Speech enhancement (SE) aims to extract the clean waveform from noise-contaminated measurements to improve the speech quality and intelligibility. Although learning-based methods can perform much better than traditional counterparts, the large computational complexity and model size heavily limit the deployment on latency-sensitive and low-resource edge devices. In this work, we propose a lightweight SE network (LiSenNet) for real-time applications. We design sub-band downsampling and upsampling blocks and a dual-path recurrent module to capture band-aware features and time-frequency patterns, respectively. A noise detector is developed to detect noisy regions in order to perform SE adaptively and save computational costs. Compared to recent higher-resource-dependent baseline models, the proposed LiSenNet can achieve a competitive performance with only 37k parameters (half of the state-of-the-art model) and 56M multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations per second.

Significant progress has been made in openvocabulary mobile manipulation, where the goal is for a robot to perform tasks in any environment given a natural language description. However, most current systems assume a static environment, which limits the system's applicability in realworld scenarios where environments frequently change due to human intervention or the robot's own actions. In this work, we present DynaMem, a new approach to open-world mobile manipulation that uses a dynamic spatio-semantic memory to represent a robot's environment. DynaMem constructs a 3D data structure to maintain a dynamic memory of point clouds, and answers open-vocabulary object localization queries using multimodal LLMs or open-vocabulary features generated by state-of-the-art vision-language models. Powered by DynaMem, our robots can explore novel environments, search for objects not found in memory, and continuously update the memory as objects move, appear, or disappear in the scene. We run extensive experiments on the Stretch SE3 robots in three real and nine offline scenes, and achieve an average pick-and-drop success rate of 70 % on non-stationary objects, which is more than a$\mathbf{2} \times$improvement over state-of-the-art static systems.

The process of satisfying daily demands is a fundamental aspect of humans' daily lives. With the advancement of embodied AI, robots are increasingly capable of satisfying human demands. Demand-driven navigation (DDN) is a task in which an agent must locate an object to satisfy a specified demand instruction, such as "I am thirsty." The previous study typically assumes that each demand instruction requires only one object to be fulfilled and does not consider individual preferences. However, the realistic human demand may involve multiple objects. In this paper, we introduce the Multi-object Demand-driven Navigation (MO-DDN) benchmark, which addresses these nuanced aspects, including multi-object search and personal preferences, thus making the MO-DDN task more reflective of real-life scenarios compared to DDN. Building upon previous work, we employ the concept of ``attribute'' to tackle this new task. However, instead of solely relying on attribute features in an end-to-end manner like DDN, we propose a modular method that involves constructing a coarse-to-fine attribute-based exploration agent (C2FAgent). Our experimental results illustrate that this coarse-to-fine exploration strategy capitalizes on the advantages of attributes at various decision-making levels, resulting in superior performance compared to baseline methods. Code and video can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/moddn.

Summary Today, thanks to the major breakthrough of sequences to sequences model in the field of natural language, most of the dialogue generation tasks are focused on generating more effective responses. However, the responses proposed by the chat‐bot are only a passive answer or assentation, which does not arouse the desire of people to continue communicating. How to transform the chat robot from a passive reply to an active questioner has become an urgent problem. In this paper, a question generalization method with four types of question proposing schemes are designed, implemented, and tested to automate question generation process. The proposed system is controlled by a probability‐triggered multiple conversion mechanism to actively propose different types of questions. We embed our methods in the mainstream dialogue generation model and demonstrate its effectiveness in dialogue response generalization on a standard dataset. In addition, it achieves good performance in subjective conversational assessment.

Developing a dialogue response generation system is one of important topics in natural language processing, but many obstacles are yet to be overcome before autogenerated dialogues with a human-like quality can become possible. A good evaluation method will help narrow the gap between machines and humans in dialogue generation. Unfortunately, the existing automatic evaluation methods are biased and correlate very poorly with human judgments of response quality. Such methods are incapable of assessing whether a dialogue response generation system can produce high-quality, knowledge-related and informative dialogues. In response to this challenge, we design an information-oriented framework to simulate human subjective evaluation. Using this framework, we implement a learning-based metric to evaluate the quality of a dialogue. An experimental validation demonstrates our proposed metric's effectiveness in dialogue selection and model evaluation on a Twitter dataset (in English) and a Weibo dataset (in Chinese). In addition, the metric is more relevant than the existing methods of dialogue evaluation to human subjective judgment.

Dialogue response generation system is one of the hot topics in natural language processing, but it is still a long way to go before it can generate human-like dialogues. A good evaluation method will help narrow the gap between the machine and human in dialogue generation. Unfortunately, current evaluation methods cannot measure whether the dialogue response generation system is able to produce high-quality, knowledge-related, and informative dialogues. Aiming to identify and measure the existence of information in dialogues, we propose a novel automatic evaluation metric. By learning from the knowledge representation method in knowledge base, we define the heuristic rules to extract the information triples from dialogue pairs. And we design an information matching method to measure the probability of the existence of information in a dialogue. In experiments, our proposed metric demonstrates its effectiveness in dialogue selection and model evaluation on the Reddit dataset (English) and the Weibo dataset (Chinese).

The details of oriented visual stimuli are better resolved when they are horizontal or vertical rather than oblique. This "oblique effect" has been researched and confirmed in numerous research studies, including behavioral studies and neurophysiological and neuroimaging findings. Although the "oblique effect" has influence in many fields, little research integrated it into computational models. In this paper, we try to explore this inhomogeneity of visual orientation based on Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in image recognition. We validate that visual orientation inhomogeneity CNNs can achieve comparable performance with higher computational efficiency on various datasets. We can also get the conclusion that, compared with the cardinal information, oblique information is indeed less useful in natural color image recognition. Through the exploration of the proposed model on image recognition, we gain more understanding of the inhomogeneity of visual orientation. It also illuminates a wide range of opportunities for integrating the inhomogeneity of visual orientation with other computational models.

Event sequence arises naturally in many applications. Episode mining can discovery the knowledge hidden in the event sequence. Currently, the most influential algorithm for episode mining is WINEPI. However, it is likely to suffer from the tendency of generating too many of candidate episodes. In this paper, a novel algorithm named DRE for mining frequent episodes is presented. It studied the conditions for the events which can be pruned from the database, so the size of database is reduced gradually. The performance of algorithm DRE was evaluated and compared with WINEPI algorithm. The results demonstrate that the DRE has better performance