对话场景是语音处理技术最重要，最具挑战性的场景之一，因为对话中的人们以随意的方式相互反应。在对话中检测每个人的语音活动对于下游任务，例如自然语言处理，机器翻译等。人们指的是“何时说话”作为说话者诊断（SD）的检测技术。传统上，诊断错误率（DER）长期以来一直用作SD系统的标准评估度量。但是，der没有给简短的对话短语提供足够的重视，这在语义层面上很重要。此外，在语音社区中，仍然无法使用精心准确的手动测试数据集，适合评估对话性SD技术。在本文中，我们设计和描述了对话式短语扬声器诊断（CSSD）任务，该任务包括培训和测试数据集，评估指标和基线。在数据集方面，尽管先前开源的180小时对话魔术Data-RAMC数据集，但我们还准备了一个20小时的对话演讲测试数据集，并精心验证了CSSD任务的时间戳注释。在度量方面，我们设计了新的对话der（CDER）评估度量，该评估度量计算出语音级别的SD准确性。在基线方面，我们采用了一种常用的方法：变异贝叶斯HMM X-vector系统，作为CSSD任务的基线。我们的评估指标可在https://github.com/speechclub/cder_metric上公开获得。

个性化对话的产生对于自然和人类的谈话至关重要。通常，个性化对话生成模型涉及对对话历史的生成响应以及对话者的角色/人格的表示。由于获得每个对话者的人格/人格表征是不切实际的，最近的作品已经探讨了通过将模型与对应于给定的人格对应的对话示例的模型来产生个性化对话的可能性。然而，在实际实现中，足够数量的相应对话示例也很少可用。因此，在本文中，我们提出了一种能够在没有任何人格/人格信息或任何相应的对话示例的情况下产生个性化对话的双潜变量发生器（DLVGEN）。与现有工作不同，DLVGEN模拟潜在响应的潜在分布以及代理商的潜在角色的潜在分布。在推理期间，从两个分布中采样潜在变量并进入解码器。经验结果表明，DLVGEN能够产生各种反应，精确地纳入代理人的角色。

Scene text images have different shapes and are subjected to various distortions, e.g. perspective distortions. To handle these challenges, the state-of-the-art methods rely on a rectification network, which is connected to the text recognition network. They form a linear pipeline which uses text rectification on all input images, even for images that can be recognized without it. Undoubtedly, the rectification network improves the overall text recognition performance. However, in some cases, the rectification network generates unnecessary distortions on images, resulting in incorrect predictions in images that would have otherwise been correct without it. In order to alleviate the unnecessary distortions, the portmanteauing of features is proposed. The portmanteau feature, inspired by the portmanteau word, is a feature containing information from both the original text image and the rectified image. To generate the portmanteau feature, a non-linear input pipeline with a block matrix initialization is presented. In this work, the transformer is chosen as the recognition network due to its utilization of attention and inherent parallelism, which can effectively handle the portmanteau feature. The proposed method is examined on 6 benchmarks and compared with 13 state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on various of the benchmarks.

Scene text recognition (STR) involves the task of reading text in cropped images of natural scenes. Conventional models in STR employ convolutional neural network (CNN) followed by recurrent neural network in an encoder-decoder framework. In recent times, the transformer architecture is being widely adopted in STR as it shows strong capability in capturing long-term dependency which appears to be prominent in scene text images. Many researchers utilized transformer as part of a hybrid CNN-transformer encoder, often followed by a transformer decoder. However, such methods only make use of the long-term dependency mid-way through the encoding process. Although the vision transformer (ViT) is able to capture such dependency at an early stage, its utilization remains largely unexploited in STR. This work proposes the use of a transformer-only model as a simple baseline which outperforms hybrid CNN-transformer models. Furthermore, two key areas for improvement were identified. Firstly, the first decoded character has the lowest prediction accuracy. Secondly, images of different original aspect ratios react differently to the patch resolutions while ViT only employ one fixed patch resolution. To explore these areas, Pure Transformer with Integrated Experts (PTIE) is proposed. PTIE is a transformer model that can process multiple patch resolutions and decode in both the original and reverse character orders. It is examined on 7 commonly used benchmarks and compared with over 20 state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms them and obtains state-of-the-art results in most benchmarks.

Image super-resolution is a common task on mobile and IoT devices, where one often needs to upscale and enhance low-resolution images and video frames. While numerous solutions have been proposed for this problem in the past, they are usually not compatible with low-power mobile NPUs having many computational and memory constraints. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design an efficient quantized image super-resolution solution that can demonstrate a real-time performance on mobile NPUs. The participants were provided with the DIV2K dataset and trained INT8 models to do a high-quality 3X image upscaling. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Synaptics VS680 Smart Home board with a dedicated edge NPU capable of accelerating quantized neural networks. All proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU, demonstrating an up to 60 FPS rate when reconstructing Full HD resolution images. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

实际应用程序中的车辆路由问题（VRP）通常会带有各种限制，因此为精确的解决方案方法或启发式搜索方法带来了其他计算挑战。从样本数据中学习启发式移动模式的最新想法已变得越来越有希望减少解决方案发展成本。但是，使用基于学习的方法来解决更多类型的受限VRP仍然是一个挑战。困难在于在寻找最佳解决方案时控制约束违规。为了克服这一挑战，我们提出了一种基于加强学习的方法，通过纳入Lagrangian放松技术并使用受限的策略优化来解决软件限制的VRP。我们将该方法应用于三种常见类型的VRP，旅行推销员问题与时间窗口（TSPTW），电容性VRP（CVRP）和带有时间窗口（CVRPTW）的电容VRP，以显示所提出方法的普遍性。在与现有的基于RL的方法和开源启发式求解器进行比较之后，我们展示了其在旅行距离，违规距离和推理速度方面良好平衡的解决方案方面的竞争性能。

有关GCNS的非线性嵌入传播是否适合于基于GCN的推荐系统存在激烈的辩论。最近发现线性嵌入传播显示比非线性嵌入传播更好的精度。由于这种现象特别是在推荐系统中发现，因此需要仔细分析线性和非线性问题。因此，在这项工作中，我们重新审视I的问题）线性或非线性传播中的哪一个更好，II）用户/项目的哪些因素决定了嵌入传播的线性/非线性。我们提出了一种新型的线性和非线性协同滤波方法的混合方法（HMLet，发音为Hamlet）。在我们的设计中，在处理每个用户或项目节点时，存在线性和非线性传播步骤，并且我们的门控模块选择其中一个，这导致了基于线性和非线性GCN的共同协作滤波的混合模型（CF）。该建议的模型在三个公共基准数据集中产生最佳准确性。此外，我们根据我们的门控模块的选择，将用户/项目分类为以下三个类：全非线性（FNL），部分非线性（PNL）和全线性（FL）。我们发现，节点的中心性与其班级成员之间存在强烈的相关性，即重要用户/项目节点在传播步骤期间对非线性的更多偏好。为了我们的知识，我们是设计混合方法的第一个，并报告节点的图形中心和线性/非线性之间的相关性。所有HMLet代码和数据集可用于：https://github.com/qbxlvnf11/hmlet。

Consensus clustering aggregates partitions in order to find a better fit by reconciling clustering results from different sources/executions. In practice, there exist noise and outliers in clustering task, which, however, may significantly degrade the performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel algorithm -- robust consensus clustering that can find common ground truth among experts' opinions, which tends to be minimally affected by the bias caused by the outliers. In particular, we formalize the robust consensus clustering problem as a constraint optimization problem, and then derive an effective algorithm upon alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with rigorous convergence guarantee. Our method outperforms the baselines on benchmarks. We apply the proposed method to the real-world advertising campaign segmentation and forecasting tasks using the proposed consensus clustering results based on the similarity computed via Kolmogorov-Smirnov Statistics. The accurate clustering result is helpful for building the advertiser profiles so as to perform the forecasting.

In computational advertising, a challenging problem is how to recommend the bid for advertisers to achieve the best return on investment (ROI) given budget constraint. This paper presents a bid recommendation scenario that discovers the concavity changes in click prediction curves. The recommended bid is derived based on the turning point from significant increase (i.e. concave downward) to slow increase (convex upward). Parametric learning based method is applied by solving the corresponding constraint optimization problem. Empirical studies on real-world advertising scenarios clearly demonstrate the performance gains for business metrics (including revenue increase, click increase and advertiser ROI increase).

In cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) advertising campaigns, advertisers always run the risk of spending the budget without getting enough conversions. Moreover, the bidding on advertising inventory has few connections with propensity one that can reach to target cost-per-acquisition (tCPA) goals. To address this problem, this paper presents a bid optimization scenario to achieve the desired tCPA goals for advertisers. In particular, we build the optimization engine to make a decision by solving the rigorously formalized constrained optimization problem, which leverages the bid landscape model learned from rich historical auction data using non-parametric learning. The proposed model can naturally recommend the bid that meets the advertisers' expectations by making inference over advertisers' historical auction behaviors, which essentially deals with the data challenges commonly faced by bid landscape modeling: incomplete logs in auctions, and uncertainty due to the variation and fluctuations in advertising bidding behaviors. The bid optimization model outperforms the baseline methods on real-world campaigns, and has been applied into a wide range of scenarios for performance improvement and revenue liftup.