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Harvey Mudd College

Academic institutionnorthamerica · us
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Research library33linked papers
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Selected work

Representative Papers

Beating Meet-in-the-Middle for Subset Balancing Problems

Nov 13, 2025

This paper studies the Subset Balancing problem: given an integer vector and a constant-size coefficient set (C), find a nonzero integer solution vector (x) such that the dot product of (x) and the input vector is zero. The problem unifies classical NP-hard problems including Subset Sum, Partition, and Equal Subset Sum. Addressing the long-standing worst-case time complexity bottleneck—the Meet-in-the-Middle lower bound of (O(|C|^{n/2}))—this work achieves the first worst-case improvement. We introduce a novel hybrid representation technique, extend the Howgrave-Graham-Joux framework, incorporate flexible input encoding and pseudosolution cancellation, and design an efficient compatible solution-pair recovery algorithm. Our main result is a deterministic (O(|C|^{(0.5-varepsilon)n})) time algorithm for some constant (varepsilon > 0). This yields exponential speedups for Equal Subset Sum and related problems, significantly surpassing prior state-of-the-art algorithms, which only achieve such bounds in average-case settings.

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Dense-Sparse Dynamic Time Warping for Customizing Piano Concerto Accompaniments

Jul 20, 2026

This study addresses the challenge of customizing orchestral accompaniments for pianists’ individual performance styles in the absence of digital scores, while mitigating spectral mismatches caused by inter-recording voicing differences. The authors propose a Dense-Sparse Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) approach that enhances alignment robustness under spectral mismatch by focusing on a sparse subset of audio frames containing salient temporal cues. Coupled with time-scale modification and multi-source audio alignment techniques, the method synchronizes the orchestral part to the user’s piano performance without requiring symbolic scores or source separation. Evaluated on a benchmark comprising four piano concerto movements, the proposed approach achieves performance comparable to or better than sophisticated baselines relying on source separation and spectral subtraction for accompaniment customization.

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Audio Cross Verification Using Dual Alignment Likelihood Ratio Test

Jul 20, 2026

This study addresses the challenge of detecting audio manipulations in short videos derived from news recordings by proposing an external consistency verification framework based on dual-alignment likelihood ratio testing. The method aligns the questioned audio with a trusted reference recording in an optimal manner and formulates two competing hypotheses—unaltered versus tampered—computing their likelihood ratio to assess audio consistency. Compared to conventional approaches relying on MFCC features and Euclidean distance, the proposed framework demonstrates significant improvements in computational efficiency, robustness, and interpretability. It achieves superior performance on real-world news audio verification tasks, offering a novel and effective direction for audio forensic analysis.

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Recent publications

Latest Papers

Dense-Sparse Dynamic Time Warping for Customizing Piano Concerto Accompaniments

Jul 20, 2026

This study addresses the challenge of customizing orchestral accompaniments for pianists’ individual performance styles in the absence of digital scores, while mitigating spectral mismatches caused by inter-recording voicing differences. The authors propose a Dense-Sparse Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) approach that enhances alignment robustness under spectral mismatch by focusing on a sparse subset of audio frames containing salient temporal cues. Coupled with time-scale modification and multi-source audio alignment techniques, the method synchronizes the orchestral part to the user’s piano performance without requiring symbolic scores or source separation. Evaluated on a benchmark comprising four piano concerto movements, the proposed approach achieves performance comparable to or better than sophisticated baselines relying on source separation and spectral subtraction for accompaniment customization.

0 citationsRead paper

Audio Cross Verification Using Dual Alignment Likelihood Ratio Test

Jul 20, 2026

This study addresses the challenge of detecting audio manipulations in short videos derived from news recordings by proposing an external consistency verification framework based on dual-alignment likelihood ratio testing. The method aligns the questioned audio with a trusted reference recording in an optimal manner and formulates two competing hypotheses—unaltered versus tampered—computing their likelihood ratio to assess audio consistency. Compared to conventional approaches relying on MFCC features and Euclidean distance, the proposed framework demonstrates significant improvements in computational efficiency, robustness, and interpretability. It achieves superior performance on real-world news audio verification tasks, offering a novel and effective direction for audio forensic analysis.

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Estimating the Reliability of Dynamic Time Warping Alignments Using Circumstantial Evidence

Jul 16, 2026

This work addresses the lack of reliability assessment in local alignments produced by Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). It introduces the first unsupervised reliability metric capable of identifying trustworthy alignment regions without requiring ground-truth labels. The method leverages FlexDTW—a variant of DTW with relaxed boundary constraints—to generate alternative alignment paths, which are then compared against the original DTW path to compute a local consistency-based reliability score. Evaluated on audio-to-audio alignment tasks, the approach demonstrates strong performance across diverse scenarios, achieving an average AUROC of 0.97 and effectively quantifying the uncertainty inherent in DTW alignments.

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