音景研究的生态有效性通常取决于代表正在研究的知觉空间的声景选择。例如，声景愉快的研究可能会调查来自“宜人”到“烦人”的音景地点。音景的选择通常是研究人员主导的，但是参与者主导的过程可以降低选择偏见并提高结果可靠性。因此，我们提出了一种强大的参与者指导的方法，以查明具有任意感知属性的特征音景。我们通过识别跨越从ISO 12913-2的Soundscape感知的ISO 12913-2 Circumplex模型的新加坡音景来验证我们的方法。从记忆和经验来看，有67名参与者首先选择了与新加坡每个主要计划区域中每个感知象限相对应的位置。然后，我们在选定的位置进行了加权K-均值聚类，每个位置的权重从每个参与者在每个位置花费的频率和持续时间得出。因此，权重是参与者信心的代理。因此，总共将62个位置确定为具有特征性音景的合适位置，可利用ISO 12913-2感知象限进行进一步研究。声音景观的视听记录和声学表征将在以后的研究中进行。

在音景增强系统中的掩蔽器和播放增益水平的选择对于改善给定环境的整体声学舒适度至关重要。传统上，选择适当的掩蔽者和增益水平的专家意见为可能无法代表目标人群或通过聆听测试而告知，这可能是耗时且富有劳动力的。此外，掩蔽器和增益的产生静态选择通常对现实世界中的动态性质不灵活。在这项工作中，我们利用了深度学习模型来执行最佳掩蔽器的联合选择及其对给定音景的增益水平。所提出的模型是使用高度模块化的构建块设计的，可以进行优化的推理过程，该过程可以快速搜索大量掩膜和增益组合。此外，我们介绍了以数字增益水平为条件的特征域音景增强，从而消除了推理期间的计算昂贵的波形 - 域混合过程，以及新的掩护者所需的乏味的预校准过程。在大规模的数据集上对拟议的系统进行了验证，该数据集对具有440多名参与者的增强音景的主观响应，以确保模型预测掩护者的联合效果及其在感知愉悦水平上的增益水平的能力。

Non-parametric tests can determine the better of two stochastic optimization algorithms when benchmarking results are ordinal, like the final fitness values of multiple trials. For many benchmarks, however, a trial can also terminate once it reaches a pre-specified target value. When only some trials reach the target value, two variables characterize a trial's outcome: the time it takes to reach the target value (or not) and its final fitness value. This paper describes a simple way to impose linear order on this two-variable trial data set so that traditional non-parametric methods can determine the better algorithm when neither dominates. We illustrate the method with the Mann-Whitney U-test. A simulation demonstrates that U-scores are much more effective than dominance when tasked with identifying the better of two algorithms. We test U-scores by having them determine the winners of the CEC 2022 Special Session and Competition on Real-Parameter Numerical Optimization.

We extend best-subset selection to linear Multi-Task Learning (MTL), where a set of linear models are jointly trained on a collection of datasets (``tasks''). Allowing the regression coefficients of tasks to have different sparsity patterns (i.e., different supports), we propose a modeling framework for MTL that encourages models to share information across tasks, for a given covariate, through separately 1) shrinking the coefficient supports together, and/or 2) shrinking the coefficient values together. This allows models to borrow strength during variable selection even when the coefficient values differ markedly between tasks. We express our modeling framework as a Mixed-Integer Program, and propose efficient and scalable algorithms based on block coordinate descent and combinatorial local search. We show our estimator achieves statistically optimal prediction rates. Importantly, our theory characterizes how our estimator leverages the shared support information across tasks to achieve better variable selection performance. We evaluate the performance of our method in simulations and two biology applications. Our proposed approaches outperform other sparse MTL methods in variable selection and prediction accuracy. Interestingly, penalties that shrink the supports together often outperform penalties that shrink the coefficient values together. We will release an R package implementing our methods.

This paper introduces the use of evolutionary algorithms for solving differential equations. The solution is obtained by optimizing a deep neural network whose loss function is defined by the residual terms from the differential equations. Recent studies have used stochastic gradient descent (SGD) variants to train these physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), but these methods can struggle to find accurate solutions due to optimization challenges. When solving differential equations, it is important to find the globally optimum parameters of the network, rather than just finding a solution that works well during training. SGD only searches along a single gradient direction, so it may not be the best approach for training PINNs with their accompanying complex optimization landscapes. In contrast, evolutionary algorithms perform a parallel exploration of different solutions in order to avoid getting stuck in local optima and can potentially find more accurate solutions. However, evolutionary algorithms can be slow, which can make them difficult to use in practice. To address this, we provide a set of five benchmark problems with associated performance metrics and baseline results to support the development of evolutionary algorithms for enhanced PINN training. As a baseline, we evaluate the performance and speed of using the widely adopted Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) for solving PINNs. We provide the loss and training time for CMA-ES run on TensorFlow, and CMA-ES and SGD run on JAX (with GPU acceleration) for the five benchmark problems. Our results show that JAX-accelerated evolutionary algorithms, particularly CMA-ES, can be a useful approach for solving differential equations. We hope that our work will support the exploration and development of alternative optimization algorithms for the complex task of optimizing PINNs.

Weakly-supervised learning (WSL) has been proposed to alleviate the conflict between data annotation cost and model performance through employing sparsely-grained (i.e., point-, box-, scribble-wise) supervision and has shown promising performance, particularly in the image segmentation field. However, it is still a very challenging problem due to the limited supervision, especially when only a small number of labeled samples are available. Additionally, almost all existing WSL segmentation methods are designed for star-convex structures which are very different from curvilinear structures such as vessels and nerves. In this paper, we propose a novel sparsely annotated segmentation framework for curvilinear structures, named YoloCurvSeg, based on image synthesis. A background generator delivers image backgrounds that closely match real distributions through inpainting dilated skeletons. The extracted backgrounds are then combined with randomly emulated curves generated by a Space Colonization Algorithm-based foreground generator and through a multilayer patch-wise contrastive learning synthesizer. In this way, a synthetic dataset with both images and curve segmentation labels is obtained, at the cost of only one or a few noisy skeleton annotations. Finally, a segmenter is trained with the generated dataset and possibly an unlabeled dataset. The proposed YoloCurvSeg is evaluated on four publicly available datasets (OCTA500, CORN, DRIVE and CHASEDB1) and the results show that YoloCurvSeg outperforms state-of-the-art WSL segmentation methods by large margins. With only one noisy skeleton annotation (respectively 0.14%, 0.02%, 1.4%, and 0.65% of the full annotation), YoloCurvSeg achieves more than 97% of the fully-supervised performance on each dataset. Code and datasets will be released at https://github.com/llmir/YoloCurvSeg.

To build general robotic agents that can operate in many environments, it is often imperative for the robot to collect experience in the real world. However, this is often not feasible due to safety, time, and hardware restrictions. We thus propose leveraging the next best thing as real-world experience: internet videos of humans using their hands. Visual priors, such as visual features, are often learned from videos, but we believe that more information from videos can be utilized as a stronger prior. We build a learning algorithm, VideoDex, that leverages visual, action, and physical priors from human video datasets to guide robot behavior. These actions and physical priors in the neural network dictate the typical human behavior for a particular robot task. We test our approach on a robot arm and dexterous hand-based system and show strong results on various manipulation tasks, outperforming various state-of-the-art methods. Videos at https://video-dex.github.io

Deep neural networks have strong capabilities of memorizing the underlying training data, which can be a serious privacy concern. An effective solution to this problem is to train models with differential privacy, which provides rigorous privacy guarantees by injecting random noise to the gradients. This paper focuses on the scenario where sensitive data are distributed among multiple participants, who jointly train a model through federated learning (FL), using both secure multiparty computation (MPC) to ensure the confidentiality of each gradient update, and differential privacy to avoid data leakage in the resulting model. A major challenge in this setting is that common mechanisms for enforcing DP in deep learning, which inject real-valued noise, are fundamentally incompatible with MPC, which exchanges finite-field integers among the participants. Consequently, most existing DP mechanisms require rather high noise levels, leading to poor model utility. Motivated by this, we propose Skellam mixture mechanism (SMM), an approach to enforce DP on models built via FL. Compared to existing methods, SMM eliminates the assumption that the input gradients must be integer-valued, and, thus, reduces the amount of noise injected to preserve DP. Further, SMM allows tight privacy accounting due to the nice composition and sub-sampling properties of the Skellam distribution, which are key to accurate deep learning with DP. The theoretical analysis of SMM is highly non-trivial, especially considering (i) the complicated math of differentially private deep learning in general and (ii) the fact that the mixture of two Skellam distributions is rather complex, and to our knowledge, has not been studied in the DP literature. Extensive experiments on various practical settings demonstrate that SMM consistently and significantly outperforms existing solutions in terms of the utility of the resulting model.

We propose AstroSLAM, a standalone vision-based solution for autonomous online navigation around an unknown target small celestial body. AstroSLAM is predicated on the formulation of the SLAM problem as an incrementally growing factor graph, facilitated by the use of the GTSAM library and the iSAM2 engine. By combining sensor fusion with orbital motion priors, we achieve improved performance over a baseline SLAM solution. We incorporate orbital motion constraints into the factor graph by devising a novel relative dynamics factor, which links the relative pose of the spacecraft to the problem of predicting trajectories stemming from the motion of the spacecraft in the vicinity of the small body. We demonstrate the excellent performance of AstroSLAM using both real legacy mission imagery and trajectory data courtesy of NASA's Planetary Data System, as well as real in-lab imagery data generated on a 3 degree-of-freedom spacecraft simulator test-bed.

Commonsense knowledge-graphs (CKGs) are important resources towards building machines that can 'reason' on text or environmental inputs and make inferences beyond perception. While current CKGs encode world knowledge for a large number of concepts and have been effectively utilized for incorporating commonsense in neural models, they primarily encode declarative or single-condition inferential knowledge and assume all conceptual beliefs to have the same likelihood. Further, these CKGs utilize a limited set of relations shared across concepts and lack a coherent knowledge organization structure resulting in redundancies as well as sparsity across the larger knowledge graph. Consequently, today's CKGs, while useful for a first level of reasoning, do not adequately capture deeper human-level commonsense inferences which can be more nuanced and influenced by multiple contextual or situational factors. Accordingly, in this work, we study how commonsense knowledge can be better represented by -- (i) utilizing a probabilistic logic representation scheme to model composite inferential knowledge and represent conceptual beliefs with varying likelihoods, and (ii) incorporating a hierarchical conceptual ontology to identify salient concept-relevant relations and organize beliefs at different conceptual levels. Our resulting knowledge representation framework can encode a wider variety of world knowledge and represent beliefs flexibly using grounded concepts as well as free-text phrases. As a result, the framework can be utilized as both a traditional free-text knowledge graph and a grounded logic-based inference system more suitable for neuro-symbolic applications. We describe how we extend the PrimeNet knowledge base with our framework through crowd-sourcing and expert-annotation, and demonstrate its application for more interpretable passage-based semantic parsing and question answering.