Wenhao Hu

Jude Haris, Rappy Saha, Wenhao Hu et al.

The increase in open-source availability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled users to deploy them on more and more resource-constrained edge devices to reduce reliance on network connections and provide more privacy. However, the high computation and memory demands of LLMs make their execution on resource-constrained edge devices challenging and inefficient. To address this issue, designing new and efficient edge accelerators for LLM inference is crucial. FPGA-based accelerators are ideal for LLM acceleration due to their reconfigurability, as they enable model-specific optimizations and higher performance per watt. However, creating and integrating FPGA-based accelerators for LLMs (particularly on edge devices) has proven challenging, mainly due to the limited hardware design flows for LLMs in existing FPGA platforms. To tackle this issue, in this paper we first propose a new design platform, named SECDA-LLM, that utilizes the SECDA methodology to streamline the process of designing, integrating, and deploying efficient FPGA-based LLM accelerators for the llama.cpp inference framework. We then demonstrate, through a case study, the potential benefits of SECDA-LLM by creating a new MatMul accelerator that supports block floating point quantized operations for LLMs. Our initial accelerator design, deployed on the PYNQ-Z1 board, reduces latency 1.7 seconds per token or ~2 seconds per word) by 11x over the dual-core Arm NEON-based CPU execution for the TinyLlama model.

Wenhao Hu, Yingying Liu, Xuanyu Chen et al.

With the development of computer-assisted techniques, research communities including biochemistry and deep learning have been devoted into the drug discovery field for over a decade. Various applications of deep learning have drawn great attention in drug discovery, such as molecule generation, molecular property prediction, retrosynthesis prediction, and reaction prediction. While most existing surveys only focus on one of the applications, limiting the view of researchers in the community. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review on the aforementioned four aspects, and discuss the relationships among different applications. The latest literature and classical benchmarks are presented for better understanding the development of variety of approaches. We commence by summarizing the molecule representation format in these works, followed by an introduction of recent proposed approaches for each of the four tasks. Furthermore, we review a variety of commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics and compare the performance of deep learning-based models. Finally, we conclude by identifying remaining challenges and discussing the future trend for deep learning methods in drug discovery.

Xuechen Guo, Wenhao Hu, Chiming Ni et al.

Medical images often incorporate doctor-added markers that can hinder AI-based diagnosis. This issue highlights the need of inpainting techniques to restore the corrupted visual contents. However, existing methods require manual mask annotation as input, limiting the application scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel blind inpainting method that automatically reconstructs visual contents within the corrupted regions without mask input as guidance. Our model includes a blind reconstruction network and an object-aware discriminator for adversarial training. The reconstruction network contains two branches that predict corrupted regions in images and simultaneously restore the missing visual contents. Leveraging the potent recognition capability of a dense object detector, the object-aware discriminator ensures markers undetectable after inpainting. Thus, the restored images closely resemble the clean ones. We evaluate our method on three datasets of various medical imaging modalities, confirming better performance over other state-of-the-art methods.

Haowei Lou, Helen Paik, Wen Hu et al.

This paper introduces StyleSpeech, a novel Text-to-Speech~(TTS) system that enhances the naturalness and accuracy of synthesized speech. Building upon existing TTS technologies, StyleSpeech incorporates a unique Style Decorator structure that enables deep learning models to simultaneously learn style and phoneme features, improving adaptability and efficiency through the principles of Lower Rank Adaptation~(LoRA). LoRA allows efficient adaptation of style features in pre-trained models. Additionally, we introduce a novel automatic evaluation metric, the LLM-Guided Mean Opinion Score (LLM-MOS), which employs large language models to offer an objective and robust protocol for automatically assessing TTS system performance. Extensive testing on benchmark datasets shows that our approach markedly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baseline methods in producing natural, accurate, and high-quality speech. These advancements not only pushes the boundaries of current TTS system capabilities, but also facilitate the application of TTS system in more dynamic and specialized, such as interactive virtual assistants, adaptive audiobooks, and customized voice for gaming. Speech samples can be found in https://style-speech.vercel.app

Haowei Lou, Hye-young Paik, Sheng Li et al.

Text-to-Speech (TTS) models can generate natural, human-like speech across multiple languages by transforming phonemes into waveforms. However, multilingual TTS remains challenging due to discrepancies in phoneme vocabularies and variations in prosody and speaking style across languages. Existing approaches either train separate models for each language, which achieve high performance at the cost of increased computational resources, or use a unified model for multiple languages that struggles to capture fine-grained, language-specific style variations. In this work, we propose LanStyleTTS, a non-autoregressive, language-aware style adaptive TTS framework that standardizes phoneme representations and enables fine-grained, phoneme-level style control across languages. This design supports a unified multilingual TTS model capable of producing accurate and high-quality speech without the need to train language-specific models. We evaluate LanStyleTTS by integrating it with several state-of-the-art non-autoregressive TTS architectures. Results show consistent performance improvements across different model backbones. Furthermore, we investigate a range of acoustic feature representations, including mel-spectrograms and autoencoder-derived latent features. Our experiments demonstrate that latent encodings can significantly reduce model size and computational cost while preserving high-quality speech generation.

Haowei Lou, Helen Paik, Wen Hu et al.

Recent advancements in text-to-speech (TTS) systems, such as FastSpeech and StyleSpeech, have significantly improved speech generation quality. However, these models often rely on duration generated by external tools like the Montreal Forced Aligner, which can be time-consuming and lack flexibility. The importance of accurate duration is often underestimated, despite their crucial role in achieving natural prosody and intelligibility. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Aligner-Guided Training Paradigm that prioritizes accurate duration labelling by training an aligner before the TTS model. This approach reduces dependence on external tools and enhances alignment accuracy. We further explore the impact of different acoustic features, including Mel-Spectrograms, MFCCs, and latent features, on TTS model performance. Our experimental results show that aligner-guided duration labelling can achieve up to a 16\% improvement in word error rate and significantly enhance phoneme and tone alignment. These findings highlight the effectiveness of our approach in optimizing TTS systems for more natural and intelligible speech generation.

Haowei Lou, Helen Paik, Pari Delir Haghighi et al.

Diffusion-based Generative AI gains significant attention for its superior performance over other generative techniques like Generative Adversarial Networks and Variational Autoencoders. While it has achieved notable advancements in fields such as computer vision and natural language processing, their application in speech generation remains under-explored. Mainstream Text-to-Speech systems primarily map outputs to Mel-Spectrograms in the spectral space, leading to high computational loads due to the sparsity of MelSpecs. To address these limitations, we propose LatentSpeech, a novel TTS generation approach utilizing latent diffusion models. By using latent embeddings as the intermediate representation, LatentSpeech reduces the target dimension to 5% of what is required for MelSpecs, simplifying the processing for the TTS encoder and vocoder and enabling efficient high-quality speech generation. This study marks the first integration of latent diffusion models in TTS, enhancing the accuracy and naturalness of generated speech. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that LatentSpeech achieves a 25% improvement in Word Error Rate and a 24% improvement in Mel Cepstral Distortion compared to existing models, with further improvements rising to 49.5% and 26%, respectively, with additional training data. These findings highlight the potential of LatentSpeech to advance the state-of-the-art in TTS technology

Jie Deng, Wenhao Chai, Junsheng Huang et al.

City scene generation has gained significant attention in autonomous driving, smart city development, and traffic simulation. It helps enhance infrastructure planning and monitoring solutions. Existing methods have employed a two-stage process involving city layout generation, typically using Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), or Transformers, followed by neural rendering. These techniques often exhibit limited diversity and noticeable artifacts in the rendered city scenes. The rendered scenes lack variety, resembling the training images, resulting in monotonous styles. Additionally, these methods lack planning capabilities, leading to less realistic generated scenes. In this paper, we introduce CityCraft, an innovative framework designed to enhance both the diversity and quality of urban scene generation. Our approach integrates three key stages: initially, a diffusion transformer (DiT) model is deployed to generate diverse and controllable 2D city layouts. Subsequently, a Large Language Model(LLM) is utilized to strategically make land-use plans within these layouts based on user prompts and language guidelines. Based on the generated layout and city plan, we utilize the asset retrieval module and Blender for precise asset placement and scene construction. Furthermore, we contribute two new datasets to the field: 1)CityCraft-OSM dataset including 2D semantic layouts of urban areas, corresponding satellite images, and detailed annotations. 2) CityCraft-Buildings dataset, featuring thousands of diverse, high-quality 3D building assets. CityCraft achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating realistic 3D cities.

Arin Chaudhuri, Carol Sadek, Deovrat Kakde et al.

Support vector data description (SVDD) is a popular anomaly detection technique. The SVDD classifier partitions the whole data space into an inlier region, which consists of the region near the training data, and an outlier region, which consists of points away from the training data. The computation of the SVDD classifier requires a kernel function, for which the Gaussian kernel is a common choice. The Gaussian kernel has a bandwidth parameter, and it is important to set the value of this parameter correctly for good results. A small bandwidth leads to overfitting such that the resulting SVDD classifier overestimates the number of anomalies, whereas a large bandwidth leads to underfitting and an inability to detect many anomalies. In this paper, we present a new unsupervised method for selecting the Gaussian kernel bandwidth. Our method exploits a low-rank representation of the kernel matrix to suggest a kernel bandwidth value. Our new technique is competitive with the current state of the art for low-dimensional data and performs extremely well for many classes of high-dimensional data. Because the mathematical formulation of SVDD is identical with the mathematical formulation of one-class support vector machines (OCSVM) when the Gaussian kernel is used, our method is equally applicable to Gaussian kernel bandwidth tuning for OCSVM.

Hansi Jiang, Haoyu Wang, Wenhao Hu et al.

Support vector data description (SVDD) is a machine learning technique that is used for single-class classification and outlier detection. The idea of SVDD is to find a set of support vectors that defines a boundary around data. When dealing with online or large data, existing batch SVDD methods have to be rerun in each iteration. We propose an incremental learning algorithm for SVDD that uses the Gaussian kernel. This algorithm builds on the observation that all support vectors on the boundary have the same distance to the center of sphere in a higher-dimensional feature space as mapped by the Gaussian kernel function. Each iteration involves only the existing support vectors and the new data point. Moreover, the algorithm is based solely on matrix manipulations; the support vectors and their corresponding Lagrange multiplier $α_i$'s are automatically selected and determined in each iteration. It can be seen that the complexity of our algorithm in each iteration is only $O(k^2)$, where $k$ is the number of support vectors. Experimental results on some real data sets indicate that FISVDD demonstrates significant gains in efficiency with almost no loss in either outlier detection accuracy or objective function value.