OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Neural Transducer Training: Reduced Memory Consumption with Sample-Wise Computation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

The neural transducer is an end-to-end model for automatic speech recognition (ASR). While the model is well-suited for streaming ASR, the training process remains challenging. During training, the memory requirements may quickly exceed the capacity of state-of-the-art GPUs, limiting batch size and sequence lengths. In this work, we analyze the time and space complexity of a typical transducer training setup. We propose a memory-efficient training method that computes the transducer loss and gradients sample by sample. We present optimizations to increase the efficiency and parallelism of the sample-wise method. In a set of thorough benchmarks, we show that our sample-wise method significantly reduces memory usage, and performs at competitive speed when compared to the default batched computation. As a highlight, we manage to compute the transducer loss and gradients for a batch size of 1024, and audio length of 40 seconds, using only 6 GB of memory.
On Out-of-Distribution Detection for Audio with Deep Nearest Neighbors
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is concerned with identifying data points that do not belong to the same distribution as the model's training data. For the safe deployment of predictive models in a real-world environment, it is critical to avoid making confident predictions on OOD inputs as it can lead to potentially dangerous consequences. However, OOD detection largely remains an under-explored area in the audio (and speech) domain. This is despite the fact that audio is a central modality for many tasks, such as speaker diarization, automatic speech recognition, and sound event detection. To address this, we propose to leverage feature-space of the model with deep k-nearest neighbors to detect OOD samples. We show that this simple and flexible method effectively detects OOD inputs across a broad category of audio (and speech) datasets. Specifically, it improves the false positive rate (FPR@TPR95) by 17% and the AUROC score by 7% than other prior techniques.
HTNet: Human Topology aware network for 3d Human pose estimation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

3D human pose estimation errors would propagate along the human body topology and accumulate at the end joints of limbs. Inspired by the backtracking mechanism in automatic control systems, we design an Intra-Part Constraint module that utilizes the parent nodes as the reference to build topological constraints for end joints at the part level. Further considering the hierarchy of the human topology, joint-level and body-level dependencies are captured via graph convolutional networks and self-attentions, respectively. Based on these designs, we propose a novel Human Topology aware Network (HTNet), which adopts a channel-split progressive strategy to sequentially learn the structural priors of the human topology from multiple semantic levels: joint, part, and body. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method improves the estimation accuracy by 18.7% on the end joints of limbs and achieves state-of-the-art results on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/vefalun/HTNet.
KG-ECO: Knowledge Graph Enhanced Entity Correction For Query Rewriting
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Query Rewriting (QR) plays a critical role in large-scale dialogue systems for reducing frictions. When there is an entity error, it imposes extra challenges for a dialogue system to produce satisfactory responses. In this work, we propose KG-ECO: Knowledge Graph enhanced Entity COrrection for query rewriting, an entity correction system with corrupt entity span detection and entity retrieval/re-ranking functionalities. To boost the model performance, we incorporate Knowledge Graph (KG) to provide entity structural information (neighboring entities encoded by graph neural networks) and textual information (KG entity descriptions encoded by RoBERTa). Experimental results show that our approach yields a clear performance gain over two baselines: utterance level QR and entity correction without utilizing KG information. The proposed system is particularly effective for few-shot learning cases where target entities are rarely seen in training or there is a KG relation between the target entity and other contextual entities in the query.
Multi-Agent Adversarial Training Using Diffusion Learning
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

This work focuses on adversarial learning over graphs. We propose a general adversarial training framework for multi-agent systems using diffusion learning. We analyze the convergence properties of the proposed scheme for convex optimization problems, and illustrate its enhanced robustness to adversarial attacks.
Vitasd: Robust Vision Transformer Baselines for Autism Spectrum Disorder Facial Diagnosis
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder with very high prevalence around the world. Research progress in the field of ASD facial analysis in pediatric patients has been hindered due to a lack of well-established baselines. In this paper, we propose the use of the Vision Transformer (ViT) for the computational analysis of pediatric ASD. The presented model, known as ViTASD, distills knowledge from large facial expression datasets and offers model structure transferability. Specifically, ViTASD employs a vanilla ViT to extract features from patients' face images and adopts a lightweight decoder with a Gaussian Process layer to enhance the robustness for ASD analysis. Extensive experiments conducted on standard ASD facial analysis benchmarks show that our method outperforms all of the representative approaches in ASD facial analysis, while the ViTASD-L achieves a new state-of-the-art. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/IrohXu/ViTASD.
Improved Training Of Mixture-Of-Experts Language GANs
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Despite the dramatic success in image generation, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) still face great challenges in synthesizing sequences of discrete elements, in particular human language. The difficulty in generator training arises from the limited representation capacity and uninformative learning signals obtained from the discriminator. In this work, we (1) first empirically show that the mixture-of-experts approach is able to enhance the representation capacity of the generator for language GANs and (2) harness the Feature Statistics Alignment (FSA) paradigm to render fine-grained learning signals to advance the generator training. Specifically, FSA forces the mean statistics of the distribution of fake data to approach that of real samples as close as possible in the finite-dimensional feature space. Empirical study on synthetic and real benchmarks shows the superior performance in quantitative evaluation and demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach to adversarial text generation.
Dialog Act Guided Contextual Adapter for Personalized Speech Recognition
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Personalization in multi-turn dialogs has been a long standing challenge for end-to-end automatic speech recognition (E2E ASR) models. Recent work on contextual adapters has tackled rare word recognition using user catalogs. This adaptation, however, does not incorporate an important cue, the dialog act, which is available in a multi-turn dialog scenario. In this work, we propose a dialog act guided contextual adapter network. Specifically, it leverages dialog acts to select the most relevant user catalogs and creates queries based on both -- the audio as well as the semantic relationship between the carrier phrase and user catalogs to better guide the contextual biasing. On industrial voice assistant datasets, our model outperforms both the baselines - dialog act encoder-only model, and the contextual adaptation, leading to the most improvement over the no-context model: 58% average relative word error rate reduction (WERR) in the multi-turn dialog scenario, in comparison to the prior-art contextual adapter, which has achieved 39% WERR over the no-context model.
Knowledge Transfer for on-Device Speech Emotion Recognition With Neural Structured Learning
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Speech emotion recognition (SER) has been a popular research topic in human-computer interaction (HCI). As edge devices are rapidly springing up, applying SER to edge devices is promising for a huge number of HCI applications. Although deep learning has been investigated to improve the performance of SER by training complex models, the memory space and computational capability of edge devices represents a constraint for embedding deep learning models. We propose a neural structured learning (NSL) framework through building synthesized graphs. An SER model is trained on a source dataset and used to build graphs on a target dataset. A relatively lightweight model is then trained with the speech samples and graphs together as the input. Our experiments demonstrate that training a lightweight SER model on the target dataset with speech samples and graphs can not only produce small SER models, but also enhance the model performance compared to models with speech samples only and those using classic transfer learning strategies.
Neural Architecture Search with Multimodal Fusion Methods for Diagnosing Dementia
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Alzheimer's dementia (AD) affects memory, thinking, and language, deteriorating person's life. An early diagnosis is very important as it enables the person to receive medical help and ensure quality of life. Therefore, leveraging spontaneous speech in conjunction with machine learning methods for recognizing AD patients has emerged into a hot topic. Most of the previous works employ Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), to process the input signal. However, finding a CNN architecture is a time-consuming process and requires domain expertise. Moreover, the researchers introduce early and late fusion approaches for fusing different modalities or concatenate the representations of the different modalities during training, thus the inter-modal interactions are not captured. To tackle these limitations, first we exploit a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method to automatically find a high performing CNN architecture. Next, we exploit several fusion methods, including Multimodal Factorized Bilinear Pooling and Tucker Decomposition, to combine both speech and text modalities. To the best of our knowledge, there is no prior work exploiting a NAS approach and these fusion methods in the task of dementia detection from spontaneous speech. We perform extensive experiments on the ADReSS Challenge dataset and show the effectiveness of our approach over state-of-the-art methods.
Learning Gradients of Convex Functions with Monotone Gradient Networks
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

While much effort has been devoted to deriving and analyzing effective convex formulations of signal processing problems, the gradients of convex functions also have critical applications ranging from gradient-based optimization to optimal transport. Recent works have explored data-driven methods for learning convex objective functions, but learning their monotone gradients is seldom studied. In this work, we propose C-MGN and M-MGN, two monotone gradient neural network architectures for directly learning the gradients of convex functions. We show that, compared to state of the art methods, our networks are easier to train, learn monotone gradient fields more accurately, and use significantly fewer parameters. We further demonstrate their ability to learn optimal transport mappings to augment driving image data.
Shadocnet: Learning Spatial-Aware Tokens in Transformer for Document Shadow Removal
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Shadow removal improves the visual quality and legibility of digital copies of documents. However, document shadow removal remains an unresolved subject. Traditional techniques rely on heuristics that vary from situation to situation. Given the quality and quantity of current public datasets, the majority of neural network models are ill-equipped for this task. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based model for document shadow removal that utilizes shadow context encoding and decoding in both shadow and shadow-free regions. Additionally, shadow detection and pixel-level enhancement are included in the whole coarse-to-fine process. On the basis of comprehensive benchmark evaluations, it is competitive with state-of-the-art methods.
Improving Noisy Student Training on Non-Target Domain Data for Automatic Speech Recognition
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Noisy Student Training (NST) has recently demonstrated extremely strong performance in Automatic Speech Recognition(ASR). In this paper, we propose a data selection strategy named LM Filter to improve the performance of NST on non-target domain data in ASR tasks. Hypotheses with and without a Language Model are generated and the CER differences between them are utilized as a filter threshold. Results reveal that significant improvements of 10.4% compared with no data filtering baselines. We can achieve 3.31% CER in AISHELL-1 test set, which is best result from our knowledge without any other supervised data. We also perform evaluations on the supervised 1000 hour AISHELL-2 dataset and competitive results of 4.73% CER can be achieved.
Deep3DSketch: 3D Modeling from Free-Hand Sketches with View- and Structural-Aware Adversarial Training
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

This work aims to investigate the problem of 3D modeling using single free-hand sketches, which is one of the most natural ways we humans express ideas. Although sketch-based 3D modeling can drastically make the 3D modeling process more accessible, the sparsity and ambiguity of sketches bring significant challenges for creating high-fidelity 3D models that reflect the creators' ideas. In this work, we propose a view- and structural-aware deep learning approach, \textit{Deep3DSketch}, which tackles the ambiguity and fully uses sparse information of sketches, emphasizing the structural information. Specifically, we introduced random pose sampling on both 3D shapes and 2D silhouettes, and an adversarial training scheme with an effective progressive discriminator to facilitate learning of the shape structures. Extensive experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms existing methods -- with state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both synthetic and real datasets.
Metric-Oriented Speech Enhancement Using Diffusion Probabilistic Model
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Deep neural network based speech enhancement technique focuses on learning a noisy-to-clean transformation supervised by paired training data. However, the task-specific evaluation metric (e.g., PESQ) is usually non-differentiable and can not be directly constructed in the training criteria. This mismatch between the training objective and evaluation metric likely results in sub-optimal performance. To alleviate it, we propose a metric-oriented speech enhancement method (MOSE), which leverages the recent advances in the diffusion probabilistic model and integrates a metric-oriented training strategy into its reverse process. Specifically, we design an actor-critic based framework that considers the evaluation metric as a posterior reward, thus guiding the reverse process to the metric-increasing direction. The experimental results demonstrate that MOSE obviously benefits from metric-oriented training and surpasses the generative baselines in terms of all evaluation metrics.
Unsupervised Noise Adaptation Using Data Simulation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Deep neural network based speech enhancement approaches aim to learn a noisy-to-clean transformation using a supervised learning paradigm. However, such a trained-well transformation is vulnerable to unseen noises that are not included in training set. In this work, we focus on the unsupervised noise adaptation problem in speech enhancement, where the ground truth of target domain data is completely unavailable. Specifically, we propose a generative adversarial network based method to efficiently learn a converse clean-to-noisy transformation using a few minutes of unpaired target domain data. Then this transformation is utilized to generate sufficient simulated data for domain adaptation of the enhancement model. Experimental results show that our method effectively mitigates the domain mismatch between training and test sets, and surpasses the best baseline by a large margin.
Dynamic Multi-View Scene Reconstruction Using Neural Implicit Surface
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Reconstructing general dynamic scenes is important for many computer vision and graphics applications. Recent works represent the dynamic scene with neural radiance fields for photorealistic view synthesis, while their surface geometry is under-constrained and noisy. Other works introduce surface constraints to the implicit neural representation to disentangle the ambiguity of geometry and appearance field for static scene reconstruction. To bridge the gap between rendering dynamic scenes and recovering static surface geometry, we propose a template-free method to reconstruct surface geometry and appearance using neural implicit representations from multi-view videos. We leverage topology-aware deformation and the signed distance field to learn complex dynamic surfaces via differentiable volume rendering without scene-specific prior knowledge like template models. Furthermore, we propose a novel mask-based ray selection strategy to significantly boost the optimization on challenging time-varying regions. Experiments on different multi-view video datasets demonstrate that our method achieves high-fidelity surface reconstruction as well as photorealistic novel view synthesis.
Visual Prompting for Adversarial Robustness
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

In this work, we leverage visual prompting (VP) to improve adversarial robustness of a fixed, pre-trained model at testing time. Compared to conventional adversarial defenses, VP allows us to design universal (i.e., data-agnostic) input prompting templates, which have plug-and-play capabilities at testing time to achieve desired model performance without introducing much computation overhead. Although VP has been successfully applied to improving model generalization, it remains elusive whether and how it can be used to defend against adversarial attacks. We investigate this problem and show that the vanilla VP approach is not effective in adversarial defense since a universal input prompt lacks the capacity for robust learning against sample-specific adversarial perturbations. To circumvent it, we propose a new VP method, termed Class-wise Adversarial Visual Prompting (C-AVP), to generate class-wise visual prompts so as to not only leverage the strengths of ensemble prompts but also optimize their interrelations to improve model robustness. Our experiments show that C-AVP outperforms the conventional VP method, with 2.1X standard accuracy gain and 2X robust accuracy gain. Compared to classical test-time defenses, C-AVP also yields a 42X inference time speedup.
Personalizing Federated Learning with Over-The-Air Computations
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Federated edge learning is a promising technology to deploy intelligence at the edge of wireless networks in a privacy-preserving manner. Under such a setting, multiple clients collaboratively train a global generic model under the coordination of an edge server. But the training efficiency is often throttled by challenges arising from limited communication and data heterogeneity. This paper presents a distributed training paradigm that employs analog over-the-air computation to address the communication bottleneck. Additionally, we leverage a bi-level optimization framework to personalize the federated learning model so as to cope with the data heterogeneity issue. As a result, it enhances the generalization and robustness of each client's local model. We elaborate on the model training procedure and its advantages over conventional frameworks. We provide a convergence analysis that theoretically demonstrates the training efficiency. We also conduct extensive experiments to validate the efficacy of the proposed framework.
Once-for-All Sequence Compression for Self-Supervised Speech Models
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

The sequence length along the time axis is often the dominant factor of the computation in speech processing. Works have been proposed to reduce the sequence length for lowering the computational cost in self-supervised speech models. However, different downstream tasks have different tolerance of sequence compressing, so a model that produces a fixed compressing rate may not fit all tasks. In this work, we introduce a once-for-all (OFA) sequence compression framework for self-supervised speech models that supports a continuous range of operating compressing rates. The framework is evaluated on various tasks, showing marginal degradation compared to the fixed compressing rate variants with a smooth performance-efficiency trade-off. We further explore adaptive compressing rate learning, demonstrating the ability to select task-specific preferred frame periods without needing a grid search.
Improving Few-Shot Learning for Talking Face System with TTS Data Augmentation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Audio-driven talking face has attracted broad interest from academia and industry recently. However, data acquisition and labeling in audio-driven talking face are labor-intensive and costly. The lack of data resource results in poor synthesis effect. To alleviate this issue, we propose to use TTS (Text-To-Speech) for data augmentation to improve few-shot ability of the talking face system. The misalignment problem brought by the TTS audio is solved with the introduction of soft-DTW, which is first adopted in the talking face task. Moreover, features extracted by HuBERT are explored to utilize underlying information of audio, and found to be superior over other features. The proposed method achieves 17%, 14%, 38% dominance on MSE score, DTW score and user study preference repectively over the baseline model, which shows the effectiveness of improving few-shot learning for talking face system with TTS augmentation.
Hyneter: Hybrid Network Transformer for Object Detection
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we point out that the essential differences between CNN-based and Transformer-based detectors, which cause the worse performance of small objects in Transformer-based methods, are the gap between local information and global dependencies in feature extraction and propagation. To address these differences, we propose a new vision Transformer, called Hybrid Network Transformer (Hyneter), after pre-experiments that indicate the gap causes CNN-based and Transformer-based methods to increase size-different objects result unevenly. Different from the divide and conquer strategy in previous methods, Hyneters consist of Hybrid Network Backbone (HNB) and Dual Switching module (DS), which integrate local information and global dependencies, and transfer them simultaneously. Based on the balance strategy, HNB extends the range of local information by embedding convolution layers into Transformer blocks, and DS adjusts excessive reliance on global dependencies outside the patch.