Generative AI has demonstrated impressive performance in various fields, among which speech synthesis is an interesting direction. With the diffusion model as the most popular generative model, numerous works have attempted two active tasks: text to speech and speech enhancement. This work conducts a survey on audio diffusion model, which is complementary to existing surveys that either lack the recent progress of diffusion-based speech synthesis or highlight an overall picture of applying diffusion model in multiple fields. Specifically, this work first briefly introduces the background of audio and diffusion model. As for the text-to-speech task, we divide the methods into three categories based on the stage where diffusion model is adopted: acoustic model, vocoder and end-to-end framework. Moreover, we categorize various speech enhancement tasks by either certain signals are removed or added into the input speech. Comparisons of experimental results and discussions are also covered in this survey.

Transformers are powerful visual learners, in large part due to their conspicuous lack of manually-specified priors. This flexibility can be problematic in tasks that involve multiple-view geometry, due to the near-infinite possible variations in 3D shapes and viewpoints (requiring flexibility), and the precise nature of projective geometry (obeying rigid laws). To resolve this conundrum, we propose a "light touch" approach, guiding visual Transformers to learn multiple-view geometry but allowing them to break free when needed. We achieve this by using epipolar lines to guide the Transformer's cross-attention maps during training, penalizing attention values outside the epipolar lines and encouraging higher attention along these lines since they contain geometrically plausible matches. Unlike previous methods, our proposal does not require any camera pose information at test-time. We focus on pose-invariant object instance retrieval, where standard Transformer networks struggle, due to the large differences in viewpoint between query and retrieved images. Experimentally, our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches at object retrieval, without needing pose information at test-time.

Recommender systems are one of the most successful applications of machine learning and data science. They are successful in a wide variety of application domains, including e-commerce, media streaming content, email marketing, and virtually every industry where personalisation facilitates better user experience or boosts sales and customer engagement. The main goal of these systems is to analyse past user behaviour to predict which items are of most interest to users. They are typically built with the use of matrix-completion techniques such as collaborative filtering or matrix factorisation. However, although these approaches have achieved tremendous success in numerous real-world applications, their effectiveness is still limited when users might interact multiple times with the same items, or when user preferences change over time. We were inspired by the approach that Natural Language Processing techniques take to compress, process, and analyse sequences of text. We designed a recommender system that induces the temporal dimension in the task of item recommendation and considers sequences of item interactions for each user in order to make recommendations. This method is empirically shown to give highly accurate predictions of user-items interactions for all users in a retail environment, without explicit feedback, besides increasing total sales by 5% and individual customer expenditure by over 50% in an A/B live test.

Futurists of the 1990s predicted that we'd be living underwater or riding flying cars by this point -- but now experts are warning of a much scarier future. Other predictions include making contact with aliens -- but whether or not that's a bad thing remains unknown. It's not all doom and gloom, though, with technology expected to have made the afterlife possible. AI'overlords' could turn everyone into serfs Right now, people are focused on AI potentially causing job losses - but the reality could be far worse. That's according to George Stakhov, chief strategy officer for the global ad agency DDB EMEA who created an AI tool named'The Uncreative Agency'.

Artificial intelligence in some shape or form has been a part of everyday life for years, but the meteoric rise of ChatGPT and the resulting aggressive development pace of conversational and generative AI models is, for the first time ever, putting the underlying technology into the hands of the general public. Even though current large language models are primarily able to guess the best-fitting next word in a sentence based on the corpus of content they were fed, CEOs, researchers and AI experts are now urging the industry to pump the brakes on training and developing models more capable than OpenAI's GPT-4. The company's latest large language model is currently available in a limited capacity for ChatGPT Plus subscribers and will soon be integrated into Microsoft productivity and security products. According to an open letter signed by influential figures like Elon Musk and Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, "powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable." The letter was released by the Future of Life Institute, a non-governmental organization founded in 2014 by MIT professor Max Tegmark and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, among others.

Time series event detection methods are evaluated mainly by standard classification metrics that focus solely on detection accuracy. However, inaccuracy in detecting an event can often result from its preceding or delayed effects reflected in neighboring detections. These detections are valuable to trigger necessary actions or help mitigate unwelcome consequences. In this context, current metrics are insufficient and inadequate for the context of event detection. There is a demand for metrics that incorporate both the concept of time and temporal tolerance for neighboring detections. This paper introduces SoftED metrics, a new set of metrics designed for soft evaluating event detection methods. They enable the evaluation of both detection accuracy and the degree to which their detections represent events. They improved event detection evaluation by associating events and their representative detections, incorporating temporal tolerance in over 36\% of experiments compared to the usual classification metrics. SoftED metrics were validated by domain specialists that indicated their contribution to detection evaluation and method selection.

Recent developments in hardware and information technology have enabled the emergence of billions of connected, intelligent devices around the world exchanging information with minimal human involvement. This paradigm, known as the Internet of Things (IoT) is progressing quickly with an estimated 27 billion devices by 2025. This growth in the number of IoT devices and successful IoT services has generated a tremendous amount of data. However, this humongous volume of data poses growing concerns for user privacy. This introductory chapter has presented a brief survey of some of the existing data privacy-preservation schemes proposed by researchers in the field of the Internet of Things.

As an intrinsic and fundamental property of big data, data heterogeneity exists in a variety of real-world applications, such as precision medicine, autonomous driving, financial applications, etc. For machine learning algorithms, the ignorance of data heterogeneity will greatly hurt the generalization performance and the algorithmic fairness, since the prediction mechanisms among different sub-populations are likely to differ from each other. In this work, we focus on the data heterogeneity that affects the prediction of machine learning models, and firstly propose the \emph{usable predictive heterogeneity}, which takes into account the model capacity and computational constraints. We prove that it can be reliably estimated from finite data with probably approximately correct (PAC) bounds. Additionally, we design a bi-level optimization algorithm to explore the usable predictive heterogeneity from data. Empirically, the explored heterogeneity provides insights for sub-population divisions in income prediction, crop yield prediction and image classification tasks, and leveraging such heterogeneity benefits the out-of-distribution generalization performance.

Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) refers to the task of answering questions from document images. Existing work on DocVQA only considers single-page documents. However, in real scenarios documents are mostly composed of multiple pages that should be processed altogether. In this work we extend DocVQA to the multi-page scenario. For that, we first create a new dataset, MP-DocVQA, where questions are posed over multi-page documents instead of single pages. Second, we propose a new hierarchical method, Hi-VT5, based on the T5 architecture, that overcomes the limitations of current methods to process long multi-page documents. The proposed method is based on a hierarchical transformer architecture where the encoder summarizes the most relevant information of every page and then, the decoder takes this summarized information to generate the final answer. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that our method is able, in a single stage, to answer the questions and provide the page that contains the relevant information to find the answer, which can be used as a kind of explainability measure.

Automatic Authorship Attribution (AAA) is the result of applying tools and techniques from Digital Humanities to authorship attribution studies. Through a quantitative and statistical approach this discipline can draw further conclusions about renowned authorship issues which traditional critics have been dealing with for centuries, opening a new door to style comparison. The aim of this paper is to prove the potential of these tools and techniques by testing the authorship of five comedies traditionally attributed to Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina (1579-1648): La ninfa del cielo, El burlador de Sevilla, Tan largo me lo fiais, La mujer por fuerza and El condenado por desconfiado. To accomplish this purpose some experiments concerning clustering analysis by Stylo package from R and four distance measures are carried out on a corpus built with plays by Tirso, Andres de Claramonte (c. 1560-1626), Antonio Mira de Amescua (1577-1644) and Luis Velez de Guevara (1579-1644). The results obtained point to the denial of all the attributions to Tirso except for the case of La mujer por fuerza.