OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Prototypical Triplet Loss for Cover Detection
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

Automatic cover detection -- the task of finding in a audio dataset all covers of a query track -- has long been a challenging theoretical problem in MIR community. It also became a practical need for music composers societies requiring to detect automatically if an audio excerpt embeds musical content belonging to their catalog. In a recent work, we addressed this problem with a convolutional neural network mapping each track's dominant melody to an embedding vector, and trained to minimize cover pairs distance in the embeddings space, while maximizing it for non-covers. We showed in particular that training this model with enough works having five or more covers yields state-of-the-art results. This however does not reflect the realistic use case, where music catalogs typically contain works with zero or at most one or two covers. We thus introduce here a new test set incorporating these constraints, and propose two contributions to improve our model's accuracy under these stricter conditions: we replace dominant melody with multi-pitch representation as input data, and describe a novel prototypical triplet loss designed to improve covers clustering. We show that these changes improve results significantly for two concrete use cases, large dataset lookup and live songs identification.
Scene Text Recognition with Temporal Convolutional Encoder
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

Texts from scene images typically consist of several characters and exhibit a characteristic sequence structure. Existing methods capture the structure with the sequence-to-sequence models by an encoder to have the visual representations and then a decoder to translate the features into the label sequence. In this paper, we study text recognition framework by considering the long-term temporal dependencies in the encoder stage. We demonstrate that the proposed Temporal Convolutional Encoder with increased sequential extents improves the accuracy of text recognition. We also study the impact of different attention modules in convolutional blocks for learning accurate text representations. We conduct comparisons on seven datasets and the experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Realizability of Planar Point Embeddings from Angle Measurements
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

Localization of a set of nodes is an important and a thoroughly researched problem in robotics and sensor networks. This paper is concerned with the theory of localization from inner-angle measurements. We focus on the challenging case where no anchor locations are known. Inspired by Euclidean distance matrices, we investigate when a set of inner angles corresponds to a realizable point set. In particular, we find linear and non-linear constraints that are provably necessary, and we conjecture also sufficient for characterizing realizable angle sets. We confirm this in extensive numerical simulations, and we illustrate the use of these constraints for denoising angle measurements along with the reconstruction of a valid point set.
End-To-End Auditory Object Recognition Via Inception Nucleus
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

Machine learning approaches to auditory object recognition are traditionally based on engineered features such as those derived from the spectrum or cepstrum. More recently, end-to-end classification systems in image and auditory recognition systems have been developed to learn features jointly with classification and result in improved classification accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end deep neural network to map the raw waveform inputs to sound class labels. Our network includes an "inception nucleus" that optimizes the size of convolutional filters on the fly that results in reducing engineering efforts dramatically. Classification results compared favorably against current state-of-the-art approaches, besting them by 10.4 percentage points on the Urbansound8k dataset. Analyses of learned representations revealed that filters in the earlier hidden layers learned wavelet-like transforms to extract features that were informative for classification.
A Comparative Study of Western and Chinese Classical Music Based on Soundscape Models
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

Whether literally or suggestively, the concept of soundscape is alluded in both modern and ancient music. In this study, we examine whether we can analyze and compare Western and Chinese classical music based on soundscape models. We addressed this question through a comparative study. Specifically, corpora of Western classical music excerpts (WCMED) and Chinese classical music excerpts (CCMED) were curated and annotated with emotional valence and arousal through a crowdsourcing experiment. We used a sound event detection (SED) and soundscape emotion recognition (SER) models with transfer learning to predict the perceived emotion of WCMED and CCMED. The results show that both SER and SED models could be used to analyze Chinese and Western classical music. The fact that SER and SED work better on Chinese classical music emotion recognition provides evidence that certain similarities exist between Chinese classical music and soundscape recordings, which permits transferability between machine learning models.
Anomalydae: Dual Autoencoder for Anomaly Detection on Attributed Networks
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

Anomaly detection on attributed networks aims at finding nodes whose patterns deviate significantly from the majority of reference nodes, which is pervasive in many applications such as network intrusion detection and social spammer detection. However, most existing methods neglect the complex cross-modality interactions between network structure and node attribute. In this paper, we propose a deep joint representation learning framework for anomaly detection through a dual autoencoder (AnomalyDAE), which captures the complex interactions between network structure and node attribute for high-quality embeddings. Specifically, AnomalyDAE consists of a structure autoencoder and an attribute autoencoder to learn both node embedding and attribute embedding jointly in latent space. Moreover, attention mechanism is employed in structure encoder to learn the importance between a node and its neighbors for an effective capturing of structure pattern, which is important to anomaly detection. Besides, by taking both the node embedding and attribute embedding as inputs of attribute decoder, the cross-modality interactions between network structure and node attribute are learned during the reconstruction of node attribute. Finally, anomalies can be detected by measuring the reconstruction errors of nodes from both the structure and attribute perspectives. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Privacy-Preserving Image Sharing Via Sparsifying Layers on Convolutional Groups
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

We propose a practical framework to address the problem of privacy-aware image sharing in large-scale setups. We argue that, while compactness is always desired at scale, this need is more severe when trying to furthermore protect the privacy-sensitive content. We therefore encode images, such that, from one hand, representations are stored in the public domain without paying the huge cost of privacy protection, but ambiguated and hence leaking no discernible content from the images, unless a combinatorially-expensive guessing mechanism is available for the attacker. From the other hand, authorized users are provided with very compact keys that can easily be kept secure. This can be used to disambiguate and reconstruct faithfully the corresponding access-granted images. We achieve this with a convolutional autoencoder of our design, where feature maps are passed independently through sparsifying transformations, providing multiple compact codes, each responsible for reconstructing different attributes of the image. The framework is tested on a large-scale database of images with public implementation available.
DNN-based Distributed Multichannel Mask Estimation for Speech Enhancement in Microphone Arrays
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

Multichannel processing is widely used for speech enhancement but several limitations appear when trying to deploy these solutions to the real-world. Distributed sensor arrays that consider several devices with a few microphones is a viable alternative that allows for exploiting the multiple devices equipped with microphones that we are using in our everyday life. In this context, we propose to extend the distributed adaptive node-specific signal estimation approach to a neural networks framework. At each node, a local filtering is performed to send one signal to the other nodes where a mask is estimated by a neural network in order to compute a global multi-channel Wiener filter. In an array of two nodes, we show that this additional signal can be efficiently taken into account to predict the masks and leads to better speech enhancement performances than when the mask estimation relies only on the local signals.
Counting Dense Objects in Remote Sensing Images
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

Estimating accurate number of interested objects from a given image is a challenging yet important task. Significant efforts have been made to address this problem and achieve great progress, yet counting number of ground objects from remote sensing images is barely studied. In this paper, we are interested in counting dense objects from remote sensing images. Compared with object counting in natural scene, this task is challenging in following factors: large scale variation, complex cluttered background and orientation arbitrariness. More importantly, the scarcity of data severely limits the development of research in this field. To address these issues, we first construct a large-scale object counting dataset based on remote sensing images, which contains four kinds of objects: buildings, crowded ships in harbor, large-vehicles and small-vehicles in parking lot. We then benchmark the dataset by designing a novel neural network which can generate density map of an input image. The proposed network consists of three parts namely convolution block attention module (CBAM), scale pyramid module (SPM) and deformable convolution module (DCM). Experiments on the proposed dataset and comparisons with state of the art methods demonstrate the challenging of the proposed dataset, and superiority and effectiveness of our method.
Integrating Discrete and Neural Features Via Mixed-Feature Trans-Dimensional Random Field Language Models
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

There has been a long recognition that discrete features (n-gram features) and neural network based features have complementary strengths for language models (LMs). Improved performance can be obtained by model interpolation, which is, however, a suboptimal two-step integration of discrete and neural features. The trans-dimensional random field (TRF) framework has the potential advantage of being able to flexibly integrate a richer set of features. However, either discrete or neural features are used alone in previous TRF LMs. This paper develops a mixed-feature TRF LM and demonstrates its advantage in integrating discrete and neural features. Various LMs are trained over PTB and Google one-billion-word datasets, and evaluated in N-best list rescoring experiments for speech recognition. Among all single LMs (i.e. without model interpolation), the mixed-feature TRF LMs perform the best, improving over both discrete TRF LMs and neural TRF LMs alone, and also being significantly better than LSTM LMs. Compared to interpolating two separately trained models with discrete and neural features respectively, the performance of mixed-feature TRF LMs matches the best interpolated model, and with simplified one-step training process and reduced training time.
Joint Learning of Assignment and Representation for Biometric Group Membership
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

This paper proposes a framework for group membership protocols preventing the curious but honest server from reconstructing the enrolled biometric signatures and inferring the identity of querying clients. This framework learns the embedding parameters, group representations and assignments simultaneously. Experiments show the trade-off between security/privacy and verification/identification performances.
CS-R-FCN: Cross-Supervised Learning for Large-Scale Object Detection
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

Generic object detection is one of the most fundamental problems in computer vision, yet it is difficult to provide all the bounding-box-level annotations aiming at large-scale object detection for thousands of categories. In this paper, we present a novel cross-supervised learning pipeline for large-scale object detection, denoted as CS-R-FCN. First, we propose to utilize the data flow of image-level annotated images in the fully-supervised two-stage object detection framework, leading to cross-supervised learning combining bounding-box-level annotated data and image-level annotated data. Second, we introduce a semantic aggregation strategy utilizing the relationships among the cross-supervised categories to reduce the unreasonable mutual inhibition effects during the feature learning. Experimental results show that the proposed CS-R-FCN improves the mAP by a large margin compared to previous related works.
Semi-Implicit Stochastic Recurrent Neural Networks
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

Stochastic recurrent neural networks with latent random variables of complex dependency structures have shown to be more successful in modeling sequential data than deterministic deep models. However, the majority of existing methods have limited expressive power due to the Gaussian assumption of latent variables. In this paper, we advocate learning implicit latent representations using semi-implicit variational inference to further increase model flexibility. Semi-implicit stochastic recurrent neural network(SIS-RNN) is developed to enrich inferred model posteriors that may have no analytic density functions, as long as independent random samples can be generated via reparameterization. Extensive experiments in different tasks on real-world datasets show that SIS-RNN outperforms the existing methods.
Focus on Semantic Consistency for Cross-Domain Crowd Understanding
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

For pixel-level crowd understanding, it is time-consuming and laborious in data collection and annotation. Some domain adaptation algorithms try to liberate it by training models with synthetic data, and the results in some recent works have proved the feasibility. However, we found that a mass of estimation errors in the background areas impede the performance of the existing methods. In this paper, we propose a domain adaptation method to eliminate it. According to the semantic consistency, a similar distribution in deep layer's features of the synthetic and real-world crowd area, we first introduce a semantic extractor to effectively distinguish crowd and background in high-level semantic information. Besides, to further enhance the adapted model, we adopt adversarial learning to align features in the semantic space. Experiments on three representative real datasets show that the proposed domain adaptation scheme achieves the state-of-the-art for cross-domain counting problems.
Adaptive Distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent for Minimizing Delay in the Presence of Stragglers
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

We consider the setting where a master wants to run a distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm on $n$ workers each having a subset of the data. Distributed SGD may suffer from the effect of stragglers, i.e., slow or unresponsive workers who cause delays. One solution studied in the literature is to wait at each iteration for the responses of the fastest $k<n$ workers before updating the model, where $k$ is a fixed parameter. The choice of the value of $k$ presents a trade-off between the runtime (i.e., convergence rate) of SGD and the error of the model. Towards optimizing the error-runtime trade-off, we investigate distributed SGD with adaptive $k$. We first design an adaptive policy for varying $k$ that optimizes this trade-off based on an upper bound on the error as a function of the wall-clock time which we derive. Then, we propose an algorithm for adaptive distributed SGD that is based on a statistical heuristic. We implement our algorithm and provide numerical simulations which confirm our intuition and theoretical analysis.
Espnet-TTS: Unified, Reproducible, and Integratable Open Source End-to-End Text-to-Speech Toolkit
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

This paper introduces a new end-to-end text-to-speech (E2E-TTS) toolkit named ESPnet-TTS, which is an extension of the open-source speech processing toolkit ESPnet. The toolkit supports state-of-the-art E2E-TTS models, including Tacotron~2, Transformer TTS, and FastSpeech, and also provides recipes inspired by the Kaldi automatic speech recognition (ASR) toolkit. The recipes are based on the design unified with the ESPnet ASR recipe, providing high reproducibility. The toolkit also provides pre-trained models and samples of all of the recipes so that users can use it as a baseline. Furthermore, the unified design enables the integration of ASR functions with TTS, e.g., ASR-based objective evaluation and semi-supervised learning with both ASR and TTS models. This paper describes the design of the toolkit and experimental evaluation in comparison with other toolkits. The experimental results show that our models can achieve state-of-the-art performance comparable to the other latest toolkits, resulting in a mean opinion score (MOS) of 4.25 on the LJSpeech dataset. The toolkit is publicly available at https://github.com/espnet/espnet.
Generalized Kernel-Based Dynamic Mode Decomposition
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

Reduced modeling in high-dimensional reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces offers the opportunity to approximate efficiently non-linear dynamics. In this work, we devise an algorithm based on low rank constraint optimization and kernel-based computation that generalizes a recent approach called "kernel-based dynamic mode decomposition". This new algorithm is characterized by a gain in approximation accuracy, as evidenced by numerical simulations, and in computational complexity.
Demystifying TasNet: A Dissecting Approach
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

In recent years time domain speech separation has excelled over frequency domain separation in single channel scenarios and noise-free environments. In this paper we dissect the gains of the time-domain audio separation network (TasNet) approach by gradually replacing components of an utterance-level permutation invariant training (u-PIT) based separation system in the frequency domain until the TasNet system is reached, thus blending components of frequency domain approaches with those of time domain approaches. Some of the intermediate variants achieve comparable signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR) gains to TasNet, but retain the advantage of frequency domain processing: compatibility with classic signal processing tools such as frequency-domain beamforming and the human interpretability of the masks. Furthermore, we show that the scale invariant signal-to-distortion ratio (si-SDR) criterion used as loss function in TasNet is related to a logarithmic mean square error criterion and that it is this criterion which contributes most reliable to the performance advantage of TasNet. Finally, we critically assess which gains in a noise-free single channel environment generalize to more realistic reverberant conditions.
AL2: Progressive Activation Loss for Learning General Representations in Classification Neural Networks
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

The large capacity of neural networks enables them to learn complex functions. To avoid overfitting, networks however require a lot of training data that can be expensive and time-consuming to collect. A common practical approach to attenuate overfitting is the use of network regularization techniques. We propose a novel regularization method that progressively penalizes the magnitude of activations during training. The combined activation signals produced by all neurons in a given layer form the representation of the input image in that feature space. We propose to regularize this representation in the last feature layer before classification layers. Our method's effect on generalization is analyzed with label randomization tests and cumulative ablations. Experimental results show the advantages of our approach in comparison with commonly-used regularizers on standard benchmark datasets.
Divergence-Based Adaptive Extreme Video Completion
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

Extreme image or video completion, where, for instance, we only retain 1% of pixels in random locations, allows for very cheap sampling in terms of the required pre-processing. The consequence is, however, a reconstruction that is challenging for humans and inpainting algorithms alike. We propose an extension of a state-of-the-art extreme image completion algorithm to extreme video completion. We analyze a color-motion estimation approach based on color KL-divergence that is suitable for extremely sparse scenarios. Our algorithm leverages the estimate to adapt between its spatial and temporal filtering when reconstructing the sparse randomly-sampled video. We validate our results on 50 publicly-available videos using reconstruction PSNR and mean opinion scores.
Addressing The Confounds Of Accompaniments In Singer Identification
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2020
Year: 2020

Identifying singers is an important task with many applications. However, the task remains challenging due to many issues. One major issue is related to the confounding factors from the background instrumental music that is mixed with the vocals in music production. A singer identification model may learn to extract non-vocal related features from the instrumental part of the songs, if a singer only sings in certain musical contexts (e.g., genres). The model cannot therefore generalize well when the singer sings in unseen contexts. In this paper, we attempt to address this issue. Specifically, we employ open-unmix, an open source tool with state-of-the-art performance in source separation, to separate the vocal and instrumental tracks of music. We then investigate two means to train a singer identification model: by learning from the separated vocal only, or from an augmented set of data where we "shuffle-and-remix" the separated vocal tracks and instrumental tracks of different songs to artificially make the singers sing in different contexts. We also incorporate melodic features learned from the vocal melody contour for better performance. Evaluation results on a benchmark dataset called the artist20 shows that this data augmentation method greatly improves the accuracy of singer identification.