Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

In this work, we find that better model usage can make a huge difference.

Animals need to devise strategies to maximize returns while interacting with their environment based on incoming noisy sensory observations. Task-relevant states, such as the agent's location within an environment or the presence of a predator, are often not directly observable but must be inferred using available sensory information. Successor representations (SR) have been proposed as a middle-ground between model-based and model-free reinforcement learning strategies, allowing for fast value computation and rapid adaptation to changes in the reward function or goal locations. Indeed, recent studies suggest that features of neural responses are consistent with the SR framework. However, it is not clear how such representations might be learned and computed in partially observed, noisy environments. Here, we introduce a neurally plausible model using \emph{distributional successor features}, which builds on the distributed distributional code for the representation and computation of uncertainty, and which allows for efficient value function computation in partially observed environments via the successor representation. We show that distributional successor features can support reinforcement learning in noisy environments in which direct learning of successful policies is infeasible.

We present an approach for simultaneously separating and localizing multiple sound sources using recorded microphone data. Inspired by topic models, our approach is based on a probabilistic model of inter-microphone phase differences, and poses separation and localization as a Bayesian inference problem. We assume sound activity is locally smooth across time, frequency, and location, and use the known position of the microphones to obtain a consistent separation. We compare the performance of our method against existing algorithms on simulated anechoic voice data and find that it obtains high performance across a variety of input conditions.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative disorder. PD telemonitoring emerges as a novel assessment modality enabling self-administered at-home tests of Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) scores, enhancing accessibility for PD patients. However, three types of noise would occur during measurements: (1) patient-induced measurement inaccuracies, (2) environmental noise, and (3) data packet loss during transmission, resulting in higher prediction errors. To address these challenges, NoRo, a noise-robust UPDRS prediction framework is proposed. First, the original speech features are grouped into ordered bins, based on the continuous values of a selected feature, to construct contrastive pairs. Second, the contrastive pairs are employed to train a multilayer perceptron encoder for generating noise-robust features. Finally, these features are concatenated with the original features as the augmented features, which are then fed into the UPDRS prediction models. Notably, we further introduces a novel evaluation approach with customizable noise injection module, and extensive experiments show that NoRo can successfully enhance the noise robustness of UPDRS prediction across various downstream prediction models under different noisy environments.

Quantum computing, with its ability to do exponentially faster computation compared to classical systems, has found novel applications in various fields such as machine learning and recommendation systems. Quantum Machine Learning (QML), which integrates quantum computing with machine learning techniques, presents powerful new tools for data processing and pattern recognition. This paper proposes a hybrid recommendation system that combines Quantum Hopfield Associative Memory (QHAM) with deep neural networks to improve the extraction and classification on the MovieLens 1M dataset. User archetypes are clustered into multiple unique groups using the K-Means algorithm and converted into polar patterns through the encoder's activation function. These polar patterns are then integrated into the variational QHAM-based hybrid recommendation model. The system was trained using the MSE loss over 35 epochs in an ideal environment, achieving an ROC value of 0.9795, an accuracy of 0.8841, and an F-1 Score of 0.8786. Trained with the same number of epochs in a noisy environment using a custom Qiskit AER noise model incorporating bit-flip and readout errors with the same probabilities as in real quantum hardware, it achieves an ROC of 0.9177, an accuracy of 0.8013, and an F-1 Score equal to 0.7866, demonstrating consistent performance. Additionally, we were able to optimize the qubit overhead present in previous QHAM architectures by efficiently updating only one random targeted qubit. This research presents a novel framework that combines variational quantum computing with deep learning, capable of dealing with real-world datasets with comparable performance compared to purely classical counterparts. Additionally, the model can perform similarly well in noisy configurations, showcasing a steady performance and proposing a promising direction for future usage in recommendation systems.

Voice Activity Detection (VAD) in the presence of background noise remains a challenging problem in speech processing. Accurate VAD is essential in automatic speech recognition, voice-to-text, conversational agents, etc, where noise can severely degrade the performance. A modern application includes the voice assistant, specially mounted on Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) devices such as cell phones, smart glasses, earbuds, etc, where the voice signal includes background noise. Therefore, VAD modules must remain light-weight due to their practical on-device limitation. The existing models often struggle with low signal-to-noise ratios across diverse acoustic environments. A simple VAD often detects human voice in a clean environment, but struggles to detect the human voice in noisy conditions. We propose a noise-robust VAD that comprises a light-weight VAD, with data pre-processing and post-processing added modules to handle the background noise. This approach significantly enhances the VAD accuracy in noisy environments and requires neither a larger model, nor fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves a notable improvement compared to baselines, particularly in environments with high background noise interference. This modified VAD additionally improving clean speech detection.

Training deep neural networks for computer vision is inherently challenging due to issues like unstable gradients, local minima, and pervasive noisy data [48]. These challenges are magnified in anomalous environments where data distributions deviate from the norm, critically impairing the optimization process. Such instability hinders the model's ability to learn robust representations and significantly affects its generalization to unseen data. The choice of optimizer is central to alleviating these issues, as it governs both convergence speed and stability during training. Over the decades, various optimizers have been proposed to tackle different facets of this optimization challenge. Early work on Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) [30, 33] laid the foundation for iterative gradient-based methods by employing a simple yet effective parameter update scheme. AdaGrad [4] introduced per-parameter learning rate adjustments to better handle sparse gradients, while Adam [13] fused momentum-based updates with adaptive learning rates, accelerating convergence. Subsequently, Adam variants such as AdamW [23], AdaBelief [52], and Adan [21] have sought to address limitations in Adam's adaptive mechanism and enhance robustness in complex, non-convex landscapes.

Addressing the detrimental impact of non-stationary environmental noise on automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been a persistent and significant research focus. Despite advancements, this challenge continues to be a major concern. Recently, data-driven supervised approaches, such as deep neural networks, have emerged as promising alternatives to traditional unsupervised methods. With extensive training, these approaches have the potential to overcome the challenges posed by diverse real-life acoustic environments. In this light, this paper introduces a novel neural framework that incorporates a robust frontend into ASR systems in both clean and noisy environments. Utilizing the Aurora-2 speech database, the authors evaluate the effectiveness of an acoustic feature set for Mel-frequency, employing the approach of transfer learning based on Residual neural network (ResNet). The experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement in recognition accuracy compared to convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. They achieved accuracies of 98.94% in clean and 91.21% in noisy mode.