehensive experimental results on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO detection datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In particular, with a VGG16 based DES, we achieve an mAP of 81.7 on VOC2007 test and an mAP of 32.8 on COCO test-dev with an inference speed of 31.5 milliseconds per image on a Titan Xp GPU. With a lower resolution version, we achieve an mAP of 79.7 on VOC2007 with an inference speed of 13.0 milliseconds per image.
We investigate the problem of automatically determining what type of shoe left an impression found at a crime scene. This recognition problem is made difficult by the variability in types of crime scene evidence (ranging from traces of dust or oil on hard surfaces to impressions made in soil) and the lack of comprehensive databases of shoe outsole tread patterns. We find that mid-level features extracted by pre-trained convolutional neural nets are surprisingly effective descriptors for this specialized domains. However, the choice of similarity measure for matching exemplars to a query image is essential to good performance. For matching multi-channel deep features, we propose the use of multi-channel normalized cross-correlation and analyze its effectiveness. Our proposed metric significantly improves performance in matching crime scene shoeprints to laboratory test impressions. We also show its effectiveness in other cross-domain image retrieval problems: matching facade images to segmentation labels and aerial photos to map images. Finally, we introduce a discriminatively trained variant and fine-tune our system through our proposed metric, obtaining state-of-the-art performance.