arXiv subjects

Cheng Siong Chin

Publications and source records attributed to Cheng Siong Chin.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Computing at Sea: Floating and Offshore Data Centres as a Pathway to Sustainable AI Infrastructure

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is transforming data centres into one of the world's fastest-growing sources of electricity demand. As AI systems scale in size and capability, the physical infrastructure supporting computation is approaching critical limits in energy availability, cooling capacity, land use, freshwater consumption, and carbon management. Conventional land-based data centres are increasingly constrained by urban land competition, grid congestion, environmental pressures, and lengthy permitting processes, raising fundamental questions about where future computing infrastructure can sustainably exist. This article examines floating and offshore data centres as an emerging alternative model for digital infrastructure. By relocating computation to marine environments, offshore systems can exploit the ocean's natural cooling capacity, reduce freshwater dependence, and enable direct integration with offshore renewable energy resources such as wind, wave, and tidal power. Early deployments have demonstrated the potential for significantly improved energy efficiency and operational reliability compared with conventional facilities, while also opening new possibilities for distributed and resilient computing architectures. The article explores how offshore computing may reshape the future relationship between electrification, renewable energy, and large-scale AI infrastructure. It analyses the opportunities and trade-offs associated with marine deployment, including environmental impacts, engineering design challenges, economic feasibility, and regulatory governance. Rather than treating offshore data centres as experimental novelties, the article presents them as part of a broader systems-level transition in how society may power, cool, and sustain the next generation of computational growth.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

The Logic of Machine Self-Preservation

There is already evidence of agentic AI exhibiting self-preservation behaviors: resisting deactivation, misrepresenting their activities, and, in some instances, attempting to copy themselves into other machines. This can be attributed to a phenomenon known as instrumental convergence, a theory proposed long before the development of large language models, which says that any goal-driven system will benefit from remaining functional in achieving its objective. Several experiments conducted by Anthropic, Palisade Research, and Apollo Research have shown the emergence of such a behavior in contemporary agents in adversarial settings. The phenomenon does not stem from survival instincts. Instead, it is the consequence of goal-oriented activity combined with having tools and awareness of the situation. The following discussion aims to distinguish what these findings prove and what they do not, as well as draw conclusions concerning the implications of such discoveries on agentic system testing, supervision, and development.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Machines that know they are aging: a framework for hardware-aware autonomous intelligence

Autonomous systems inevitably age, yet their artificial intelligence typically assumes hardware remains in its original condition. Batteries degrade, sensors drift, processors accumulate timing errors, and memory reliability declines, creating a growing mismatch between assumed and actual capability. This can lead to agnostic collapse, where mission failure arises from accumulated hardware degradation rather than a single component fault. We propose Aging-Aware Autonomous Intelligence (AAAI), a framework that integrates hardware health directly into reasoning, planning, and mission execution. AAAI is built on three pillars: hardware self-awareness, which continuously estimates the health of power, sensing, memory, and computation subsystems using physics-of-failure models; self-adaptive reasoning, which adjusts inference complexity, planning horizon, and task priorities according to remaining hardware capability; and survival-centric intelligence, which allocates remaining operational life across mission objectives through performance optimization, resource conservation, and graceful degradation. Rather than introducing new hardware, AAAI unifies prognostics, lifecycle management, and hardware-aware computing into a closed-loop cognitive architecture. We argue that such integration is essential for autonomous systems operating in inaccessible or safety-critical environments, including space missions, marine robotics, and implantable medical devices. By enabling machines to recognize and respond to their own aging, AAAI improves resilience, extends operational lifetime, and supports safer, more graceful mission completion.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

What the Waveform Knows: Transparent-first Speech and Audio Intelligence with Caption Studio

Caption Studio is a transparency-first speech and audio intelligence platform that transforms spoken audio and video into structured, searchable content through automated transcription, speaker diarization, speech analytics, signal-level audio analysis, and subtitle generation. The system is built on a FastAPI backend with a real-time dashboard and adopts a three-layer architecture comprising (i) a transcription and diarization core based on Whisper-class automatic speech recognition and pyannote speaker diarization, (ii) an audio intelligence layer that extracts acoustic and linguistic features, including waveforms, spectrograms, pitch, speaking rate, silence, filler-word frequency, and sentiment, directly from the audio signal, and (iii) an integration layer that supports data export and downstream workflow integration. A principal contribution of this work is the transparency-first framework, in which every reported metric is explicitly identified as measured, derived, or unavailable, thereby improving the traceability, interpretability, and reliability of speech analytics. The paper presents the system architecture, benchmarking methodology, explainability and uncertainty framework, and key considerations for enterprise-scale deployment.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2021

Detecting Sound Events Using Convolutional Macaron Net With Pseudo Strong Labels

In this paper, we propose addressing the lack of strongly labeled data by using pseudo strongly labeled data approximated using Convolutive Nonnegative Matrix Factorization. Using this set of data, we then train a novel architecture called the Convolutional Macaron Net (CMN), which combines Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with MN, in a semi-supervised manner. Instead of training only a single model or using the Mean-teacher approach, we train two different CMNs synchronously using a curriculum consistency cost and a curriculum interpolated consistency cost. In the inference stage, one of the models will provide the frame-level prediction while the other model will provide the clip-level prediction. Our system outperforms the baseline system of the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2020 Challenge Task 4 by a margin of over 10% based on our proposed framework. By comparing with the top submission of the DCASE 2019 challenge, our system accuracy is also higher by 1.8%. On the other hand, as compared to the top submission of DCASE 2020, our accuracy is also marginally higher by 0.3%, even with fewer Transformer encoding layers. Our system remains robust on unseen YouTube evaluation dataset and has a winning margin of 0.6% and 6.3% against the top submission of DCASE 2019 and the baseline system.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2020

Acoustic Scene Classification Using Bilinear Pooling on Time-liked and Frequency-liked Convolution Neural Network

The current methodology in tackling Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC) task can be described in two steps, preprocessing of the audio waveform into log-mel spectrogram and then using it as the input representation for Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). This paradigm shift occurs after DCASE 2016 where this framework model achieves the state-of-the-art result in ASC tasks on the (ESC-50) dataset and achieved an accuracy of 64.5%, which constitute to 20.5% improvement over the baseline model, and DCASE 2016 dataset with an accuracy of 90.0% (development) and 86.2% (evaluation), which constitute a 6.4% and 9% improvements with respect to the baseline system. In this paper, we explored the use of harmonic and percussive source separation (HPSS) to split the audio into harmonic audio and percussive audio, which has received popularity in the field of music information retrieval (MIR). Although works have been done in using HPSS as input representation for CNN model in ASC task, this paper further investigate the possibility on leveraging the separated harmonic component and percussive component by curating 2 CNNs which tries to understand harmonic audio and percussive audio in their natural form, one specialized in extracting deep features in time biased domain and another specialized in extracting deep features in frequency biased domain, respectively. The deep features extracted from these 2 CNNs will then be combined using bilinear pooling. Hence, presenting a two-stream time and frequency CNN architecture approach in classifying acoustic scene. The model is being evaluated on DCASE 2019 sub task 1a dataset and scored an average of 65% on development dataset, Kaggle Leadership Private and Public board.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2020

Non-Negative Matrix Factorization-Convolutional Neural Network (NMF-CNN) For Sound Event Detection

The main scientific question of this year DCASE challenge, Task 4 - Sound Event Detection in Domestic Environments, is to investigate the types of data (strongly labeled synthetic data, weakly labeled data, unlabeled in domain data) required to achieve the best performing system. In this paper, we proposed a deep learning model that integrates Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The key idea of such integration is to use NMF to provide an approximate strong label to the weakly labeled data. Such integration was able to achieve a higher event-based F1-score as compared to the baseline system (Evaluation Dataset: 30.39% vs. 23.7%, Validation Dataset: 31% vs. 25.8%). By comparing the validation results with other participants, the proposed system was ranked 8th among 19 teams (inclusive of the baseline system) in this year Task 4 challenge.

cs.SD↗