In the realm of digital audio processing, Voice Activity Detection (VAD) plays a pivotal role in distinguishing speech from non-speech elements, a task that becomes increasingly complex in noisy environments. This paper details the development and implementation of a VAD system, specifically engineered to maintain high accuracy in the presence of various ambient noises. We introduce a novel algorithm enhanced with a specially designed filtering technique, effectively isolating speech even amidst diverse background sounds. Our comprehensive testing and validation demonstrate the system's robustness, highlighting its capability to discern speech from noise with remarkable precision. The exploration delves into: (1) the core principles underpinning VAD and its crucial role in modern audio processing; (2) the methodologies we employed to filter ambient noise; and (3) a presentation of evidence affirming our system's superior performance in noisy conditions.
Realistic video simulation has shown significant potential across diverse applications, from virtual reality to film production. This is particularly true for scenarios where capturing videos in real-world settings is either impractical or expensive. Existing approaches in video simulation often fail to accurately model the lighting environment, represent the object geometry, or achieve high levels of photorealism. In this paper, we propose Anything in Any Scene, a novel and generic framework for realistic video simulation that seamlessly inserts any object into an existing dynamic video with a strong emphasis on physical realism. Our proposed general framework encompasses three key processes: 1) integrating a realistic object into a given scene video with proper placement to ensure geometric realism; 2) estimating the sky and environmental lighting distribution and simulating realistic shadows to enhance the light realism; 3) employing a style transfer network that refines the final video output to maximize photorealism. We experimentally demonstrate that Anything in Any Scene framework produces simulated videos of great geometric realism, lighting realism, and photorealism. By significantly mitigating the challenges associated with video data generation, our framework offers an efficient and cost-effective solution for acquiring high-quality videos. Furthermore, its applications extend well beyond video data augmentation, showing promising potential in virtual reality, video editing, and various other video-centric applications. Please check our project website //anythinginanyscene.github.io for access to our project code and more high-resolution video results.
While traditional video representations are organized around discrete image frames, event-based video is a new paradigm that forgoes image frames altogether. Rather, pixel samples are temporally asynchronous and independent of one another. Until now, researchers have lacked a cohesive software framework for exploring the representation, compression, and applications of event-based video. I present the AD$\Delta$ER software suite to fill this gap. This framework includes utilities for transcoding framed and multimodal event-based video sources to a common representation, rate control mechanisms, lossy compression, application support, and an interactive GUI for transcoding and playback. In this paper, I describe these various software components and their usage.
Interactive visual grounding in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is challenging yet practical due to the inevitable ambiguity in natural languages. It requires robots to disambiguate the user input by active information gathering. Previous approaches often rely on predefined templates to ask disambiguation questions, resulting in performance reduction in realistic interactive scenarios. In this paper, we propose TiO, an end-to-end system for interactive visual grounding in human-robot interaction. Benefiting from a unified formulation of visual dialogue and grounding, our method can be trained on a joint of extensive public data, and show superior generality to diversified and challenging open-world scenarios. In the experiments, we validate TiO on GuessWhat?! and InViG benchmarks, setting new state-of-the-art performance by a clear margin. Moreover, we conduct HRI experiments on the carefully selected 150 challenging scenes as well as real-robot platforms. Results show that our method demonstrates superior generality to diversified visual and language inputs with a high success rate. Codes and demos are available at //github.com/jxu124/TiO.
Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) requires precise modelling of fine-grained moment-text associations to capture intricate visual-language relationships. Due to the lack of a diverse and generalisable VMR dataset to facilitate learning scalable moment-text associations, existing methods resort to joint training on both source and target domain videos for cross-domain applications. Meanwhile, recent developments in vision-language multimodal models pre-trained on large-scale image-text and/or video-text pairs are only based on coarse associations (weakly labelled). They are inadequate to provide fine-grained moment-text correlations required for cross-domain VMR. In this work, we solve the problem of unseen cross-domain VMR, where certain visual and textual concepts do not overlap across domains, by only utilising target domain sentences (text prompts) without accessing their videos. To that end, we explore generative video diffusion for fine-grained editing of source videos controlled by the target sentences, enabling us to simulate target domain videos. We address two problems in video editing for optimising unseen domain VMR: (1) generation of high-quality simulation videos of different moments with subtle distinctions, (2) selection of simulation videos that complement existing source training videos without introducing harmful noise or unnecessary repetitions. On the first problem, we formulate a two-stage video diffusion generation controlled simultaneously by (1) the original video structure of a source video, (2) subject specifics, and (3) a target sentence prompt. This ensures fine-grained variations between video moments. On the second problem, we introduce a hybrid selection mechanism that combines two quantitative metrics for noise filtering and one qualitative metric for leveraging VMR prediction on simulation video selection.
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.
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play a pivotal role in enabling Internet of Things (IoT) devices with sensing and actuation capabilities. Operating in remote and resource-constrained environments, these IoT devices face challenges related to energy consumption, crucial for network longevity. Clustering protocols have emerged as an effective solution to alleviate energy burdens on IoT devices. This paper introduces Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy with Reinforcement Learning-based Controller (LEACH-RLC), a novel clustering protocol that employs a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) for strategic selection of cluster heads (CHs) and node-to-cluster assignments. Additionally, it integrates a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent to minimize control overhead by learning optimal timings for generating new clusters. Addressing key research questions, LEACH-RLC seeks to balance control overhead reduction without compromising overall network performance. Through extensive simulations, this paper investigates the frequency and opportune moments for generating new clustering solutions. Results demonstrate the superior performance of LEACH-RLC over conventional LEACH and LEACH-C, showcasing enhanced network lifetime, reduced average energy consumption, and minimized control overhead. The proposed protocol contributes to advancing the efficiency and adaptability of WSNs, addressing critical challenges in IoT deployments.
Counterfactual Explanations (CE) is the de facto method for providing insight and interpretability in black-box decision-making models by identifying alternative input instances that lead to different outcomes. This paper extends the concept of CEs to a distributional context, broadening the scope from individual data points to entire input and output distributions, named Distributional Counterfactual Explanation (DCE). In DCE, our focus shifts to analyzing the distributional properties of the factual and counterfactual, drawing parallels to the classical approach of assessing individual instances and their resulting decisions. We leverage Optimal Transport (OT) to frame a chance-constrained optimization problem, aiming to derive a counterfactual distribution that closely aligns with its factual counterpart, substantiated by statistical confidence. Our proposed optimization method, DISCOUNT, strategically balances this confidence across both input and output distributions. This algorithm is accompanied by an analysis of its convergence rate. The efficacy of our proposed method is substantiated through a series of illustrative case studies, highlighting its potential in providing deep insights into decision-making models.
We propose a novel technique to enhance Knowledge Graph Reasoning by combining Graph Convolution Neural Network (GCN) with the Attention Mechanism. This approach utilizes the Attention Mechanism to examine the relationships between entities and their neighboring nodes, which helps to develop detailed feature vectors for each entity. The GCN uses shared parameters to effectively represent the characteristics of adjacent entities. We first learn the similarity of entities for node representation learning. By integrating the attributes of the entities and their interactions, this method generates extensive implicit feature vectors for each entity, improving performance in tasks including entity classification and link prediction, outperforming traditional neural network models. To conclude, this work provides crucial methodological support for a range of applications, such as search engines, question-answering systems, recommendation systems, and data integration tasks.
Numerical difference computation is one of the cores and indispensable in the modern digital era. Tao general difference (TGD) is a novel theory and approach to difference computation for discrete sequences and arrays in multidimensional space. Built on the solid theoretical foundation of the general difference in a finite interval, the TGD operators demonstrate exceptional signal processing capabilities in real-world applications. A novel smoothness property of a sequence is defined on the first- and second TGD. This property is used to denoise one-dimensional signals, where the noise is the non-smooth points in the sequence. Meanwhile, the center of the gradient in a finite interval can be accurately location via TGD calculation. This solves a traditional challenge in computer vision, which is the precise localization of image edges with noise robustness. Furthermore, the power of TGD operators extends to spatio-temporal edge detection in three-dimensional arrays, enabling the identification of kinetic edges in video data. These diverse applications highlight the properties of TGD in discrete domain and the significant promise of TGD for the computation across signal processing, image analysis, and video analytic.
With the rapid development of deep learning, training Big Models (BMs) for multiple downstream tasks becomes a popular paradigm. Researchers have achieved various outcomes in the construction of BMs and the BM application in many fields. At present, there is a lack of research work that sorts out the overall progress of BMs and guides the follow-up research. In this paper, we cover not only the BM technologies themselves but also the prerequisites for BM training and applications with BMs, dividing the BM review into four parts: Resource, Models, Key Technologies and Application. We introduce 16 specific BM-related topics in those four parts, they are Data, Knowledge, Computing System, Parallel Training System, Language Model, Vision Model, Multi-modal Model, Theory&Interpretability, Commonsense Reasoning, Reliability&Security, Governance, Evaluation, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Dialogue and Protein Research. In each topic, we summarize clearly the current studies and propose some future research directions. At the end of this paper, we conclude the further development of BMs in a more general view.