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Multimodal emotion recognition from speech is an important area in affective computing. Fusing multiple data modalities and learning representations with limited amounts of labeled data is a challenging task. In this paper, we explore the use of modality specific"BERT-like" pretrained Self Supervised Learning (SSL) architectures to represent both speech and text modalities for the task of multimodal speech emotion recognition. By conducting experiments on three publicly available datasets (IEMOCAP, CMU-MOSEI, and CMU-MOSI), we show that jointly fine-tuning "BERT-like" SSL architectures achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. We also evaluate two methods of fusing speech and text modalities and show that a simple fusion mechanism can outperform more complex ones when using SSL models that have similar architectural properties to BERT.

Retrieval Augment Generation (RAG) is a recent advancement in Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA). RAG has only been trained and explored with a Wikipedia-based external knowledge base and is not optimized for use in other specialized domains such as healthcare and news. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of joint training of the retriever and generator components of RAG for the task of domain adaptation in ODQA. We propose RAG-end2end, an extension to RAG that can adapt to a domain-specific knowledge base by updating all components of the external knowledge base during training. In addition, we introduce an auxiliary training signal to inject more domain-specific knowledge. This auxiliary signal forces RAG-end2end to reconstruct a given sentence by accessing the relevant information from the external knowledge base. Our novel contribution is that, unlike RAG, RAG-end2end does joint training of the retriever and generator for the end QA task and domain adaptation. We evaluate our approach with datasets from three domains: COVID-19, News, and Conversations, and achieve significant performance improvements compared to the original RAG model. Our work has been open-sourced through the HuggingFace Transformers library, attesting to our work’s credibility and technical consistency.

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Short-term traffic prediction is a key component of Intelligent Transportation Systems. It uses historical data to construct models for reliably predicting traffic state at specific locations in road networks in the near future. Despite being a mature field, short-term traffic prediction still poses some open problems related to the choice of optimal data resolution, prediction of nonrecurring congestion, and the modelling of relevant spatiotemporal dependencies. As a step towards addressing these problems, this paper investigates the ability of Artificial Neural Networks, Random Forests, and Support Vector Regression algorithms to reliably model traffic flow at different data resolutions and respond to unexpected traffic incidents. We also explore different feature selection methods to identify and better understand the spatiotemporal attributes that most influence the reliability of these models. Experimental results indicate that data aggregation does not necessarily achieve good performance for multivariate spatiotemporal machine learning models. The models learned using high-resolution 30-second input data outperformed the corresponding baseline ARIMA models by 8%. Furthermore, feature selection based on Recursive Feature Elimination resulted in models that outperformed those based on linear correlation-based feature selection.