New Bounds for Keyed Sponges with Extendable Output: Independence between Capacity and Message Length

We provide new bounds for the pseudo-random function security of keyed sponge constructions. For the case $c\leq b/2$ ($c$ the capacity and $b$ the permutation size), our result improves over all previously-known bounds. A remarkable aspect of our bound is that dependence between capacity and message length is removed, partially solving the open problem posed by Gaži~et~al. at CRYPTO~2015. Our bound is essentially tight, matching the two types of attacks pointed out by Gaži~et~al. For the case $c>b/2$, Gaži~et~al.\u27s bound remains the best for the case of single-block output, but for keyed sponges with extendable outputs, our result partly (when query complexity is relatively large) provides better security than Mennink~et~al.\u27s bound presented at ASIACRYPT~2015

Neural Harmonic-plus-Noise Waveform Model with Trainable Maximum Voice Frequency for Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Neural source-filter (NSF) models are deep neural networks that produce waveforms given input acoustic features. They use dilated-convolution-based neural filter modules to filter sine-based excitation for waveform generation, which is different from WaveNet and flow-based models. One of the NSF models, called harmonic-plus-noise NSF (h-NSF) model, uses separate pairs of source and neural filters to generate harmonic and noise waveform components. It is close to WaveNet in terms of speech quality while being superior in generation speed. The h-NSF model can be improved even further. While h-NSF merges the harmonic and noise components using pre-defined digital low- and high-pass filters, it is well known that the maximum voice frequency (MVF) that separates the periodic and aperiodic spectral bands are time-variant. Therefore, we propose a new h-NSF model with time-variant and trainable MVF. We parameterize the digital low- and high-pass filters as windowed-sinc filters and predict their cut-off frequency (i.e., MVF) from the input acoustic features. Our experiments demonstrated that the new model can predict a good trajectory of the MVF and produce high-quality speech for a text-to-speech synthesis system.Comment: Accepted by Speech Synthesis Workshop 201

Cold water upwelling and entrainment near the Anadyr Strait: Implications to the North Pacific-Arctic interaction

The Tenth Symposium on Polar Science/Ordinary sessions: [OM] Polar Meteorology and Glaciology, Wed. 4 Dec. / Entrance Hall (1st floor) , National Institute of Polar Researc