Voice recognition technology enables the execution of real-world operations through a single voice command. This paper introduces a voice recognition system that involves converting input voice signals into corresponding text using an Android application. The text messages are then transmitted through Bluetooth connectivity, serving as a communication platform. Simultaneously, a controller circuit, equipped with a Bluetooth module, receives the text signal and, following a coding mechanism, executes real-world operations. The paper extends the application of voice recognition to real-time surveillance and automation, incorporating obstacle detection and avoidance mechanisms, as well as control over lighting and horn functions through predefined voice commands. The proposed technique not only serves as an assistive tool for individuals with disabilities but also finds utility in industrial automation, enabling robots to perform specific tasks with precision.
This paper introduces innovative benchmarks to evaluate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in real-world zero-shot recognition tasks, focusing on the granularity and specificity of prompting text. We propose a unique evaluation protocol using adapted ImageNet and MS-COCO datasets to assess models' consistency in recognizing concepts at varying granularity levels and their sensitivity to the specificity of language inputs. Our extensive evaluation reveals that state-of-the-art VLMs, including contrastive models like CLIP, struggle with granularity and are sensitive to text specificity, impacting their effectiveness in open-world settings. This comprehensive study, a first in evaluating VLMs from these perspectives, provides valuable insights and tools for the community, highlighting the limitations and paving the way for enhanced models with better generalization in zero-shot recognition.
Most existing masked audio modeling (MAM) methods learn audio representations by masking and reconstructing local spectrogram patches. However, the reconstruction loss mainly accounts for the signal-level quality of the reconstructed spectrogram and is still limited in extracting high-level audio semantics. In this paper, we propose to enhance the semantic modeling of MAM by distilling cross-modality knowledge from contrastive language-audio pretraining (CLAP) representations for both masked and unmasked regions (MAM-CLAP) and leveraging a multi-objective learning strategy with a supervised classification branch (SupMAM), thereby providing more semantic knowledge for MAM and enabling it to effectively learn global features from labels. Experiments show that our methods significantly improve the performance on multiple downstream tasks. Furthermore, by combining our MAM-CLAP with SupMAM, we can achieve new state-of-the-art results on various audio and speech classification tasks, exceeding previous self-supervised learning and supervised pretraining methods.
In the realm of recommender systems, handling noisy implicit feedback is a prevalent challenge. While most research efforts focus on mitigating noise through data cleaning methods like resampling and reweighting, these approaches often rely on heuristic assumptions. Alternatively, model perspective denoising strategies actively incorporate noise into user-item interactions, aiming to bolster the model's inherent denoising capabilities. Nonetheless, this type of denoising method presents substantial challenges to the capacity of the recommender model to accurately identify and represent noise patterns. To overcome these hurdles, we introduce a plug-in diffusion model for embedding denoising in recommendation system, which employs a multi-step denoising approach based on diffusion models to foster robust representation learning of embeddings. Our model operates by introducing controlled Gaussian noise into user and item embeddings derived from various recommender systems during the forward phase. Subsequently, it iteratively eliminates this noise in the reverse denoising phase, thereby augmenting the embeddings' resilience to noisy feedback. The primary challenge in this process is determining direction and an optimal starting point for the denoising process. To address this, we incorporate a specialized denoising module that utilizes collaborative data as a guide for the denoising process. Furthermore, during the inference phase, we employ the average of item embeddings previously favored by users as the starting point to facilitate ideal item generation. Our thorough evaluations across three datasets and in conjunction with three classic backend models confirm its superior performance.
The widespread smart devices raise people's concerns of being eavesdropped on. To enhance voice privacy, recent studies exploit the nonlinearity in microphone to jam audio recorders with inaudible ultrasound. However, existing solutions solely rely on energetic masking. Their simple-form noise leads to several problems, such as high energy requirements and being easily removed by speech enhancement techniques. Besides, most of these solutions do not support authorized recording, which restricts their usage scenarios. In this paper, we design an efficient yet robust system that can jam microphones while preserving authorized recording. Specifically, we propose a novel phoneme-based noise with the idea of informational masking, which can distract both machines and humans and is resistant to denoising techniques. Besides, we optimize the noise transmission strategy for broader coverage and implement a hardware prototype of our system. Experimental results show that our system can reduce the recognition accuracy of recordings to below 50\% under all tested speech recognition systems, which is much better than existing solutions.
In this paper we study the expectation maximization (EM) technique for one-bit MIMO-OFDM detection (OMOD). Arising from the recent interest in massive MIMO with one-bit analog-to-digital converters, OMOD is a massive-scale problem. EM is an iterative method that can exploit the OFDM structure to process the problem in a per-iteration efficient fashion. In this study we analyze the convergence rate of EM for a class of approximate maximum-likelihood OMOD formulations, or, in a broader sense, a class of problems involving regression from quantized data. We show how the SNR and channel conditions can have an impact on the convergence rate. We do so by making a connection between the EM and the proximal gradient methods in the context of OMOD. This connection also gives us insight to build new accelerated and/or inexact EM schemes. The accelerated scheme has faster convergence in theory, and the inexact scheme provides us with the flexibility to implement EM more efficiently, with convergence guarantee. Furthermore we develop a deep EM algorithm, wherein we take the structure of our inexact EM algorithm and apply deep unfolding to train an efficient structured deep net. Simulation results show that our accelerated exact/inexact EM algorithms run much faster than their standard EM counterparts, and that the deep EM algorithm gives promising detection and runtime performances.
This paper introduces RABBIT, a novel robot-assisted bed bathing system designed to address the growing need for assistive technologies in personal hygiene tasks. It combines multimodal perception and dual (software and hardware) compliance to perform safe and comfortable physical human-robot interaction. Using RGB and thermal imaging to segment dry, soapy, and wet skin regions accurately, RABBIT can effectively execute washing, rinsing, and drying tasks in line with expert caregiving practices. Our system includes custom-designed motion primitives inspired by human caregiving techniques, and a novel compliant end-effector called Scrubby, optimized for gentle and effective interactions. We conducted a user study with 12 participants, including one participant with severe mobility limitations, demonstrating the system's effectiveness and perceived comfort. Supplementary material and videos can be found on our website //emprise.cs.cornell.edu/rabbit.
This paper investigates the spectrum sharing between a multiple-input single-output (MISO) secure communication system and a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar system in the presence of one suspicious eavesdropper. We jointly design the radar waveform and communication beamforming vector at the two systems, such that the interference between the base station (BS) and radar is reduced, and the detrimental radar interference to the communication system is enhanced to jam the eavesdropper, thereby increasing secure information transmission performance. In particular, by considering the imperfect channel state information (CSI) for the user and eavesdropper, we maximize the worst-case secrecy rate at the user, while ensuring the detection performance of radar system. To tackle this challenging problem, we propose a two-layer robust cooperative algorithm based on the S-lemma and semidefinite relaxation techniques. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves significant secrecy rate gains over the non-robust scheme. Furthermore, we illustrate the trade-off between secrecy rate and detection probability.
This paper introduces a novel paradigm for the generalizable neural radiance field (NeRF). Previous generic NeRF methods combine multiview stereo techniques with image-based neural rendering for generalization, yielding impressive results, while suffering from three issues. First, occlusions often result in inconsistent feature matching. Then, they deliver distortions and artifacts in geometric discontinuities and locally sharp shapes due to their individual process of sampled points and rough feature aggregation. Third, their image-based representations experience severe degradations when source views are not near enough to the target view. To address challenges, we propose the first paradigm that constructs the generalizable neural field based on point-based rather than image-based rendering, which we call the Generalizable neural Point Field (GPF). Our approach explicitly models visibilities by geometric priors and augments them with neural features. We propose a novel nonuniform log sampling strategy to improve both rendering speed and reconstruction quality. Moreover, we present a learnable kernel spatially augmented with features for feature aggregations, mitigating distortions at places with drastically varying geometries. Besides, our representation can be easily manipulated. Experiments show that our model can deliver better geometries, view consistencies, and rendering quality than all counterparts and benchmarks on three datasets in both generalization and finetuning settings, preliminarily proving the potential of the new paradigm for generalizable NeRF.
Linear solvers are major computational bottlenecks in a wide range of decision support and optimization computations. The challenges become even more pronounced on heterogeneous hardware, where traditional sparse numerical linear algebra methods are often inefficient. For example, methods for solving ill-conditioned linear systems have relied on conditional branching, which degrades performance on hardware accelerators such as graphical processing units (GPUs). To improve the efficiency of solving ill-conditioned systems, our computational strategy separates computations that are efficient on GPUs from those that need to run on traditional central processing units (CPUs). Our strategy maximizes the reuse of expensive CPU computations. Iterative methods, which thus far have not been broadly used for ill-conditioned linear systems, play an important role in our approach. In particular, we extend ideas from [1] to implement iterative refinement using inexact LU factors and flexible generalized minimal residual (FGMRES), with the aim of efficient performance on GPUs. We focus on solutions that are effective within broader application contexts, and discuss how early performance tests could be improved to be more predictive of the performance in a realistic environment
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.