arXiv subjects

Jordan Prescott

Publications and source records attributed to Jordan Prescott.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Attack-Dependent Robustness of Neural Audio Codecs for Adversarial ASR

Neural audio codecs impose a discrete bottleneck through residual vector quantization (RVQ), making them a useful class of inference-time transformations for reducing adversarial perturbations before ASR inference. We study how codec quantization depth affects defended ASR under non-adaptive, standard adaptive, and quantization-aware adaptive untargeted $\ell_\infty$ attacks. Under non-adaptive attacks, intermediate RVQ depths yield the lowest word error rates and outperform traditional compression at comparable bitrates. However, this apparent optimum is not stable under adaptive evaluation. The standard identity-gradient adaptive baseline (BPDA+EOT) can overestimate robustness, while an implementation of an RVQ-relaxed adaptive attack (SoftVQ-PGD) substantially changes the observed depth trend and largely removes the intermediate-depth advantage. Overall, neural codecs can improve defended ASR under specific threat models. However, the relationship between robustness and RVQ depth depends on the attack used for evaluation, rather than on the codec architecture alone.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2026

Encoding Emotion Through Self-Supervised Eye Movement Reconstruction

The relationship between emotional expression and eye movement is well-documented, with literature establishing gaze patterns are reliable indicators of emotion. However, most studies utilize specialized, high-resolution eye-tracking equipment, limiting the potential reach of findings. We investigate how eye movement can be used to predict multimodal markers of emotional expression from naturalistic, low-resolution videos. We utilize a collection of video interviews from the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive with Holocaust survivors as they recount their experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Inspired by pretraining methods on language models, we develop a novel gaze detection model that uses self-supervised eye movement reconstruction that can effectively leverage unlabeled video. We use this model's encoder embeddings to fine-tune models on two downstream tasks related to emotional expression. The first is aligning eye movement with directional emotion estimates from speech. The second task is using eye gaze as a predictor of three momentary manifestations of emotional behaviors: laughing, crying/sobbing, and sighing. We find our new model is predictive of emotion outcomes and observe a positive correlation between pretraining performance and emotion processing performance for both experiments. We conclude self-supervised eye movement reconstruction is an effective method for encoding the affective signal they carry.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Efficient Industrial Refrigeration Scheduling with Peak Pricing

The widespread use of industrial refrigeration systems across various sectors contribute significantly to global energy consumption, highlighting substantial opportunities for energy conservation through intelligent control design. As such, this work focuses on control algorithm design in industrial refrigeration that minimize operational costs and provide efficient heat extraction. By adopting tools from inventory control, we characterize the structure of these optimal control policies, exploring the impact of different energy cost-rate structures such as time-of-use (TOU) pricing and peak pricing. While classical threshold policies are optimal under TOU costs, introducing peak pricing challenges their optimality, emphasizing the need for carefully designed control strategies in the presence of significant peak costs. We provide theoretical findings and simulation studies on this phenomenon, offering insights for more efficient industrial refrigeration management.

eess.SY↗