We have developed a diffusion-based speech refiner that improves the reference-free perceptual quality of the audio predicted by preceding single-channel speech separation models. Although modern deep neural network-based speech separation models have show high performance in reference-based metrics, they often produce perceptually unnatural artifacts. The recent advancements made to diffusion models motivated us to tackle this problem by restoring the degraded parts of initial separations with a generative approach. Utilizing the denoising diffusion restoration model (DDRM) as a basis, we propose a shared DDRM-based refiner that generates samples conditioned on the global information of preceding outputs from arbitrary speech separation models. We experimentally show that our refiner can provide a clearer harmonic structure of speech and improves the reference-free metric of perceptual quality for arbitrary preceding model architectures. Furthermore, we tune the variance of the measurement noise based on preceding outputs, which results in higher scores in both reference-free and reference-based metrics. The separation quality can also be further improved by blending the discriminative and generative outputs.
Diffusion models have attracted significant attention due to their remarkable ability to create content and generate data for tasks such as image classification. However, the usage of diffusion models to generate high-quality object detection data remains an underexplored area, where not only the image-level perceptual quality but also geometric conditions such as bounding boxes and camera views are essential. Previous studies have utilized either copy-paste synthesis or layout-to-image (L2I) generation with specifically designed modules to encode semantic layouts. In this paper, we propose GeoDiffusion, a simple framework that can flexibly translate various geometric conditions into text prompts and empower the pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models for high-quality detection data generation. Unlike previous L2I methods, our GeoDiffusion is able to encode not only bounding boxes but also extra geometric conditions such as camera views in self-driving scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate GeoDiffusion outperforms previous L2I methods while maintaining 4x training time faster. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to adopt diffusion models for layout-to-image generation with geometric conditions and demonstrate that L2I-generated images can be beneficial for improving the performance of object detectors.
Due to the nature of pure-tone audiometry test, hearing loss data often has a complicated correlation structure. Generalized estimating equation (GEE) is commonly used to investigate the association between exposures and hearing loss, because it is robust to misspecification of the correlation matrix. However, this robustness typically entails a moderate loss of estimation efficiency in finite samples. This paper proposes to model the correlation coefficients and use second-order generalized estimating equations to estimate the correlation parameters. In simulation studies, we assessed the finite sample performance of our proposed method and compared it with other methods, such as GEE with independent, exchangeable and unstructured correlation structures. Our method achieves an efficiency gain which is larger for the coefficients of the covariates corresponding to the within-cluster variation (e.g., ear-level covariates) than the coefficients of cluster-level covariates. The efficiency gain is also more pronounced when the within-cluster correlations are moderate to strong, or when comparing to GEE with an unstructured correlation structure. As a real-world example, we applied the proposed method to data from the Audiology Assessment Arm of the Conservation of Hearing Study, and studied the association between a dietary adherence score and hearing loss.
Communication overhead is one of the major challenges in Federated Learning(FL). A few classical schemes assume the server can extract the auxiliary information about training data of the participants from the local models to construct a central dummy dataset. The server uses the dummy dataset to finetune aggregated global model to achieve the target test accuracy in fewer communication rounds. In this paper, we summarize the above solutions into a data-based communication-efficient FL framework. The key of the proposed framework is to design an efficient extraction module(EM) which ensures the dummy dataset has a positive effect on finetuning aggregated global model. Different from the existing methods that use generator to design EM, our proposed method, FedINIBoost borrows the idea of gradient match to construct EM. Specifically, FedINIBoost builds a proxy dataset of the real dataset in two steps for each participant at each communication round. Then the server aggregates all the proxy datasets to form a central dummy dataset, which is used to finetune aggregated global model. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of our method compared with the existing classical method, FedAVG, FedProx, Moon and FedFTG. Moreover, FedINIBoost plays a significant role in finetuning the performance of aggregated global model at the initial stage of FL.
Recently, deep learning-based beamforming algorithms have shown promising performance in target speech extraction tasks. However, most systems do not fully utilize spatial information. In this paper, we propose a target speech extraction network that utilizes spatial information to enhance the performance of neural beamformer. To achieve this, we first use the UNet-TCN structure to model input features and improve the estimation accuracy of the speech pre-separation module by avoiding information loss caused by direct dimensionality reduction in other models. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-head cross-attention mechanism that enhances the neural beamformer's perception of spatial information by making full use of the spatial information received by the array. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach, which incorporates a more reasonable target mask estimation network and a spatial information-based cross-attention mechanism into the neural beamformer, effectively improves speech separation performance.
Separating signals from an additive mixture may be an unnecessarily hard problem when one is only interested in specific properties of a given signal. In this work, we tackle simpler "statistical component separation" problems that focus on recovering a predefined set of statistical descriptors of a target signal from a noisy mixture. Assuming access to samples of the noise process, we investigate a method devised to match the statistics of the solution candidate corrupted by noise samples with those of the observed mixture. We first analyze the behavior of this method using simple examples with analytically tractable calculations. Then, we apply it in an image denoising context employing 1) wavelet-based descriptors, 2) ConvNet-based descriptors on astrophysics and ImageNet data. In the case of 1), we show that our method better recovers the descriptors of the target data than a standard denoising method in most situations. Additionally, despite not constructed for this purpose, it performs surprisingly well in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio on full signal reconstruction. In comparison, representation 2) appears less suitable for image denoising. Finally, we extend this method by introducing a diffusive stepwise algorithm which gives a new perspective to the initial method and leads to promising results for image denoising under specific circumstances.
Deep dilated temporal convolutional networks (TCN) have been proved to be very effective in sequence modeling. In this paper we propose several improvements of TCN for end-to-end approach to monaural speech separation, which consists of 1) multi-scale dynamic weighted gated dilated convolutional pyramids network (FurcaPy), 2) gated TCN with intra-parallel convolutional components (FurcaPa), 3) weight-shared multi-scale gated TCN (FurcaSh), 4) dilated TCN with gated difference-convolutional component (FurcaSu), that all these networks take the mixed utterance of two speakers and maps it to two separated utterances, where each utterance contains only one speaker's voice. For the objective, we propose to train the network by directly optimizing utterance level signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR) in a permutation invariant training (PIT) style. Our experiments on the the public WSJ0-2mix data corpus results in 18.4dB SDR improvement, which shows our proposed networks can leads to performance improvement on the speaker separation task.
Model specification searches and modifications are commonly employed in covariance structure analysis (CSA) or structural equation modeling (SEM) to improve the goodness-of-fit. However, these practices can be susceptible to capitalizing on chance, as a model that fits one sample may not generalize to another sample from the same population. This paper introduces the improved Lagrange Multipliers (LM) test, which provides a reliable method for conducting a thorough model specification search and effectively identifying missing parameters. By leveraging the stepwise bootstrap method in the standard LM and Wald tests, our data-driven approach enhances the accuracy of parameter identification. The results from Monte Carlo simulations and two empirical applications in political science demonstrate the effectiveness of the improved LM test, particularly when dealing with small sample sizes and models with large degrees of freedom. This approach contributes to better statistical fit and addresses the issue of capitalization on chance in model specification.
Denoising diffusion models represent a recent emerging topic in computer vision, demonstrating remarkable results in the area of generative modeling. A diffusion model is a deep generative model that is based on two stages, a forward diffusion stage and a reverse diffusion stage. In the forward diffusion stage, the input data is gradually perturbed over several steps by adding Gaussian noise. In the reverse stage, a model is tasked at recovering the original input data by learning to gradually reverse the diffusion process, step by step. Diffusion models are widely appreciated for the quality and diversity of the generated samples, despite their known computational burdens, i.e. low speeds due to the high number of steps involved during sampling. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of articles on denoising diffusion models applied in vision, comprising both theoretical and practical contributions in the field. First, we identify and present three generic diffusion modeling frameworks, which are based on denoising diffusion probabilistic models, noise conditioned score networks, and stochastic differential equations. We further discuss the relations between diffusion models and other deep generative models, including variational auto-encoders, generative adversarial networks, energy-based models, autoregressive models and normalizing flows. Then, we introduce a multi-perspective categorization of diffusion models applied in computer vision. Finally, we illustrate the current limitations of diffusion models and envision some interesting directions for future research.
Deep learning shows great potential in generation tasks thanks to deep latent representation. Generative models are classes of models that can generate observations randomly with respect to certain implied parameters. Recently, the diffusion Model becomes a raising class of generative models by virtue of its power-generating ability. Nowadays, great achievements have been reached. More applications except for computer vision, speech generation, bioinformatics, and natural language processing are to be explored in this field. However, the diffusion model has its natural drawback of a slow generation process, leading to many enhanced works. This survey makes a summary of the field of the diffusion model. We firstly state the main problem with two landmark works - DDPM and DSM. Then, we present a diverse range of advanced techniques to speed up the diffusion models - training schedule, training-free sampling, mixed-modeling, and score & diffusion unification. Regarding existing models, we also provide a benchmark of FID score, IS, and NLL according to specific NFE. Moreover, applications with diffusion models are introduced including computer vision, sequence modeling, audio, and AI for science. Finally, there is a summarization of this field together with limitations & further directions.
We introduce a generic framework that reduces the computational cost of object detection while retaining accuracy for scenarios where objects with varied sizes appear in high resolution images. Detection progresses in a coarse-to-fine manner, first on a down-sampled version of the image and then on a sequence of higher resolution regions identified as likely to improve the detection accuracy. Built upon reinforcement learning, our approach consists of a model (R-net) that uses coarse detection results to predict the potential accuracy gain for analyzing a region at a higher resolution and another model (Q-net) that sequentially selects regions to zoom in. Experiments on the Caltech Pedestrians dataset show that our approach reduces the number of processed pixels by over 50% without a drop in detection accuracy. The merits of our approach become more significant on a high resolution test set collected from YFCC100M dataset, where our approach maintains high detection performance while reducing the number of processed pixels by about 70% and the detection time by over 50%.