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Self-supervised learning (SSL) has garnered significant attention in speech processing, excelling in linguistic tasks such as speech recognition. However, jointly improving the performance of pre-trained models on various downstream tasks, each requiring different speech information, poses significant challenges. To this purpose, we propose a progressive residual extraction based self-supervised learning method, named ProgRE. Specifically, we introduce two lightweight and specialized task modules into an encoder-style SSL backbone to enhance its ability to extract pitch variation and speaker information from speech. Furthermore, to prevent the interference of reinforced pitch variation and speaker information with irrelevant content information learning, we residually remove the information extracted by these two modules from the main branch. The main branch is then trained using HuBERT's speech masking prediction to ensure the performance of the Transformer's deep-layer features on content tasks. In this way, we can progressively extract pitch variation, speaker, and content representations from the input speech. Finally, we can combine multiple representations with diverse speech information using different layer weights to obtain task-specific representations for various downstream tasks. Experimental results indicate that our proposed method achieves joint performance improvements on various tasks, such as speaker identification, speech recognition, emotion recognition, speech enhancement, and voice conversion, compared to excellent SSL methods such as wav2vec2.0, HuBERT, and WavLM. more...

The existence of a cosmic background of primordial gravitational waves (PGWB) is a robust prediction of inflationary cosmology, but it has so far evaded discovery. The most promising avenue of its detection is via measurements of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) $B$-polarization. However, this is not straightforward due to (a) the fact that CMB maps are distorted by gravitational lensing and (b) the high-dimensional nature of CMB data, which renders likelihood-based analysis methods computationally extremely expensive. In this paper, we introduce an efficient likelihood-free, end-to-end inference method to directly infer the posterior distribution of the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ from lensed maps of the Stokes $Q$ and $U$ polarization parameters. Our method employs a generative model to delense the maps and utilizes the Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) algorithm to sample $r$. We demonstrate that our method yields unbiased estimates of $r$ with well-calibrated uncertainty quantification. more...

Transformer networks excel in natural language processing and computer vision tasks. However, they still face challenges in generalizing to Out-of-Distribution (OOD) datasets, i.e. data whose distribution differs from that seen during training. The OOD detection aims to distinguish outliers while preserving in-distribution (ID) data performance. This paper introduces the OOD detection Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) Theory for transformers, which establishes the conditions for data distribution and model configurations for the learnability of transformers in terms of OOD detection. The theory demonstrates that outliers can be accurately represented and distinguished with sufficient data. The theoretical implications highlight the trade-off between theoretical principles and practical training paradigms. By examining this trade-off, we naturally derived the rationale for leveraging auxiliary outliers to enhance OOD detection. Our theory suggests that by penalizing the misclassification of outliers within the loss function and strategically generating soft synthetic outliers, one can robustly bolster the reliability of transformer networks. This approach yields a novel algorithm that ensures learnability and refines the decision boundaries between inliers and outliers. In practice, the algorithm consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across various data formats. more...

Many real-world relational systems, such as social networks and biological systems, contain dynamic interactions. When learning dynamic graph representation, it is essential to employ sequential temporal information and geometric structure. Mainstream work achieves topological embedding via message passing networks (e.g., GCN, GAT). The temporal evolution, on the other hand, is conventionally expressed via memory units (e.g., LSTM or GRU) that possess convenient information filtration in a gate mechanism. Though, such a design prevents large-scale input sequence due to the over-complicated encoding. This work learns from the philosophy of self-attention and proposes an efficient spectral-based neural unit that employs informative long-range temporal interaction. The developed spectral window unit (SWINIT) model predicts scalable dynamic graphs with assured efficiency. The architecture is assembled with a few simple effective computational blocks that constitute randomized SVD, MLP, and graph Framelet convolution. The SVD plus MLP module encodes the long-short-term feature evolution of the dynamic graph events. A fast framelet graph transform in the framelet convolution embeds the structural dynamics. Both strategies enhance the model's ability on scalable analysis. In particular, the iterative SVD approximation shrinks the computational complexity of attention to O(Nd\log(d)) for the dynamic graph with N edges and d edge features, and the multiscale transform of framelet convolution allows sufficient scalability in the network training. Our SWINIT achieves state-of-the-art performance on a variety of online continuous-time dynamic graph learning tasks, while compared to baseline methods, the number of its learnable parameters reduces by up to seven times. more...

Topological data analysis uses tools from topology -- the mathematical area that studies shapes -- to create representations of data. In particular, in persistent homology, one studies one-parameter families of spaces associated with data, and persistence diagrams describe the lifetime of topological invariants, such as connected components or holes, across the one-parameter family. In many applications, one is interested in working with features associated with persistence diagrams rather than the diagrams themselves. In our work, we explore the possibility of learning several types of features extracted from persistence diagrams using neural networks., Comment: Topological Data Analysis and Beyond Workshop at the 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020), Vancouver, Canada more...