1. Automated analysis of bioacoustic recordings using machine learning (ML) methods has the potential to greatly scale biodiversity monitoring efforts. The use of ML for high-stakes applications, such as conservation research, demands a data-centric approach with a focus on utilizing carefully annotated and curated evaluation and training data that is relevant and representative. Creating annotated datasets of sound recordings presents a number of challenges, such as managing large collections of recordings with associated metadata, developing flexible annotation tools that can accommodate the diverse range of vocalization profiles of different organisms, and addressing the scarcity of expert annotators. 2. We present Whombat a user-friendly, browser-based interface for managing audio recordings and annotation projects, with several visualization, exploration, and annotation tools. It enables users to quickly annotate, review, and share annotations, as well as visualize and evaluate a set of machine learning predictions on a dataset. The tool facilitates an iterative workflow where user annotations and machine learning predictions feedback to enhance model performance and annotation quality. 3. We demonstrate the flexibility of Whombat by showcasing two distinct use cases: an project aimed at enhancing automated UK bat call identification at the Bat Conservation Trust (BCT), and a collaborative effort among the USDA Forest Service and Oregon State University researchers exploring bioacoustic applications and extending automated avian classification models in the Pacific Northwest, USA. 4. Whombat is a flexible tool that can effectively address the challenges of annotation for bioacoustic research. It can be used for individual and collaborative work, hosted on a shared server or accessed remotely, or run on a personal computer without the need for coding skills.
相關內容
Language models (LMs) have recently flourished in natural language processing and computer vision, generating high-fidelity texts or images in various tasks. In contrast, the current speech generative models are still struggling regarding speech quality and task generalization. This paper presents Vec-Tok Speech, an extensible framework that resembles multiple speech generation tasks, generating expressive and high-fidelity speech. Specifically, we propose a novel speech codec based on speech vectors and semantic tokens. Speech vectors contain acoustic details contributing to high-fidelity speech reconstruction, while semantic tokens focus on the linguistic content of speech, facilitating language modeling. Based on the proposed speech codec, Vec-Tok Speech leverages an LM to undertake the core of speech generation. Moreover, Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) is introduced to reduce the token length and bit rate for lower exposure bias and longer context coverage, improving the performance of LMs. Vec-Tok Speech can be used for intra- and cross-lingual zero-shot voice conversion (VC), zero-shot speaking style transfer text-to-speech (TTS), speech-to-speech translation (S2ST), speech denoising, and speaker de-identification and anonymization. Experiments show that Vec-Tok Speech, built on 50k hours of speech, performs better than other SOTA models. Code will be available at //github.com/BakerBunker/VecTok .
Continual learning (CL) algorithms strive to acquire new knowledge while preserving prior information. However, this stability-plasticity trade-off remains a central challenge. This paper introduces a framework that dissects this trade-off, offering valuable insights into CL algorithms. The Readout-Decomposition of Activation Change (RDAC) framework first addresses the stability-plasticity dilemma and its relation to catastrophic forgetting. It relates learning-induced activation changes in the range of prior readouts to the degree of stability and changes in the null space to the degree of plasticity. In deep non-linear networks tackling split-CIFAR-110 tasks, the framework clarifies the stability-plasticity trade-offs of the popular regularization algorithms Synaptic intelligence (SI), Elastic-weight consolidation (EWC), and learning without Forgetting (LwF), and replay-based algorithms Gradient episodic memory (GEM), and data replay. GEM and data replay preserved stability and plasticity, while SI, EWC, and LwF traded off plasticity for stability. The inability of the regularization algorithms to maintain plasticity was linked to them restricting the change of activations in the null space of the prior readout. Additionally, for one-hidden-layer linear neural networks, we derived a gradient decomposition algorithm to restrict activation change only in the range of the prior readouts, to maintain high stability while not further sacrificing plasticity. Results demonstrate that the algorithm maintained stability without significant plasticity loss. The RDAC framework informs the behavior of existing CL algorithms and paves the way for novel CL approaches. Finally, it sheds light on the connection between learning-induced activation/representation changes and the stability-plasticity dilemma, also offering insights into representational drift in biological systems.
Unlike primates, training artificial neural networks on changing data distributions leads to a rapid decrease in performance on old tasks. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we investigate the representational changes that underlie this performance decrease and identify three distinct processes that together account for the phenomenon. The largest component is a misalignment between hidden representations and readout layers. Misalignment occurs due to learning on additional tasks and causes internal representations to shift. Representational geometry is partially conserved under this misalignment and only a small part of the information is irrecoverably lost. All types of representational changes scale with the dimensionality of hidden representations. These insights have implications for deep learning applications that need to be continuously updated, but may also aid aligning ANN models to the rather robust biological vision.
Research in high energy physics (HEP) requires huge amounts of computing and storage, putting strong constraints on the code speed and resource usage. To meet these requirements, a compiled high-performance language is typically used; while for physicists, who focus on the application when developing the code, better research productivity pleads for a high-level programming language. A popular approach consists of combining Python, used for the high-level interface, and C++, used for the computing intensive part of the code. A more convenient and efficient approach would be to use a language that provides both high-level programming and high-performance. The Julia programming language, developed at MIT especially to allow the use of a single language in research activities, has followed this path. In this paper the applicability of using the Julia language for HEP research is explored, covering the different aspects that are important for HEP code development: runtime performance, handling of large projects, interface with legacy code, distributed computing, training, and ease of programming. The study shows that the HEP community would benefit from a large scale adoption of this programming language. The HEP-specific foundation libraries that would need to be consolidated are identified
Keystroke dynamics is a behavioural biometric utilised for user identification and authentication. We propose a new set of features based on the distance between keys on the keyboard, a concept that has not been considered before in keystroke dynamics. We combine flight times, a popular metric, with the distance between keys on the keyboard and call them as Distance Enhanced Flight Time features (DEFT). This novel approach provides comprehensive insights into a person's typing behaviour, surpassing typing velocity alone. We build a DEFT model by combining DEFT features with other previously used keystroke dynamic features. The DEFT model is designed to be device-agnostic, allowing us to evaluate its effectiveness across three commonly used devices: desktop, mobile, and tablet. The DEFT model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods when we evaluate its effectiveness across two datasets. We obtain accuracy rates exceeding 99% and equal error rates below 10% on all three devices.
We address the fundamental limits of learning unknown parameters of any stochastic process from time-series data, and discover exact closed-form expressions for how optimal inference scales with observation length. Given a parametrized class of candidate models, the Fisher information of observed sequence probabilities lower-bounds the variance in model estimation from finite data. As sequence-length increases, the minimal variance scales as the square inverse of the length -- with constant coefficient given by the information rate. We discover a simple closed-form expression for this information rate, even in the case of infinite Markov order. We furthermore obtain the exact analytic lower bound on model variance from the observation-induced metadynamic among belief states. We discover ephemeral, exponential, and more general modes of convergence to the asymptotic information rate. Surprisingly, this myopic information rate converges to the asymptotic Fisher information rate with exactly the same relaxation timescales that appear in the myopic entropy rate as it converges to the Shannon entropy rate for the process. We illustrate these results with a sequence of examples that highlight qualitatively distinct features of stochastic processes that shape optimal learning.
To analyse large numbers of texts, social science researchers are increasingly confronting the challenge of text classification. When manual labeling is not possible and researchers have to find automatized ways to classify texts, computer science provides a useful toolbox of machine-learning methods whose performance remains understudied in the social sciences. In this article, we compare the performance of the most widely used text classifiers by applying them to a typical research scenario in social science research: a relatively small labeled dataset with infrequent occurrence of categories of interest, which is a part of a large unlabeled dataset. As an example case, we look at Twitter communication regarding climate change, a topic of increasing scholarly interest in interdisciplinary social science research. Using a novel dataset including 5,750 tweets from various international organizations regarding the highly ambiguous concept of climate change, we evaluate the performance of methods in automatically classifying tweets based on whether they are about climate change or not. In this context, we highlight two main findings. First, supervised machine-learning methods perform better than state-of-the-art lexicons, in particular as class balance increases. Second, traditional machine-learning methods, such as logistic regression and random forest, perform similarly to sophisticated deep-learning methods, whilst requiring much less training time and computational resources. The results have important implications for the analysis of short texts in social science research.
Artificial neural networks thrive in solving the classification problem for a particular rigid task, acquiring knowledge through generalized learning behaviour from a distinct training phase. The resulting network resembles a static entity of knowledge, with endeavours to extend this knowledge without targeting the original task resulting in a catastrophic forgetting. Continual learning shifts this paradigm towards networks that can continually accumulate knowledge over different tasks without the need to retrain from scratch. We focus on task incremental classification, where tasks arrive sequentially and are delineated by clear boundaries. Our main contributions concern 1) a taxonomy and extensive overview of the state-of-the-art, 2) a novel framework to continually determine the stability-plasticity trade-off of the continual learner, 3) a comprehensive experimental comparison of 11 state-of-the-art continual learning methods and 4 baselines. We empirically scrutinize method strengths and weaknesses on three benchmarks, considering Tiny Imagenet and large-scale unbalanced iNaturalist and a sequence of recognition datasets. We study the influence of model capacity, weight decay and dropout regularization, and the order in which the tasks are presented, and qualitatively compare methods in terms of required memory, computation time, and storage.
Graph representation learning for hypergraphs can be used to extract patterns among higher-order interactions that are critically important in many real world problems. Current approaches designed for hypergraphs, however, are unable to handle different types of hypergraphs and are typically not generic for various learning tasks. Indeed, models that can predict variable-sized heterogeneous hyperedges have not been available. Here we develop a new self-attention based graph neural network called Hyper-SAGNN applicable to homogeneous and heterogeneous hypergraphs with variable hyperedge sizes. We perform extensive evaluations on multiple datasets, including four benchmark network datasets and two single-cell Hi-C datasets in genomics. We demonstrate that Hyper-SAGNN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on traditional tasks while also achieving great performance on a new task called outsider identification. Hyper-SAGNN will be useful for graph representation learning to uncover complex higher-order interactions in different applications.
Machine-learning models have demonstrated great success in learning complex patterns that enable them to make predictions about unobserved data. In addition to using models for prediction, the ability to interpret what a model has learned is receiving an increasing amount of attention. However, this increased focus has led to considerable confusion about the notion of interpretability. In particular, it is unclear how the wide array of proposed interpretation methods are related, and what common concepts can be used to evaluate them. We aim to address these concerns by defining interpretability in the context of machine learning and introducing the Predictive, Descriptive, Relevant (PDR) framework for discussing interpretations. The PDR framework provides three overarching desiderata for evaluation: predictive accuracy, descriptive accuracy and relevancy, with relevancy judged relative to a human audience. Moreover, to help manage the deluge of interpretation methods, we introduce a categorization of existing techniques into model-based and post-hoc categories, with sub-groups including sparsity, modularity and simulatability. To demonstrate how practitioners can use the PDR framework to evaluate and understand interpretations, we provide numerous real-world examples. These examples highlight the often under-appreciated role played by human audiences in discussions of interpretability. Finally, based on our framework, we discuss limitations of existing methods and directions for future work. We hope that this work will provide a common vocabulary that will make it easier for both practitioners and researchers to discuss and choose from the full range of interpretation methods.
小貼士
登錄享
注冊地址： 北京市海淀區羊坊店路18號2幢3層301-191