A key question in neuroscience is how to encode sensory stimuli such as images and sounds. Motivated by studies of response properties of neurons in the early cortical areas, we propose an encoding scheme that dispenses with absolute measures of signal intensity or contrast and uses, instead, only local ordinal measures. In this scheme, the structure of a signal is represented by a set of equalities and inequalities across adjacent regions. In this paper, we focus on characterizing the fidelity of this representation strategy. We develop a regularization approach for image reconstruction from ordinal measures and thereby demonstrate that the ordinal representation scheme can faithfully encode signal structure. We also present a neurally plausible implementation of this computation that uses only local update rules.

A nonlinear supervised learning model, the Specialized Mappings Architecture (SMA), is described and applied to the estimation of human body pose from monocular images. The SMA consists of several specialized forward mapping functions and an inverse mapping function. Each specialized function maps certain domains of the input space (image features) onto the output space (body pose parameters). The key algorithmic problems faced are those of learning the specialized domains and mapping functions in an optimal way, as well as performing inference given inputs and knowledge of the inverse function. Solutions to these problems employ the EM algorithm and alternating choices of conditional independence assumptions. Performance of the approach is evaluated with synthetic and real video sequences of human motion.

Locally Linear Embedding (LLE) is an elegant nonlinear dimensionality-reduction technique recently introduced by Roweis and Saul [2]. It fails when the data is divided into separate groups. We study a variant of LLE that can simultaneously group the data and calculate local embedding of each group. An estimate for the upper bound on the intrinsic dimension of the data set is obtained automatically. 1 Introduction Consider a collection of N data points Xi E ]RD.

We present new simulation results, in which a computational model of interacting visual neurons simultaneously predicts the modulation of spatial vision thresholds by focal visual attention, for five dual-task human psychophysics experiments. This new study complements our previous findings that attention activates a winnertake-all competition among early visual neurons within one cortical hypercolumn. This "intensified competition" hypothesis assumed that attention equally affects all neurons, and yielded two singleunit predictions: an increase in gain and a sharpening of tuning with attention. While both effects have been separately observed in electrophysiology, no single-unit study has yet shown them simultaneously. Hence, we here explore whether our model could still predict our data if attention might only modulate neuronal gain, but do so non-uniformly across neurons and tasks. Specifically, we investigate whether modulating the gain of only the neurons that are loudest, best-tuned, or most informative about the stimulus, or of all neurons equally but in a task-dependent manner, may account for the data. We find that none of these hypotheses yields predictions as plausible as the intensified competition hypothesis, hence providing additional support for our original findings.

We present a sequential Monte Carlo method applied to additive noise compensation for robust speech recognition in time-varying noise. The method generates a set of samples according to the prior distribution given by clean speech models and noise prior evolved from previous estimation. An explicit model representing noise effects on speech features is used, so that an extended Kalman filter is constructed for each sample, generating the updated continuous state estimate as the estimation of the noise parameter, and prediction likelihood for weighting each sample. Minimum mean square error (MMSE) inference of the time-varying noise parameter is carried out over these samples by fusion the estimation of samples according to their weights. A residual resampling selection step and a Metropolis-Hastings smoothing step are used to improve calculation efficiency. Experiments were conducted on speech recognition in simulated non-stationary noises, where noise power changed artificially, and highly non-stationary Machinegun noise. In all the experiments carried out, we observed that the method can have significant recognition performance improvement, over that achieved by noise compensation with stationary noise assumption.

An important issue in applying SVMs to speech recognition is the ability to classify variable length sequences. This paper presents extensions to a standard scheme for handling this variable length data, the Fisher score. A more useful mapping is introduced based on the likelihood-ratio. The score-space defined by this mapping avoids some limitations of the Fisher score. Class-conditional generative models are directly incorporated into the definition of the score-space.

In the'missing data' approach to improving the robustness of automatic speech recognition to added noise, an initial process identifies spectraltemporal regions which are dominated by the speech source. The remaining regions are considered to be'missing'. In this paper we develop a connectionist approach to the problem of adapting speech recognition to the missing data case, using Recurrent Neural Networks. In contrast to methods based on Hidden Markov Models, RNNs allow us to make use of long-term time constraints and to make the problems of classification with incomplete data and imputing missing values interact. We report encouraging results on an isolated digit recognition task.

When applying unsupervised learning techniques like ICA or temporal decorrelation, a key question is whether the discovered projections are reliable. In other words: can we give error bars or can we assess the quality of our separation? We use resampling methods to tackle these questions and show experimentally that our proposed variance estimations are strongly correlated to the separation error. We demonstrate that this reliability estimation can be used to choose the appropriate ICA-model, to enhance significantly the separation performance, and, most important, to mark the components that have a actual physical meaning.

It is well known that under noisy conditions we can hear speech much more clearly when we read the speaker's lips. This suggests the utility of audiovisual information for the task of speech enhancement. We propose a method to exploit audiovisual cues to enable speech separation under non-stationary noise and with a single microphone. We revise and extend HMM-based speech enhancement techniques, in which signal and noise models are factori ally combined, to incorporate visual lip information and employ novel signal HMMs in which the dynamics of narrow-band and wide band components are factorial. We avoid the combinatorial explosion in the factorial model by using a simple approximate inference technique to quickly estimate the clean signals in a mixture. We present a preliminary evaluation of this approach using a small-vocabulary audiovisual database, showing promising improvements in machine intelligibility for speech enhanced using audio and visual information.

A challenging, unsolved problem in the speech recognition community is recognizing speech signals that are corrupted by loud, highly nonstationary noise. One approach to noisy speech recognition is to automatically remove the noise from the cepstrum sequence before feeding it in to a clean speech recognizer. In previous work published in Eurospeech, we showed how a probability model trained on clean speech and a separate probability model trained on noise could be combined for the purpose of estimating the noisefree speech from the noisy speech. We showed how an iterative 2nd order vector Taylor series approximation could be used for probabilistic inference in this model. In many circumstances, it is not possible to obtain examples of noise without speech.