OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Modelling Black-Box Audio Effects with Time-Varying Feature Modulation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Deep learning approaches for black-box modelling of audio effects have shown promise, however, the majority of existing work focuses on nonlinear effects with behaviour on relatively short time-scales, such as guitar amplifiers and distortion. While recurrent and convolutional architectures can theoretically be extended to capture behaviour at longer time scales, we show that simply scaling the width, depth, or dilation factor of existing architectures does not result in satisfactory performance when modelling audio effects such as fuzz and dynamic range compression. To address this, we propose the integration of time-varying feature-wise linear modulation into existing temporal convolutional backbones, an approach that enables learnable adaptation of the intermediate activations. We demonstrate that our approach more accurately captures long-range dependencies for a range of fuzz and compressor implementations across both time and frequency domain metrics. We provide sound examples, source code, and pretrained models to faciliate reproducibility.
Overview of the 2023 ICASSP SP Clarity Challenge: Speech Enhancement for Hearing Aids
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

This paper reports on the design and outcomes of the ICASSP SP Clarity Challenge: Speech Enhancement for Hearing Aids. The scenario was a listener attending to a target speaker in a noisy, domestic environment. There were multiple interferers and head rotation by the listener. The challenge extended the second Clarity Enhancement Challenge (CEC2) by fixing the amplification stage of the hearing aid; evaluating with a combined metric for speech intelligibility and quality; and providing two evaluation sets, one based on simulation and the other on real-room measurements. Five teams improved on the baseline system for the simulated evaluation set, but the performance on the measured evaluation set was much poorer. Investigations are on-going to determine the exact cause of the mismatch between the simulated and measured data sets. The presence of transducer noise in the measurements, lower order Ambisonics harming the ability for systems to exploit binaural cues and the differences between real and simulated room impulse responses are suggested causes
Relate Auditory Speech To Eeg By Shallow-Deep Attention-Based Network
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Electroencephalography (EEG) plays a vital role in detecting how brain responses to different stimulus. In this paper, we propose a novel Shallow-Deep Attention-based Network (SDANet) to classify the correct auditory stimulus evoking the EEG signal. It adopts the Attention-based Correlation Module (ACM) to discover the connection between auditory speech and EEG from global aspect, and the Shallow-Deep Similarity Classification Module (SDSCM) to decide the classification result via the embeddings learned from the shallow and deep layers. Moreover, various training strategies and data augmentation are used to boost the model robustness. Experiments are conducted on the dataset provided by Auditory EEG challenge (ICASSP Signal Processing Grand Challenge 2023). Results show that the proposed model has a significant gain over the baseline on the match-mismatch track.
Cross-Head Supervision for Crowd Counting with Noisy Annotations
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Noisy annotations such as missing annotations and location shifts often exist in crowd counting datasets due to multi-scale head sizes, high occlusion, etc. These noisy annotations severely affect the model training, especially for density map-based methods. To alleviate the negative impact of noisy annotations, we propose a novel crowd counting model with one convolution head and one transformer head, in which these two heads can supervise each other in noisy areas, called Cross-Head Supervision. The resultant model, CHS-Net, can synergize different types of inductive biases for better counting. In addition, we develop a progressive cross-head supervision learning strategy to stabilize the training process and provide more reliable supervision. Extensive experimental results on ShanghaiTech and QNRF datasets demonstrate superior performance over state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/RaccoonDML/CHSNet.
Sketch Less Face Image Retrieval: A New Challenge
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

In some specific scenarios, face sketch was used to identify a person. However, drawing a complete face sketch often needs skills and takes time, which hinder its widespread applicability in the practice. In this study, we proposed a new task named sketch less face image retrieval (SLFIR), in which the retrieval was carried out at each stroke and aim to retrieve the target face photo using a partial sketch with as few strokes as possible (see Fig.1). Firstly, we developed a method to generate the data of sketch with drawing process, and opened such dataset; Secondly, we proposed a two-stage method as the baseline for SLFIR that (1) A triplet network, was first adopt to learn the joint embedding space shared between the complete sketch and its target face photo; (2) Regarding the sketch drawing episode as a sequence, we designed a LSTM module to optimize the representation of the incomplete face sketch. Experiments indicate that the new framework can finish the retrieval using a partial or pool drawing sketch.
Transadapt: A Transformative Framework for Online Test Time Adaptive Semantic Segmentation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Test-time adaptive (TTA) semantic segmentation adapts a source pre-trained image semantic segmentation model to unlabeled batches of target domain test images, different from real-world, where samples arrive one-by-one in an online fashion. To tackle online settings, we propose TransAdapt, a framework that uses transformer and input transformations to improve segmentation performance. Specifically, we pre-train a transformer-based module on a segmentation network that transforms unsupervised segmentation output to a more reliable supervised output, without requiring test-time online training. To also facilitate test-time adaptation, we propose an unsupervised loss based on the transformed input that enforces the model to be invariant and equivariant to photometric and geometric perturbations, respectively. Overall, our framework produces higher quality segmentation masks with up to 17.6% and 2.8% mIOU improvement over no-adaptation and competitive baselines, respectively.
Coded Matrix Computations for D2D-Enabled Linearized Federated Learning
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Federated learning (FL) is a popular technique for training a global model on data distributed across client devices. Like other distributed training techniques, FL is susceptible to straggler (slower or failed) clients. Recent work has proposed to address this through device-to-device (D2D) offloading, which introduces privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a novel straggler-optimal approach for coded matrix computations which can significantly reduce the communication delay and privacy issues introduced from D2D data transmissions in FL. Moreover, our proposed approach leads to a considerable improvement of the local computation speed when the generated data matrix is sparse. Numerical evaluations confirm the superiority of our proposed method over baseline approaches.
Human Pose Estimation from Ambiguous Pressure Recordings with Spatio-Temporal Masked Transformers
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Despite the impressive performance of vision-based pose estimators, they generally fail to perform well under adverse vision conditions and often don't satisfy the privacy demands of customers. As a result, researchers have begun to study tactile sensing systems as an alternative. However, these systems suffer from noisy and ambiguous recordings. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel solution for pose estimation from ambiguous pressure data. Our method comprises a spatio-temporal vision transformer with an encoder-decoder architecture. Detailed experiments on two popular public datasets reveal that our model outperforms existing solutions in the area. Moreover, we observe that increasing the number of temporal crops in the early stages of the network positively impacts the performance while pre-training the network in a self-supervised setting using a masked auto-encoder approach also further improves the results.
Does Your Model Think Like an Engineer? Explainable AI for Bearing Fault Detection with Deep Learning
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Deep Learning has already been successfully applied to analyze industrial sensor data in a variety of relevant use cases. However, the opaque nature of many well-performing methods poses a major obstacle for real-world deployment. Explainable AI (XAI) and especially feature attribution techniques promise to enable insights about how such models form their decision. But the plain application of such methods often fails to provide truly informative and problem-specific insights to domain experts. In this work, we focus on the specific task of detecting faults in rolling element bearings from vibration signals. We propose a novel and domain-specific feature attribution framework that allows us to evaluate how well the underlying logic of a model corresponds with expert reasoning. Utilizing the framework we are able to validate the trustworthiness and to successfully anticipate the generalization ability of different well-performing deep learning models. Our methodology demonstrates how signal processing tools can effectively be used to enhance Explainable AI techniques and acts as a template for similar problems.
Exploring Attention Mechanisms for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in an Emergency Call Center Corpus
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

The emotion detection technology to enhance human decision-making is an important research issue for real-world applications, but real-life emotion datasets are relatively rare and small. The experiments conducted in this paper use the CEMO, which was collected in a French emergency call center. Two pre-trained models based on speech and text were fine-tuned for speech emotion recognition. Using pre-trained Transformer encoders mitigates our data's limited and sparse nature. This paper explores the different fusion strategies of these modality-specific models. In particular, fusions with and without cross-attention mechanisms were tested to gather the most relevant information from both the speech and text encoders. We show that multimodal fusion brings an absolute gain of 4-9% with respect to either single modality and that the Symmetric multi-headed cross-attention mechanism performed better than late classical fusion approaches. Our experiments also suggest that for the real-life CEMO corpus, the audio component encodes more emotive information than the textual one.
Continuous Descriptor-Based Control for Deep Audio Synthesis
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Despite significant advances in deep models for music generation, the use of these techniques remains restricted to expert users. Before being democratized among musicians, generative models must first provide expressive control over the generation, as this conditions the integration of deep generative models in creative workflows. In this paper, we tackle this issue by introducing a deep generative audio model providing expressive and continuous descriptor-based control, while remaining lightweight enough to be embedded in a hardware synthesizer. We enforce the controllability of real-time generation by explicitly removing salient musical features in the latent space using an adversarial confusion criterion. User-specified features are then reintroduced as additional conditioning information, allowing for continuous control of the generation, akin to a synthesizer knob. We assess the performance of our method on a wide variety of sounds including instrumental, percussive and speech recordings while providing both timbre and attributes transfer, allowing new ways of generating sounds.
Modify: Model-Driven Face Stylization Without Style Images
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Existing face stylization methods always acquire the presence of the target (style) domain during the translation process, which violates privacy regulations and limits their applicability in real-world systems. To address this issue, we propose a new method called MODel-drIven Face stYlization (MODIFY), which relies on the generative model to bypass the dependence of the target images. Briefly, MODIFY first trains a generative model in the target domain and then translates a source input to the target domain via the provided style model. To preserve the multimodal style information, MODIFY further introduces an additional remapping network, mapping a known continuous distribution into the encoder's embedding space. During translation in the source domain, MODIFY fine-tunes the encoder module within the target style-persevering model to capture the content of the source input as precisely as possible. Our method is extremely simple and satisfies versatile training modes for face stylization. Experimental results on several different datasets validate the effectiveness of MODIFY for unsupervised face stylization.
HARQ Delay Minimization of 5G Wireless Network with Imperfect Feedback
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

5G new radio (NR) technology is introduced to satisfy more demanding services. Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) requires very low delay compared with the previous techniques. This is hard to achieve when hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) is applied and especially when the feedback channel is erroneous. In this work, we consider various delay components in incremental redundancy (IR) HARQ systems and minimize the average delay by applying asymmetric feedback detection (AFD) and find the optimal transmission length for each transmission attempt. A M/G/1 queuing model is used in this work to analyze the queuing delay in 5G NR when there are multiple uses in the system. Numerical results show that significant performance gains and lower outage probability can be achieved by applying AFD.
Unified Keyword Spotting and Audio Tagging on Mobile Devices with Transformers
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Keyword spotting (KWS) is a core human-machine-interaction front-end task for most modern intelligent assistants. Recently, a unified (UniKW-AT) framework has been proposed that adds additional capabilities in the form of audio tagging (AT) to a KWS model. However, previous work did not consider the real-world deployment of a UniKW-AT model, where factors such as model size and inference speed are more important than performance alone. This work introduces three mobile-device deployable models named Unified Transformers (UiT). Our best model achieves an mAP of 34.09 on Audioset, and an accuracy of 97.76 on the public Google Speech Commands V1 dataset. Further, we benchmark our proposed approaches on four mobile platforms, revealing that the proposed UiT models can achieve a speedup of 2 - 6 times against a competitive MobileNetV2.
Hierarchical Pronunciation Assessment with Multi-Aspect Attention
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Automatic pronunciation assessment is a major component of a computer-assisted pronunciation training system. To provide in-depth feedback, scoring pronunciation at various levels of granularity such as phoneme, word, and utterance, with diverse aspects such as accuracy, fluency, and completeness, is essential. However, existing multi-aspect multi-granularity methods simultaneously predict all aspects at all granularity levels; therefore, they have difficulty in capturing the linguistic hierarchy of phoneme, word, and utterance. This limitation further leads to neglecting intimate cross-aspect relations at the same linguistic unit. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Pronunciation Assessment with Multi-aspect Attention (HiPAMA) model, which hierarchically represents the granularity levels to directly capture their linguistic structures and introduces multi-aspect attention that reflects associations across aspects at the same level to create more connotative representations. By obtaining relational information from both the granularity- and aspect-side, HiPAMA can take full advantage of multi-task learning. Remarkable improvements in the experimental results on the speachocean762 datasets demonstrate the robustness of HiPAMA, particularly in the difficult-to-assess aspects.
Textless Speech-to-Music Retrieval Using Emotion Similarity
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

We introduce a framework that recommends music based on the emotions of speech. In content creation and daily life, speech contains information about human emotions, which can be enhanced by music. Our framework focuses on a cross-domain retrieval system to bridge the gap between speech and music via emotion labels. We explore different speech representations and report their impact on different speech types, including acting voice and wake-up words. We also propose an emotion similarity regularization term in cross-domain retrieval tasks. By incorporating the regularization term into training, similar speech-and-music pairs in the emotion space are closer in the joint embedding space. Our comprehensive experimental results show that the proposed model is effective in textless speech-to-music retrieval.
RD-NAS: Enhancing One-Shot Supernet Ranking Ability Via Ranking Distillation From Zero-Cost Proxies
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Neural architecture search (NAS) has made tremendous progress in the automatic design of effective neural network structures but suffers from a heavy computational burden. One-shot NAS significantly alleviates the burden through weight sharing and improves computational efficiency. Zero-shot NAS further reduces the cost by predicting the performance of the network from its initial state, which conducts no training. Both methods aim to distinguish between "good" and "bad" architectures, i.e., ranking consistency of predicted and true performance. In this paper, we propose Ranking Distillation one-shot NAS (RD-NAS) to enhance ranking consistency, which utilizes zero-cost proxies as the cheap teacher and adopts the margin ranking loss to distill the ranking knowledge. Specifically, we propose a margin subnet sampler to distill the ranking knowledge from zero-shot NAS to one-shot NAS by introducing Group distance as margin. Our evaluation of the NAS-Bench-201 and ResNet-based search space demonstrates that RD-NAS achieve 10.7\% and 9.65\% improvements in ranking ability, respectively. Our codes are available at https://github.com/pprp/CVPR2022-NAS-competition-Track1-3th-solution
Progressive Meta-Pooling Learning for Lightweight Image Classification Model
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Practical networks for edge devices adopt shallow depth and small convolutional kernels to save memory and computational cost, which leads to a restricted receptive field. Conventional efficient learning methods focus on lightweight convolution designs, ignoring the role of the receptive field in neural network design. In this paper, we propose the Meta-Pooling framework to make the receptive field learnable for a lightweight network, which consists of parameterized pooling-based operations. Specifically, we introduce a parameterized spatial enhancer, which is composed of pooling operations to provide versatile receptive fields for each layer of a lightweight model. Then, we present a Progressive Meta-Pooling Learning (PMPL) strategy for the parameterized spatial enhancer to acquire a suitable receptive field size. The results on the ImageNet dataset demonstrate that MobileNetV2 using Meta-Pooling achieves top1 accuracy of 74.6\%, which outperforms MobileNetV2 by 2.3\%.
Bytecover3: Accurate Cover Song Identification On Short Queries
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Deep learning based methods have become a paradigm for cover song identification (CSI) in recent years, where the ByteCover systems have achieved state-of-the-art results on all the mainstream datasets of CSI. However, with the burgeon of short videos, many real-world applications require matching short music excerpts to full-length music tracks in the database, which is still under-explored and waiting for an industrial-level solution. In this paper, we upgrade the previous ByteCover systems to ByteCover3 that utilizes local features to further improve the identification performance of short music queries. ByteCover3 is designed with a local alignment loss (LAL) module and a two-stage feature retrieval pipeline, allowing the system to perform CSI in a more precise and efficient way. We evaluated ByteCover3 on multiple datasets with different benchmark settings, where ByteCover3 beat all the compared methods including its previous versions.
MHLAT: Multi-Hop Label-Wise Attention Model for Automatic ICD Coding
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding is the task of assigning ICD diagnosis codes to clinical notes. This can be challenging given the large quantity of labels (nearly 9,000) and lengthy texts (up to 8,000 tokens). However, unlike the single-pass reading process in previous works, humans tend to read the text and label definitions again to get more confident answers. Moreover, although pretrained language models have been used to address these problems, they suffer from huge memory usage. To address the above problems, we propose a simple but effective model called the Multi-Hop Label-wise ATtention (MHLAT), in which multi-hop label-wise attention is deployed to get more precise and informative representations. Extensive experiments on three benchmark MIMIC datasets indicate that our method achieves significantly better or competitive performance on all seven metrics, with much fewer parameters to optimize.
Contrastive Learning-Based Audio to Lyrics Alignment for Multiple Languages
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Lyrics alignment gained considerable attention in recent years. State-of-the-art systems either re-use established speech recognition toolkits, or design end-to-end solutions involving a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss. However, both approaches suffer from specific weaknesses: toolkits are known for their complexity, and CTC systems use a loss designed for transcription which can limit alignment accuracy. In this paper, we use instead a contrastive learning procedure that derives cross-modal embeddings linking the audio and text domains. This way, we obtain a novel system that is simple to train end-to-end, can make use of weakly annotated training data, jointly learns a powerful text model, and is tailored to alignment. The system is not only the first to yield an average absolute error below 0.2 seconds on the standard Jamendo dataset but it is also robust to other languages, even when trained on English data only. Finally, we release word-level alignments for the JamendoLyrics Multi-Lang dataset.
Toward Asymptotic Optimality: Sequential Unsupervised Regression of Density Ratio for Early Classification
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Theoretically-inspired sequential density ratio estimation (SDRE) algorithms are proposed for the early classification of time series. Conventional SDRE algorithms can fail to estimate DRs precisely due to the internal overnormalization problem, which prevents the DR-based sequential algorithm, Sequential Probability Ratio Test (SPRT), from reaching its asymptotic Bayes optimality. Two novel SPRT-based algorithms, B2Bsqrt-TANDEM and TANDEMformer, are designed to avoid the overnormalization problem for precise unsupervised regression of SDRs. The two algorithms statistically significantly reduce DR estimation errors and classification errors on an artificial sequential Gaussian dataset and real datasets (SiW, UCF101, and HMDB51), respectively. The code is available at: https://github.com/Akinori-F-Ebihara/LLR_saturation_problem.