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Preconditioned Proximal Point (PPP) algorithms provide a unified framework for splitting methods in image restoration. Recent advancements with RED (Regularization by Denoising) and PnP (Plug-and-Play) priors have achieved state-of-the-art performance in this domain, emphasizing the need for a meaningful particular solution. However, degenerate PPP algorithms typically exhibit weak convergence in infinite-dimensional Hilbert space, leading to uncertain solutions. To address this issue, we propose the Halpern-type Preconditioned Proximal Point (HPPP) algorithm, which leverages the strong convergence properties of Halpern iteration to achieve a particular solution. Based on the implicit regularization defined by gradient RED, we further introduce the Gradient REgularization by Denoising via HPPP called GraRED-HP3 algorithm. The HPPP algorithm is shown to have the regularity converging to a particular solution by a toy example. Additionally, experiments in image deblurring and inpainting validate the effectiveness of GraRED-HP3, showing it surpasses classical methods such as Chambolle-Pock (CP), PPP, RED, and RED-PRO.

Spontaneous style speech synthesis, which aims to generate human-like speech, often encounters challenges due to the scarcity of high-quality data and limitations in model capabilities. Recent language model-based TTS systems can be trained on large, diverse, and low-quality speech datasets, resulting in highly natural synthesized speech. However, they are limited by the difficulty of simulating various spontaneous behaviors and capturing prosody variations in spontaneous speech. In this paper, we propose a novel spontaneous speech synthesis system based on language models. We systematically categorize and uniformly model diverse spontaneous behaviors. Moreover, fine-grained prosody modeling is introduced to enhance the model's ability to capture subtle prosody variations in spontaneous speech.Experimental results show that our proposed method significantly outperforms the baseline methods in terms of prosody naturalness and spontaneous behavior naturalness.

In recent years, there has been increased demand for speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) systems in industry settings. Although successfully commercialized, cloning-based S2ST systems expose their distributors to liabilities when misused by individuals and can infringe on personality rights when exploited by media organizations. This work proposes a regulated S2ST framework called Preset-Voice Matching (PVM). PVM removes cross-lingual voice cloning in S2ST by first matching the input voice to a similar prior consenting speaker voice in the target-language. With this separation, PVM avoids cloning the input speaker, ensuring PVM systems comply with regulations and reduce risk of misuse. Our results demonstrate PVM can significantly improve S2ST system run-time in multi-speaker settings and the naturalness of S2ST synthesized speech. To our knowledge, PVM is the first explicitly regulated S2ST framework leveraging similarly-matched preset-voices for dynamic S2ST tasks.

Clinical trials need to recruit a sufficient number of volunteer patients to demonstrate the statistical power of the treatment (e.g., a new drug) in curing a certain disease. Clinical trial recruitment has a significant impact on trial success. Forecasting whether the recruitment process would be successful before we run the trial would save many resources and time. This paper develops a novel deep & cross network with large language model (LLM)-augmented text feature that learns semantic information from trial eligibility criteria and predicts enrollment success. The proposed method enables interpretability by understanding which sentence/word in eligibility criteria contributes heavily to prediction. We also demonstrate the empirical superiority of the proposed method (0.7002 PR-AUC) over a bunch of well-established machine learning methods. The code and curated dataset are publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TrialEnroll-7E12.

In the field of language modeling, models augmented with retrieval components have emerged as a promising solution to address several challenges faced in the natural language processing (NLP) field, including knowledge grounding, interpretability, and scalability. Despite the primary focus on NLP, we posit that the paradigm of retrieval-enhancement can be extended to a broader spectrum of machine learning (ML) such as computer vision, time series prediction, and computational biology. Therefore, this work introduces a formal framework of this paradigm, Retrieval-Enhanced Machine Learning (REML), by synthesizing the literature in various domains in ML with consistent notations which is missing from the current literature. Also, we found that while a number of studies employ retrieval components to augment their models, there is a lack of integration with foundational Information Retrieval (IR) research. We bridge this gap between the seminal IR research and contemporary REML studies by investigating each component that comprises the REML framework. Ultimately, the goal of this work is to equip researchers across various disciplines with a comprehensive, formally structured framework of retrieval-enhanced models, thereby fostering interdisciplinary future research.

We present R+X, a framework which enables robots to learn skills from long, unlabelled, first-person videos of humans performing everyday tasks. Given a language command from a human, R+X first retrieves short video clips containing relevant behaviour, and then executes the skill by conditioning an in-context imitation learning method on this behaviour. By leveraging a Vision Language Model (VLM) for retrieval, R+X does not require any manual annotation of the videos, and by leveraging in-context learning for execution, robots can perform commanded skills immediately, without requiring a period of training on the retrieved videos. Experiments studying a range of everyday household tasks show that R+X succeeds at translating unlabelled human videos into robust robot skills, and that R+X outperforms several recent alternative methods. Videos are available at https://www.robot-learning.uk/r-plus-x.

Tibet, ensconced within China's territorial expanse, is distinguished by its labyrinthine and heterogeneous topography, a testament to its profound historical heritage, and the cradle of a unique religious ethos. The very essence of these attributes, however, has impeded the advancement of Tibet's tourism service infrastructure, rendering existing smart tourism services inadequate for the region's visitors. This study delves into the ramifications of informational disparities at tourist sites on Tibetan tourism and addresses the challenge of establishing the Large Language Model (LLM) evaluation criteria. It introduces an innovative approach, the DualGen Bridge AI system, employing supervised fine-tuning techniques to bolster model functionality and enhance optimization processes. Furthermore, it pioneers a multi-structured generative results assessment framework. Empirical validation confirms the efficacy of this framework. The study also explores the application of the supervised fine-tuning method within the proprietary DualGen Bridge AI, aimed at refining the generation of tourist site information. The study's findings offer valuable insights for optimizing system performance and provide support and inspiration for the application of LLM technology in Tibet's tourism services and beyond, potentially revolutionizing the smart tourism industry with advanced, tailored information generation capabilities.

Accurate assessment of Parkinsonian tremor is vital for monitoring disease progression and evaluating treatment efficacy. We introduce a pixel-based deep learning model designed to analyse postural tremor in Parkinson's disease (PD) from video data, overcoming the limitations of traditional pose estimation techniques. Trained on 2,742 assessments from five specialised movement disorder centres across two continents, the model demonstrated robust concordance with clinical evaluations. It effectively predicted treatment effects for levodopa and deep brain stimulation (DBS), detected lateral asymmetry of symptoms, and differentiated between different tremor severities. Feature space analysis revealed a non-linear, structured distribution of tremor severity, with low-severity scores occupying a larger portion of the feature space. The model also effectively identified outlier videos, suggesting its potential for adaptive learning and quality control in clinical settings. Our approach offers a scalable and objective method for tremor scoring, with potential integration into other MDS-UPDRS motor assessments, including bradykinesia and gait. The system's adaptability and performance underscore its promise for high-frequency, longitudinal monitoring of PD symptoms, complementing clinical expertise and enhancing decision-making in patient management. Future work will extend this pixel-based methodology to other cardinal symptoms of PD, aiming to develop a comprehensive, multi-symptom model for automated Parkinson's disease severity assessment.

Video deblurring aims at recovering sharp details from a sequence of blurry frames. Despite the proliferation of depth sensors in mobile phones and the potential of depth information to guide deblurring, depth-aware deblurring has received only limited attention. In this work, we introduce the 'Depth-Aware VIdeo DEblurring' (DAVIDE) dataset to study the impact of depth information in video deblurring. The dataset comprises synchronized blurred, sharp, and depth videos. We investigate how the depth information should be injected into the existing deep RGB video deblurring models, and propose a strong baseline for depth-aware video deblurring. Our findings reveal the significance of depth information in video deblurring and provide insights into the use cases where depth cues are beneficial. In addition, our results demonstrate that while the depth improves deblurring performance, this effect diminishes when models are provided with a longer temporal context. Project page: https://germanftv.github.io/DAVIDE.github.io/ .

Pre-trained on extensive and diverse multi-modal datasets, 2D foundation models excel at addressing 2D tasks with little or no downstream supervision, owing to their robust representations. The emergence of 2D-to-3D distillation frameworks has extended these capabilities to 3D models. However, distilling 3D representations for autonomous driving datasets presents challenges like self-similarity, class imbalance, and point cloud sparsity, hindering the effectiveness of contrastive distillation, especially in zero-shot learning contexts. Whereas other methodologies, such as similarity-based distillation, enhance zero-shot performance, they tend to yield less discriminative representations, diminishing few-shot performance. We investigate the gap in structure between the 2D and the 3D representations that result from state-of-the-art distillation frameworks and reveal a significant mismatch between the two. Additionally, we demonstrate that the observed structural gap is negatively correlated with the efficacy of the distilled representations on zero-shot and few-shot 3D semantic segmentation. To bridge this gap, we propose a relational distillation framework enforcing intra-modal and cross-modal constraints, resulting in distilled 3D representations that closely capture the structure of the 2D representation. This alignment significantly enhances 3D representation performance over those learned through contrastive distillation in zero-shot segmentation tasks. Furthermore, our relational loss consistently improves the quality of 3D representations in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution few-shot segmentation tasks, outperforming approaches that rely on the similarity loss.

Speech signals encompass various information across multiple levels including content, speaker, and style. Disentanglement of these information, although challenging, is important for applications such as voice conversion. The contrastive predictive coding supported factorized variational autoencoder achieves unsupervised disentanglement of a speech signal into speaker and content embeddings by assuming speaker info to be temporally more stable than content-induced variations. However, this assumption may introduce other temporal stable information into the speaker embeddings, like environment or emotion, which we call style. In this work, we propose a method to further disentangle non-content features into distinct speaker and style features, notably by leveraging readily accessible and well-defined speaker labels without the necessity for style labels. Experimental results validate the proposed method's effectiveness on extracting disentangled features, thereby facilitating speaker, style, or combined speaker-style conversion.

The Complex Emotion Recognition System (CERS) deciphers complex emotional states by examining combinations of basic emotions expressed, their interconnections, and the dynamic variations. Through the utilization of advanced algorithms, CERS provides profound insights into emotional dynamics, facilitating a nuanced understanding and customized responses. The attainment of such a level of emotional recognition in machines necessitates the knowledge distillation and the comprehension of novel concepts akin to human cognition. The development of AI systems for discerning complex emotions poses a substantial challenge with significant implications for affective computing. Furthermore, obtaining a sizable dataset for CERS proves to be a daunting task due to the intricacies involved in capturing subtle emotions, necessitating specialized methods for data collection and processing. Incorporating physiological signals such as Electrocardiogram (ECG) and Electroencephalogram (EEG) can notably enhance CERS by furnishing valuable insights into the user's emotional state, enhancing the quality of datasets, and fortifying system dependability. A comprehensive literature review was conducted in this study to assess the efficacy of machine learning, deep learning, and meta-learning approaches in both basic and complex emotion recognition utilizing EEG, ECG signals, and facial expression datasets. The chosen research papers offer perspectives on potential applications, clinical implications, and results of CERSs, with the objective of promoting their acceptance and integration into clinical decision-making processes. This study highlights research gaps and challenges in understanding CERSs, encouraging further investigation by relevant studies and organizations. Lastly, the significance of meta-learning approaches in improving CERS performance and guiding future research endeavors is underscored.