Non-parallel voice conversion (VC) is a technique for learning mappings between source and target speeches without using a parallel corpus. Recently, cycle-consistent adversarial network (CycleGAN)-VC and CycleGAN-VC2 have shown promising results regarding this problem and have been widely used as benchmark methods. However, owing to the ambiguity of the effectiveness of CycleGAN-VC/VC2 for mel-spectrogram conversion, they are typically used for mel-cepstrum conversion even when comparative methods employ mel-spectrogram as a conversion target. To address this, we examined the applicability of CycleGAN-VC/VC2 to mel-spectrogram conversion. Through initial experiments, we discovered that their direct applications compromised the time-frequency structure that should be preserved during conversion. To remedy this, we propose CycleGAN-VC3, an improvement of CycleGAN-VC2 that incorporates time-frequency adaptive normalization (TFAN). Using TFAN, we can adjust the scale and bias of the converted features while reflecting the time-frequency structure of the source mel-spectrogram. We evaluated CycleGAN-VC3 on inter-gender and intra-gender non-parallel VC. A subjective evaluation of naturalness and similarity showed that for every VC pair, CycleGAN-VC3 outperforms or is competitive with the two types of CycleGAN-VC2, one of which was applied to mel-cepstrum and the other to mel-spectrogram. Audio samples are available at http://www.kecl.ntt.co.jp/people/kaneko.takuhiro/projects/cyclegan-vc3/index.html.

The field of machine learning is constantly evolving, sometimes slowly, and at other times we experience the tech equivalent of the Cambrian Explosion with rapid advance that makes a good many data scientists experience a serious case of imposter syndrome. It has only been 8 years since the modern era of deep learning began at the 2012 ImageNet competition. Which novel AI approaches will unlock currently unimaginable possibilities in technology and business? This article highlights emerging areas within AI that are poised to redefine the field -- and society -- in the years ahead. Unsupervised learning more closely mirrors the way that humans learn about the world: through open-ended exploration and inference, without a need for the "training wheels" of supervised learning.

Well,…Unsupervised learning in itself says not supervised learning. Intuitively speaking,most of human and animal learning is unsupervised learning. We are not given right answer every where. We just make decision we find to be right and try to do less mistakes next time. Just like above, unsupervised learning is the process of learning by machines without having labels (right answer) and making less errors next time(clustering does it by placing data in nearest clusters).

Active learning is an effective technique for reducing the labeling cost by improving data efficiency. In this work, we propose a novel batch acquisition strategy for active learning in the setting where the model training is performed in a semi-supervised manner. We formulate our approach as a data summarization problem via bilevel optimization, where the queried batch consists of the points that best summarize the unlabeled data pool. We show that our method is highly effective in keyword detection tasks in the regime when only few labeled samples are available.

In many contemporary applications, large amounts of unlabeled data are readily available while labeled examples are limited. There has been substantial interest in semi-supervised learning (SSL) which aims to leverage unlabeled data to improve estimation or prediction. However, current SSL literature focuses primarily on settings where labeled data is selected randomly from the population of interest. Non-random sampling, while posing additional analytical challenges, is highly applicable to many real world problems. Moreover, no SSL methods currently exist for estimating the prediction performance of a fitted model under non-random sampling. In this paper, we propose a two-step SSL procedure for evaluating a prediction rule derived from a working binary regression model based on the Brier score and overall misclassification rate under stratified sampling. In step I, we impute the missing labels via weighted regression with nonlinear basis functions to account for nonrandom sampling and to improve efficiency. In step II, we augment the initial imputations to ensure the consistency of the resulting estimators regardless of the specification of the prediction model or the imputation model. The final estimator is then obtained with the augmented imputations. We provide asymptotic theory and numerical studies illustrating that our proposals outperform their supervised counterparts in terms of efficiency gain. Our methods are motivated by electronic health records (EHR) research and validated with a real data analysis of an EHR-based study of diabetic neuropathy.

To leverage enormous unlabeled data on distributed edge devices, we formulate a new problem in federated learning called Federated Unsupervised Representation Learning (FURL) to learn a common representation model without supervision while preserving data privacy. FURL poses two new challenges: (1) data distribution shift (Non-IID distribution) among clients would make local models focus on different categories, leading to the inconsistency of representation spaces. (2) without the unified information among clients in FURL, the representations across clients would be misaligned. To address these challenges, we propose Federated Constrastive Averaging with dictionary and alignment (FedCA) algorithm. FedCA is composed of two key modules: (1) dictionary module to aggregate the representations of samples from each client and share with all clients for consistency of representation space and (2) alignment module to align the representation of each client on a base model trained on a public data. We adopt the contrastive loss for local model training. Through extensive experiments with three evaluation protocols in IID and Non-IID settings, we demonstrate that FedCA outperforms all baselines with significant margins.

During the 21st century, the revolution in data storage techniques reduces the storage cost of the data as a result the amount of data generated is growing exponentially. It is estimated the by the end of the 21st we will have 44 zettabytes of data. Every action we perform generates data viz. The algorithm we are using such as Naïve Bayes, KNN clustering, etc. has roots back in the 1960s but due to the technology barrier was not able to implement this algorithm. But in the 21st-century lot of innovation has been taken place -- result hardware has been evolved.

Abstract--Point clouds are often sparse and incomplete, which imposes difficulties for real-world applications, such as 3D object classification, detection and segmentation. Existing shape completion methods tend to generate coarse shapes of objects without finegrained details. Moreover, current approaches require fully-complete ground truth, which are difficult to obtain in real-world applications. In view of these, we propose a self-supervised object completion method, which optimizes the training procedure solely on the partial input without utilizing the fully-complete ground truth. In order to generate high-quality objects with detailed geometric structures, we propose a cascaded refinement network (CRN) with a coarse-to-fine strategy to synthesize the complete objects. Considering the local details of partial input together with the adversarial training, we are able to learn the complicated distributions of point clouds and generate the object details as realistic as possible. We verify our self-supervised method on both unsupervised and supervised experimental settings and show superior performances. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on different datasets demonstrate that our method achieves more realistic outputs compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches on the 3D point cloud completion task. A large amount of works [1], [2], [3], [4] have been proposed for point cloud analysis by directly extracting pointwise features from the point coordinates.

We propose to solve the natural language inference problem without any supervision from the inference labels via task-agnostic multimodal pretraining. Although recent studies of multimodal self-supervised learning also represent the linguistic and visual context, their encoders for different modalities are coupled. Thus they cannot incorporate visual information when encoding plain text alone. In this paper, we propose Multimodal Aligned Contrastive Decoupled learning (MACD) network. MACD forces the decoupled text encoder to represent the visual information via contrastive learning. Therefore, it embeds visual knowledge even for plain text inference. We conducted comprehensive experiments over plain text inference datasets (i.e. SNLI and STS-B). The unsupervised MACD even outperforms the fully-supervised BiLSTM and BiLSTM+ELMO on STS-B.

Self-training algorithms, which train a model to fit pseudolabels predicted by another previously-learned model, have been very successful for learning with unlabeled data using neural networks. However, the current theoretical understanding of self-training only applies to linear models. This work provides a unified theoretical analysis of self-training with deep networks for semi-supervised learning, unsupervised domain adaptation, and unsupervised learning. At the core of our analysis is a simple but realistic "expansion" assumption, which states that a low-probability subset of the data must expand to a neighborhood with large probability relative to the subset. We also assume that neighborhoods of examples in different classes have minimal overlap. We prove that under these assumptions, the minimizers of population objectives based on self-training and input-consistency regularization will achieve high accuracy with respect to ground-truth labels. By using off-the-shelf generalization bounds, we immediately convert this result to sample complexity guarantees for neural nets that are polynomial in the margin and Lipschitzness. Our results help explain the empirical successes of recently proposed self-training algorithms which use input consistency regularization.