Radio-frequency coverage maps (RF maps) are extensively utilized in wireless networks for capacity planning, placement of access points and base stations, localization, and coverage estimation. Conducting site surveys to obtain RF maps is labor-intensive and sometimes not feasible. In this paper, we propose radio-frequency adversarial deep-learning inference for automated network coverage estimation (RADIANCE), a generative adversarial network (GAN) based approach for synthesizing RF maps in indoor scenarios. RADIANCE utilizes a semantic map, a high-level representation of the indoor environment to encode spatial relationships and attributes of objects within the environment and guide the RF map generation process. We introduce a new gradient-based loss function that computes the magnitude and direction of change in received signal strength (RSS) values from a point within the environment. RADIANCE incorporates this loss function along with the antenna pattern to capture signal propagation within a given indoor configuration and generate new patterns under new configuration, antenna (beam) pattern, and center frequency. Extensive simulations are conducted to compare RADIANCE with ray-tracing simulations of RF maps. Our results show that RADIANCE achieves a mean average error (MAE) of 0.09, root-mean-squared error (RMSE) of 0.29, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 10.78, and multi-scale structural similarity index (MS-SSIM) of 0.80.

Sequential recommenders have made great strides in capturing a user's preferences. Nevertheless, the cold-start recommendation remains a fundamental challenge as they typically involve limited user-item interactions for personalization. Recently, gradient-based meta-learning approaches have emerged in the sequential recommendation field due to their fast adaptation and easy-to-integrate abilities. The meta-learning algorithms formulate the cold-start recommendation as a few-shot learning problem, where each user is represented as a task to be adapted. While meta-learning algorithms generally assume that task-wise samples are evenly distributed over classes or values, user-item interactions in real-world applications do not conform to such a distribution (e.g., watching favorite videos multiple times, leaving only positive ratings without any negative ones). Consequently, imbalanced user feedback, which accounts for the majority of task training data, may dominate the user adaptation process and prevent meta-learning algorithms from learning meaningful meta-knowledge for personalized recommendations. To alleviate this limitation, we propose a novel sequential recommendation framework based on gradient-based meta-learning that captures the imbalanced rating distribution of each user and computes adaptive loss for user-specific learning. Our work is the first to tackle the impact of imbalanced ratings in cold-start sequential recommendation scenarios. Through extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

Steven Spielberg's wholesome sci-fi classic, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, became a cultural touchstone following its release in 1982. The film's hastily-developed (as in, "you have five weeks to get this to market") Atari 2600 tie-in game became a cultural touchstone for entirely different reasons. In his new book, The Stuff Games Are Made Of, experimental game maker and assistant professor in design and computation arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Pippin Barr deconstructs the game design process using an octet of his own previous projects to shed light on specific aspects of how games could better be put together. In the excerpt below, Dr. Barr muses in what makes good cinema versus games and why the storytelling goals of those two mediums may not necessarily align. Excerpted from The Stuff Games Are Made Of by Pippin Barr.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Since the launch of ChatGPT 3 in the fall of 2022, panic over artificial intelligence (AI) has been in the air and it's easy to succumb to the negative hype. Renowned inventors, business leaders and AI experts are signing letters and penning op-eds about how this spells doomsday for humanity. Governments are joining the fray by calling for new regulations.

Since the recent prosperity of Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been interleaved discussions regarding how to reduce hallucinations from LLM responses, how to increase the factuality of LLMs, and whether Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which store the world knowledge in a symbolic form, will be replaced with LLMs. In this paper, we try to answer these questions from a new angle: How knowledgeable are LLMs? To answer this question, we constructed Head-to-Tail, a benchmark that consists of 18K question-answer (QA) pairs regarding head, torso, and tail facts in terms of popularity. We designed an automated evaluation method and a set of metrics that closely approximate the knowledge an LLM confidently internalizes. Through a comprehensive evaluation of 14 publicly available LLMs, we show that existing LLMs are still far from being perfect in terms of their grasp of factual knowledge, especially for facts of torso-to-tail entities.

Hand Pose Estimation (HPE) is crucial to many applications, but conventional cameras-based CM-HPE methods are completely subject to Line-of-Sight (LoS), as cameras cannot capture occluded objects. In this paper, we propose to exploit Radio-Frequency-Vision (RF-vision) capable of bypassing obstacles for achieving occluded HPE, and we introduce OCHID-Fi as the first RF-HPE method with 3D pose estimation capability. OCHID-Fi employs wideband RF sensors widely available on smart devices (e.g., iPhones) to probe 3D human hand pose and extract their skeletons behind obstacles. To overcome the challenge in labeling RF imaging given its human incomprehensible nature, OCHID-Fi employs a cross-modality and cross-domain training process. It uses a pre-trained CM-HPE network and a synchronized CM/RF dataset, to guide the training of its complex-valued RF-HPE network under LoS conditions. It further transfers knowledge learned from labeled LoS domain to unlabeled occluded domain via adversarial learning, enabling OCHID-Fi to generalize to unseen occluded scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of OCHID-Fi: it achieves comparable accuracy to CM-HPE under normal conditions while maintaining such accuracy even in occluded scenarios, with empirical evidence for its generalizability to new domains.

In this paper, we present empirical studies on conversational recommendation tasks using representative large language models in a zero-shot setting with three primary contributions. (1) Data: To gain insights into model behavior in "in-the-wild" conversational recommendation scenarios, we construct a new dataset of recommendation-related conversations by scraping a popular discussion website. This is the largest public real-world conversational recommendation dataset to date. (2) Evaluation: On the new dataset and two existing conversational recommendation datasets, we observe that even without fine-tuning, large language models can outperform existing fine-tuned conversational recommendation models. (3) Analysis: We propose various probing tasks to investigate the mechanisms behind the remarkable performance of large language models in conversational recommendation. We analyze both the large language models' behaviors and the characteristics of the datasets, providing a holistic understanding of the models' effectiveness, limitations and suggesting directions for the design of future conversational recommenders

Recent studies have shown that dense retrieval models, lacking dedicated training data, struggle to perform well across diverse retrieval tasks, as different retrieval tasks often entail distinct search intents. To address this challenge, in this work we introduce ControlRetriever, a generic and efficient approach with a parameter isolated architecture, capable of controlling dense retrieval models to directly perform varied retrieval tasks, harnessing the power of instructions that explicitly describe retrieval intents in natural language. Leveraging the foundation of ControlNet, which has proven powerful in text-to-image generation, ControlRetriever imbues different retrieval models with the new capacity of controllable retrieval, all while being guided by task-specific instructions. Furthermore, we propose a novel LLM guided Instruction Synthesizing and Iterative Training strategy, which iteratively tunes ControlRetriever based on extensive automatically-generated retrieval data with diverse instructions by capitalizing the advancement of large language models. Extensive experiments show that in the BEIR benchmark, with only natural language descriptions of specific retrieval intent for each task, ControlRetriever, as a unified multi-task retrieval system without task-specific tuning, significantly outperforms baseline methods designed with task-specific retrievers and also achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance.

Singing technique conversion (STC) refers to the task of converting from one voice technique to another while leaving the original singer identity, melody, and linguistic components intact. Previous STC studies, as well as singing voice conversion research in general, have utilized convolutional autoencoders (CAEs) for conversion, but how the bottleneck width of the CAE affects the synthesis quality has not been thoroughly evaluated. To this end, we constructed a GAN-based multi-domain STC system which took advantage of the WORLD vocoder representation and the CAE architecture. We varied the bottleneck width of the CAE, and evaluated the conversion results subjectively. The model was trained on a Mandarin dataset which features four singers and four singing techniques: the chest voice, the falsetto, the raspy voice, and the whistle voice. The results show that a wider bottleneck corresponds to better articulation clarity but does not necessarily lead to higher likeness to the target technique. Among the four techniques, we also found that the whistle voice is the easiest target for conversion, while the other three techniques as a source produce more convincing conversion results than the whistle.

The article "Headed to Ottawa? Here's what you shouldn't miss!" included recommendations for catching a baseball game, honoring fallen soldiers at a war museum and… swinging by the Ottawa Food Bank. Paris Marx first called out the story on X (formerly Twitter). "People who come to us have jobs and families to support, as well as expenses to pay," the AI-written section about the food bank section read. "Life is already difficult enough. Consider going into it on an empty stomach."