Removing background noise from speech audio has been the subject of considerable research and effort, especially in recent years due to the rise of virtual communication and amateur sound recording. Yet background noise is not the only unpleasant disturbance that can prevent intelligibility: reverb, clipping, codec artifacts, problematic equalization, limited bandwidth, or inconsistent loudness are equally disturbing and ubiquitous. In this work, we propose to consider the task of speech enhancement as a holistic endeavor, and present a universal speech enhancement system that tackles 55 different distortions at the same time. Our approach consists of a generative model that employs score-based diffusion, together with a multi-resolution conditioning network that performs enhancement with mixture density networks. We show that this approach significantly outperforms the state of the art in a subjective test performed by expert listeners. We also show that it achieves competitive objective scores with just 4-8 diffusion steps, despite not considering any particular strategy for fast sampling. We hope that both our methodology and technical contributions encourage researchers and practitioners to adopt a universal approach to speech enhancement, possibly framing it as a generative task.
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It is a well-known fact that there is no complete and discrete invariant on the collection of all multiparameter persistence modules. Nonetheless, many invariants have been proposed in the literature to study multiparameter persistence modules, though each invariant will lose some amount of information. One such invariant is the generalized rank invariant. This invariant is known to be complete on the class of interval decomposable persistence modules in general, under mild assumptions on the indexing poset $P$. There is often a trade-off, where the stronger an invariant is, the more expensive it is to compute in practice. The generalized rank invariant on its own is difficult to compute, whereas the standard rank invariant is readily computable through software implementations such as RIVET. We can interpolate between these two to induce new invariants via restricting the domain of the generalized rank invariant, and this family exhibits the aforementioned trade-off. This work studies the tension which exists between computational efficiency and retaining strength when restricting the domain of the generalized rank invariant. We provide a characterization result on where such restrictions are complete invariants in the setting where $P$ is finite, and furthermore show that such restricted generalized rank invariants are stable.
Distinctive Image Captioning (DIC) -- generating distinctive captions that describe the unique details of a target image -- has received considerable attention over the last few years. A recent DIC work proposes to generate distinctive captions by comparing the target image with a set of semantic-similar reference images, i.e., reference-based DIC (Ref-DIC). It aims to make the generated captions can tell apart the target and reference images. Unfortunately, reference images used by existing Ref-DIC works are easy to distinguish: these reference images only resemble the target image at scene-level and have few common objects, such that a Ref-DIC model can trivially generate distinctive captions even without considering the reference images. To ensure Ref-DIC models really perceive the unique objects (or attributes) in target images, we first propose two new Ref-DIC benchmarks. Specifically, we design a two-stage matching mechanism, which strictly controls the similarity between the target and reference images at object-/attribute- level (vs. scene-level). Secondly, to generate distinctive captions, we develop a strong Transformer-based Ref-DIC baseline, dubbed as TransDIC. It not only extracts visual features from the target image, but also encodes the differences between objects in the target and reference images. Finally, for more trustworthy benchmarking, we propose a new evaluation metric named DisCIDEr for Ref-DIC, which evaluates both the accuracy and distinctiveness of the generated captions. Experimental results demonstrate that our TransDIC can generate distinctive captions. Besides, it outperforms several state-of-the-art models on the two new benchmarks over different metrics.
Deep neural network (DNN) based speech enhancement models have attracted extensive attention due to their promising performance. However, it is difficult to deploy a powerful DNN in real-time applications because of its high computational cost. Typical compression methods such as pruning and quantization do not make good use of the data characteristics. In this paper, we introduce the Skip-RNN strategy into speech enhancement models with parallel RNNs. The states of the RNNs update intermittently without interrupting the update of the output mask, which leads to significant reduction of computational load without evident audio artifacts. To better leverage the difference between the voice and the noise, we further regularize the skipping strategy with voice activity detection (VAD) guidance, saving more computational load. Experiments on a high-performance speech enhancement model, dual-path convolutional recurrent network (DPCRN), show the superiority of our strategy over strategies like network pruning or directly training a smaller model. We also validate the generalization of the proposed strategy on two other competitive speech enhancement models.
This paper describes a practical dual-process speech enhancement system that adapts environment-sensitive frame-online beamforming (front-end) with help from environment-free block-online source separation (back-end). To use minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamforming, one may train a deep neural network (DNN) that estimates time-frequency masks used for computing the covariance matrices of sources (speech and noise). Backpropagation-based run-time adaptation of the DNN was proposed for dealing with the mismatched training-test conditions. Instead, one may try to directly estimate the source covariance matrices with a state-of-the-art blind source separation method called fast multichannel non-negative matrix factorization (FastMNMF). In practice, however, neither the DNN nor the FastMNMF can be updated in a frame-online manner due to its computationally-expensive iterative nature. Our DNN-free system leverages the posteriors of the latest source spectrograms given by block-online FastMNMF to derive the current source covariance matrices for frame-online beamforming. The evaluation shows that our frame-online system can quickly respond to scene changes caused by interfering speaker movements and outperformed an existing block-online system with DNN-based beamforming by 5.0 points in terms of the word error rate.
We study a new approach to learning energy-based models (EBMs) based on adversarial training (AT). We show that (binary) AT learns a special kind of energy function that models the support of the data distribution, and the learning process is closely related to MCMC-based maximum likelihood learning of EBMs. We further propose improved techniques for generative modeling with AT, and demonstrate that this new approach is capable of generating diverse and realistic images. Aside from having competitive image generation performance to explicit EBMs, the studied approach is stable to train, is well-suited for image translation tasks, and exhibits strong out-of-distribution adversarial robustness. Our results demonstrate the viability of the AT approach to generative modeling, suggesting that AT is a competitive alternative approach to learning EBMs.
Advances in artificial intelligence often stem from the development of new environments that abstract real-world situations into a form where research can be done conveniently. This paper contributes such an environment based on ideas inspired by elementary Microeconomics. Agents learn to produce resources in a spatially complex world, trade them with one another, and consume those that they prefer. We show that the emergent production, consumption, and pricing behaviors respond to environmental conditions in the directions predicted by supply and demand shifts in Microeconomics. We also demonstrate settings where the agents' emergent prices for goods vary over space, reflecting the local abundance of goods. After the price disparities emerge, some agents then discover a niche of transporting goods between regions with different prevailing prices -- a profitable strategy because they can buy goods where they are cheap and sell them where they are expensive. Finally, in a series of ablation experiments, we investigate how choices in the environmental rewards, bartering actions, agent architecture, and ability to consume tradable goods can either aid or inhibit the emergence of this economic behavior. This work is part of the environment development branch of a research program that aims to build human-like artificial general intelligence through multi-agent interactions in simulated societies. By exploring which environment features are needed for the basic phenomena of elementary microeconomics to emerge automatically from learning, we arrive at an environment that differs from those studied in prior multi-agent reinforcement learning work along several dimensions. For example, the model incorporates heterogeneous tastes and physical abilities, and agents negotiate with one another as a grounded form of communication.
The advent of artificial intelligence technology paved the way of many researches to be made within air combat sector. Academicians and many other researchers did a research on a prominent research direction called autonomous maneuver decision of UAV. Elaborative researches produced some outcomes, but decisions that include Reinforcement Learning(RL) came out to be more efficient. There have been many researches and experiments done to make an agent reach its target in an optimal way, most prominent are Genetic Algorithm(GA) , A star, RRT and other various optimization techniques have been used. But Reinforcement Learning is the well known one for its success. In DARPHA Alpha Dogfight Trials, reinforcement learning prevailed against a real veteran F16 human pilot who was trained by Boeing. This successor model was developed by Heron Systems. After this accomplishment, reinforcement learning bring tremendous attention on itself. In this research we aimed our UAV which has a dubin vehicle dynamic property to move to the target in two dimensional space in an optimal path using Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients (TD3) and used in experience replay Hindsight Experience Replay(HER).We did tests on two different environments and used simulations.
Knowledge enhanced pre-trained language models (K-PLMs) are shown to be effective for many public tasks in the literature but few of them have been successfully applied in practice. To address this problem, we propose K-AID, a systematic approach that includes a low-cost knowledge acquisition process for acquiring domain knowledge, an effective knowledge infusion module for improving model performance, and a knowledge distillation component for reducing the model size and deploying K-PLMs on resource-restricted devices (e.g., CPU) for real-world application. Importantly, instead of capturing entity knowledge like the majority of existing K-PLMs, our approach captures relational knowledge, which contributes to better-improving sentence-level text classification and text matching tasks that play a key role in question answering (QA). We conducted a set of experiments on five text classification tasks and three text matching tasks from three domains, namely E-commerce, Government, and Film&TV, and performed online A/B tests in E-commerce. Experimental results show that our approach is able to achieve substantial improvement on sentence-level question answering tasks and bring beneficial business value in industrial settings.
Knowledge is a formal way of understanding the world, providing a human-level cognition and intelligence for the next-generation artificial intelligence (AI). One of the representations of knowledge is the structural relations between entities. An effective way to automatically acquire this important knowledge, called Relation Extraction (RE), a sub-task of information extraction, plays a vital role in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Its purpose is to identify semantic relations between entities from natural language text. To date, there are several studies for RE in previous works, which have documented these techniques based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) become a prevailing technique in this research. Especially, the supervised and distant supervision methods based on DNNs are the most popular and reliable solutions for RE. This article 1)introduces some general concepts, and further 2)gives a comprehensive overview of DNNs in RE from two points of view: supervised RE, which attempts to improve the standard RE systems, and distant supervision RE, which adopts DNNs to design the sentence encoder and the de-noise method. We further 3)cover some novel methods and describe some recent trends and discuss possible future research directions for this task.
Attention mechanism has been used as an ancillary means to help RNN or CNN. However, the Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) recently recorded the state-of-the-art performance in machine translation with a dramatic reduction in training time by solely using attention. Motivated by the Transformer, Directional Self Attention Network (Shen et al., 2017), a fully attention-based sentence encoder, was proposed. It showed good performance with various data by using forward and backward directional information in a sentence. But in their study, not considered at all was the distance between words, an important feature when learning the local dependency to help understand the context of input text. We propose Distance-based Self-Attention Network, which considers the word distance by using a simple distance mask in order to model the local dependency without losing the ability of modeling global dependency which attention has inherent. Our model shows good performance with NLI data, and it records the new state-of-the-art result with SNLI data. Additionally, we show that our model has a strength in long sentences or documents.
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