acm
SplashNet: Split-and-Share Encoders for Accurate and Efficient Typing with Surface Electromyography
Surface electromyography (sEMG) at the wrists could enable natural, keyboard-free text entry, yet the state-of-the-art emg2qwertybaseline still misrecognizes 51.8% of characters zero-shot on unseen users and 7.0% after user-specific fine-tuning. We trace much of these errors to mismatched cross-user signal statistics, fragile reliance on high-order feature dependencies, and the absence of architectural inductive biases aligned with the bilateral nature of typing. To address these issues, we introduce three simple modifications: (i) Rolling Time Normalization which adaptively aligns input distributions across users; (ii) Aggressive Channel Masking, which encourages reliance on low-order feature combinations more likely to generalize across users; and (iii) a Split-and-Share encoder that processes each hand independently with weight-shared streams to reflect the bilateral symmetry of the neuromuscular system. Combined with a five-fold reduction in spectral resolution (33 6 frequency bands), these components yield a compact Splitand-Share model, SplashNet-mini, which uses only the parameters and 0.6 the FLOPs of the baseline while reducing character error rate (CER) to 36.4% zero-shot and 5.9% after fine-tuning. An upscaled variant, SplashNet ( parameters, 1.15 FLOPs of the baseline), further lowers error to 35.7% and 5.5%, representing 31% and 21% relative improvements in the zero-shot and finetuned settings, respectively. SplashNet therefore establishes a new state-of-the-art without requiring additional data.
Obtaining Partition Crossover masks using Statistical Linkage Learning for solving noised optimization problems with hidden variable dependency structure
Przewozniczek, M. W., Frej, B., Komarnicki, M. M., Prusik, M., Tinรณs, R.
In optimization problems, some variable subsets may have a joint non-linear or non-monotonical influence on the function value. Therefore, knowledge of variable dependencies may be crucial for effective optimization, and many state-of-the-art optimizers leverage it to improve performance. However, some real-world problem instances may be the subject of noise of various origins. In such a case, variable dependencies relevant to optimization may be hard or impossible to tell using dependency checks sufficient for problems without noise, making highly effective operators, e.g., Partition Crossover (PX), useless. Therefore, we use Statistical Linkage Learning (SLL) to decompose problems with noise and propose a new SLL-dedicated mask construction algorithm. We prove that if the quality of the SLL-based decomposition is sufficiently high, the proposed clustering algorithm yields masks equivalent to PX masks for the noise-free instances. The experiments show that the optimizer using the proposed mechanisms remains equally effective despite the noise level and outperforms state-of-the-art optimizers for the problems with high noise.
Prior-Free Dynamic Auctions with Low Regret Buyers
Yuan Deng, Jon Schneider, Balasubramanian Sivan
We study the problem of how to repeatedly sell to a buyer running a no-regret,mean-based algorithm. Previous work [Braverman et al., 2018] shows that it ispossible to design effective mechanisms in such a setting that extract almost allof the economic surplus, but these mechanisms require the buyer's values each