Recent studies have shown that introducing communication between agents can significantly improve overall performance in cooperative Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, existing communication schemes often require agents to exchange an excessive number of messages at run-time under a reliable communication channel, which hinders its practicality in many real-world situations… In this paper, we present textit{Temporal Message Control} (TMC), a simple yet effective approach for achieving succinct and robust communication in MARL. TMC applies a temporal smoothing technique to drastically reduce […]

Fully quantized training (FQT), which uses low-bitwidth hardware by quantizing the activations, weights, and gradients of a neural network model, is a promising approach to accelerate the training of deep neural networks. One major challenge with FQT is the lack of theoretical understanding, in particular of how gradient quantization impacts convergence properties… In this paper, we address this problem by presenting a statistical framework for analyzing FQT algorithms. We view the quantized gradient of FQT as a stochastic estimator of […]

High dimensionality poses many challenges to the use of data, from visualization and interpretation, to prediction and storage for historical preservation. Techniques abound to reduce the dimensionality of fixed-length sequences, yet these methods rarely generalize to variable-length sequences… To address this gap, we extend existing methods that rely on the use of kernels to variable-length sequences via use of the Recurrent Neural Tangent Kernel (RNTK). Since a deep neural network with ReLu activation is a Max-Affine Spline Operator (MASO), we […]

This paper applies the dual-signal transformation LSTM network (DTLN) to the task of real-time acoustic echo cancellation (AEC). The DTLN combines a short-time Fourier transformation and a learned feature representation in a stacked network approach, which enables robust information processing in the time-frequency and in the time domain, which also includes phase information… The model is only trained on 60~h of real and synthetic echo scenarios. The training setup includes multi-lingual speech, data augmentation, additional noise and reverberation to create […]

Independence assumptions during sequence generation can speed up inference, but parallel generation of highly inter-dependent tokens comes at a cost in quality. Instead of assuming independence between neighbouring tokens (semi-autoregressive decoding, SA), we take inspiration from bidirectional sequence generation and introduce a decoder that generates target words from the left-to-right and right-to-left directions simultaneously… We show that we can easily convert a standard architecture for unidirectional decoding into a bidirectional decoder by simply interleaving the two directions and adapting the […]

In this paper we propose the first multi-armed bandit algorithm based on re-sampling that achieves asymptotically optimal regret simultaneously for different families of arms (namely Bernoulli, Gaussian and Poisson distributions). Unlike Thompson Sampling which requires to specify a different prior to be optimal in each case, our proposal RB-SDA does not need any distribution-dependent tuning… RB-SDA belongs to the family of Sub-sampling Duelling Algorithms (SDA) which combines the sub-sampling idea first used by the BESA [1] and SSMC [2] algorithms […]

Continuous observation of climate indicators, such as trends in lake freezing, is important to understand the dynamics of the local and global climate system. Consequently, lake ice has been included among the Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) of the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), and there is a need to set up operational monitoring capabilities… Multi-temporal satellite images and publicly available webcam streams are among the viable data sources to monitor lake ice. In this work we investigate machine learning-based image […]

Self-supervised visual pretraining has shown significant progress recently. Among those methods, SimCLR greatly advanced the state of the art in self-supervised and semi-supervised learning on ImageNet… The input feature representations for speech and visual tasks are both continuous, so it is natural to consider applying similar objective on speech representation learning. In this paper, we propose Speech SimCLR, a new self-supervised objective for speech representation learning. During training, Speech SimCLR applies augmentation on raw speech and its spectrogram. Its objective […]