293 research outputs found
UWSpeech: Speech to Speech Translation for Unwritten Languages
Existing speech to speech translation systems heavily rely on the text of
target language: they usually translate source language either to target text
and then synthesize target speech from text, or directly to target speech with
target text for auxiliary training. However, those methods cannot be applied to
unwritten target languages, which have no written text or phoneme available. In
this paper, we develop a translation system for unwritten languages, named as
UWSpeech, which converts target unwritten speech into discrete tokens with a
converter, and then translates source-language speech into target discrete
tokens with a translator, and finally synthesizes target speech from target
discrete tokens with an inverter. We propose a method called XL-VAE, which
enhances vector quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) with cross-lingual
(XL) speech recognition, to train the converter and inverter of UWSpeech
jointly. Experiments on Fisher Spanish-English conversation translation dataset
show that UWSpeech outperforms direct translation and VQ-VAE baseline by about
16 and 10 BLEU points respectively, which demonstrate the advantages and
potentials of UWSpeech
Multi-objective analysis of the co-mitigation of CO2 and PM2.5 pollution by China's iron and steel industry
China has experienced serious fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution in recent years, and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions must be controlled so that China can keep its pledge to reduce CO2 emissions by 2030. The iron and steel industry is energy intensive and contributes significantly to PM2.5 pollution in China. The simultaneous reduction of CO2 emissions and PM2.5 pollution while minimizing the total mitigation costs remains a crucial issue that must be resolved. Using a multi-objective analysis, we compared potential technology combinations based on various policy preferences and targets. Our results showed that policies designed to mitigate PM2.5 pollution have substantial co-benefits for CO2 emissions reductions. However, policies focused solely on reducing CO2 emissions fail to effectively reduce PM2.5. Furthermore, CO2 emissions reductions correspond to large financial costs, whereas PM2.5 pollution reductions are less expensive. Our results suggest that under limited budgets, decision makers should prioritize PM2.5 reductions because CO2 reductions may be simultaneously achieved. Achieving large decreases in CO2 emissions will require further technological innovations to reduce the cost threshold. Thus, China should focus on reducing PM pollution in the short term and prepare for the expected challenges associated with CO2 reductions in the future
Lipidomics analysis facilitate insight into the molecular mechanisms of urate nephropathy in a gout model induced by combination of MSU crystals injection and high-fat diet feeding
Renal injury is one of the most common clinical manifestations of patients with hyperuricaemia/gout. The precise pathophysiological mechanism(s) for the renal injury is still unknown. Furthermore, it is also unclear whether the clinical therapies (e.g., colchicine and febuxostat) could prevent its progression or not. Lipids are involved in almost all of important biological processes and play critical roles in maintaining the renal functions. Herein, shotgun lipidomics was performed for class-targeted lipid analysis of cellular lipidomes in renal tissue of a gouty model induced by combination of monosodium urate crystals injection and high-fat diet feeding with/without treatment with either colchicine or febuxostat. Serum uric acid (UA), proinflammatory cytokines (i.e., TNF-α and IL-6), xanthine oxidase activity, footpad swelling, and pain threshold were determined to evaluate the gouty severity. Renal histopathological changes, blood urea nitrogen, creatinine, and kidney index were used to reflect renal injury. Lipidomics analysis revealed that altered triacylglycerol (TAG) profile, impaired mitochondrial function resulted by decreased tetra 18:2 cardiolipin, reduced 4-hydroxyalkenal (HNE) species, and elevated lysophospholipids were already present in the kidneys at early stage of renal injury, probably contributing to its occurrence and development. In addition to significantly reduce the UA level and relief the gouty severity, treatment with either colchicine or febuxostat could restore HNE bioavailability, thereby delaying the progression of renal injury. However, both of them could not recover the altered TAG profile and the impaired mitochondrial function, indicating that treatment with either of them could not completely prevent the development of renal injury in the gouty model
ReLyMe: Improving Lyric-to-Melody Generation by Incorporating Lyric-Melody Relationships
Lyric-to-melody generation, which generates melody according to given lyrics,
is one of the most important automatic music composition tasks. With the rapid
development of deep learning, previous works address this task with end-to-end
neural network models. However, deep learning models cannot well capture the
strict but subtle relationships between lyrics and melodies, which compromises
the harmony between lyrics and generated melodies. In this paper, we propose
ReLyMe, a method that incorporates Relationships between Lyrics and Melodies
from music theory to ensure the harmony between lyrics and melodies.
Specifically, we first introduce several principles that lyrics and melodies
should follow in terms of tone, rhythm, and structure relationships. These
principles are then integrated into neural network lyric-to-melody models by
adding corresponding constraints during the decoding process to improve the
harmony between lyrics and melodies. We use a series of objective and
subjective metrics to evaluate the generated melodies. Experiments on both
English and Chinese song datasets show the effectiveness of ReLyMe,
demonstrating the superiority of incorporating lyric-melody relationships from
the music domain into neural lyric-to-melody generation.Comment: Accepted by ACMMM 2022, ora
How Spin Relaxes and Dephases in Bulk Halide Perovskites
Spintronics in halide perovskites has drawn significant attention in recent
years, due to highly tunable spin-orbit fields and intriguing interplay with
lattice symmetry. Spin lifetime -- a key parameter that determines the
applicability of materials for spintronics and spin-based quantum information
applications -- has been extensively measured in halide perovskites, but not
yet assessed from first-principles calculations. Here, we leverage our
recently-developed \emph{ab initio} density-matrix dynamics framework to
compute the spin relaxation time () and ensemble spin dephasing time
() in a prototype halide perovskite, namely CsPbBr with
self-consistent spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and quantum descriptions of the
electron scattering processes. We also implement the Land\'e -factor for
solids from first principles and take it into account in our dynamics, which is
required to accurately capture spin dephasing at external magnetic fields. We
thereby predict intrinsic spin lifetimes as an upper bound for experiments,
identify the dominant spin relaxation pathways, and evaluate the dependence on
temperature, external fields, carrier density,and impurities. Importantly, we
find that the Fr{\"o}hlich interaction that dominates carrier relaxation
contributes negligibly to spin relaxation, consistent with the spin-conserving
nature of this interaction. We investigated the effect of spin-orbit field with
inversion asymmetry on spin lifetime, and we demonstrated from our calculation,
persistent spin helix can enhance spin lifetime when the spin-split is large,
but it can not be realized by Rashba SOC. Our theoretical approach may lead to
new strategies to optimize spin and carrier transport properties in spintronics
and quantum information applications.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure
MelodyGLM: Multi-task Pre-training for Symbolic Melody Generation
Pre-trained language models have achieved impressive results in various music
understanding and generation tasks. However, existing pre-training methods for
symbolic melody generation struggle to capture multi-scale, multi-dimensional
structural information in note sequences, due to the domain knowledge
discrepancy between text and music. Moreover, the lack of available large-scale
symbolic melody datasets limits the pre-training improvement. In this paper, we
propose MelodyGLM, a multi-task pre-training framework for generating melodies
with long-term structure. We design the melodic n-gram and long span sampling
strategies to create local and global blank infilling tasks for modeling the
local and global structures in melodies. Specifically, we incorporate pitch
n-grams, rhythm n-grams, and their combined n-grams into the melodic n-gram
blank infilling tasks for modeling the multi-dimensional structures in
melodies. To this end, we have constructed a large-scale symbolic melody
dataset, MelodyNet, containing more than 0.4 million melody pieces. MelodyNet
is utilized for large-scale pre-training and domain-specific n-gram lexicon
construction. Both subjective and objective evaluations demonstrate that
MelodyGLM surpasses the standard and previous pre-training methods. In
particular, subjective evaluations show that, on the melody continuation task,
MelodyGLM gains average improvements of 0.82, 0.87, 0.78, and 0.94 in
consistency, rhythmicity, structure, and overall quality, respectively.
Notably, MelodyGLM nearly matches the quality of human-composed melodies on the
melody inpainting task
WuYun: Exploring hierarchical skeleton-guided melody generation using knowledge-enhanced deep learning
Although deep learning has revolutionized music generation, existing methods
for structured melody generation follow an end-to-end left-to-right
note-by-note generative paradigm and treat each note equally. Here, we present
WuYun, a knowledge-enhanced deep learning architecture for improving the
structure of generated melodies, which first generates the most structurally
important notes to construct a melodic skeleton and subsequently infills it
with dynamically decorative notes into a full-fledged melody. Specifically, we
use music domain knowledge to extract melodic skeletons and employ sequence
learning to reconstruct them, which serve as additional knowledge to provide
auxiliary guidance for the melody generation process. We demonstrate that WuYun
can generate melodies with better long-term structure and musicality and
outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by 0.51 on average on all subjective
evaluation metrics. Our study provides a multidisciplinary lens to design
melodic hierarchical structures and bridge the gap between data-driven and
knowledge-based approaches for numerous music generation tasks
Total genetic contribution assessment across the human genome
Quantifying the overall magnitude of every single locus' genetic effect on the widely measured human phenome is of great challenge. We introduce a unified modelling technique that can consistently provide a total genetic contribution assessment (TGCA) of a gene or genetic variant without thresholding genetic association signals. Genome-wide TGCA in five UK Biobank phenotype domains highlights loci such as the HLA locus for medical conditions, the bone mineral density locus WNT16 for physical measures, and the skin tanning locus MC1R and smoking behaviour locus CHRNA3 for lifestyle. Tissue-specificity investigation reveals several tissues associated with total genetic contributions, including the brain tissues for mental health. Such associations are driven by tissue-specific gene expressions, which share genetic basis with the total genetic contributions. TGCA can provide a genome-wide atlas for the overall genetic contributions in each particular domain of human complex traits. Quantifying the effects of individual loci on the human phenome is a challenging task. Here, the authors introduce a modelling technique, TGCA, that assesses total genetic contribution per locus and apply this to UK Biobank phenotype domains, revealing top loci and links to tissue-specific gene expression
- …