OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning Audio Concepts from Counterfactual Natural Language
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Conventional audio classification relied on predefined classes, lacking the ability to learn from free-form text. Recent methods unlock learning joint audio-text embeddings from raw audio-text pairs describing audio in natural language. Despite recent advancements, there is little exploration of systematic methods to train models for recognizing sound events and sources in alternative scenarios, such as distinguishing fireworks from gunshots at outdoor events in similar situations. This study introduces causal reasoning and counterfactual analysis in the audio domain. We use counterfactual instances and include them in our model across different aspects. Our model considers acoustic characteristics and sound source information from human-annotated reference texts. To validate the effectiveness of our model, we conducted pre-training utilizing multiple audio captioning datasets. We then evaluate with several common downstream tasks, demonstrating the merits of the proposed method as one of the first works leveraging counterfactual information in audio domain. Specifically, the top-1 accuracy in open-ended language-based audio retrieval task increased by more than 43%.
A Multimodal Approach to Device-Directed Speech Detection with Large Language Models
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Interactions with virtual assistants typically start with a predefined trigger phrase followed by the user command. To make interactions with the assistant more intuitive, we explore whether it is feasible to drop the requirement that users must begin each command with a trigger phrase. We explore this task in three ways: First, we train classifiers using only acoustic information obtained from the audio waveform. Second, we take the decoder outputs of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, such as 1-best hypotheses, as input features to a large language model (LLM). Finally, we explore a multimodal system that combines acoustic and lexical features, as well as ASR decoder signals in an LLM. Using multimodal information yields relative equal-error-rate improvements over text-only and audio-only models of up to 39% and 61%. Increasing the size of the LLM and training with low-rank adaption leads to further relative EER reductions of up to 18% on our dataset.
Residualtransformer: Residual Low-Rank Learning With Weight-Sharing For Transformer Layers
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Memory constraint of always-on devices is one of the major concerns when deploying speech processing models on these devices. While larger models trained with sufficiently large amount of data generally perform better, making them fit in the device memory is a demanding challenge. In this paper, we aim to reduce model size by reparameterizing model weights across Transformer encoder layers and assuming a special weight composition and structure. More specifically, inspired by ResNet and the more recent LoRA work, we propose an approach named ResidualTransformer, where each weight matrix in a Transformer layer comprises 1) a shared full-rank component with its adjacent layers, and 2) a unique low-rank component to itself. The low-rank matrices only account for a small amount of model size increase. In addition, we add diagonal weight matrices to improve modeling capacity of the low-rank matrices. Experiments of our 10k-hour speech recognition and speech translation tasks show that the Transformer encoder size can be reduced by ~3X with very slight performance degradation.
Exploiting Modality-Specific Features for Multi-Modal Manipulation Detection and Grounding
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

AI-synthesized text and images have gained significant attention, particularly due to the widespread dissemination of multi-modal manipulations on the internet, which has resulted in numerous negative impacts on society. Existing methods for multi-modal manipulation detection and grounding primarily focus on fusing vision-language features to make predictions, while overlooking the importance of modality-specific features, leading to sub-optimal results. In this paper, we construct a simple and novel transformer-based framework for multi-modal manipulation detection and grounding tasks. Our framework simultaneously explores modality-specific features while preserving the capability for multi-modal alignment. To achieve this, we introduce visual/language pre-trained encoders and dual-branch cross-attention (DCA) to extract and fuse modality-unique features. Furthermore, we design decoupled fine-grained classifiers (DFC) to enhance modality-specific feature mining and mitigate modality competition. Moreover, we propose an implicit manipulation query (IMQ) that adaptively aggregates global contextual cues within each modality using learnable queries, thereby improving the discovery of forged details. Extensive experiments on the $\rm DGM^4$ dataset demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed model compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
Federated Learning with Instance-Dependent Noisy Label
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Federated learning (FL) with noisy labels poses a significant challenge. Existing methods designed for handling noisy labels in centralized learning tend to lose their effectiveness in the FL setting, mainly due to the small dataset size and the heterogeneity of client data. While some attempts have been made to tackle FL with noisy labels, they primarily focused on scenarios involving class-conditional noise. In this paper, we study the more challenging and practical issue of instance-dependent noise (IDN) in FL. We introduce a novel algorithm called FedBeat (Federated Learning with Bayesian Ensemble-Assisted Transition Matrix Estimation). FedBeat aims to build a global statistically consistent classifier using the IDN transition matrix (IDNTM), which encompasses three synergistic steps: (1) A federated data extraction step that constructs a weak global model and extracts high-confidence data using a Bayesian model ensemble method. (2) A federated transition matrix estimation step in which clients collaboratively train an IDNTM estimation network based on the extracted data. (3) A federated classifier correction step that enhances the global model's performance by training it using a loss function tailored for noisy labels, leveraging the IDNTM. Experiments conducted on CIFAR-10 and SVHN verify that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Robust Wake Word Spotting With Frame-Level Cross-Modal Attention Based Audio-Visual Conformer
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, neural network-based Wake Word Spotting achieves good performance on clean audio samples but struggles in noisy environments. Audio-Visual Wake Word Spotting (AVWWS) receives lots of attention because visual lip movement information is not affected by complex acoustic scenes. Previous works usually use simple addition or concatenation for multi-modal fusion. The inter-modal correlation remains relatively under-explored. In this paper, we propose a novel module called Frame-Level Cross-Modal Attention (FLCMA) to improve the performance of AVWWS systems. This module can help model multi-modal information at the frame-level through synchronous lip movements and speech signals. We train the end-to-end FLCMA based Audio-Visual Conformer and further improve the performance by fine-tuning pre-trained uni-modal models for the AVWWS task. The proposed system achieves a new state-of-the-art result (4.57% WWS score) on the far-field MISP dataset.
Turn-Taking and Backchannel Prediction with Acoustic and Large Language Model Fusion
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

We propose an approach for continuous prediction of turn-taking and backchanneling locations in spoken dialogue by fusing a neural acoustic model with a large language model (LLM). Experiments on the Switchboard human-human conversation dataset demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms the baseline models with single modality. We also develop a novel multi-task instruction fine-tuning strategy to further benefit from LLM-encoded knowledge for understanding the tasks and conversational contexts, leading to additional improvements. Our approach demonstrates the potential of combined LLMs and acoustic models for a more natural and conversational interaction between humans and speech-enabled AI agents.
Domain-Adaptive and Subgroup-Specific Cascaded Temperature Regression for Out-of-Distribution Calibration
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Although deep neural networks yield high classification accuracy given sufficient training data, their predictions are typically overconfident or under-confident, i.e., the prediction confidences cannot truly reflect the accuracy. Post-hoc calibration tackles this problem by calibrating the prediction confidences without re-training the classification model. However, current approaches assume congruence between test and validation data distributions, limiting their applicability to out-of-distribution scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel meta-set-based cascaded temperature regression method for post-hoc calibration. Our method tailors fine-grained scaling functions to distinct test sets by simulating various domain shifts through data augmentation on the validation set. We partition each meta-set into subgroups based on predicted category and confidence level, capturing diverse uncertainties. A regression network is then trained to derive category-specific and confidence-level-specific scaling, achieving calibration across meta-sets. Extensive experimental results on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and TinyImageNet demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Multiscale Matching Driven by Cross-Modal Similarity Consistency for Audio-Text Retrieval
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Audio-text retrieval (ATR), which retrieves a relevant caption given an audio clip (A2T) and vice versa (T2A), has recently attracted much research attention. Existing methods typically aggregate information from each modality into a single vector for matching, but this sacrifices local details and can hardly capture intricate relationships within and between modalities. Furthermore, current ATR datasets lack comprehensive alignment information, and simple binary contrastive learning labels overlook the measurement of fine-grained semantic differences between samples. To counter these challenges, we present a novel ATR framework that comprehensively captures the matching relationships of multimodal information from different perspectives and finer granularities. Specifically, a fine-grained alignment method is introduced, achieving a more detail-oriented matching through a multiscale process from local to global levels to capture meticulous cross-modal relationships. In addition, we pioneer the application of cross-modal similarity consistency, leveraging intra-modal similarity relationships as soft supervision to boost more intricate alignment. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming previous methods by significant margins of at least 3.9% (T2A) / 6.9% (A2T) R@1 on the AudioCaps dataset and 2.9% (T2A) / 5.4% (A2T) R@1 on the Clotho dataset.
Hint-Enhanced In-Context Learning Wakes Large Language Models Up For Knowledge-Intensive Tasks
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

In-context learning (ICL) ability has emerged with the increasing scale of large language models (LLMs), enabling them to learn input-label mappings from demonstrations and perform well on downstream tasks. However, under the standard ICL setting, LLMs may sometimes neglect query-related information in demonstrations, leading to incorrect predictions. To address this limitation, we propose a new paradigm called Hint-enhanced In-Context Learning (HICL) to explore the power of ICL in open-domain question answering, an important form in knowledge-intensive tasks. HICL leverages LLMs' reasoning ability to extract query-related knowledge from demonstrations, then concatenates the knowledge to prompt LLMs in a more explicit way. Furthermore, we track the source of this knowledge to identify specific examples, and introduce a Hint-related Example Retriever (HER) to select informative examples for enhanced demonstrations. We evaluate HICL with HER on 3 open-domain QA benchmarks, and observe average performance gains of 2.89 EM score and 2.52 F1 score on gpt-3.5-turbo, 7.62 EM score and 7.27 F1 score on LLaMA-2-Chat-7B compared with standard setting.
MLCA-AVSR: Multi-Layer Cross Attention Fusion Based Audio-Visual Speech Recognition
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

While automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems degrade significantly in noisy environments, audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) systems aim to complement the audio stream with noise-invariant visual cues and improve the system's robustness. However, current studies mainly focus on fusing the well-learned modality features, like the output of modality-specific encoders, without considering the contextual relationship during the modality feature learning. In this study, we propose a multi-layer cross-attention fusion based AVSR (MLCA-AVSR) approach that promotes representation learning of each modality by fusing them at different levels of audio/visual encoders. Experimental results on the MISP2022-AVSR Challenge dataset show the efficacy of our proposed system, achieving a concatenated minimum permutation character error rate (cpCER) of 30.57% on the Eval set and yielding up to 3.17% relative improvement compared with our previous system which ranked the second place in the challenge. Following the fusion of multiple systems, our proposed approach surpasses the first-place system, establishing a new SOTA cpCER of 29.13% on this dataset.
Parallel Augmentation and Dual Enhancement for Occluded Person Re-Identification
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Occluded person re-identification (Re-ID), the task of searching for the same person's images in occluded environments, has attracted lots of attention in the past decades. Recent approaches concentrate on improving performance on occluded data by data/feature augmentation or using extra models to predict occlusions. However, they ignore the imbalance problem in this task and can not fully utilize the information from the training data. To alleviate these two issues, we propose a simple yet effective method with Parallel Augmentation and Dual Enhancement (PADE), which is robust on both occluded and non-occluded data and does not require any auxiliary clues. First, we design a parallel augmentation mechanism (PAM) to generate more suitable occluded data to mitigate the negative effects of unbalanced data. Second, we propose the global and local dual enhancement strategy (DES) to promote the context information and details. Experimental results on three widely used occluded datasets and two non-occluded datasets validate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/littleprince1121/PADE_Parallel_Augmentation_and_Dual_Enhancement_for_Occluded_Person_ReID
Enhancing Pre-Trained ASR System Fine-Tuning for Dysarthric Speech Recognition Using Adversarial Data Augmentation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Automatic recognition of dysarthric speech remains a highly challenging task to date. Neuro-motor conditions and co-occurring physical disabilities create difficulty in large-scale data collection for ASR system development. Adapting SSL pre-trained ASR models to limited dysarthric speech via data-intensive parameter fine-tuning leads to poor generalization. To this end, this paper presents an extensive comparative study of various data augmentation approaches to improve the robustness of pre-trained ASR model fine-tuning to dysarthric speech. These include: a) conventional speaker-independent perturbation of impaired speech; b) speaker-dependent speed perturbation, or GAN-based adversarial perturbation of normal, control speech based on their time alignment against parallel dysarthric speech; c) novel Spectral basis GAN-based adversarial data augmentation operating on non-parallel data. Experiments conducted on the UASpeech corpus suggest GAN-based data augmentation consistently outperforms fine-tuned Wav2vec2.0 and HuBERT models using no data augmentation and speed perturbation across different data expansion operating points by statistically significant word error rate (WER) reductions up to 2.01% and 0.96% absolute (9.03% and 4.63% relative) respectively on the UASpeech test set of 16 dysarthric speakers. After cross-system outputs rescoring, the best system produced the lowest published WER of 16.53% (46.47% on very low intelligibility) on UASpeech.
MSSTNet: A Multi-Scale Spatio-Temporal CNN-Transformer Network for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Unlike typical video action recognition, Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition (DFER) does not involve distinct moving targets but relies on localized changes in facial muscles. Addressing this distinctive attribute, we propose a Multi-Scale Spatio-temporal CNN-Transformer network (MSSTNet). Our approach takes spatial features of different scales extracted by CNN and feeds them into a Multi-scale Embedding Layer (MELayer). The MELayer extracts multi-scale spatial information and encodes these features before sending them into a Temporal Transformer (T-Former). The T-Former simultaneously extracts temporal information while continually integrating multi-scale spatial information. This process culminates in the generation of multi-scale spatio-temporal features that are utilized for the final classification. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on two in-the-wild datasets. Furthermore, a series of ablation experiments and visualizations provide further validation of our approach's proficiency in leveraging spatio-temporal information within DFER.
Eye Motion Matters for 3D Face Reconstruction
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advances in single-image 3D face reconstruction have shown remarkable progress in various applications. Nevertheless, prevailing techniques tend to prioritize the global facial contour and expression, often neglecting the nuanced dynamics of the eye region. In response, we introduce an Eye Landmark Adjustment Module, complemented by a Local Dynamic Loss, designed to capture the dynamic features of the eyes area. Our module allows for flexible adjustment of landmarks, resulting in accurate recreation of various eye states. In this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation of our approach, conducting extensive experiments on two datasets. The results underscore the superior performance of our approach, highlighting its significant contributions in addressing this particular challenge.
Speech Swin-Transformer: Exploring a Hierarchical Transformer with Shifted Windows for Speech Emotion Recognition
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Swin-Transformer has demonstrated remarkable success in computer vision by leveraging its hierarchical feature representation based on Transformer. In speech signals, emotional information is distributed across different scales of speech features, e.\,g., word, phrase, and utterance. Drawing above inspiration, this paper presents a hierarchical speech Transformer with shifted windows to aggregate multi-scale emotion features for speech emotion recognition (SER), called Speech Swin-Transformer. Specifically, we first divide the speech spectrogram into segment-level patches in the time domain, composed of multiple frame patches. These segment-level patches are then encoded using a stack of Swin blocks, in which a local window Transformer is utilized to explore local inter-frame emotional information across frame patches of each segment patch. After that, we also design a shifted window Transformer to compensate for patch correlations near the boundaries of segment patches. Finally, we employ a patch merging operation to aggregate segment-level emotional features for hierarchical speech representation by expanding the receptive field of Transformer from frame-level to segment-level. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed Speech Swin-Transformer outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
ADVSV: An Over-the-Air Adversarial Attack Dataset for Speaker Verification
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

It is known that deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Although Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) built on top of deep neural networks exhibits robust performance in controlled scenarios, many studies confirm that ASV is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. The lack of a standard dataset is a bottleneck for further research, especially reproducible research. In this study, we developed an open-source adversarial attack dataset for speaker verification research. As an initial step, we focused on the over-the-air attack. An over-the-air adversarial attack involves a perturbation generation algorithm, a loudspeaker, a microphone, and an acoustic environment. The variations in the recording configurations make it very challenging to reproduce previous research. The AdvSV dataset is constructed using the Voxceleb1 Verification test set as its foundation. This dataset employs representative ASV models subjected to adversarial attacks and records adversarial samples to simulate over-the-air attack settings. The scope of the dataset can be easily extended to include more types of adversarial attacks. The dataset will be released to the public under the CC BY-SA 4.0. In addition, we also provide a detection baseline for reproducible research.
A Bi-Pyramid Multimodal Fusion Method for the Diagnosis Of Bipolar Disorders
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Previous research on the diagnosis of Bipolar disorder has mainly focused on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. However, their accuracy can not meet the requirements of clinical diagnosis. Efficient multimodal fusion strategies have great potential for applications in multimodal data and can further improve the performance of medical diagnosis models. In this work, we utilize both sMRI and fMRI data and propose a novel multimodal diagnosis model for bipolar disorder. The proposed Patch Pyramid Feature Extraction Module extracts sMRI features, and the spatio-temporal pyramid structure extracts the fMRI features. Finally, they are fused by a fusion module to output diagnosis results with a classifier. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method outperforms others in balanced accuracy from 0.657 to 0.732 on the OpenfMRI dataset, and achieves the state of the art.
Cross-Age Contrastive Learning for Age-Invariant Face Recognition
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Cross-age facial images are typically challenging and expensive to collect, making noise-free age-oriented datasets relatively small compared to widely-used large-scale facial datasets. Additionally, in real scenarios, images of the same subject at different ages are usually hard or even impossible to obtain. Both of these factors lead to a lack of supervised data, which limits the versatility of supervised methods for age-invariant face recognition, a critical task in applications such as security and biometrics. To address this issue, we propose a novel semi-supervised learning approach named Cross-Age Contrastive Learning (CACon). Thanks to the identity-preserving power of recent face synthesis models, CACon introduces a new contrastive learning method that leverages an additional synthesized sample from the input image. We also propose a new loss function in association with CACon to perform contrastive learning on a triplet of samples. We demonstrate that our method not only achieves state-of-the-art performance in homogeneous-dataset experiments on several age-invariant face recognition benchmarks but also outperforms other methods by a large margin in cross-dataset experiments.