13,858 research outputs found
Joint Bayesian Gaussian discriminant analysis for speaker verification
State-of-the-art i-vector based speaker verification relies on variants of
Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis (PLDA) for discriminant analysis. We
are mainly motivated by the recent work of the joint Bayesian (JB) method,
which is originally proposed for discriminant analysis in face verification. We
apply JB to speaker verification and make three contributions beyond the
original JB. 1) In contrast to the EM iterations with approximated statistics
in the original JB, the EM iterations with exact statistics are employed and
give better performance. 2) We propose to do simultaneous diagonalization (SD)
of the within-class and between-class covariance matrices to achieve efficient
testing, which has broader application scope than the SVD-based efficient
testing method in the original JB. 3) We scrutinize similarities and
differences between various Gaussian PLDAs and JB, complementing the previous
analysis of comparing JB only with Prince-Elder PLDA. Extensive experiments are
conducted on NIST SRE10 core condition 5, empirically validating the
superiority of JB with faster convergence rate and 9-13% EER reduction compared
with state-of-the-art PLDA.Comment: accepted by ICASSP201
A Scale Mixture Perspective of Multiplicative Noise in Neural Networks
Corrupting the input and hidden layers of deep neural networks (DNNs) with
multiplicative noise, often drawn from the Bernoulli distribution (or
'dropout'), provides regularization that has significantly contributed to deep
learning's success. However, understanding how multiplicative corruptions
prevent overfitting has been difficult due to the complexity of a DNN's
functional form. In this paper, we show that when a Gaussian prior is placed on
a DNN's weights, applying multiplicative noise induces a Gaussian scale
mixture, which can be reparameterized to circumvent the problematic likelihood
function. Analysis can then proceed by using a type-II maximum likelihood
procedure to derive a closed-form expression revealing how regularization
evolves as a function of the network's weights. Results show that
multiplicative noise forces weights to become either sparse or invariant to
rescaling. We find our analysis has implications for model compression as it
naturally reveals a weight pruning rule that starkly contrasts with the
commonly used signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). While the SNR prunes weights with
large variances, seeing them as noisy, our approach recognizes their robustness
and retains them. We empirically demonstrate our approach has a strong
advantage over the SNR heuristic and is competitive to retraining with soft
targets produced from a teacher model
Turbulence and unemployment in a job matching model
According to Ljungqvist and Sargent (1998), high European unemployment since the 1980s can be explained by a rise in economic turbulence, leading to greater numbers of unemployed workers with obsolete skills. These workers refuse new jobs due to high unemployment benefits. In this paper we reassess the turbulence-unemployment relationship using a matching model with endogenous job destruction. In our model, higher turbulence reduces the incentives of employed workers to leave their jobs. If turbulence has only a tiny effect on the skills of workers experiencing endogenous separation, then the results of Lungqvist and Sargent (1998, 2004) are reversed, and higher turbulence leads to a reduction in unemployment. Thus, changes in turbulence cannot provide an explanation for European unemployment that reconciles the incentives of both unemployed and employed workers.Skill loss, European unemployment puzzle
Thermal Dileptons from Coarse-Grained Transport as Fireball Probes at SIS Energies
Utilizing a coarse-graining method to convert hadronic transport simulations
of Au+Au collisions at SIS energies into local temperature, baryon and pion
densities, we compute the pertinent radiation of thermal dileptons based on an
in-medium spectral function that describes available spectra at
ultrarelativistic collision energies. In particular, we analyze how far the
resulting yields and slopes of the invariant-mass spectra can probe the
lifetime and temperatures of the fireball. We find that dilepton radiation sets
in after the initial overlap phase of the colliding nuclei of about 7 fm/c, and
lasts for about 13 fm/c. This duration closely coincides with the development
of the transverse collectivity of the baryons, thus establishing a direct
correlation between hadronic collective effects and thermal EM radiation, and
supporting a near local equilibration of the system. This fireball "lifetime"
is substantially smaller than the typical 20-30 fm/c that naive considerations
of the density evolution alone would suggest. We furthermore find that the
total dilepton yield radiated into the invariant-mass window of
GeV/, normalized to the number of charged pions, follows a relation to
the lifetime found earlier in the (ultra-) relativistic regime of heavy-ion
collisions, and thus corroborates the versatility of this tool. The spectral
slopes of the invariant-mass spectra above the mass provide a
thermometer of the hottest phases of the collision, and agree well with the
maximal temperatures extracted from the coarse-grained hadron spectra.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures; v2: extended discussion, matches the version
accepted for publicatio
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