In this paper, a novel approach is proposed for learning robot control in contact-rich tasks such as wiping, by developing Diffusion Contact Model (DCM). Previous methods of learning such tasks relied on impedance control with time-varying stiffness tuning by performing Bayesian optimization by trial-and-error with robots. The proposed approach aims to reduce the cost of robot operation by predicting the robot contact trajectories from the variable stiffness inputs and using neural models. However, contact dynamics are inherently highly nonlinear, and their simulation requires iterative computations such as convex optimization. Moreover, approximating such computations by using finite-layer neural models is difficult. To overcome these limitations, the proposed DCM used the denoising diffusion models that could simulate the complex dynamics via iterative computations of multi-step denoising, thus improving the prediction accuracy. Stiffness tuning experiments conducted in simulated and real environments showed that the DCM achieved comparable performance to a conventional robot-based optimization method while reducing the number of robot trials.
This paper investigates a joint active and passive beamforming design for distributed simultaneous transmitting and reflecting (STAR) reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted multi-user (MU)- mutiple input single output (MISO) systems, where the energy splitting (ES) mode is considered for the STAR-RIS. We aim to design the active beamforming vectors at the base station (BS) and the passive beamforming at the STAR-RIS to maximize the user sum rate under transmitting power constraints. The formulated problem is non-convex and nontrivial to obtain the global optimum due to the coupling between active beamforming vectors and STAR-RIS phase shifts. To efficiently solve the problem, we propose a novel graph neural network (GNN)-based framework. Specifically, we first model the interactions among users and network entities are using a heterogeneous graph representation. A heterogeneous graph neural network (HGNN) implementation is then introduced to directly optimizes beamforming vectors and STAR-RIS coefficients with the system objective. Numerical results show that the proposed approach yields efficient performance compared to the previous benchmarks. Furthermore, the proposed GNN is scalable with various system configurations.
In this paper, we propose an efficient and accurate streaming speech recognition model based on the FastConformer architecture. We adapted the FastConformer architecture for streaming applications through: (1) constraining both the look-ahead and past contexts in the encoder, and (2) introducing an activation caching mechanism to enable the non-autoregressive encoder to operate autoregressively during inference. The proposed model is thoughtfully designed in a way to eliminate the accuracy disparity between the train and inference time which is common for many streaming models. Furthermore, our proposed encoder works with various decoder configurations including Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and RNN-Transducer (RNNT) decoders. Additionally, we introduced a hybrid CTC/RNNT architecture which utilizes a shared encoder with both a CTC and RNNT decoder to boost the accuracy and save computation. We evaluate the proposed model on LibriSpeech dataset and a multi-domain large scale dataset and demonstrate that it can achieve better accuracy with lower latency and inference time compared to a conventional buffered streaming model baseline. We also showed that training a model with multiple latencies can achieve better accuracy than single latency models while it enables us to support multiple latencies with a single model. Our experiments also showed the hybrid architecture would not only speedup the convergence of the CTC decoder but also improves the accuracy of streaming models compared to single decoder models.
Anomaly detection is vital in many domains, such as finance, healthcare, and cybersecurity. In this paper, we propose a novel deep anomaly detection method for tabular data that leverages Non-Parametric Transformers (NPTs), a model initially proposed for supervised tasks, to capture both feature-feature and sample-sample dependencies. In a reconstruction-based framework, we train an NPT to reconstruct masked features of normal samples. In a non-parametric fashion, we leverage the whole training set during inference and use the model's ability to reconstruct the masked features to generate an anomaly score. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to successfully combine feature-feature and sample-sample dependencies for anomaly detection on tabular datasets. Through extensive experiments on 31 benchmark tabular datasets, we demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods by 2.4% and 1.2% in terms of F1-score and AUROC, respectively. Our ablation study further proves that modeling both types of dependencies is crucial for anomaly detection on tabular data.
In this paper, we present a novel approach that combines deep metric learning and synthetic data generation using diffusion models for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. One popular approach for OOD detection is outlier exposure, where models are trained using a mixture of in-distribution (ID) samples and ``seen" OOD samples. For the OOD samples, the model is trained to minimize the KL divergence between the output probability and the uniform distribution while correctly classifying the in-distribution (ID) data. In this paper, we propose a label-mixup approach to generate synthetic OOD data using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs). Additionally, we explore recent advancements in metric learning to train our models. In the experiments, we found that metric learning-based loss functions perform better than the softmax. Furthermore, the baseline models (including softmax, and metric learning) show a significant improvement when trained with the generated OOD data. Our approach outperforms strong baselines in conventional OOD detection metrics.
In this paper, we present some enhanced error estimates for augmented subspace methods with the nonconforming Crouzeix-Raviart (CR) element. Before the novel estimates, we derive the explicit error estimates for the case of single eigenpair and multiple eigenpairs based on our defined spectral projection operators, respectively. Then we first strictly prove that the CR element based augmented subspace method exhibits the second-order convergence rate between the two steps of the augmented subspace iteration, which coincides with the practical experimental results. The algebraic error estimates of second order for the augmented subspace method explicitly elucidate the dependence of the convergence rate of the algebraic error on the coarse space, which provides new insights into the performance of the augmented subspace method. Numerical experiments are finally supplied to verify these new estimate results and the efficiency of our algorithms.
Link prediction is a very fundamental task on graphs. Inspired by traditional path-based methods, in this paper we propose a general and flexible representation learning framework based on paths for link prediction. Specifically, we define the representation of a pair of nodes as the generalized sum of all path representations, with each path representation as the generalized product of the edge representations in the path. Motivated by the Bellman-Ford algorithm for solving the shortest path problem, we show that the proposed path formulation can be efficiently solved by the generalized Bellman-Ford algorithm. To further improve the capacity of the path formulation, we propose the Neural Bellman-Ford Network (NBFNet), a general graph neural network framework that solves the path formulation with learned operators in the generalized Bellman-Ford algorithm. The NBFNet parameterizes the generalized Bellman-Ford algorithm with 3 neural components, namely INDICATOR, MESSAGE and AGGREGATE functions, which corresponds to the boundary condition, multiplication operator, and summation operator respectively. The NBFNet is very general, covers many traditional path-based methods, and can be applied to both homogeneous graphs and multi-relational graphs (e.g., knowledge graphs) in both transductive and inductive settings. Experiments on both homogeneous graphs and knowledge graphs show that the proposed NBFNet outperforms existing methods by a large margin in both transductive and inductive settings, achieving new state-of-the-art results.
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.
Many real-world problems can be represented as graph-based learning problems. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for learning spatial and attentional convolution neural networks on arbitrary graphs. Different from previous convolutional neural networks on graphs, we first design a motif-matching guided subgraph normalization method to capture neighborhood information. Then we implement subgraph-level self-attentional layers to learn different importances from different subgraphs to solve graph classification problems. Analogous to image-based attentional convolution networks that operate on locally connected and weighted regions of the input, we also extend graph normalization from one-dimensional node sequence to two-dimensional node grid by leveraging motif-matching, and design self-attentional layers without requiring any kinds of cost depending on prior knowledge of the graph structure. Our results on both bioinformatics and social network datasets show that we can significantly improve graph classification benchmarks over traditional graph kernel and existing deep models.
In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task learning architecture, which incorporates recent advances in attention mechanisms. Our approach, the Multi-Task Attention Network (MTAN), consists of a single shared network containing a global feature pool, together with task-specific soft-attention modules, which are trainable in an end-to-end manner. These attention modules allow for learning of task-specific features from the global pool, whilst simultaneously allowing for features to be shared across different tasks. The architecture can be built upon any feed-forward neural network, is simple to implement, and is parameter efficient. Experiments on the CityScapes dataset show that our method outperforms several baselines in both single-task and multi-task learning, and is also more robust to the various weighting schemes in the multi-task loss function. We further explore the effectiveness of our method through experiments over a range of task complexities, and show how our method scales well with task complexity compared to baselines.
In this paper, we propose a conceptually simple and geometrically interpretable objective function, i.e. additive margin Softmax (AM-Softmax), for deep face verification. In general, the face verification task can be viewed as a metric learning problem, so learning large-margin face features whose intra-class variation is small and inter-class difference is large is of great importance in order to achieve good performance. Recently, Large-margin Softmax and Angular Softmax have been proposed to incorporate the angular margin in a multiplicative manner. In this work, we introduce a novel additive angular margin for the Softmax loss, which is intuitively appealing and more interpretable than the existing works. We also emphasize and discuss the importance of feature normalization in the paper. Most importantly, our experiments on LFW BLUFR and MegaFace show that our additive margin softmax loss consistently performs better than the current state-of-the-art methods using the same network architecture and training dataset. Our code has also been made available at //github.com/happynear/AMSoftmax