Mixed-reality (MR) soundscapes blend real-world sound with virtual audio from hearing devices, presenting intricate auditory information that is hard to discern and differentiate. This is particularly challenging for blind or visually impaired individuals, who rely on sounds and descriptions in their everyday lives. To understand how complex audio information is consumed, we analyzed online forum posts within the blind community, identifying prevailing challenges, needs, and desired solutions. We synthesized the results and propose SoundShift for increasing MR sound awareness, which includes six sound manipulations: Transparency Shift, Envelope Shift, Position Shift, Style Shift, Time Shift, and Sound Append. To evaluate the effectiveness of SoundShift, we conducted a user study with 18 blind participants across three simulated MR scenarios, where participants identified specific sounds within intricate soundscapes. We found that SoundShift increased MR sound awareness and minimized cognitive load. Finally, we developed three real-world example applications to demonstrate the practicality of SoundShift.
Most novel view synthesis methods such as NeRF are unable to capture the true high dynamic range (HDR) radiance of scenes since they are typically trained on photos captured with standard low dynamic range (LDR) cameras. While the traditional exposure bracketing approach which captures several images at different exposures has recently been adapted to the multi-view case, we find such methods to fall short of capturing the full dynamic range of indoor scenes, which includes very bright light sources. In this paper, we present PanDORA: a PANoramic Dual-Observer Radiance Acquisition system for the casual capture of indoor scenes in high dynamic range. Our proposed system comprises two 360{\deg} cameras rigidly attached to a portable tripod. The cameras simultaneously acquire two 360{\deg} videos: one at a regular exposure and the other at a very fast exposure, allowing a user to simply wave the apparatus casually around the scene in a matter of minutes. The resulting images are fed to a NeRF-based algorithm that reconstructs the scene's full high dynamic range. Compared to HDR baselines from previous work, our approach reconstructs the full HDR radiance of indoor scenes without sacrificing the visual quality while retaining the ease of capture from recent NeRF-like approaches.
Multicasting is a vital information dissemination technique in Software-Defined Networking (SDN). With SDN, a multicast service can incorporate network functions implemented at different nodes, which is referred to as software-defined multicast. Emerging ubiquitous wireless networks for 5G and Beyond (B5G) inherently support multicast. However, the broadcast nature of wireless channels, especially in dense deployments, leads to neighborhood interference as a primary system degradation factor, which introduces a new challenge for software-defined multicast in wireless mesh networks. To tackle this, this paper introduces an innovative approach, based on the idea of minimizing both the total length cost of the multicast tree and the interference at the same time. Accordingly, a novel bicriteria optimization problem is formulated--\emph{Minimum Interference Steiner Tree (MIST)}, which is the edge-weighted variant of the vertex-weighted secluded Steiner tree problem \cite{chechik2013secluded}. To solve the bicriteria problem, instead of resorting to heuristics, this paper employs an innovative approach that is an approximate algorithm for MIST but with guaranteed performance. Specifically, the approach exploits the monotone submodularity property of the interference metric and identifies Pareto optimal solutions for MIST, then converts the problem into the submodular minimization under Steiner tree constraints, and designs a two-stage relaxation algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate and validate the performance of the proposed algorithm.
Verbal videos, featuring voice-overs or text overlays, provide valuable content but present significant challenges in composition, especially when incorporating editing effects to enhance clarity and visual appeal. In this paper, we introduce the novel task of verbal video composition with editing effects. This task aims to generate coherent and visually appealing verbal videos by integrating multimodal editing effects across textual, visual, and audio categories. To achieve this, we curate a large-scale dataset of video effects compositions from publicly available sources. We then formulate this task as a generative problem, involving the identification of appropriate positions in the verbal content and the recommendation of editing effects for these positions. To address this task, we propose VCoME, a general framework that employs a large multimodal model to generate editing effects for video composition. Specifically, VCoME takes in the multimodal video context and autoregressively outputs where to apply effects within the verbal content and which effects are most appropriate for each position. VCoME also supports prompt-based control of composition density and style, providing substantial flexibility for diverse applications. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of VCoME. A comprehensive user study shows that our method produces videos of professional quality while being 85$\times$ more efficient than professional editors.
In real-world scenarios, image impairments often manifest as composite degradations, presenting a complex interplay of elements such as low light, haze, rain, and snow. Despite this reality, existing restoration methods typically target isolated degradation types, thereby falling short in environments where multiple degrading factors coexist. To bridge this gap, our study proposes a versatile imaging model that consolidates four physical corruption paradigms to accurately represent complex, composite degradation scenarios. In this context, we propose OneRestore, a novel transformer-based framework designed for adaptive, controllable scene restoration. The proposed framework leverages a unique cross-attention mechanism, merging degraded scene descriptors with image features, allowing for nuanced restoration. Our model allows versatile input scene descriptors, ranging from manual text embeddings to automatic extractions based on visual attributes. Our methodology is further enhanced through a composite degradation restoration loss, using extra degraded images as negative samples to fortify model constraints. Comparative results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate OneRestore as a superior solution, significantly advancing the state-of-the-art in addressing complex, composite degradations.
Speech enabled foundation models, either in the form of flexible speech recognition based systems or audio-prompted large language models (LLMs), are becoming increasingly popular. One of the interesting aspects of these models is their ability to perform tasks other than automatic speech recognition (ASR) using an appropriate prompt. For example, the OpenAI Whisper model can perform both speech transcription and speech translation. With the development of audio-prompted LLMs there is the potential for even greater control options. In this work we demonstrate that with this greater flexibility the systems can be susceptible to model-control adversarial attacks. Without any access to the model prompt it is possible to modify the behaviour of the system by appropriately changing the audio input. To illustrate this risk, we demonstrate that it is possible to prepend a short universal adversarial acoustic segment to any input speech signal to override the prompt setting of an ASR foundation model. Specifically, we successfully use a universal adversarial acoustic segment to control Whisper to always perform speech translation, despite being set to perform speech transcription. Overall, this work demonstrates a new form of adversarial attack on multi-tasking speech enabled foundation models that needs to be considered prior to the deployment of this form of model.
We introduce Autoverse, an evolvable, domain-specific language for single-player 2D grid-based games, and demonstrate its use as a scalable training ground for Open-Ended Learning (OEL) algorithms. Autoverse uses cellular-automaton-like rewrite rules to describe game mechanics, allowing it to express various game environments (e.g. mazes, dungeons, sokoban puzzles) that are popular testbeds for Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents. Each rewrite rule can be expressed as a series of simple convolutions, allowing for environments to be parallelized on the GPU, thereby drastically accelerating RL training. Using Autoverse, we propose jump-starting open-ended learning by imitation learning from search. In such an approach, we first evolve Autoverse environments (their rules and initial map topology) to maximize the number of iterations required by greedy tree search to discover a new best solution, producing a curriculum of increasingly complex environments and playtraces. We then distill these expert playtraces into a neural-network-based policy using imitation learning. Finally, we use the learned policy as a starting point for open-ended RL, where new training environments are continually evolved to maximize the RL player agent's value function error (a proxy for its regret, or the learnability of generated environments), finding that this approach improves the performance and generality of resultant player agents.
This work explores class-incremental learning (CIL) for sound event detection (SED), advancing adaptability towards real-world scenarios. CIL's success in domains like computer vision inspired our SED-tailored method, addressing the unique challenges of diverse and complex audio environments. Our approach employs an independent unsupervised learning framework with a distillation loss function to integrate new sound classes while preserving the SED model consistency across incremental tasks. We further enhance this framework with a sample selection strategy for unlabeled data and a balanced exemplar update mechanism, ensuring varied and illustrative sound representations. Evaluating various continual learning methods on the DCASE 2023 Task 4 dataset, we find that our research offers insights into each method's applicability for real-world SED systems that can have newly added sound classes. The findings also delineate future directions of CIL in dynamic audio settings.
This work aims to advance sound event detection (SED) research by presenting a new large language model (LLM)-powered dataset namely wild domestic environment sound event detection (WildDESED). It is crafted as an extension to the original DESED dataset to reflect diverse acoustic variability and complex noises in home settings. We leveraged LLMs to generate eight different domestic scenarios based on target sound categories of the DESED dataset. Then we enriched the scenarios with a carefully tailored mixture of noises selected from AudioSet and ensured no overlap with target sound. We consider widely popular convolutional neural recurrent network to study WildDESED dataset, which depicts its challenging nature. We then apply curriculum learning by gradually increasing noise complexity to enhance the model's generalization capabilities across various noise levels. Our results with this approach show improvements within the noisy environment, validating the effectiveness on the WildDESED dataset promoting noise-robust SED advancements.
The rapid advances in Vision Transformer (ViT) refresh the state-of-the-art performances in various vision tasks, overshadowing the conventional CNN-based models. This ignites a few recent striking-back research in the CNN world showing that pure CNN models can achieve as good performance as ViT models when carefully tuned. While encouraging, designing such high-performance CNN models is challenging, requiring non-trivial prior knowledge of network design. To this end, a novel framework termed Mathematical Architecture Design for Deep CNN (DeepMAD) is proposed to design high-performance CNN models in a principled way. In DeepMAD, a CNN network is modeled as an information processing system whose expressiveness and effectiveness can be analytically formulated by their structural parameters. Then a constrained mathematical programming (MP) problem is proposed to optimize these structural parameters. The MP problem can be easily solved by off-the-shelf MP solvers on CPUs with a small memory footprint. In addition, DeepMAD is a pure mathematical framework: no GPU or training data is required during network design. The superiority of DeepMAD is validated on multiple large-scale computer vision benchmark datasets. Notably on ImageNet-1k, only using conventional convolutional layers, DeepMAD achieves 0.7% and 1.5% higher top-1 accuracy than ConvNeXt and Swin on Tiny level, and 0.8% and 0.9% higher on Small level.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown dramatic improvements in single image super-resolution (SISR) by using large-scale external samples. Despite their remarkable performance based on the external dataset, they cannot exploit internal information within a specific image. Another problem is that they are applicable only to the specific condition of data that they are supervised. For instance, the low-resolution (LR) image should be a "bicubic" downsampled noise-free image from a high-resolution (HR) one. To address both issues, zero-shot super-resolution (ZSSR) has been proposed for flexible internal learning. However, they require thousands of gradient updates, i.e., long inference time. In this paper, we present Meta-Transfer Learning for Zero-Shot Super-Resolution (MZSR), which leverages ZSSR. Precisely, it is based on finding a generic initial parameter that is suitable for internal learning. Thus, we can exploit both external and internal information, where one single gradient update can yield quite considerable results. (See Figure 1). With our method, the network can quickly adapt to a given image condition. In this respect, our method can be applied to a large spectrum of image conditions within a fast adaptation process.