Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) plays a pivotal role in enhancing human-computer interaction by enabling a deeper understanding of emotional states across a wide range of applications, contributing to more empathetic and effective communication. This study proposes an innovative approach that integrates self-supervised feature extraction with supervised classification for emotion recognition from small audio segments. In the preprocessing step, to eliminate the need of crafting audio features, we employed a self-supervised feature extractor, based on the Wav2Vec model, to capture acoustic features from audio data. Then, the output featuremaps of the preprocessing step are fed to a custom designed Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based model to perform emotion classification. Utilizing the ShEMO dataset as our testing ground, the proposed method surpasses two baseline methods, i.e. support vector machine classifier and transfer learning of a pretrained CNN. comparing the propose method to the state-of-the-art methods in SER task indicates the superiority of the proposed method. Our findings underscore the pivotal role of deep unsupervised feature learning in elevating the landscape of SER, offering enhanced emotional comprehension in the realm of human-computer interactions.

Construction contracts are the foundation for relationships among project stakeholders, protecting their rights and interests throughout the project's lifespan. Contractual risks remain a long-standing and significant concern for all parties involved in a construction project, and failure to identify these risks in the contract clauses may result in disputes, posing a risk of project loss. According to a recent report (Victoria et al., 2022), the global average values and durations of disputes are $52.6M and 15.4 months, respectively. Contract review involves several important tasks, such as identifying and modifying ambiguous clauses (Artan Ilter and Bakioglu, 2018), clarifying vaguely stated requirements (Hassan and Le, 2020; ul Hassan et al., 2020; ul Hassan and Le, 2021), and correcting inaccurately referenced specifications (Hamie and Abdul-Malak, 2018). Currently, the construction industry mainly relies on manual review due to the lack of sophisticated and reliable automated methods for identifying construction contract risks (CCRI). However, studies (Lee et al., 2019; Moon et al., 2021) have shown that this labor-intensive approach is error-prone and time-consuming.

Performative prediction is a recently proposed framework where predictions guide decision-making and hence influence future data distributions. Such performative phenomena are ubiquitous in various areas, such as transportation, finance, public policy, and recommendation systems. To date, work on performative prediction has only focused on unconstrained scenarios, neglecting the fact that many real-world learning problems are subject to constraints. This paper bridges this gap by studying performative prediction under inequality constraints. Unlike most existing work that provides only performative stable points, we aim to find the optimal solutions. Anticipating performative gradients is a challenging task, due to the agnostic performative effect on data distributions. To address this issue, we first develop a robust primal-dual framework that requires only approximate gradients up to a certain accuracy, yet delivers the same order of performance as the stochastic primal-dual algorithm without performativity. Based on this framework, we then propose an adaptive primal-dual algorithm for location families. Our analysis demonstrates that the proposed adaptive primal-dual algorithm attains $\ca{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret and constraint violations, using only $\sqrt{T} + 2T$ samples, where $T$ is the time horizon. To our best knowledge, this is the first study and analysis on the optimality of the performative prediction problem under inequality constraints. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our algorithm and theoretical results through numerical simulations.

We introduce the task of automatic human action co-occurrence identification, i.e., determine whether two human actions can co-occur in the same interval of time. We create and make publicly available the ACE (Action Co-occurrencE) dataset, consisting of a large graph of ~12k co-occurring pairs of visual actions and their corresponding video clips. We describe graph link prediction models that leverage visual and textual information to automatically infer if two actions are co-occurring. We show that graphs are particularly well suited to capture relations between human actions, and the learned graph representations are effective for our task and capture novel and relevant information across different data domains. The ACE dataset and the code introduced in this paper are publicly available at https://github.com/MichiganNLP/vlog_action_co-occurrence.

In this research, new concepts of existential granules that determine themselves are invented, and are characterized from algebraic, topological, and mereological perspectives. Existential granules are those that determine themselves initially, and interact with their environment subsequently. Examples of the concept, such as those of granular balls, though inadequately defined, algorithmically established, and insufficiently theorized in earlier works by others, are already used in applications of rough sets and soft computing. It is shown that they fit into multiple theoretical frameworks (axiomatic, adaptive, and others) of granular computing. The characterization is intended for algorithm development, application to classification problems and possible mathematical foundations of generalizations of the approach. Additionally, many open problems are posed and directions provided.

This study proposes an extendable modelling framework for Digital Twin-Oriented Complex Networked Systems (DT-CNSs) with a goal of generating networks that faithfully represent real systems. Modelling process focuses on (i) features of nodes and (ii) interaction rules for creating connections that are built based on individual node's preferences. We conduct experiments on simulation-based DT-CNSs that incorporate various features and rules about network growth and different transmissibilities related to an epidemic spread on these networks. We present a case study on disaster resilience of social networks given an epidemic outbreak by investigating the infection occurrence within specific time and social distance. The experimental results show how different levels of the structural and dynamics complexities, concerned with feature diversity and flexibility of interaction rules respectively, influence network growth and epidemic spread. The analysis revealed that, to achieve maximum disaster resilience, mitigation policies should be targeted at nodes with preferred features as they have higher infection risks and should be the focus of the epidemic control.

In dynamic scenes, both localization and mapping in visual SLAM face significant challenges. In recent years, numerous outstanding research works have proposed effective solutions for the localization problem. However, there has been a scarcity of excellent works focusing on constructing long-term consistent maps in dynamic scenes, which severely hampers map applications. To address this issue, we have designed a multi-level map construction system tailored for dynamic scenes. In this system, we employ multi-object tracking algorithms, DBSCAN clustering algorithm, and depth information to rectify the results of object detection, accurately extract static point clouds, and construct dense point cloud maps and octree maps. We propose a plane map construction algorithm specialized for dynamic scenes, involving the extraction, filtering, data association, and fusion optimization of planes in dynamic environments, thus creating a plane map. Additionally, we introduce an object map construction algorithm targeted at dynamic scenes, which includes object parameterization, data association, and update optimization. Extensive experiments on public datasets and real-world scenarios validate the accuracy of the multi-level maps constructed in this study and the robustness of the proposed algorithms. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical application prospects of our algorithms by utilizing the constructed object maps for dynamic object tracking.

Art curatorial practice is characterized by the presentation of an art collection in a knowledgeable way. Machine processes are characterized by their capacity to manage and analyze large amounts of data. This paper envisages AI curation and audience interaction to explore the implications of contemporary machine learning models for the curatorial world. This project was developed for the occasion of the 2023 Helsinki Art Biennial, entitled New Directions May Emerge. We use the Helsinki Art Museum (HAM) collection to re-imagine the city of Helsinki through the lens of machine perception. We use visual-textual models to place indoor artworks in public spaces, assigning fictional coordinates based on similarity scores. We transform the space that each artwork inhabits in the city by generating synthetic 360 art panoramas. We guide the generation estimating depth values from 360 panoramas at each artwork location, and machine-generated prompts of the artworks. The result of this project is an AI curation that places the artworks in their imagined physical space, blurring the lines of artwork, context, and machine perception. The work is virtually presented as a web-based installation on this link http://newlyformedcity.net/, where users can navigate an alternative version of the city while exploring and interacting with its cultural heritage at scale.

Young children develop sophisticated internal models of the world based on their visual experience. Can such models be learned from a child's visual experience without strong inductive biases? To investigate this, we train state-of-the-art neural networks on a realistic proxy of a child's visual experience without any explicit supervision or domain-specific inductive biases. Specifically, we train both embedding models and generative models on 200 hours of headcam video from a single child collected over two years and comprehensively evaluate their performance in downstream tasks using various reference models as yardsticks. On average, the best embedding models perform at a respectable 70% of a high-performance ImageNet-trained model, despite substantial differences in training data. They also learn broad semantic categories and object localization capabilities without explicit supervision, but they are less object-centric than models trained on all of ImageNet. Generative models trained with the same data successfully extrapolate simple properties of partially masked objects, like their rough outline, texture, color, or orientation, but struggle with finer object details. We replicate our experiments with two other children and find remarkably consistent results. Broadly useful high-level visual representations are thus robustly learnable from a representative sample of a child's visual experience without strong inductive biases.

N-ary facts composed of a primary triple (head entity, relation, tail entity) and an arbitrary number of auxiliary attribute-value pairs, are prevalent in real-world knowledge graphs (KGs). Link prediction on n-ary facts is to predict a missing element in an n-ary fact. This helps populate and enrich KGs and further promotes numerous downstream applications. Previous studies usually require a substantial amount of high-quality data to understand the elements in n-ary facts. However, these studies overlook few-shot relations, which have limited labeled instances, yet are common in real-world scenarios. Thus, this paper introduces a new task, few-shot link prediction on n-ary facts. It aims to predict a missing entity in an n-ary fact with limited labeled instances. We further propose a model for Few-shot Link prEdict on N-ary facts, thus called FLEN, which consists of three modules: the relation learning, support-specific adjusting, and query inference modules. FLEN captures relation meta information from limited instances to predict a missing entity in a query instance. To validate the effectiveness of FLEN, we construct three datasets based on existing benchmark data. Our experimental results show that FLEN significantly outperforms existing related models in both few-shot link prediction on n-ary facts and binary facts.