Diffusion models have shown a great ability at bridging the performance gap between predictive and generative approaches for speech enhancement. We have shown that they may even outperform their predictive counterparts for non-additive corruption types or when they are evaluated on mismatched conditions. However, diffusion models suffer from a high computational burden, mainly as they require to run a neural network for each reverse diffusion step, whereas predictive approaches only require one pass. As diffusion models are generative approaches they may also produce vocalizing and breathing artifacts in adverse conditions. In comparison, in such difficult scenarios, predictive models typically do not produce such artifacts but tend to distort the target speech instead, thereby degrading the speech quality. In this work, we present a stochastic regeneration approach where an estimate given by a predictive model is provided as a guide for further diffusion. We show that the proposed approach uses the predictive model to remove the vocalizing and breathing artifacts while producing very high quality samples thanks to the diffusion model, even in adverse conditions. We further show that this approach enables to use lighter sampling schemes with fewer diffusion steps without sacrificing quality, thus lifting the computational burden by an order of magnitude. Source code and audio examples are available online (https://uhh.de/inf-sp-storm).

Diffusion-based generative models have had a high impact on the computer vision and speech processing communities these past years. Besides data generation tasks, they have also been employed for data restoration tasks like speech enhancement and dereverberation. While discriminative models have traditionally been argued to be more powerful e.g. for speech enhancement, generative diffusion approaches have recently been shown to narrow this performance gap considerably. In this paper, we systematically compare the performance of generative diffusion models and discriminative approaches on different speech restoration tasks. For this, we extend our prior contributions on diffusion-based speech enhancement in the complex time-frequency domain to the task of bandwith extension. We then compare it to a discriminatively trained neural network with the same network architecture on three restoration tasks, namely speech denoising, dereverberation and bandwidth extension. We observe that the generative approach performs globally better than its discriminative counterpart on all tasks, with the strongest benefit for non-additive distortion models, like in dereverberation and bandwidth extension. Code and audio examples can be found online at https://uhh.de/inf-sp-sgmsemultitask

最近，基于扩散的生成模型已引入语音增强的任务。干净的语音损坏被建模为固定的远期过程，其中逐渐添加了越来越多的噪声。通过学习以嘈杂的输入为条件的迭代方式扭转这一过程，可以产生干净的语音。我们以先前的工作为基础，并在随机微分方程的形式主义中得出训练任务。我们对基础分数匹配目标进行了详细的理论综述，并探索了不同的采样器配置，以解决测试时的反向过程。通过使用自然图像生成文献的复杂网络体系结构，与以前的出版物相比，我们可以显着提高性能。我们还表明，我们可以与最近的判别模型竞争，并在评估与培训不同的语料库时获得更好的概括。我们通过主观的听力测试对评估结果进行补充，其中我们提出的方法是最好的。此外，我们表明所提出的方法在单渠道语音覆盖中实现了出色的最新性能。我们的代码和音频示例可在线获得，请参见https://uhh.de/inf-sp-sgmse

蒙特卡洛方法和深度学习的组合最近导致了在高维度中求解部分微分方程（PDE）的有效算法。相关的学习问题通常被称为基于相关随机微分方程（SDE）的变异公式，可以使用基于梯度的优化方法最小化相应损失。因此，在各自的数值实现中，至关重要的是要依靠足够的梯度估计器，这些梯度估计器表现出较低的差异，以便准确，迅速地达到收敛性。在本文中，我们严格研究了在线性Kolmogorov PDE的上下文中出现的相应数值方面。特别是，我们系统地比较了现有的深度学习方法，并为其表演提供了理论解释。随后，我们建议的新方法在理论上和数字上都可以证明更健壮，从而导致了实质性的改进。

基于分数的生成模型（SGM）最近显示了难以生成的任务的令人印象深刻的结果，例如自然图像和音频信号的无条件生成和条件生成。在这项工作中，我们将这些模型扩展到复杂的短时傅立叶变换（STFT）域，并提出了使用复杂值的深神经网络来增强语音的新型训练任务。我们在随机微分方程（SDE）的形式主义中得出了这项训练任务，从而实现了预测器 - 矫正器采样器的使用。我们提供了以前出版物启发的替代配方，以使用生成扩散模型来增强语音，从而避免了对噪声分布的任何先前假设的需求，并使训练任务纯粹是生成纯生成的，这是我们所显示的，从而改善了增强性能。

Nucleolar organizer regions (NORs) are parts of the DNA that are involved in RNA transcription. Due to the silver affinity of associated proteins, argyrophilic NORs (AgNORs) can be visualized using silver-based staining. The average number of AgNORs per nucleus has been shown to be a prognostic factor for predicting the outcome of many tumors. Since manual detection of AgNORs is laborious, automation is of high interest. We present a deep learning-based pipeline for automatically determining the AgNOR-score from histopathological sections. An additional annotation experiment was conducted with six pathologists to provide an independent performance evaluation of our approach. Across all raters and images, we found a mean squared error of 0.054 between the AgNOR- scores of the experts and those of the model, indicating that our approach offers performance comparable to humans.

Early on during a pandemic, vaccine availability is limited, requiring prioritisation of different population groups. Evaluating vaccine allocation is therefore a crucial element of pandemics response. In the present work, we develop a model to retrospectively evaluate age-dependent counterfactual vaccine allocation strategies against the COVID-19 pandemic. To estimate the effect of allocation on the expected severe-case incidence, we employ a simulation-assisted causal modelling approach which combines a compartmental infection-dynamics simulation, a coarse-grained, data-driven causal model and literature estimates for immunity waning. We compare Israel's implemented vaccine allocation strategy in 2021 to counterfactual strategies such as no prioritisation, prioritisation of younger age groups or a strict risk-ranked approach; we find that Israel's implemented strategy was indeed highly effective. We also study the marginal impact of increasing vaccine uptake for a given age group and find that increasing vaccinations in the elderly is most effective at preventing severe cases, whereas additional vaccinations for middle-aged groups reduce infections most effectively. Due to its modular structure, our model can easily be adapted to study future pandemics. We demonstrate this flexibility by investigating vaccine allocation strategies for a pandemic with characteristics of the Spanish Flu. Our approach thus helps evaluate vaccination strategies under the complex interplay of core epidemic factors, including age-dependent risk profiles, immunity waning, vaccine availability and spreading rates.

We present a unified probabilistic model that learns a representative set of discrete vehicle actions and predicts the probability of each action given a particular scenario. Our model also enables us to estimate the distribution over continuous trajectories conditioned on a scenario, representing what each discrete action would look like if executed in that scenario. While our primary objective is to learn representative action sets, these capabilities combine to produce accurate multimodal trajectory predictions as a byproduct. Although our learned action representations closely resemble semantically meaningful categories (e.g., "go straight", "turn left", etc.), our method is entirely self-supervised and does not utilize any manually generated labels or categories. Our method builds upon recent advances in variational inference and deep unsupervised clustering, resulting in full distribution estimates based on deterministic model evaluations.

Electricity prices in liberalized markets are determined by the supply and demand for electric power, which are in turn driven by various external influences that vary strongly in time. In perfect competition, the merit order principle describes that dispatchable power plants enter the market in the order of their marginal costs to meet the residual load, i.e. the difference of load and renewable generation. Many market models implement this principle to predict electricity prices but typically require certain assumptions and simplifications. In this article, we present an explainable machine learning model for the prices on the German day-ahead market, which substantially outperforms a benchmark model based on the merit order principle. Our model is designed for the ex-post analysis of prices and thus builds on various external features. Using Shapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) values, we can disentangle the role of the different features and quantify their importance from empiric data. Load, wind and solar generation are most important, as expected, but wind power appears to affect prices stronger than solar power does. Fuel prices also rank highly and show nontrivial dependencies, including strong interactions with other features revealed by a SHAP interaction analysis. Large generation ramps are correlated with high prices, again with strong feature interactions, due to the limited flexibility of nuclear and lignite plants. Our results further contribute to model development by providing quantitative insights directly from data.

We investigate whether three types of post hoc model explanations--feature attribution, concept activation, and training point ranking--are effective for detecting a model's reliance on spurious signals in the training data. Specifically, we consider the scenario where the spurious signal to be detected is unknown, at test-time, to the user of the explanation method. We design an empirical methodology that uses semi-synthetic datasets along with pre-specified spurious artifacts to obtain models that verifiably rely on these spurious training signals. We then provide a suite of metrics that assess an explanation method's reliability for spurious signal detection under various conditions. We find that the post hoc explanation methods tested are ineffective when the spurious artifact is unknown at test-time especially for non-visible artifacts like a background blur. Further, we find that feature attribution methods are susceptible to erroneously indicating dependence on spurious signals even when the model being explained does not rely on spurious artifacts. This finding casts doubt on the utility of these approaches, in the hands of a practitioner, for detecting a model's reliance on spurious signals.