With the drive to create a decentralized digital economy, Web 3.0 has become a cornerstone of digital transformation, developed on the basis of computing-force networking, distributed data storage, and blockchain. With the rapid realization of quantum devices, Web 3.0 is being developed in parallel with the deployment of quantum cloud computing and quantum Internet. In this regard, quantum computing first disrupts the original cryptographic systems that protect data security while reshaping modern cryptography with the advantages of quantum computing and communication. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a quantum blockchain-driven Web 3.0 framework that provides information-theoretic security for decentralized data transferring and payment transactions. First, we present the framework of quantum blockchain-driven Web 3.0 with future-proof security during the transmission of data and transaction information. Next, we discuss the potential applications and challenges of implementing quantum blockchain in Web 3.0. Finally, we describe a use case for quantum non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and propose a quantum deep learning-based optimal auction for NFT trading to maximize the achievable revenue for sufficient liquidity in Web 3.0. In this way, the proposed framework can achieve proven security and sustainability for the next-generation decentralized digital society.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods such as WavLM have shown promising speech separation (SS) results in small-scale simulation-based experiments. In this work, we extend the exploration of the SSL-based SS by massively scaling up both the pre-training data (more than 300K hours) and fine-tuning data (10K hours). We also investigate various techniques to efficiently integrate the pre-trained model with the SS network under a limited computation budget, including a low frame rate SSL model training setup and a fine-tuning scheme using only the part of the pre-trained model. Compared with a supervised baseline and the WavLM-based SS model using feature embeddings obtained with the previously released 94K hours trained WavLM, our proposed model obtains 15.9% and 11.2% of relative word error rate (WER) reductions, respectively, for a simulated far-field speech mixture test set. For conversation transcription on real meeting recordings using continuous speech separation, the proposed model achieves 6.8% and 10.6% of relative WER reductions over the purely supervised baseline on AMI and ICSI evaluation sets, respectively, while reducing the computational cost by 38%.

Multi-talker automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been studied to generate transcriptions of natural conversation including overlapping speech of multiple speakers. Due to the difficulty in acquiring real conversation data with high-quality human transcriptions, a na\"ive simulation of multi-talker speech by randomly mixing multiple utterances was conventionally used for model training. In this work, we propose an improved technique to simulate multi-talker overlapping speech with realistic speech overlaps, where an arbitrary pattern of speech overlaps is represented by a sequence of discrete tokens. With this representation, speech overlapping patterns can be learned from real conversations based on a statistical language model, such as N-gram, which can be then used to generate multi-talker speech for training. In our experiments, multi-talker ASR models trained with the proposed method show consistent improvement on the word error rates across multiple datasets.

This paper proposes a token-level serialized output training (t-SOT), a novel framework for streaming multi-talker automatic speech recognition (ASR). Unlike existing streaming multi-talker ASR models using multiple output branches, the t-SOT model has only a single output branch that generates recognition tokens (e.g., words, subwords) of multiple speakers in chronological order based on their emission times. A special token that indicates the change of ``virtual'' output channels is introduced to keep track of the overlapping utterances. Compared to the prior streaming multi-talker ASR models, the t-SOT model has the advantages of less inference cost and a simpler model architecture. Moreover, in our experiments with LibriSpeechMix and LibriCSS datasets, the t-SOT-based transformer transducer model achieves the state-of-the-art word error rates by a significant margin to the prior results. For non-overlapping speech, the t-SOT model is on par with a single-talker ASR model in terms of both accuracy and computational cost, opening the door for deploying one model for both single- and multi-talker scenarios.

Speech separation has been shown effective for multi-talker speech recognition. Under the ad hoc microphone array setup where the array consists of spatially distributed asynchronous microphones, additional challenges must be overcome as the geometry and number of microphones are unknown beforehand. Prior studies show, with a spatial-temporalinterleaving structure, neural networks can efficiently utilize the multi-channel signals of the ad hoc array. In this paper, we further extend this approach to continuous speech separation. Several techniques are introduced to enable speech separation for real continuous recordings. First, we apply a transformer-based network for spatio-temporal modeling of the ad hoc array signals. In addition, two methods are proposed to mitigate a speech duplication problem during single talker segments, which seems more severe in the ad hoc array scenarios. One method is device distortion simulation for reducing the acoustic mismatch between simulated training data and real recordings. The other is speaker counting to detect the single speaker segments and merge the output signal channels. Experimental results for AdHoc-LibiCSS, a new dataset consisting of continuous recordings of concatenated LibriSpeech utterances obtained by multiple different devices, show the proposed separation method can significantly improve the ASR accuracy for overlapped speech with little performance degradation for single talker segments.

Edge computing-enhanced Internet of Vehicles (EC-IoV) enables ubiquitous data processing and content sharing among vehicles and terrestrial edge computing (TEC) infrastructures (e.g., 5G base stations and roadside units) with little or no human intervention, plays a key role in the intelligent transportation systems. However, EC-IoV is heavily dependent on the connections and interactions between vehicles and TEC infrastructures, thus will break down in some remote areas where TEC infrastructures are unavailable (e.g., desert, isolated islands and disaster-stricken areas). Driven by the ubiquitous connections and global-area coverage, space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGINs) efficiently support seamless coverage and efficient resource management, represent the next frontier for edge computing. In light of this, we first review the state-of-the-art edge computing research for SAGINs in this article. After discussing several existing orbital and aerial edge computing architectures, we propose a framework of edge computing-enabled space-air-ground integrated networks (EC-SAGINs) to support various IoV services for the vehicles in remote areas. The main objective of the framework is to minimize the task completion time and satellite resource usage. To this end, a pre-classification scheme is presented to reduce the size of action space, and a deep imitation learning (DIL) driven offloading and caching algorithm is proposed to achieve real-time decision making. Simulation results show the effectiveness of our proposed scheme. At last, we also discuss some technology challenges and future directions.

Given two possible treatments, there may exist subgroups who benefit greater from one treatment than the other. This problem is relevant to the field of marketing, where treatments may correspond to different ways of selling a product. It is similarly relevant to the field of public policy, where treatments may correspond to specific government programs. And finally, personalized medicine is a field wholly devoted to understanding which subgroups of individuals will benefit from particular medical treatments. We present a computationally fast tree-based method, ABtree, for treatment effect differentiation. Unlike other methods, ABtree specifically produces decision rules for optimal treatment assignment on a per-individual basis. The treatment choices are selected for maximizing the overall occurrence of a desired binary outcome, conditional on a set of covariates. In this poster, we present the methodology on tree growth and pruning, and show performance results when applied to simulated data as well as real data.