End-to-End Paired Ambisonic-Binaural Audio Rendering

Binaural rendering is of great interest to virtual reality and immersive media. Although humans can naturally use their two ears to perceive the spatial information contained in sounds, it is a challenging task for machines to achieve binaural rendering since the description of a sound field often requires multiple channels and even the metadata of the sound sources. In addition, the perceived sound varies from person to person even in the same sound field. Previous methods generally rely on individual-dependent head-related transferred function(HRTF)datasets and optimization algorithms that act on HRTFs. In practical applications, there are two major drawbacks to existing methods. The first is a high personalization cost, as traditional methods achieve personalized needs by measuring HRTFs. The second is insufficient accuracy because the optimization goal of traditional methods is to retain another part of information that is more important in perception at the cost of discarding a part of the information. Therefore, it is desirable to develop novel techniques to achieve personalization and accuracy at a low cost. To this end, we focus on the binaural rendering of ambisonic and propose 1) channel-shared encoder and channel-compared attention integrated into neural networks and 2) a loss function quantifying interaural level differences to deal with spatial information. To verify the proposed method, we collect and release the first paired ambisonic-binaural dataset and introduce three metrics to evaluate the content information and spatial information accuracy of the end-to-end methods. Extensive experimental results on the collected dataset demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method and the shortcomings of previous methods.

SOOP: Efficient Distributed Graph Computation Supporting Second-Order Random Walks

The second-order random walk has recently been shown to effectively improve the accuracy in graph analysis tasks.Existing work mainly focuses on centralized second-order random walk(SOW)algorithms.SOW algorithms rely on edge-to-edge transition probabilities to generate next random steps.However,it is prohibitively costly to store all the probabilities for large-scale graphs,and restricting the number of probabilities to consider can negatively impact the accuracy of graph analysis tasks.In this paper,we propose and study an alternative approach,SOOP(second-order random walks with on-demand probability computation),that avoids the space overhead by computing the edge-to-edge transition probabilities on demand during the random walk.However,the same probabilities may be computed multiple times when the same edge appears multiple times in SOW,incurring extra cost for redundant computation and communication.We propose two optimization techniques that reduce the complexity of computing edge-to-edge transition probabilities to generate next random steps,and reduce the cost of communicating out-neighbors for the probability computation,respectively.Our experiments on real-world and synthetic graphs show that SOOP achieves orders of magnitude better performance than baseline precompute solutions,and it can efficiently computes SOW algorithms on billion-scale graphs.

Reflection on China’s Poverty Alleviation over Four Decades of Reform and Opening Up

China has made remarkable progress in the socioeconomic sphere since the reform and opening up in 1978;further,its success in large-scale poverty alleviation has been warmly applauded by the international community.After the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China(CPC)in 2012,the CPC Central Committee and the State Council decided to adopt targeted poverty reduction and alleviation as the basic strategy for providing development-oriented poverty alleviation.The report delivered at the 19th National Congress of the CPC in 2017 proposed that“we must ensure that by the year 2020,all rural residents living below the current poverty line have been lifted out of poverty,and poverty is eliminated in all poor countries and regions.”