Real-Time Neural-Enhancement for Online Cloud Gaming

Online Cloud gaming demands real-time, high-quality video transmission across variable wide-area networks (WANs). Neural-enhanced video transmission algorithms employing super-resolution (SR) for video quality enhancement have effectively challenged WAN environments. However, these SR-based methods require intensive fine-tuning for the whole video, making it infeasible in diverse online cloud gaming. To address this, we introduce River, a cloud gaming delivery framework designed based on the observation that video segment features in cloud gaming are typically repetitive and redundant. This permits a significant opportunity to reuse fine-tuned SR models, reducing the fine-tuning latency of minutes to query latency of milliseconds. To enable the idea, we design a practical system that addresses several challenges, such as model organization, online model scheduler, and transfer strategy. River first builds a content-aware encoder that fine-tunes SR models for diverse video segments and stores them in a lookup table. When delivering cloud gaming video streams online, River checks the video features and retrieves the most relevant SR models to enhance the frame quality. Meanwhile, if no existing SR model performs well enough for some video segments, River will further fine-tune new models and update the lookup table. Finally, to avoid the overhead of streaming model weight to the clients, River designs a prefetching strategy that predicts the models with the highest possibility of being retrieved. Our evaluation based on real video game streaming demonstrates River can reduce redundant training overhead by 44% and improve the Peak-Signal-to-Noise-Ratio by 1.81dB compared to the SOTA solutions. Practical deployment shows River meets real-time requirements, achieving approximately 720p 20fps on mobile devices.

FFCG: Effective and Fast Family Column Generation for Solving Large-Scale Linear Program

Column Generation (CG) is an effective and iterative algorithm to solve large-scale linear programs (LP). During each CG iteration, new columns are added to improve the solution of the LP. Typically, CG greedily selects one column with the most negative reduced cost, which can be improved by adding more columns at once. However, selecting all columns with negative reduced costs would lead to the addition of redundant columns that do not improve the objective value. Therefore, selecting the appropriate columns to add is still an open problem and previous machine-learning-based approaches for CG only add a constant quantity of columns per iteration due to the state-space explosion problem. To address this, we propose Fast Family Column Generation (FFCG) -- a novel reinforcement-learning-based CG that selects a variable number of columns as needed in an iteration. Specifically, we formulate the column selection problem in CG as an MDP and design a reward metric that balances both the convergence speed and the number of redundant columns. In our experiments, FFCG converges faster on the common benchmarks and reduces the number of CG iterations by 77.1% for Cutting Stock Problem (CSP) and 84.8% for Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW), and a 71.4% reduction in computing time for CSP and 84.0% for VRPTW on average compared to several state-of-the-art baselines.

The Field-based Model: A New Perspective on RF-based Material Sensing

This paper introduces the design and implementation of WiField, a WiFi sensing system deployed on COTS devices that can simultaneously identify multiple wavelength-level targets placed flexibly. Unlike traditional RF sensing schemes that focus on specific targets and RF links, WiField focuses on all media in the sensing area for the entire electric field. In this perspective, WiField provides a unified framework to finely characterize the diffraction, scattering, and other effects of targets at different positions, materials, and numbers on signals. The combination of targets in different positions, numbers, and sizes is just a special case. WiField proposed a scheme that utilizes phaseless data to complete the inverse mapping from electric field to material distribution, thereby achieving the simultaneous identification of multiple wavelength-level targets at any position and having the potential for deployment on a wide range of low-cost COTS devices. Our evaluation results show that it has an average identification accuracy of over 97% for 1-3 targets (5 cm * 10 cm in size) with different materials randomly placed within a 1.05 m * 1.05 m area.

DeepCore: Simple Fingerprint Construction for Differentiating Homologous and Piracy Models

As intellectual property rights, the copyright protection of deep models is becoming increasingly important. Existing work has made many attempts at model watermarking and fingerprinting, but they have ignored homologous models trained with similar structures or training datasets. We highlight challenges in efficiently querying black-box piracy models to protect model copyrights without misidentifying homologous models. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method called DeepCore, which discovers that the classification confidence of the model is positively correlated with the distance of the predicted sample from the model decision boundary and piracy models behave more similarly at high-confidence classified sample points. Then DeepCore constructs core points far away from the decision boundary by optimizing the predicted confidence of a few sample points and leverages behavioral discrepancies between piracy and homologous models to identify piracy models. Finally, we design different model identification methods, including two similarity-based methods and a clustering-based method to identify piracy models using models' predictions of core points. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of DeepCore in identifying various piracy models, achieving lower missed and false identification rates, and outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

ViRED: Prediction of Visual Relations in Engineering Drawings

To accurately understand engineering drawings, it is essential to establish the correspondence between images and their description tables within the drawings. Existing document understanding methods predominantly focus on text as the main modality, which is not suitable for documents containing substantial image information. In the field of visual relation detection, the structure of the task inherently limits its capacity to assess relationships among all entity pairs in the drawings. To address this issue, we propose a vision-based relation detection model, named ViRED, to identify the associations between tables and circuits in electrical engineering drawings. Our model mainly consists of three parts: a vision encoder, an object encoder, and a relation decoder. We implement ViRED using PyTorch to evaluate its performance. To validate the efficacy of ViRED, we conduct a series of experiments. The experimental results indicate that, within the engineering drawing dataset, our approach attained an accuracy of 96\% in the task of relation prediction, marking a substantial improvement over existing methodologies. The results also show that ViRED can inference at a fast speed even when there are numerous objects in a single engineering drawing.

SGSM: A Foundation-model-like Semi-generalist Sensing Model

The significance of intelligent sensing systems is growing in the realm of smart services. These systems extract relevant signal features and generate informative representations for particular tasks. However, building the feature extraction component for such systems requires extensive domain-specific expertise or data. The exceptionally rapid development of foundation models is likely to usher in newfound abilities in such intelligent sensing. We propose a new scheme for sensing model, which we refer to as semi-generalist sensing model (SGSM). SGSM is able to semiautomatically solve various tasks using relatively less task-specific labeled data compared to traditional systems. Built through the analysis of the common theoretical model, SGSM can depict different modalities, such as the acoustic and Wi-Fi signal. Experimental results on such two heterogeneous sensors illustrate that SGSM functions across a wide range of scenarios, thereby establishing its broad applicability. In some cases, SGSM even achieves better performance than sensor-specific specialized solutions. Wi-Fi evaluations indicate a 20\% accuracy improvement when applying SGSM to an existing sensing model.

Towards the limits: Sensing Capability Measurement for ISAC Through Channel Encoder

Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) is gradually becoming a reality due to the significant increase in frequency and bandwidth of next-generation wireless communication technologies. Therefore it becomes crucial to evaluate the communication and sensing performance using appropriate channel models to address resource competition from each other. Existing work only models the sensing capability based on the mutual information between the channel response and the received signal, and its theoretical resolution is difficult to support the high-precision requirements of ISAC for sensing tasks, and may even affect its communication optimal. In this paper, we propose a sensing channel encoder model to measure the sensing capacity with higher resolution by discrete task mutual information. For the first time, derive upper and lower bounds on the sensing accuracy for a given channel. This model not only provides the possibility of optimizing the ISAC systems at a finer granularity and balancing communication and sensing resources, but also provides theoretical explanations for classical intuitive feelings (like more modalities more accuracy) in wireless sensing. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed channel model through real-case studies, including person identification, displacement detection, direction estimation, and device recognition. The evaluation results indicate a Pearson correlation coefficient exceeding 0.9 between our task mutual information and conventional experimental metrics (e.g., accuracy).

NaturalSpeech 3: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis with Factorized Codec and Diffusion Models

While recent large-scale text-to-speech (TTS) models have achieved significant progress, they still fall short in speech quality, similarity, and prosody. Considering speech intricately encompasses various attributes (e.g., content, prosody, timbre, and acoustic details) that pose significant challenges for generation, a natural idea is to factorize speech into individual subspaces representing different attributes and generate them individually. Motivated by it, we propose NaturalSpeech 3, a TTS system with novel factorized diffusion models to generate natural speech in a zero-shot way. Specifically, 1) we design a neural codec with factorized vector quantization (FVQ) to disentangle speech waveform into subspaces of content, prosody, timbre, and acoustic details; 2) we propose a factorized diffusion model to generate attributes in each subspace following its corresponding prompt. With this factorization design, NaturalSpeech 3 can effectively and efficiently model the intricate speech with disentangled subspaces in a divide-and-conquer way. Experiments show that NaturalSpeech 3 outperforms the state-of-the-art TTS systems on quality, similarity, prosody, and intelligibility. Furthermore, we achieve better performance by scaling to 1B parameters and 200K hours of training data.

PromptTTS 2: Describing and Generating Voices with Text Prompt

Speech conveys more information than just text, as the same word can be uttered in various voices to convey diverse information. Compared to traditional text-to-speech (TTS) methods relying on speech prompts (reference speech) for voice variability, using text prompts (descriptions) is more user-friendly since speech prompts can be hard to find or may not exist at all. TTS approaches based on the text prompt face two challenges: 1) the one-to-many problem, where not all details about voice variability can be described in the text prompt, and 2) the limited availability of text prompt datasets, where vendors and large cost of data labeling are required to write text prompt for speech. In this work, we introduce PromptTTS 2 to address these challenges with a variation network to provide variability information of voice not captured by text prompts, and a prompt generation pipeline to utilize the large language models (LLM) to compose high quality text prompts. Specifically, the variation network predicts the representation extracted from the reference speech (which contains full information about voice) based on the text prompt representation. For the prompt generation pipeline, it generates text prompts for speech with a speech understanding model to recognize voice attributes (e.g., gender, speed) from speech and a large language model to formulate text prompt based on the recognition results. Experiments on a large-scale (44K hours) speech dataset demonstrate that compared to the previous works, PromptTTS 2 generates voices more consistent with text prompts and supports the sampling of diverse voice variability, thereby offering users more choices on voice generation. Additionally, the prompt generation pipeline produces high-quality prompts, eliminating the large labeling cost. The demo page of PromptTTS 2 is available online\footnote{https://speechresearch.github.io/prompttts2}.

Tight Memory-Regret Lower Bounds for Streaming Bandits

In this paper, we investigate the streaming bandits problem, wherein the learner aims to minimize regret by dealing with online arriving arms and sublinear arm memory. We establish the tight worst-case regret lower bound of $\Omega \left( (TB)^{\alpha} K^{1-\alpha}\right), \alpha = 2^{B} / (2^{B+1}-1)$ for any algorithm with a time horizon $T$, number of arms $K$, and number of passes $B$. The result reveals a separation between the stochastic bandits problem in the classical centralized setting and the streaming setting with bounded arm memory. Notably, in comparison to the well-known $\Omega(\sqrt{KT})$ lower bound, an additional double logarithmic factor is unavoidable for any streaming bandits algorithm with sublinear memory permitted. Furthermore, we establish the first instance-dependent lower bound of $\Omega \left(T^{1/(B+1)} \sum_{\Delta_x>0} \frac{\mu^*}{\Delta_x}\right)$ for streaming bandits. These lower bounds are derived through a unique reduction from the regret-minimization setting to the sample complexity analysis for a sequence of $\epsilon$-optimal arms identification tasks, which maybe of independent interest. To complement the lower bound, we also provide a multi-pass algorithm that achieves a regret upper bound of $\tilde{O} \left( (TB)^{\alpha} K^{1 - \alpha}\right)$ using constant arm memory.