The application of data-intensive automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies to dysarthric and elderly adult speech is confronted by their mismatch against healthy and nonaged voices, data scarcity and large speaker-level variability. To this end, this paper proposes two novel data-efficient methods to learn homogeneous dysarthric and elderly speaker-level features for rapid, on-the-fly test-time adaptation of DNN/TDNN and Conformer ASR models. These include: 1) speaker-level variance-regularized spectral basis embedding (VR-SBE) features that exploit a special regularization term to enforce homogeneity of speaker features in adaptation; and 2) feature-based learning hidden unit contributions (f-LHUC) transforms that are conditioned on VR-SBE features. Experiments are conducted on four tasks across two languages: the English UASpeech and TORGO dysarthric speech datasets, the English DementiaBank Pitt and Cantonese JCCOCC MoCA elderly speech corpora. The proposed on-the-fly speaker adaptation techniques consistently outperform baseline iVector and xVector adaptation by statistically significant word or character error rate reductions up to 5.32% absolute (18.57% relative) and batch-mode LHUC speaker adaptation by 2.24% absolute (9.20% relative), while operating with real-time factors speeding up to 33.6 times against xVectors during adaptation. The efficacy of the proposed adaptation techniques is demonstrated in a comparison against current ASR technologies including SSL pre-trained systems on UASpeech, where our best system produces a state-of-the-art WER of 23.33%. Analyses show VR-SBE features and f-LHUC transforms are insensitive to speaker-level data quantity in testtime adaptation. T-SNE visualization reveals they have stronger speaker-level homogeneity than baseline iVectors, xVectors and batch-mode LHUC transforms.
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The success of AI models relies on the availability of large, diverse, and high-quality datasets, which can be challenging to obtain due to data scarcity, privacy concerns, and high costs. Synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution by generating artificial data that mimics real-world patterns. This paper provides an overview of synthetic data research, discussing its applications, challenges, and future directions. We present empirical evidence from prior art to demonstrate its effectiveness and highlight the importance of ensuring its factuality, fidelity, and unbiasedness. We emphasize the need for responsible use of synthetic data to build more powerful, inclusive, and trustworthy language models.
Face recognition technology has advanced significantly in recent years due largely to the availability of large and increasingly complex training datasets for use in deep learning models. These datasets, however, typically comprise images scraped from news sites or social media platforms and, therefore, have limited utility in more advanced security, forensics, and military applications. These applications require lower resolution, longer ranges, and elevated viewpoints. To meet these critical needs, we collected and curated the first and second subsets of a large multi-modal biometric dataset designed for use in the research and development (R&D) of biometric recognition technologies under extremely challenging conditions. Thus far, the dataset includes more than 350,000 still images and over 1,300 hours of video footage of approximately 1,000 subjects. To collect this data, we used Nikon DSLR cameras, a variety of commercial surveillance cameras, specialized long-rage R&D cameras, and Group 1 and Group 2 UAV platforms. The goal is to support the development of algorithms capable of accurately recognizing people at ranges up to 1,000 m and from high angles of elevation. These advances will include improvements to the state of the art in face recognition and will support new research in the area of whole-body recognition using methods based on gait and anthropometry. This paper describes methods used to collect and curate the dataset, and the dataset's characteristics at the current stage.
Molecular design and synthesis planning are two critical steps in the process of molecular discovery that we propose to formulate as a single shared task of conditional synthetic pathway generation. We report an amortized approach to generate synthetic pathways as a Markov decision process conditioned on a target molecular embedding. This approach allows us to conduct synthesis planning in a bottom-up manner and design synthesizable molecules by decoding from optimized conditional codes, demonstrating the potential to solve both problems of design and synthesis simultaneously. The approach leverages neural networks to probabilistically model the synthetic trees, one reaction step at a time, according to reactivity rules encoded in a discrete action space of reaction templates. We train these networks on hundreds of thousands of artificial pathways generated from a pool of purchasable compounds and a list of expert-curated templates. We validate our method with (a) the recovery of molecules using conditional generation, (b) the identification of synthesizable structural analogs, and (c) the optimization of molecular structures given oracle functions relevant to drug discovery.
Deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and Data Fusion techniques have gained popularity in public and government domains. This usually requires capturing and consolidating data from multiple sources. As datasets do not necessarily originate from identical sensors, fused data typically results in a complex data problem. Because military is investigating how heterogeneous IoT devices can aid processes and tasks, we investigate a multi-sensor approach. Moreover, we propose a signal to image encoding approach to transform information (signal) to integrate (fuse) data from IoT wearable devices to an image which is invertible and easier to visualize supporting decision making. Furthermore, we investigate the challenge of enabling an intelligent identification and detection operation and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed Deep Learning and Anomaly Detection models that can support future application that utilizes hand gesture data from wearable devices.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
Automatic KB completion for commonsense knowledge graphs (e.g., ATOMIC and ConceptNet) poses unique challenges compared to the much studied conventional knowledge bases (e.g., Freebase). Commonsense knowledge graphs use free-form text to represent nodes, resulting in orders of magnitude more nodes compared to conventional KBs (18x more nodes in ATOMIC compared to Freebase (FB15K-237)). Importantly, this implies significantly sparser graph structures - a major challenge for existing KB completion methods that assume densely connected graphs over a relatively smaller set of nodes. In this paper, we present novel KB completion models that can address these challenges by exploiting the structural and semantic context of nodes. Specifically, we investigate two key ideas: (1) learning from local graph structure, using graph convolutional networks and automatic graph densification and (2) transfer learning from pre-trained language models to knowledge graphs for enhanced contextual representation of knowledge. We describe our method to incorporate information from both these sources in a joint model and provide the first empirical results for KB completion on ATOMIC and evaluation with ranking metrics on ConceptNet. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of language model representations in boosting link prediction performance and the advantages of learning from local graph structure (+1.5 points in MRR for ConceptNet) when training on subgraphs for computational efficiency. Further analysis on model predictions shines light on the types of commonsense knowledge that language models capture well.
Pre-trained deep neural network language models such as ELMo, GPT, BERT and XLNet have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, their size makes them impractical for a number of scenarios, especially on mobile and edge devices. In particular, the input word embedding matrix accounts for a significant proportion of the model's memory footprint, due to the large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Knowledge distillation techniques have had success at compressing large neural network models, but they are ineffective at yielding student models with vocabularies different from the original teacher models. We introduce a novel knowledge distillation technique for training a student model with a significantly smaller vocabulary as well as lower embedding and hidden state dimensions. Specifically, we employ a dual-training mechanism that trains the teacher and student models simultaneously to obtain optimal word embeddings for the student vocabulary. We combine this approach with learning shared projection matrices that transfer layer-wise knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Our method is able to compress the BERT_BASE model by more than 60x, with only a minor drop in downstream task metrics, resulting in a language model with a footprint of under 7MB. Experimental results also demonstrate higher compression efficiency and accuracy when compared with other state-of-the-art compression techniques.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
Top-down visual attention mechanisms have been used extensively in image captioning and visual question answering (VQA) to enable deeper image understanding through fine-grained analysis and even multiple steps of reasoning. In this work, we propose a combined bottom-up and top-down attention mechanism that enables attention to be calculated at the level of objects and other salient image regions. This is the natural basis for attention to be considered. Within our approach, the bottom-up mechanism (based on Faster R-CNN) proposes image regions, each with an associated feature vector, while the top-down mechanism determines feature weightings. Applying this approach to image captioning, our results on the MSCOCO test server establish a new state-of-the-art for the task, achieving CIDEr / SPICE / BLEU-4 scores of 117.9, 21.5 and 36.9, respectively. Demonstrating the broad applicability of the method, applying the same approach to VQA we obtain first place in the 2017 VQA Challenge.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.
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