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 noise reduction


The 7 best open earbuds stay put, sound great, and keep us aware of the world

Mashable

Look Up Say More Safety Net Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series We tested open earbuds from Shokz, Sony, Bose, and more -- these were our seven favorites. Bethany Allard is a Los Angeles-based shopping reporter at Mashable covering beauty tech, dating, sex and relationships, and headphones. That basically means she puts her hair through a lot, scrolls through a lot of dating apps, and rotates through a lot of different headphones. In addition to testing out and rounding up the best products, she also covers deals for Mashable, paying an especially obsessive amount of attention to Apple deals and prices. That knowledge comes in handy when she's covering shopping holidays like Prime Day and Black Friday, which she's now done for three years at Mashable. All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission. Noise-cancelling earbuds are a popular choice for many people, but if you want to hear the world around you or find an in-ear design uncomfortable, there's a better option: open earbuds . The best open earbuds let you enjoy your workout playlist without losing touch with your surroundings.



Shokz OpenFit Pro review: Reducing distractions while keeping your ears open

Engadget

Apple could unveil Gemini-powered Siri in Feb. These open-fit earbuds actually make a difference with background noise. Rarely does a set of open-fit earbuds actually impress me. I tend to find them underwhelming because overall sound quality is subpar compared to the more "traditional" in-ear models. The first time I used the Shokz OpenFit Pro ($249.95)


Adaptive Guided Upsampling for Low-light Image Enhancement

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce Adaptive Guided Upsampling (AGU), an efficient method for upscaling low-light images capable of optimizing multiple image quality characteristics at the same time, such as reducing noise and increasing sharpness. It is based on a guided image method, which transfers image characteristics from a guidance image to the target image. Using state-of-the-art guided methods, low-light images lack sufficient characteristics for this purpose due to their high noise level and low brightness, rendering suboptimal/not significantly improved images in the process. We solve this problem with multi-parameter optimization, learning the association between multiple low-light and bright image characteristics. Our proposed machine learning method learns these characteristics from a few sample images-pairs. AGU can render high-quality images in real time using low-quality, low-resolution input; our experiments demonstrate that it is superior to state-of-the-art methods in the addressed low-light use case.


Diff-eRank: A Novel Rank-Based Metric for Evaluating Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing and extended their powerful capabilities to multi-modal domains. As LLMs continue to advance, it is crucial to develop diverse and appropriate metrics for their evaluation. In this paper, we introduce a novel rank-based metric, Diff-eRank, grounded in information theory and geometry principles.


Towards Skeletal and Signer Noise Reduction in Sign Language Production via Quaternion-Based Pose Encoding and Contrastive Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

One of the main challenges in neural sign language production (SLP) lies in the high intra-class variability of signs, arising from signer morphology and stylistic variety in the training data. To improve robustness to such variations, we propose two enhancements to the standard Progressive Transformers (PT) architecture (Saunders et al., 2020). First, we encode poses using bone rotations in quaternion space and train with a geodesic loss to improve the accuracy and clarity of angular joint movements. Second, we introduce a contrastive loss to structure decoder embeddings by semantic similarity, using either gloss overlap or SBERT-based sentence similarity, aiming to filter out anatomical and stylistic features that do not convey relevant semantic information. On the Phoenix14T dataset, the contrastive loss alone yields a 16% improvement in Probability of Correct Keypoint over the PT baseline. When combined with quaternion-based pose encoding, the model achieves a 6% reduction in Mean Bone Angle Error. These results point to the benefit of incorporating skeletal structure modeling and semantically guided contrastive objectives on sign pose representations into the training of Transformer-based SLP models.


Minimizing Acoustic Noise: Enhancing Quiet Locomotion for Quadruped Robots in Indoor Applications

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

-- Recent advancements in quadruped robot research have significantly improved their ability to traverse complex and unstructured outdoor environments. However, the issue of noise generated during locomotion is generally overlooked, which is critically important in noise-sensitive indoor environments, such as service and healthcare settings, where maintaining low noise levels is essential. This study aims to optimize the acoustic noise generated by quadruped robots during locomotion through the development of advanced motion control algorithms. T o achieve this, we propose a novel approach that minimizes noise emissions by integrating optimized gait design with tailored control strategies. This method achieves an average noise reduction of approximately 8 dBA during movement, thereby enhancing the suitability of quadruped robots for deployment in noise-sensitive indoor environments. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach across various indoor settings, highlighting the potential of quadruped robots for quiet operation in noise-sensitive environments. I. INTRODUCTION Quadruped robots have garnered significant attention in recent years, particularly due to their versatility and capability to navigate complex terrains using Reinforcement Learning-based motion control [1]-[7].


Composite Reward Design in PPO-Driven Adaptive Filtering

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--Model-free and reinforcement learning-based adaptive filtering methods are gaining traction for denoising in dynamic, non-stationary environments such as wireless signal channels. Traditional filters like LMS, RLS, Wiener, and Kalman are limited by assumptions of stationary or requiring complex fine-tuning or exact noise statistics or fixed models. This letter proposes an adaptive filtering framework using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), guided by a composite reward that balances SNR improvement, MSE reduction, and residual smoothness. Experiments on synthetic signals with various noise types show that our PPO agent generalizes beyond its training distribution, achieving real-time performance and outperforming classical filters. This work demonstrates the viability of policy-gradient reinforcement learning for robust, low-latency adaptive signal filtering. Wireless communication systems and sensor networks often operate in noisy, time-varying environments where effective denoising is critical.


Quantitative Error Feedback for Quantization Noise Reduction of Filtering over Graphs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--This paper introduces an innovative error feedback framework designed to mitigate quantization noise in distributed graph filtering, where communications are constrained to quantized messages. It comes from error spectrum shaping techniques from state-space digital filters, and therefore establishes connections between quantized filtering processes over different domains. In contrast to existing error compensation methods, our framework quantitatively feeds back the quantization noise for exact compensation. We examine the framework under three key scenarios: (i) deterministic graph filtering, (ii) graph filtering over random graphs, and (iii) graph filtering with random node-asynchronous updates. Rigorous theoretical analysis demonstrates that the proposed framework significantly reduces the effect of quantization noise, and we provide closed-form solutions for the optimal error feedback coefficients. Moreover, this quantitative error feedback mechanism can be seamlessly integrated into communication-efficient decentralized optimization frameworks, enabling lower error floors. Numerical experiments validate the theoretical results, consistently showing that our method outperforms conventional quantization strategies in terms of both accuracy and robustness. Index T erms --Graph signal processing, distributed graph filtering, quantization, error feedback, stochastic linear system, decentralized optimization. HE theory of graph filtering has seen substantial progress in recent years [1]-[4], emerging as a cornerstone of modern signal processing and machine learning on networked data.


Unified AI for Accurate Audio Anomaly Detection

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Existing methodologies often struggle to balance computational efficiency with high performance. Traditional techniques, such as the Fourier transforms and Mel - frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), have been widely used for feature extraction. While these methods are computationally efficient, they lack the flexibility to handle complex, noisy, or highly dynamic datasets. On the other hand, deep learning - based approaches, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), offer superior performance but often require extensive computational resources, making them less viable for real - time or resource - constrained applications. Recent works, including those by Patel et al. [1] and Tan et al. [2], have explored specific solutions to these challenges. Patel et al. introduced a wavelet - based noise reduction method that demonstrated improvements in signal clarity. Similarly, Tan et al. proposed lightweight deep learning models optimized for real - time anomaly detection, addressing latency concerns. While these contributions are noteworthy, they often lack generalizability across diverse datasets and fail to address scalability for large - scale deployments. Our research aims to overcome these limitations by proposing a unified framework that seamlessly integrates advanced preprocessing techniques with flexible machine learning architectures.