Yuyang Yan

Yuyang Yan, Sami O. Simons, Visara Urovi

Early detection of exacerbations in asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is important for timely intervention. Speech has emerged as a promising tool for continuous, non-invasive respiratory disease monitoring. However, speech signals inherently carry speaker-identifiable attributes that may dominate model predictions, which may compromise both diagnosis performance and patient privacy. Furthermore, the acoustic features associated with respiratory disease and speaker identity remain unclear in respiratory disease monitoring. We propose an adversarial learning architecture that disentangles pathology-related acoustic patterns from speaker-identifiable attributes. The framework optimizes two clinically hierarchical tasks: (i) respiratory status classification (stable vs. exacerbated) and (ii) exacerbation type classification (asthma exacerbation vs. COPD exacerbation). Speaker identity is suppressed through gradient reversal-based adversarial training. To enhance clinical interpretability, we employ SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) to quantify the contributions of acoustic features to pathology-related predictions versus speaker identity. On the TACTICAS dataset, our method outperforms the single-task baseline across both tasks. For the respiratory status task (stable vs. exacerbated), the AUC improves from 0.897 to 0.910. For the exacerbation type task (asthma exacerbation vs. COPD exacerbation), the AUC increases from 0.674 to 0.793. Concurrently, the J-ratio decreases, confirming effective suppression of speaker information. SHAP analysis reveals the contributions of the acoustic features to both tasks. External validation on the Bridge2AI-Voice dataset further demonstrates consistent performance improvement and reduced speaker dependency, confirming cross-dataset generalizability.

Yuyang Yan, Sami O. Simons, Loes van Bemmel et al.

Voice signals originating from the respiratory tract are utilized as valuable acoustic biomarkers for the diagnosis and assessment of respiratory diseases. Among the employed acoustic features, Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) is widely used for automatic analysis, with MFCC extraction commonly relying on default parameters. However, no comprehensive study has systematically investigated the impact of MFCC extraction parameters on respiratory disease diagnosis. In this study, we address this gap by examining the effects of key parameters, namely the number of coefficients, frame length, and hop length between frames, on respiratory condition examination. Our investigation uses four datasets: the Cambridge COVID-19 Sound database, the Coswara dataset, the Saarbrucken Voice Disorders (SVD) database, and a TACTICAS dataset. The Support Vector Machine (SVM) is employed as the classifier, given its widespread adoption and efficacy. Our findings indicate that the accuracy of MFCC decreases as hop length increases, and the optimal number of coefficients is observed to be approximately 30. The performance of MFCC varies with frame length across the datasets: for the COVID-19 datasets (Cambridge COVID-19 Sound database and Coswara dataset), performance declines with longer frame lengths, while for the SVD dataset, performance improves with increasing frame length (from 50 ms to 500 ms). Furthermore, we investigate the optimized combination of these parameters and observe substantial enhancements in accuracy. Compared to the worst combination, the SVM model achieves an accuracy of 81.1%, 80.6%, and 71.7%, with improvements of 19.6%, 16.10%, and 14.90% for the Cambridge COVID-19 Sound database, the Coswara dataset, and the SVD dataset respectively.

Shengbang Liu, Yueru Jia, Yuyang Yan et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promising generalization in robotic manipulation, but they still struggle with contact-rich tasks, where minor contact perturbations can cause unrecoverable failures that are hard to detect from vision alone. Since these failures are localized rather than task-level semantic errors, tactile-aware corrective post-training offers an efficient way to improve recovery. However, scaling such supervision through human intervention is costly. Recent works have explored world models to synthesize imagined rollouts for policy improvement, but vision-only world models may produce visually plausible yet contact-inconsistent trajectories. We therefore introduce TACO, a tactile-aware world-model-driven framework for scalable VLA post-training in contact-rich manipulation. Given real robot rollouts, TACO follows a Recognize-Imagine-Label loop with a tactile-aware world model: a unified progress-action model recognizes failure-adjacent states using progress estimates, a visuo-tactile generation model imagines local correction segments, and the progress-action model labels them with executable corrective actions. To incorporate tactile corrective supervision into VLA post-training, TACO combines knowledge-insulated tactile adaptation with advantage-conditioned training, enabling the policy to learn from imagined corrections without degrading pretrained visual-language priors. These components enable TACO to convert real-world failures into imagined visuo-tactile corrections for iterative VLA post-training. Experiments on real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks show that TACO achieves 44% absolute success rate improvement over the base policy and 32% over the policy without knowledge-insulated tactile adaptation.

Yuyang Yan, Wafaa Aljbawi, Sami O. Simons et al.

COVID-19 has affected more than 223 countries worldwide and in the Post-COVID Era, there is a pressing need for non-invasive, low-cost, and highly scalable solutions to detect COVID-19. We develop a deep learning model to identify COVID-19 from voice recording data. The novelty of this work is in the development of deep learning models for COVID-19 identification from only voice recordings. We use the Cambridge COVID-19 Sound database which contains 893 speech samples, crowd-sourced from 4352 participants via a COVID-19 Sounds app. Voice features including Mel-spectrograms and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) and CNN Encoder features are extracted. Based on the voice data, we develop deep learning classification models to detect COVID-19 cases. These models include Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Hidden-Unit BERT (HuBERT). We compare their predictive power to baseline machine learning models. HuBERT achieves the highest accuracy of 86\% and the highest AUC of 0.93. The results achieved with the proposed models suggest promising results in COVID-19 diagnosis from voice recordings when compared to the results obtained from the state-of-the-art.