Ali Zare

Alp Ozdemir, Ali Zare, Mark A. Iwen et al.

The widespread use of multisensor technology and the emergence of big datasets have created the need to develop tools to reduce, approximate, and classify large and multimodal data such as higher-order tensors. While early approaches focused on matrix and vector based methods to represent these higher-order data, more recently it has been shown that tensor decomposition methods are better equipped to capture couplings across their different modes. For these reasons, tensor decomposition methods have found applications in many different signal processing problems including dimensionality reduction, signal separation, linear regression, feature extraction, and classification. However, most of the existing tensor decomposition methods are based on the principle of finding a low-rank approximation in a linear subspace structure, where the definition of the rank may change depending on the particular decomposition. Since many datasets are not necessarily low-rank in a linear subspace, this often results in high approximation errors or low compression rates. In this paper, we introduce a new adaptive, multi-scale tensor decomposition method for higher order data inspired by hybrid linear modeling and subspace clustering techniques. In particular, we develop a multi-scale higher-order singular value decomposition (MS-HoSVD) approach where a given tensor is first permuted and then partitioned into several sub-tensors each of which can be represented as a low-rank tensor with increased representational efficiency. The proposed approach is evaluated for dimensionality reduction and classification for several different real-life tensor signals with promising results.

Ali Zare, Yulei Niu, Hammad Ayyubi et al.

Procedure Planning in instructional videos entails generating a sequence of action steps based on visual observations of the initial and target states. Despite the rapid progress in this task, there remain several critical challenges to be solved: (1) Adaptive procedures: Prior works hold an unrealistic assumption that the number of action steps is known and fixed, leading to non-generalizable models in real-world scenarios where the sequence length varies. (2) Temporal relation: Understanding the step temporal relation knowledge is essential in producing reasonable and executable plans. (3) Annotation cost: Annotating instructional videos with step-level labels (i.e., timestamp) or sequence-level labels (i.e., action category) is demanding and labor-intensive, limiting its generalizability to large-scale datasets. In this work, we propose a new and practical setting, called adaptive procedure planning in instructional videos, where the procedure length is not fixed or pre-determined. To address these challenges, we introduce Retrieval-Augmented Planner (RAP) model. Specifically, for adaptive procedures, RAP adaptively determines the conclusion of actions using an auto-regressive model architecture. For temporal relation, RAP establishes an external memory module to explicitly retrieve the most relevant state-action pairs from the training videos and revises the generated procedures. To tackle high annotation cost, RAP utilizes a weakly-supervised learning manner to expand the training dataset to other task-relevant, unannotated videos by generating pseudo labels for action steps. Experiments on CrossTask and COIN benchmarks show the superiority of RAP over traditional fixed-length models, establishing it as a strong baseline solution for adaptive procedure planning.

Yinghao Aaron Li, Ali Zare, Nima Mesgarani

We present an unsupervised non-parallel many-to-many voice conversion (VC) method using a generative adversarial network (GAN) called StarGAN v2. Using a combination of adversarial source classifier loss and perceptual loss, our model significantly outperforms previous VC models. Although our model is trained only with 20 English speakers, it generalizes to a variety of voice conversion tasks, such as any-to-many, cross-lingual, and singing conversion. Using a style encoder, our framework can also convert plain reading speech into stylistic speech, such as emotional and falsetto speech. Subjective and objective evaluation experiments on a non-parallel many-to-many voice conversion task revealed that our model produces natural sounding voices, close to the sound quality of state-of-the-art text-to-speech (TTS) based voice conversion methods without the need for text labels. Moreover, our model is completely convolutional and with a faster-than-real-time vocoder such as Parallel WaveGAN can perform real-time voice conversion.