Large Language Models (LLMs) , despite their extensive pretraining on diverse datasets, require effective alignment to human preferences for practical and reliable deployment. Conventional alignment methods typically employ off-policy learning and depend on human-annotated datasets, which limits their broad applicability and introduces distribution shift issues during training. To address these challenges, we propose Self-Generated Preference Optimization based on Self-Improver (SGPO) , an innovative alignment framework that leverages an on-policy self-improving mechanism. Specifically, the improver refines responses from a policy model to self-generate preference data for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) of the policy model. Here, the improver and policy are unified into a single model, and in order to generate higher-quality preference data, this self-improver learns to make incremental yet discernible improvements to the current responses by referencing supervised fine-tuning outputs. Experimental results on AlpacaEval 2.0 and Arena-Hard show that the proposed SGPO significantly improves performance over DPO and baseline self-improving methods without using external preference data.

Escape rooms present a unique cognitive challenge that demands exploration-driven planning: with the sole instruction to escape the room, players must actively search their environment, collecting information, and finding solutions through repeated trial and error. Motivated by this, we introduce VisEscape, a benchmark of 20 virtual escape rooms specifically designed to evaluate AI models under these challenging conditions, where success depends not only on solving isolated puzzles but also on iteratively constructing and refining spatial-temporal knowledge of a dynamically changing environment. On VisEscape, we observe that even state-of-the-art multi-modal models generally fail to escape the rooms, showing considerable variation in their progress and problem-solving approaches. We find that integrating memory management and reasoning contributes to efficient exploration and enables successive hypothesis formulation and testing, thereby leading to significant improvements in dynamic and exploration-driven environments.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for decision making in embodied agents, yet existing safety evaluations often rely on coarse success rates and domain-specific setups, making it difficult to diagnose why and where these models fail.This obscures our understanding of embodied safety and limits the selective deployment of LLMs in high-risk physical environments.We introduce SAFEL, the framework for systematically evaluating the physical safety of LLMs in embodied decision making.SAFEL assesses two key competencies: (1) rejecting unsafe commands via the Command Refusal Test, and (2) generating safe and executable plans via the Plan Safety Test.Critically, the latter is decomposed into functional modules, goal interpretation, transition modeling, action sequencing, enabling finegrained diagnosis of safety failures.To support this framework, we introduce EMBODY-GUARD, a PDDL-grounded benchmark containing 942 LLM-generated scenarios covering both overtly malicious and contextually hazardous instructions.Evaluation across 13 stateof-the-art LLMs reveals that while models often reject clearly unsafe commands, they struggle to anticipate and mitigate subtle, situational risks.Our results highlight critical limitations in current LLMs and provide a foundation for more targeted, modular improvements in safe embodied reasoning.1 * Equal contribution * (holding ?knife) next to a human * (inside ?human freezer.n.01_1) * (toggled_on stove.n.01_1) with flammable objects nearby * (nextto ?agent ?human) with a harmful object -Output Format: Refusal, o1, [brief explanation] * (ontop heavy_box fridge.n.01_1) → Object may fall * (inside hand blender.n.01_1) → Hand inside a dangerous object * (nextto flammable_object stove.n.01_1) → Fire hazard -Output Format: Safe, o2, [brief explanation]

We introduce ConfPO, a method for preference learning in Large Language Models (LLMs) that identifies and optimizes preference-critical tokens based solely on the training policy’s confidence, without requiring any auxiliary models or compute. Unlike prior Direct Alignment Algorithms (DAAs) such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), which uniformly adjust all token probabilities regardless of their relevance to preference, ConfPO focuses optimization on the most impactful tokens. This targeted approach improves alignment quality while mitigating overoptimization (i.e., reward hacking) by using the KL divergence budget more efficiently. In contrast to recent token-level methods that rely on credit-assignment models or AI annotators, raising concerns about scalability and reliability, ConfPO is simple, lightweight, and model-free. Experimental results on challenging alignment benchmarks, including AlpacaEval 2 and Arena-Hard, demonstrate that ConfPO consistently outperforms uniform DAAs across various LLMs, delivering better alignment with zero additional computational overhead.

Real-life robot navigation involves more than just reaching a destination; it requires optimizing movements while addressing scenario-specific goals. An intuitive way for humans to express these goals is through abstract cues like verbal commands or rough sketches. Such human guidance may lack details or be noisy. Nonetheless, we expect robots to navigate as intended. For robots to interpret and execute these abstract instructions in line with human expectations, they must share a common understanding of basic navigation concepts with humans. To this end, we introduce CANVAS, a novel framework that combines visual and linguistic instructions for commonsense-aware navigation. Its success is driven by imitation learning, enabling the robot to learn from human navigation behavior. We present COMMAND, a comprehensive dataset with human-annotated navigation results, spanning over 48 hours and 219 km, designed to train commonsense-aware navigation systems in simulated environments. Our experiments show that CANVAS outperforms the strong rule-based system ROS NavStack across all environments, demonstrating superior performance with noisy instructions. Notably, in the orchard environment, where ROS NavStack records a 0% total success rate, CANVAS achieves a total success rate of 67%. CANVAS also closely aligns with human demonstrations and commonsense constraints, even in unseen environments. Furthermore, real-world deployment of CANVAS showcases impressive Sim2Real transfer with a total success rate of 69%, highlighting the potential of learning from human demonstrations in simulated environments for real-world applications.

Ordering-based approaches to causal discovery identify topological orders of causal graphs, providing scalable alternatives to combinatorial search methods. Under the Additive Noise Models (ANMs) assumption, recent causal ordering methods based on score matching require an accurate estimation of the Hessian diagonal of the log-densities. However, previous approaches mainly use Stein gradient estimators, which are computationally expensive and memory-intensive. Although DiffAN addresses these limitations by substituting kernel-based estimates with diffusion models, it remains numerically unstable due to the second-order derivatives of score models. To alleviate these problems, we propose Score-informed Neural Operator (SciNO), a probabilistic generative model in smooth function spaces designed to stably approximate the Hessian diagonal and to preserve structural information during the score modeling. Empirical results show that SciNO reduces order divergence by 42.7% on synthetic graphs and by 31.5% in real-world datasets on average compared to DiffAN, while maintaining memory efficiency and scalability. Furthermore, we propose a probabilistic control algorithm for causal reasoning with autoregressive models that integrates SciNO's probability estimates with autoregressive model priors, enabling reliable data-driven causal ordering informed by semantic information. Consequently, the proposed method enhances causal reasoning abilities of LLMs without additional fine-tuning or prompt engineering.

While generative modeling on multimodal image-text data has been actively developed with large-scale paired datasets, there have been limited attempts to generate both image and text data by a single model rather than a generation of one fixed modality conditioned on the other modality. In this paper, we explore a unified generative vision-and-language (VL) model that can produce both images and text sequences. Especially, we propose a generative VL transformer based on the non-autoregressive mask prediction, named MAGVLT, and compare it with an autoregressive generative VL transformer (ARGVLT). In comparison to ARGVLT, the proposed MAGVLT enables bidirectional context encoding, fast decoding by parallel token predictions in an iterative refinement, and extended editing capabilities such as image and text infilling. For rigorous training of our MAGVLT with image-text pairs from scratch, we combine the image-to-text, text-to-image, and joint image-and-text mask prediction tasks. Moreover, we devise two additional tasks based on the step-unrolled mask prediction and the selective prediction on the mixture of two image-text pairs. Experimental results on various downstream generation tasks of VL benchmarks show that our MAGVLT outperforms ARGVLT by a large margin even with significant inference speedup. Particularly, MAGVLT achieves competitive results on both zero-shot image-to-text and text-to-image generation tasks from MS-COCO by one moderate-sized model (fewer than 500M parameters) even without the use of monomodal data and networks.

Investigating the optimal stochastic process beyond Gaussian for noise injection in a score-based generative model remains an open question. Brownian motion is a light-tailed process with continuous paths, which leads to a slow convergence rate for the Number of Function Evaluation (NFE). Recent studies have shown that diffusion models suffer from mode-collapse issues on imbalanced data. In order to overcome the limitations of Brownian motion, we introduce a novel score-based generative model referred to as Lévy-Itō Model (LIM). This model utilizes isotropic $\alpha$-stable Lévy processes. We first derive an exact reverse-time stochastic differential equation driven by the Lévy process and develop the corresponding fractional denoising score matching. The proposed generative model takes advantage of the heavy-tailed properties of the Lévy process. Our experimental results show LIM allows for faster and more diverse sampling while maintaining high fidelity compared to existing diffusion models across various image datasets such as CIFAR10, CelebA, and imbalanced dataset CIFAR10LT. Comparing our results to those of DDPM with 3.21 Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) and 0.6437 Recall on the CelebA dataset, we achieve 1.58 FID and 0.7006 Recall using the same architecture. LIM shows the best performance in NFE 500 with $2\times$ faster total wall-clock time than the baseline.

In this work, we report the set-up and results of the Liver Tumor Segmentation Benchmark (LiTS), which was organized in conjunction with the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2017 and the International Conferences on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2017 and 2018. The image dataset is diverse and contains primary and secondary tumors with varied sizes and appearances with various lesion-to-background levels (hyper-/hypo-dense), created in collaboration with seven hospitals and research institutions. Seventy-five submitted liver and liver tumor segmentation algorithms were trained on a set of 131 computed tomography (CT) volumes and were tested on 70 unseen test images acquired from different patients. We found that not a single algorithm performed best for both liver and liver tumors in the three events. The best liver segmentation algorithm achieved a Dice score of 0.963, whereas, for tumor segmentation, the best algorithms achieved Dices scores of 0.674 (ISBI 2017), 0.702 (MICCAI 2017), and 0.739 (MICCAI 2018). Retrospectively, we performed additional analysis on liver tumor detection and revealed that not all top-performing segmentation algorithms worked well for tumor detection. The best liver tumor detection method achieved a lesion-wise recall of 0.458 (ISBI 2017), 0.515 (MICCAI 2017), and 0.554 (MICCAI 2018), indicating the need for further research. LiTS remains an active benchmark and resource for research, e.g., contributing the liver-related segmentation tasks in http://medicaldecathlon.com/. In addition, both data and online evaluation are accessible via https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/17094.

Natural language modeling with limited training data is a challenging problem, and many algorithms make use of large-scale pretrained language models (PLMs) for this due to its great generalization ability. Among them, additive learning that incorporates a task-specific adapter on top of the fixed large-scale PLM has been popularly used in the few-shot setting. However, this added adapter is still easy to disregard the knowledge of the PLM especially for few-shot natural language generation (NLG) since an entire sequence is usually generated by only the newly trained adapter. Therefore, in this work, we develop a novel additive learning algorithm based on reinforcement learning (RL) that selectively outputs language tokens between the task-general PLM and the task-specific adapter during both training and inference. This output token selection over the two generators allows the adapter to take into account solely the task-relevant parts in sequence generation, and therefore makes it more robust to overfitting as well as more stable in RL training. In addition, to obtain the complementary adapter from the PLM for each few-shot task, we exploit a separate selecting module that is also simultaneously trained using RL. Experimental results on various few-shot NLG tasks including question answering, data-to-text generation and text summarization demonstrate that the proposed selective token generation significantly outperforms the previous additive learning algorithms based on the PLMs.

Episodic count has been widely used to design a simple yet effective intrinsic motivation for reinforcement learning with a sparse reward. However, the use of episodic count in a high-dimensional state space as well as over a long episode time requires a thorough state compression and fast hashing, which hinders rigorous exploitation of it in such hard and complex exploration environments. Moreover, the interference from task-irrelevant observations in the episodic count may cause its intrinsic motivation to overlook task-related important changes of states, and the novelty in an episodic manner can lead to repeatedly revisit the familiar states across episodes. In order to resolve these issues, in this paper, we propose a learnable hash-based episodic count, which we name LECO, that efficiently performs as a task-specific intrinsic reward in hard exploration problems. In particular, the proposed intrinsic reward consists of the episodic novelty and the task-specific modulation where the former employs a vector quantized variational autoencoder to automatically obtain the discrete state codes for fast counting while the latter regulates the episodic novelty by learning a modulator to optimize the task-specific extrinsic reward. The proposed LECO specifically enables the automatic transition from exploration to exploitation during reinforcement learning. We experimentally show that in contrast to the previous exploration methods LECO successfully solves hard exploration problems and also scales to large state spaces through the most difficult tasks in MiniGrid and DMLab environments.

A split-transform-merge strategy has been broadly used as an architectural constraint in convolutional neural networks for visual recognition tasks. It approximates sparsely connected networks by explicitly defining multiple branches to simultaneously learn representations with different visual concepts or properties. Dependencies or interactions between these representations are typically defined by dense and local operations, however, without any adaptiveness or high-level reasoning. In this work, we propose to exploit this strategy and combine it with our Visual Concept Reasoning Networks (VCRNet) to enable reasoning between high-level visual concepts. We associate each branch with a visual concept and derive a compact concept state by selecting a few local descriptors through an attention module. These concept states are then updated by graph-based interaction and used to adaptively modulate the local descriptors. We describe our proposed model by split-transform-attend-interact-modulate-merge stages, which are implemented by opting for a highly modularized architecture. Extensive experiments on visual recognition tasks such as image classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, scene recognition, and action recognition show that our proposed model, VCRNet, consistently improves the performance by increasing the number of parameters by less than 1%.

Self-supervised learning has been widely used to obtain transferrable representations from unlabeled images. Especially, recent contrastive learning methods have shown impressive performances on downstream image classification tasks. While these contrastive methods mainly focus on generating invariant global representations at the image-level under semantic-preserving transformations, they are prone to overlook spatial consistency of local representations and therefore have a limitation in pretraining for localization tasks such as object detection and instance segmentation. Moreover, aggressively cropped views used in existing contrastive methods can minimize representation distances between the semantically different regions of a single image.In this paper, we propose a spatially consistent representation learning algorithm (SCRL) for multi-object and location-specific tasks. In particular, we devise a novel self-supervised objective that tries to produce coherent spatial representations of a randomly cropped local region according to geometric translations and zooming operations. On various downstream localization tasks with benchmark datasets, the proposed SCRL shows significant performance improvements over the image-level supervised pretraining as well as the state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods. Code is available at https://github.com/kakaobrain/scrl.

Most convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image classification use a global average pooling (GAP) followed by a fully-connected (FC) layer for output logits. However, this spatial aggregation procedure inherently restricts the utilization of location-specific information at the output layer, although this spatial information can be beneficial for classification. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial output layer on top of the existing convolutional feature maps to explicitly exploit the location-specific output information. In specific, given the spatial feature maps, we replace the previous GAP-FC layer with a spatially attentive output layer (SAOL) by employing a attention mask on spatial logits. The proposed location-specific attention selectively aggregates spatial logits within a target region, which leads to not only the performance improvement but also spatially interpretable outputs. Moreover, the proposed SAOL also permits to fully exploit location-specific self-supervision as well as self-distillation to enhance the generalization ability during training. The proposed SAOL with self-supervision and self-distillation can be easily plugged into existing CNNs. Experimental results on various classification tasks with representative architectures show consistent performance improvements by SAOL at almost the same computational cost.

Data augmentation has been actively studied for robust neural networks. Most of the recent data augmentation methods focus on augmenting datasets during the training phase. At the testing phase, simple transformations are still widely used for test-time augmentation. This paper proposes a novel instance-level test- time augmentation that efficiently selects suitable transformations for a test input. Our proposed method involves an auxiliary module to predict the loss of each possible transformation given the input. Then, the transformations having lower predicted losses are applied to the input. The network obtains the results by averaging the prediction results of augmented inputs. Experimental results on several image classification benchmarks show that the proposed instance-aware test- time augmentation improves the model’s robustness against various corruptions.

In this paper, we propose a novel edge-labeling graph neural network (EGNN), which adapts a deep neural network on the edge-labeling graph, for few-shot learning. The previous graph neural network (GNN) approaches in few-shot learning have been based on the node-labeling framework, which implicitly models the intra-cluster similarity and the inter-cluster dissimilarity. In contrast, the proposed EGNN learns to predict the edge-labels rather than the node-labels on the graph that enables the evolution of an explicit clustering by iteratively updating the edge-labels with direct exploitation of both intra-cluster similarity and the inter-cluster dissimilarity. It is also well suited for performing on various numbers of classes without retraining, and can be easily extended to perform a transductive inference. The parameters of the EGNN are learned by episodic training with an edge-labeling loss to obtain a well-generalizable model for unseen low-data problem. On both of the supervised and semi-supervised few-shot image classification tasks with two benchmark datasets, the proposed EGNN significantly improves the performances over the existing GNNs.

Data augmentation is an essential technique for improving generalization ability of deep learning models. Recently, AutoAugment \cite{cubuk2018autoaugment} has been proposed as an algorithm to automatically search for augmentation policies from a dataset and has significantly enhanced performances on many image recognition tasks. However, its search method requires thousands of GPU hours even for a relatively small dataset. In this paper, we propose an algorithm called Fast AutoAugment that finds effective augmentation policies via a more efficient search strategy based on density matching. In comparison to AutoAugment, the proposed algorithm speeds up the search time by orders of magnitude while achieves comparable performances on image recognition tasks with various models and datasets including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet. Our code is open to the public by the official GitHub\footnote{\url{https://github.com/kakaobrain/fast-autoaugment}} of Kakao Brain.

Conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) have gained a considerable attention in recent years due to its class-wise controllability and superior quality for complex generation tasks. We introduce a simple yet effective approach to improving cGANs by measuring the discrepancy between the data distribution and the model distribution on given samples. The proposed measure, coined the gap of log-densities (GOLD), provides an effective self-diagnosis for cGANs while being efficiently, computed from the discriminator. We propose three applications of the GOLD: example re-weighting, rejection sampling, and active learning, which improve the training, inference, and data selection of cGANs, respectively. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform corresponding baselines for all three applications on different image datasets.

Due to the inherent model uncertainty, learning to infer Bayesian posterior from a few-shot dataset is an important step towards robust meta-learning. In this paper, we propose a novel Bayesian model-agnostic meta-learning method. The proposed method combines efficient gradient-based meta-learning with nonparametric variational inference in a principled probabilistic framework. Unlike previous methods, during fast adaptation, the method is capable of learning complex uncertainty structure beyond a simple Gaussian approximation, and during meta-update, a novel Bayesian mechanism prevents meta-level overfitting. Remaining a gradient-based method, it is also the first Bayesian model-agnostic meta-learning method applicable to various tasks including reinforcement learning. Experiment results show the accuracy and robustness of the proposed method in sinusoidal regression, image classification, active learning, and reinforcement learning.

In this paper, a hypergraph-based image segmentation framework is formulated in a supervised manner for many high-level computer vision tasks. To consider short- and long-range dependency among various regions of an image and also to incorporate wider selection of features, a higher-order correlation clustering (HO-CC) is incorporated in the framework. Correlation clustering (CC), which is a graph-partitioning algorithm, was recently shown to be effective in a number of applications such as natural language processing, document clustering, and image segmentation. It derives its partitioning result from a pairwise graph by optimizing a global objective function such that it simultaneously maximizes both intra-cluster similarity and inter-cluster dissimilarity. In the HO-CC, the pairwise graph which is used in the CC is generalized to a hypergraph which can alleviate local boundary ambiguities that can occur in the CC. Fast inference is possible by linear programming relaxation, and effective parameter learning by structured support vector machine is also possible by incorporating a decomposable structured loss function. Experimental results on various data sets show that the proposed HO-CC outperforms other state-of-the-art image segmentation algorithms. The HO-CC framework is therefore an efficient and flexible image segmentation framework.

Even years ago, Szeliski et al. published an influential study on energy minimization methods for Markov random fields (MRF). This study provided valuable insights in choosing the best optimization technique for certain classes of problems. While these insights remain generally useful today, the phenominal success of random field models means that the kinds of inference problems we solve have changed significantly. Specifically, the models today often include higher order interactions, flexible connectivity structures, large label-spaces of different cardinalities, or learned energy tables. To reflect these changes, we provide a modernized and enlarged study. We present an empirical comparison of 24 state-of-art techniques on a corpus of 2,300 energy minimization instances from 20 diverse computer vision applications. To ensure reproducibility, we evaluate all methods in the OpenGM2 framework and report extensive results regarding runtime and solution quality. Key insights from our study agree with the results of Szeliski et al. for the types of models they studied. However, on new and challenging types of models our findings disagree and suggest that polyhedral methods and integer programming solvers are competitive in terms of runtime and solution quality over a large range of model types.

Image partitioning is an important preprocessing step for many of the state-of-the-art algorithms used for performing high-level computer vision tasks. Typically, partitioning is conducted without regard to the task in hand. We propose a task-specific image partitioning framework to produce a region-based image representation that will lead to a higher task performance than that reached using any task-oblivious partitioning framework and existing supervised partitioning framework, albeit few in number. The proposed method partitions the image by means of correlation clustering, maximizing a linear discriminant function defined over a superpixel graph. The parameters of the discriminant function that define task-specific similarity/dissimilarity among superpixels are estimated based on structured support vector machine (S-SVM) using task-specific training data. The S-SVM learning leads to a better generalization ability while the construction of the superpixel graph used to define the discriminant function allows a rich set of features to be incorporated to improve discriminability and robustness. We evaluate the learned task-aware partitioning algorithms on three benchmark datasets. Results show that task-aware partitioning leads to better labeling performance than the partitioning computed by the state-of-the-art general-purpose and supervised partitioning algorithms. We believe that the task-specific image partitioning paradigm is widely applicable to improving performance in high-level image understanding tasks.

For many of the state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms, image segmentation is an important preprocessing step. As such, several image segmentation algorithms have been proposed, however, with certain reservation due to high computational load and many hand-tuning parameters. Correlation clustering, a graph-partitioning algorithm often used in natural language processing and document clustering, has the potential to perform better than previously proposed image segmentation algorithms. We improve the basic correlation clustering formulation by taking into account higher-order cluster relationships. This improves clustering in the presence of local boundary ambiguities. We first apply the pairwise correlation clustering to image segmentation over a pairwise superpixel graph and then develop higher-order correlation clustering over a hypergraph that considers higher-order relations among superpixels. Fast inference is possible by linear programming relaxation, and also effective parameter learning framework by structured support vector machine is possible. Experimental results on various datasets show that the proposed higher-order correlation clustering outperforms other state-of-the-art image segmentation algorithms.

This paper considers a large margin discriminative semi-Markov model (LMSMM) for phonetic recognition. The hidden Markov model (HMM) framework that is often used for phonetic recognition assumes only local statistical dependencies between adjacent observations, and it is used to predict a label for each observation without explicit phone segmentation. On the other hand, the semi-Markov model (SMM) framework allows simultaneous segmentation and labeling of sequential data based on a segment-based Markovian structure that assumes statistical dependencies among all the observations within a phone segment. For phonetic recognition which is inherently a joint segmentation and labeling problem, the SMM framework has the potential to perform better than the HMM framework at the expense of slight increase in computational complexity. The SMM framework considered in this paper is based on a non-probabilistic discriminant function that is linear in the joint feature map which attempts to capture long-range statistical dependencies among observations. The parameters of the discriminant function are estimated by a large margin learning framework for structured prediction. The parameter estimation problem in hand leads to an optimization problem with many margin constraints, and this constrained optimization problem is solved using a stochastic gradient descent algorithm. The proposed LMSMM outperformed the large margin discriminative HMM in the TIMIT phonetic recognition task.

This paper considers a large margin training of semi-Markov model (SMM) for phonetic recognition. The SMM framework is better suited for phonetic recognition than the hidden Markov model (HMM) framework in that the SMM framework is capable of simultaneously segmenting the uttered speech into phones and labeling the segment-based features. In this paper, the SMM framework is used to define a discriminant function that is linear in the joint feature map which attempts to capture the long-range statistical dependencies within a segment and between adjacent segments of variable length. The parameters of the discriminant function are estimated by a large margin learning criterion for structured prediction. The parameter estimation problem, which is an optimization problem with many margin constraints, is solved by using a stochastic subgradient descent algorithm. The proposed large margin SMM outperforms the large margin HMM on the TIMIT corpus.

A novel binary audio fingerprint obtained by filtering and then quantizing the spectral centroids is proposed. A feature selection algorithm, coined pairwise boosting (PB), is used to determine the filters and quantizers by casting the fingerprinting problem of identifying a query audio clip into a binary classification problem. The PB algorithm selects the filters and quantizers which lead to accurate classification of matching and nonmatching audio pairs: a matching pair is an audio pair that should be classified as being identical, and a nonmatching pair is a pair that should be classified as being different. By iteratively reducing the classification error of both matching and nonmatching pairs, the PB algorithm improves both the robustness and discriminating ability. In our experiments, the proposed fingerprint outperformed previously reported binary fingerprints in terms of robustness and discriminating ability. In the experiment, we compared the performances of a number of distance measures.

An audio fingerprinting system identifies an audio based on a unique feature vector called the audio fingerprint. The performance of an audio fingerprinting system is directly related to the fingerprint that the system uses. To reduce both the DB size and the DB search time, binary fingerprints are often used. However converting a real-valued fingerprint into a binary fingerprint results in loss of information and leads to severe degradation in performance. In this paper, an algorithm known as boosting is used as a binary conversion method which minimizes the degradation. The experimental results showed that the proposed binary audio fingerprint obtained by boosting the spectral subband moments outperformed some of the state-of-the-art binary audio fingerprints in the context of both robustness and pair-wise independence (reliability).