Time-Contrastive Learning Based Deep Bottleneck Features for Text-Dependent Speaker Verification

There are a number of studies about extraction of bottleneck (BN) features from deep neural networks (DNNs)trained to discriminate speakers, pass-phrases and triphone states for improving the performance of text-dependent speaker verification (TD-SV). However, a moderate success has been achieved. A recent study [1] presented a time contrastive learning (TCL) concept to explore the non-stationarity of brain signals for classification of brain states. Speech signals have similar non-stationarity property, and TCL further has the advantage of having no need for labeled data. We therefore present a TCL based BN feature extraction method. The method uniformly partitions each speech utterance in a training dataset into a predefined number of multi-frame segments. Each segment in an utterance corresponds to one class, and class labels are shared across utterances. DNNs are then trained to discriminate all speech frames among the classes to exploit the temporal structure of speech. In addition, we propose a segment-based unsupervised clustering algorithm to re-assign class labels to the segments. TD-SV experiments were conducted on the RedDots challenge database. The TCL-DNNs were trained using speech data of fixed pass-phrases that were excluded from the TD-SV evaluation set, so the learned features can be considered phrase-independent. We compare the performance of the proposed TCL bottleneck (BN) feature with those of short-time cepstral features and BN features extracted from DNNs discriminating speakers, pass-phrases, speaker+pass-phrase, as well as monophones whose labels and boundaries are generated by three different automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Experimental results show that the proposed TCL-BN outperforms cepstral features and speaker+pass-phrase discriminant BN features, and its performance is on par with those of ASR derived BN features. Moreover,....Comment: Copyright (c) 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other work

Inorganic Graphenylene: A Porous Two-Dimensional Material With Tunable Band Gap

By means of ab initio calculations we investigate the possibility of existence of a boron nitride (BN) porous two-dimensional nanosheet which is geometrically similar to the carbon allotrope known as biphenylene carbon. The proposed structure, which we called Inorganic Graphenylene (IGP), is formed spontaneously after selective dehydrogenation of the porous Boron Nitride (BN) structure proposed by Ding et al. We study the structural and electronic properties of both porous BN and IGP and it is shown that, by selective substitution of B and N atoms with carbon atoms in these structures, the band gap can be significantly reduced, changing their behavior from insulators to semiconductors, thus opening the possibility of band gap engineering for this class of two-dimensional materials

On minor-closed classes of matroids with exponential growth rate

Let \cM be a minor-closed class of matroids that does not contain arbitrarily long lines. The growth rate function, h:\bN\rightarrow \bN of \cM is given by h(n) = \max(|M|\, : \, M\in \cM, simple, rank-$n$). The Growth Rate Theorem shows that there is an integer $c$ such that either: $h(n)\le c\, n$, or ${n+1 \choose 2} \le h(n)\le c\, n^2$, or there is a prime-power $q$ such that $\frac{q^n-1}{q-1} \le h(n) \le c\, q^n$; this separates classes into those of linear density, quadratic density, and base-$q$ exponential density. For classes of base-$q$ exponential density that contain no $(q^2+1)$-point line, we prove that $h(n) =\frac{q^n-1}{q-1}$ for all sufficiently large $n$. We also prove that, for classes of base-$q$ exponential density that contain no $(q^2+q+1)$-point line, there exists k\in\bN such that $h(n) = \frac{q^{n+k}-1}{q-1} - q\frac{q^{2k}-1}{q^2-1}$ for all sufficiently large $n$

Moufang sets of finite Morley rank of odd type

We show that for a wide class of groups of finite Morley rank the presence of a split $BN$-pair of Tits rank $1$ forces the group to be of the form $\operatorname{PSL}_2$ and the $BN$-pair to be standard. Our approach is via the theory of Moufang sets. Specifically, we investigate infinite and so-called hereditarily proper Moufang sets of finite Morley rank in the case where the little projective group has no infinite elementary abelian $2$-subgroups and show that all such Moufang sets are standard (and thus associated to $\operatorname{PSL}_2(F)$ for $F$ an algebraically closed field of characteristic not $2$) provided the Hua subgroups are nilpotent. Further, we prove that the same conclusion can be reached whenever the Hua subgroups are $L$-groups and the root groups are not simple

<i>Herschel</i> observations of B1-bS and B1-bN: two first hydrostatic core candidates in the Perseus star-forming cloud

We report far-infrared Herschel observations obtained between 70 μm and 500 μm of two star-forming dusty condensations, [HKM99] B1-bS and [HKM99] B1-bN, in the B1 region of the Perseus star-forming cloud. In the western part of the Perseus cloud, B1-bS is the only source detected in all six PACS and SPIRE photometric bands, but it is not visible in the Spitzer map at 24 μm. B1-bN is clearly detected between 100 μm and 250 μm. We have fitted the spectral energy distributions of these sources to derive their physical properties, and find that a simple greybody model fails to reproduce the observed spectral energy distributions. At least a two-component model is required, consisting of a central source surrounded by a dusty envelope. The properties derived from the fit, however, suggest that the central source is not a Class 0 object. We then conclude that while B1-bS and B1-bN appear to be more evolved than a pre-stellar core, the best-fit models suggest that their central objects are younger than a Class 0 source. Hence, they may be good candidates to be examples of the first hydrostatic core phase. The projected distance between B1-bS and B1-bN is a few Jeans lengths. If their physical separation is close to this value, this pair would allow studying the mutual interactions between two forming stars at a very early stage of their evolution

High-energy-density and superhard nitrogen-rich B-N compounds

The pressure-induced transformation of diatomic nitrogen into non-molecular polymeric phases may produce potentially useful high-energy-density materials. We combine first-principles calculations with structure searching to predict a new class of nitrogen-rich boron nitrides with a stoichiometry of B3N5 that are stable or metastable relative to solid N2 and h-BN at ambient pressure. The most stable phase at ambient pressure has a layered structure (h-B3N5) containing hexagonal B3N3 layers sandwiched with intercalated freely rotating N2 molecules. At 15 GPa, a three-dimensional C2221 structure with single N-N bonds becomes the most stable. This pressure is much lower than that required for triple-to-single bond transformation in pure solid nitrogen (110 GPa). More importantly, C2221-B3N5 is metastable, and can be recovered under ambient conditions. Its energy density of 3.44 kJ/g makes it a potential high-energy-density material. In addition, stress-strain calculations estimate a Vickers hardness of 44 GPa. Structure searching reveals a new clathrate sodalite-like BN structure that is metastable under ambient conditions.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, accepted by PR