Publications

2022

• Generalized Fast Multichannel Nonnegative Matrix Factorization Based on Gaussian Scale Mixtures for Blind Source Separation
  
  • Fontaine Mathieu
  • Sekiguchi Kouhei
  • Nugraha Aditya
  • Bando Yoshiaki
  • Yoshii Kazuyoshi
  IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2022, pp.1-1. This paper describes heavy-tailed extensions of a state-of-the-art versatile blind source separation method called fast multichannel nonnegative matrix factorization (FastMNMF) from a unified point of view. The common way of deriving such an extension is to replace the multivariate complex Gaussian distribution in the likelihood function with its heavy-tailed generalization, e.g., the multivariate complex Student's t and leptokurtic generalized Gaussian distributions, and tailor-make the corresponding parameter optimization algorithm. Using a wider class of heavy-tailed distributions called a Gaussian scale mixture (GSM), i.e., a mixture of Gaussian distributions whose variances are perturbed by positive random scalars called impulse variables, we propose GSM-FastMNMF and develop an expectationmaximization algorithm that works even when the probability density function of the impulse variables have no analytical expressions. We show that existing heavy-tailed FastMNMF extensions are instances of GSM-FastMNMF and derive a new instance based on the generalized hyperbolic distribution that include the normal-inverse Gaussian, Student's t, and Gaussian distributions as the special cases. Our experiments show that the normalinverse Gaussian FastMNMF outperforms the state-of-the-art FastMNMF extensions and ILRMA model in speech enhancement and separation in terms of the signal-to-distortion ratio. (10.1109/TASLP.2022.3172631)
  DOI : 10.1109/TASLP.2022.3172631
• Uniform Reliability of Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries
  
  • Amarilli Antoine
  • Kimelfeld Benny
  Logical Methods in Computer Science, Logical Methods in Computer Science Association, 2022. The reliability of a Boolean Conjunctive Query (CQ) over a tuple-independent probabilistic database is the probability that the CQ is satisfied when the tuples of the database are sampled one by one, independently, with their associated probability. For queries without self-joins (repeated relation symbols), the data complexity of this problem is fully characterized by a known dichotomy: reliability can be computed in polynomial time for hierarchical queries, and is #P-hard for non-hierarchical queries. Inspired by this dichotomy, we investigate a fundamental counting problem for CQs without self-joins: how many sets of facts from the input database satisfy the query? This is equivalent to the uniform case of the query reliability problem, where the probability of every tuple is required to be 1/2. Of course, for hierarchical queries, uniform reliability is solvable in polynomial time, like the reliability problem. We show that being hierarchical is also necessary for this tractability (under conventional complexity assumptions). In fact, we establish a generalization of the dichotomy that covers every restricted case of reliability in which the probabilities of tuples are determined by their relation. (10.46298/lmcs-18(4:3)2022)
  DOI : 10.46298/lmcs-18(4:3)2022
• Towards Outdoor Electromagnetic Field Exposure Mapping Generation Using Conditional GANs
  
  • Mallik Mohammed
  • Tesfay Angesom Ataklity
  • Allaert Benjamin
  • Kassi Rédha
  • Egea-Lopez Esteban
  • Molina-Garcia-Pardo Jose-Maria
  • Wiart Joe
  • Gaillot Davy
  • Clavier Laurent
  Sensors, MDPI, 2022, 22 (24), pp.9643. With the ongoing fifth-generation cellular network (5G) deployment, electromagnetic field exposure has become a critical concern. However, measurements are scarce, and accurate electromagnetic field reconstruction in a geographic region remains challenging. This work proposes a conditional generative adversarial network to address this issue. The main objective is to reconstruct the electromagnetic field exposure map accurately according to the environment’s topology from a few sensors located in an outdoor urban environment. The model is trained to learn and estimate the propagation characteristics of the electromagnetic field according to the topology of a given environment. In addition, the conditional generative adversarial network-based electromagnetic field mapping is compared with simple kriging. Results show that the proposed method produces accurate estimates and is a promising solution for exposure map reconstruction. (10.3390/s22249643)
  DOI : 10.3390/s22249643
• High-capacity free-space optical link in the midinfrared thermal atmospheric windows using unipolar quantum devices
  
  • Didier Pierre
  • Dely Hamza
  • Bonazzi Thomas
  • Spitz Olivier
  • Awwad Elie
  • Rodriguez Etienne
  • Vasanelli Angela
  • Sirtori Carlo
  • Grillot Frédéric
  Advanced photonics, SPIE, 2022, 4 (5), pp.056004. Free-space optical communication is a very promising alternative to fiber communication systems, in terms of ease of deployment and costs. Midinfrared light has several features of utter relevance for free-space applications: low absorption when propagating in the atmosphere even under adverse conditions, robustness of the wavefront during long-distance propagation, and absence of regulations and restrictions for this range of wavelengths. A proof-of-concept of high-speed transmission taking advantage of intersubband devices has recently been demonstrated, but this effort was limited by the short-distance optical path (up to 1 m). In this work, we study the possibility of building a long-range link using unipolar quantum optoelectronics. Two different detectors are used: an uncooled quantum cascade detector and a nitrogen-cooled quantum well-infrared photodetector. We evaluate the maximum data rate of our link in a back-to-back configuration before adding a Herriott cell to increase the length of the light path up to 31 m. By using pulse shaping, pre- and post-processing, we reach a record bitrate of 30 Gbit s − 1 for both two-level (OOK) and four-level (PAM-4) modulation schemes for a 31-m propagation link and a bit error rate compatible with error-correction codes. (10.1117/1.AP.4.5.056004)
  DOI : 10.1117/1.AP.4.5.056004
• A Quadrature Rule combining Control Variates and Adaptive Importance Sampling
  
  • Leluc Rémi
  • Portier François
  • Zhuman Aigerim
  • Segers Johan
  Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2022, 35, pp.11842--11853. Driven by several successful applications such as in stochastic gradient descent or in Bayesian computation, control variates have become a major tool for Monte Carlo integration. However, standard methods do not allow the distribution of the particles to evolve during the algorithm, as is the case in sequential simulation methods. Within the standard adaptive importance sampling framework, a simple weighted least squares approach is proposed to improve the procedure with control variates. The procedure takes the form of a quadrature rule with adapted quadrature weights to reflect the information brought in by the control variates. The quadrature points and weights do not depend on the integrand, a computational advantage in case of multiple integrands. Moreover, the target density needs to be known only up to a multiplicative constant. Our main result is a non-asymptotic bound on the probabilistic error of the procedure. The bound proves that for improving the estimate's accuracy, the benefits from adaptive importance sampling and control variates can be combined. The good behavior of the method is illustrated empirically on synthetic examples and real-world data for Bayesian linear regression.
• Handwriting and Drawing Features for Detecting Personality Traits: An Analysis on Big Five Sub-dimensions
  
  • Esposito Anna
  • Amorese Terry
  • Buonanno Michele
  • Cuciniello Marialucia
  • Esposito Antonietta
  • Faundez-Zanuy Marcos
  • Likforman-Sulem Laurence
  • Riviello Maria Teresa
  • Spagnuolo Carmine
  • Troncone Alda
  • Cordasco Gennaro
  Acta Polytechnica Hungarica, Óbuda University, 2022, 19 (11), pp.65-84. : Handwriting and Drawing are functional tasks involving physical and cognitive processes. Recently they have been investigated for detecting cognitive and motor disorders. In this work, handwriting/drawing features are investigated for identifying connections with personality traits. For this purpose, an experiment comprising seven handwriting/drawing tasks has been administrated to 78 young adults (mean age=24.6 ± 2.4 years) equally balanced by gender. Handwriting and Drawing activities - both on and close to the paper – had been recorded online through a digitizing tablet able to measure handwriting and drawing features such as pressure, speed, dimension, and inclination of each pen-stroke on the paper. Participants were asked to fill the Big Five Personality Questionnaire (BFQ) and according to the scores obtained for each of the 5 dimensions and 10 Big Five sub-dimensions, were partitioned into three categories: low, typical, and high. To evaluate whether the recorded handwriting/drawing features are connected with personality traits ANOVA repeated measures have been performed with gender and group category (low, typical, and high) as between and the listed handwriting/drawing features as within factors. The analyses show significant differences among low, typical and, high BFQ scores for the main Big Five dimensions and the ten Big Five sub-dimensions, indicating that personality traits can be revealed by a quantitative analysis of the proposed handwriting/drawing features. (10.12700/APH.19.11.2022.11.4)
  DOI : 10.12700/APH.19.11.2022.11.4
• Selected Topics in Malliavin Calculus
  
  • Decreusefond Laurent
  , 2022, 10. (10.1007/978-3-031-01311-9)
  DOI : 10.1007/978-3-031-01311-9
• Enhanced four-wave mixing dynamics in epitaxial quantum dot laser on silicon
  
  • Ding Shihao
  • Dong Bozhang
  • Chow Weng
  • Bowers John
  • Grillot Frédéric
  , 2022, pp.NpTh3D.1. The four-wave mixing conversion efficiency of quantum dot laser is much higher than that of quantum well. These results are important for self-mode-locked pulse production and high-bandwidth optical frequency comb generation. (10.1364/NP.2022.NpTh3D.1)
  DOI : 10.1364/NP.2022.NpTh3D.1
• Unsupervised Audio Source Separation Using Differentiable Parametric Source Models
  
  • Schulze-Forster Kilian
  • Doire Clement S J
  • Richard Gael
  • Badeau Roland
  Computing Research Repository, ACM / ArXiv, 2022. Supervised deep learning approaches to underdetermined audio source separation achieve state-of-the-art performance but require a dataset of mixtures along with their corresponding isolated source signals. Such datasets can be extremely costly to obtain for musical mixtures. This raises a need for unsupervised methods. We propose a novel unsupervised modelbased deep learning approach to musical source separation. Each source is modelled with a differentiable parametric sourcefilter model. A neural network is trained to reconstruct the observed mixture as a sum of the sources by estimating the source models' parameters given their fundamental frequencies. At test time, soft masks are obtained from the synthesized source signals. The experimental evaluation on a vocal ensemble separation task shows that the proposed method outperforms learning-free methods based on nonnegative matrix factorization and a supervised deep learning baseline. Integrating domain knowledge in the form of source models into a data-driven method leads to high data efficiency: the proposed approach achieves good separation quality even when trained on less than three minutes of audio. This work makes powerful deep learning based separation usable in scenarios where training data with ground truth is expensive or nonexistent.
• Introduction
  
  • Bloch Isabelle
  • Euzenat Jérôme
  • Lang Jérôme
  • Schwarzentruber François
  Revue Ouverte d'Intelligence Artificielle, Association pour la diffusion de la recherche francophone en intelligence artificielle, 2022, 3, pp.193-199. no abstract (10.5802/roia.28fr)
  DOI : 10.5802/roia.28fr
• Compositional Equivalences Based on Open pNets
  
  • Ameur-Boulifa Rabéa
  • Henrio Ludovic
  • Madelaine Eric
  Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming, Elsevier, 2022, 131, pp.100842. Establishing equivalences between programs is crucial both for verifying correctness of programs and for justifying optimisations and program transformations. There exist several equivalence relations for programs, and bisimulations are among the most versatile of these equivalences. Among bisimulations one distinguishes strong bisimulation that requires that each action of a program is simulated by a single action of the equivalent program, and weak bisimulation that allows some of the actions to be invisible, and thus not simulated. pNet is a generalisation of automata that model open systems. They feature variables and hierarchical composition. Open pNets are pNets with holes, i.e. placeholders that can be filled later by subsystems. However, there is no standard tool for defining the semantics of an open system in this context. This article first defines open automata that are labelled transition systems with parameters and holes. Relying on open automata, it then defines bisimilarity relations for the comparison of systems specified as pNets. We first present a strong bisimilarity for open pNets called FH-bisimilarity. Next we offer an equivalence relation similar to the classical weak bisimulation equivalence, and study its properties. Among these properties we are interested in compositionality: if two systems are proven equivalent they will be indistinguishable by their context, and they will also be indistinguishable when their holes are filled with equivalent systems. We identify sufficient conditions to ensure compositionality of strong and weak bisimulation. The contributions of this article are illustrated using a transport protocol as running example. (10.1016/j.jlamp.2022.100842)
  DOI : 10.1016/j.jlamp.2022.100842
• (Complex) natural gradient optimization for optical quantum circuit design
  
  • Yao Yuan
  • Cussenot Pierre
  • Wolf Richard A.
  • Miatto Filippo M.
  Physical Review A, American Physical Society, 2022, 105 (5), pp.052402. Few-mode optical quantum circuits can be simulated and optimized using gradient-descent methods, as optical gates can be parametrized by continuous parameters. However, the parameter space as seen by a nonholomorphic cost function is not Euclidean, which means that the Euclidean gradient does not generally point in the direction of steepest ascent. In order to retrieve the true steepest-ascent direction, one must take into account the local metric in what is known as the natural-gradient (NG) method. In this work we implement the NG for the optimization of optical quantum circuits. Specifically, we adapt the NG approach to a complex-valued parameter space, allowing us to apply the NG method directly within the Bargmann formalism, which we rely on for transforming between phase space and Fock space. We then compare the NG approach to vanilla gradient descent and to Adam over two standard state-preparation benchmarks: a single-photon source and a Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill state source. We observe that the NG approach converges significantly faster (due in part to the possibility of using larger learning rates) and with a smoother decay of the cost function throughout the optimization. This result further improves our ability to design quantum circuits via classical optimization methods. (10.1103/PhysRevA.105.052402)
  DOI : 10.1103/PhysRevA.105.052402
• Combining Embeddings and Rules for Fact Prediction
  
  • Boschin Armand
  • Jain Nitisha
  • Keretchashvili Gurami
  • Suchanek Fabian M.
  , 2022. Knowledge bases are typically incomplete, meaning that they are missing information that we would expect to be there. Recent years have seen two main approaches to guess missing facts: Rule Mining and Knowledge Graph Embeddings. The first approach is symbolic, and finds rules such as "If two people are married, they most likely live in the same city". These rules can then be used to predict missing statements. Knowledge Graph Embeddings, on the other hand, are trained to predict missing facts for a knowledge base by mapping entities to a vector space. Each of these approaches has their strengths and weaknesses, and this article provides a survey of neuro-symbolic works that combine embeddings and rule mining approaches for fact prediction. (10.4230/OASIcs.AIB.2022.4)
  DOI : 10.4230/OASIcs.AIB.2022.4
• Post-actes de la Conférence Nationale en Intelligence Artificielle (CNIA 2018-2020)
  
  • Bloch Isabelle
  • Euzenat Jérôme
  • Lang Jérôme
  • Schwarzentruber François
  Revue Ouverte d'Intelligence Artificielle, Association pour la diffusion de la recherche francophone en intelligence artificielle, 2022, 3, pp.193-413. no abstract
• LAKE DETECTION WITH SENTINEL-1 DATA USING A GRAB-CUT METHOD AND ITS MULTI-TEMPORAL EXTENSION
  
  • Gasnier Nicolas
  • Denis Loïc
  • Fjørtoft Roger
  • Liege Frédéric
  • Tupin Florence
  , 2022. This paper presents a semi-guided method to detect lakes in Sentinel-1 SAR data. The proposed approach is an adaptation of the grab-cut framework developed in [1]. Starting from a coarse bounding box around the lake, an accurate segmentation is extracted using a Conditional Random Field formalism and a graph-cut based optimization. Then an extension of this approach to process jointly a stack of multi-temporal data is presented. A temporal regularization term is introduced to control the joint segmentation. The proposed approach is evaluated on Sentinel-1 datasets. Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the interest of the proposed framework and its robustness to the initialization polygon of the lake. (10.1109/IGARSS46834.2022.9883219)
  DOI : 10.1109/IGARSS46834.2022.9883219
• Vibration Detection and Localization in Buried Fiber Cable after 80km of SSMF using Digital Coherent Sensing System with Co-Propagating 600Gb/s WDM Channels
  
  • Guerrier Sterenn
  • Benyahya Kaoutar
  • Dorize Christian
  • Awwad Elie
  • Mardoyan Haik
  • Renaudier Jérémie
  , 2022, pp.M2F.3. (10.1364/OFC.2022.M2F.3)
  DOI : 10.1364/OFC.2022.M2F.3
• Free-Space Communication With Directly Modulated Mid-Infrared Quantum Cascade Devices
  
  • Spitz Olivier
  • Didier Pierre
  • Durupt Lauréline
  • Andrés Díaz-Thomas Daniel
  • Baranov Alexei N
  • Cerutti Laurent
  • Grillot Frédéric
  IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2022. This study deals with the communication capabilities of two kinds of semiconductor lasers emitting in one of the atmosphere transparency windows, around 4 µm. One of these two lasers is a quantum cascade laser and the other one is an interband cascade laser. With the quantum cascade laser, a subsequent attenuation is added to the optical path in order to mimic the attenuation of free-space transmission of several kilometers. Direct electrical modulation is used to transmit the message and two-level formats, non-return-to-zero and return-to-zero, are used and compared in terms of maximum transmission data rate. The sensitivity to optical feedback is also analyzed, as well as the evolution of the error rate when reducing the optical power at the level of the detector. This work provides a novel insight into the development of future secure free-space optical communication links based on midinfrared semiconductor lasers and sheds the light on improvements required to achieve multi-Gbits/s communication with off-the-shelf components. Index Terms-Quantum cascade laser, interband cascade laser, mid-infrared photonics, free-space communication. I. INTRODUCTION T HE development of semiconductor laser technology was considerably boosted with inventing quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) in early 90s [1] and interband cascade lasers (ICLs) shortly afterwards [2]. At the early stages of QCLs, free-space optical transmissions were envisioned [3] alongside Manuscript (10.1109/JSTQE.2021.3096316)
  DOI : 10.1109/JSTQE.2021.3096316
• Optimizing Higher-Order Correlation Analysis Against Inner Product Masking Scheme
  
  • Ming Jingdian
  • Zhou Yongbin
  • Cheng Wei
  • Li Huizhong
  IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2022, 17, pp.3555-3568. (10.1109/TIFS.2022.3209890)
  DOI : 10.1109/TIFS.2022.3209890
• Direction-Aware Adaptive Online Neural Speech Enhancement with an Augmented Reality Headset in Real Noisy Conversational Environments
  
  • Sekiguchi Kouhei
  • Nugraha Aditya Arie
  • Du Yicheng
  • Bando Yoshiaki
  • Fontaine Mathieu
  • Yoshii Kazuyoshi
  , 2022. This paper describes the practical response-and performance-aware development of online speech enhancement for an augmented reality (AR) headset that helps a user understand conversations made in real noisy echoic environments (e.g., cocktail party). One may use a state-of-the-art blind source separation method called fast multichannel nonnegative matrix factorization (FastMNMF) that works well in various environments thanks to its unsupervised nature. Its heavy computational cost, however, prevents its application to real-time processing. In contrast, a supervised beamforming method that uses a deep neural network (DNN) for estimating spatial information of speech and noise readily fits real-time processing, but suffers from drastic performance degradation in mismatched conditions. Given such complementary characteristics, we propose a dual-process robust online speech enhancement method based on DNN-based beamforming with FastMNMF-guided adaptation. FastMNMF (back end) is performed in a mini-batch style and the noisy and enhanced speech pairs are used together with the original parallel training data for updating the direction-aware DNN (front end) with backpropagation at a computationally-allowable interval. This method is used with a blind dereverberation method called weighted prediction error (WPE) for transcribing the noisy reverberant speech of a speaker, which can be detected from video or selected by a user's hand gesture or eye gaze, in a streaming manner and spatially showing the transcriptions with an AR technique. Our experiment showed that the word error rate was improved by more than 10 points with the runtime adaptation using only twelve minutes observation.
• Somme et produit, couple star
  
  • Zayana Karim
  • Rabiet Victor
  CultureMath, ENS, 2022. Relation entre somme et produit de deux nombres. Résolution des équations du second degré sans utiliser le discriminant
• Conditional and Relevant Common Information
  
  • Graczyk Robert
  • Lapidoth Amos
  • Wigger Michèle M
  Information and Inference, Oxford University Press (OUP), 2022, 11 (2), pp.679 - 737. Two variations on Wyner's common information are proposed: conditional common information and relevant common information. These are shown to have operational meanings analogous to those of Wyner's common information in appropriately defined distributed problems of compression, simulation and channel synthesis. For relevant common information, an additional operational meaning is identified: on a multiple-access channel with private and common messages, it is the minimal common-message rate that enables communication at the maximum sum-rate under a weak coordination constraint on the inputs and output. En route, the weak-coordination problem over a Gray-Wyner network is solved under the no-excess-rate constraint. (10.1093/imaiai/iaab021)
  DOI : 10.1093/imaiai/iaab021
• Variations on a Theme by Massey
  
  • Rioul Olivier
  IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2022, 68 (5), pp.2813-2828. In 1994, Jim Massey proposed the guessing entropy as a measure of the difficulty that an attacker has to guess a secret used in a cryptographic system, and established a well-known inequality between entropy and guessing entropy. Over 15 years before, in an unpublished work, he also established a well-known inequality for the entropy of an integer-valued random variable of given variance. In this paper, we establish a link between the two works by Massey in the more general framework of the relationship between discrete (absolute) entropy and continuous (differential) entropy. Two approaches are given in which the discrete entropy (or Rényi entropy) of an integer-valued variable can be upper bounded using the differential (Rényi) entropy of some suitably chosen continuous random variable. As an application, lower bounds on guessing entropy and guessing moments are derived in terms of entropy or Rényi entropy (without side information) and conditional entropy or Arimoto conditional entropy (when side information is available) (10.1109/TIT.2022.3141264)
  DOI : 10.1109/TIT.2022.3141264
• Characterization of the majority matrices of profiles of equivalence relations
  
  • Hudry Olivier
  , 2022.
• From Coherent Systems Technology to Advanced Fiber Sensing for Smart Network Monitoring
  
  • Dorize Christian
  • Guerrier Sterenn
  • Awwad Elie
  • Mardoyan Haik
  • Renaudier Jeremie
  Journal of Lightwave Technology, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)/Optical Society of America(OSA), 2022, pp.1-10. (10.1109/JLT.2022.3221552)
  DOI : 10.1109/JLT.2022.3221552
• PBRE: A Rule Extraction Method from Trained Neural Networks Designed for Smart Home Services
  
  • Qiu Mingming
  • Najm Elie
  • Sharrock Rémi
  • Traverson Bruno
  , 2022, 13427, pp.158-173. Designing smart home services is a complex task when multiple services with a large number of sensors and actuators are deployed simultaneously. It may rely on knowledge-based or data-driven approaches. The former can use rule-based methods to design services statically, and the latter can use learning methods to discover inhabitants’ preferences dynamically. However, neither of these approaches is entirely satisfactory because rules cannot cover all possible situations that may change, and learning methods may make decisions that are sometimes incomprehensible to the inhabitant. In this paper, PBRE (Pedagogic Based Rule Extractor) is proposed to extract rules from learning methods to realize dynamic rule generation for smart home systems. The expected advantage is that both the explainability of rule-based methods and the dynamicity of learning methods are adopted. We compare PBRE with an existing rule extraction method, and the results show better performance of PBRE. We also apply PBRE to extract rules from a smart home service represented by an NRL (Neural Network-based Reinforcement Learning). The results show that PBRE can help the NRL-simulated service to make understandable suggestions to the inhabitant. (10.1007/978-3-031-12426-6_13)
  DOI : 10.1007/978-3-031-12426-6_13