OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
ROI-Based Deep Image Compression with Swin Transformers
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Encoding the Region Of Interest (ROI) with better quality than the background has many applications including video conferencing systems, video surveillance and object-oriented vision tasks. In this paper, we propose a ROI-based image compression framework with Swin transformers as main building blocks for the autoencoder network. The binary ROI mask is integrated into different layers of the network to provide spatial information guidance. Based on the ROI mask, we can control the relative importance of the ROI and non-ROI by modifying the corresponding Lagrange multiplier $ λ$ for different regions. Experimental results show our model achieves higher ROI PSNR than other methods and modest average PSNR for human evaluation. When tested on models pre-trained with original images, it has superior object detection and instance segmentation performance on the COCO validation dataset.
An Adaptive Plug-and-Play Network for Few-Shot Learning
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Few-shot learning (FSL) requires a model to classify new samples after learning from only a few samples. While remarkable results are achieved in existing methods, the performance of embedding and metrics determines the upper limit of classification accuracy in FSL. The bottleneck is that deep networks and complex metrics tend to induce overfitting in FSL, making it difficult to further improve the performance. Towards this, we propose plug-and-play model-adaptive resizer (MAR) and adaptive similarity metric (ASM) without any other losses. MAR retains high-resolution details to alleviate the overfitting problem caused by data scarcity, and ASM decouples the relationship between different metrics and then fuses them into an advanced one. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method could boost existing methods on two standard dataset and a fine-grained datasets, and achieve state-of-the-art results on mini-ImageNet and tiered-ImageNet.
TrOMR:Transformer-Based Polyphonic Optical Music Recognition
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is an important technology in music and has been researched for a long time. Previous approaches for OMR are usually based on CNN for image understanding and RNN for music symbol classification. In this paper, we propose a transformer-based approach with excellent global perceptual capability for end-to-end polyphonic OMR, called TrOMR. We also introduce a novel consistency loss function and a reasonable approach for data annotation to improve recognition accuracy for complex music scores. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TrOMR outperforms current OMR methods, especially in real-world scenarios. We also develop a TrOMR system and build a camera scene dataset for full-page music scores in real-world. The code and datasets will be made available for reproducibility.
Evaluating Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning Approaches on SURE Benchmark for Speech Understanding
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Fine-tuning is widely used as the default algorithm for transfer learning from pre-trained models. Parameter inefficiency can however arise when, during transfer learning, all the parameters of a large pre-trained model need to be updated for individual downstream tasks. As the number of parameters grows, fine-tuning is prone to overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. In addition, full fine-tuning can become prohibitively expensive when the model is used for many tasks. To mitigate this issue, parameter-efficient transfer learning algorithms, such as adapters and prefix tuning, have been proposed as a way to introduce a few trainable parameters that can be plugged into large pre-trained language models such as BERT, and HuBERT. In this paper, we introduce the Speech UndeRstanding Evaluation (SURE) benchmark for parameter-efficient learning for various speech-processing tasks. Additionally, we introduce a new adapter, ConvAdapter, based on 1D convolution. We show that ConvAdapter outperforms the standard adapters while showing comparable performance against prefix tuning and LoRA with only 0.94% of trainable parameters on some of the task in SURE. We further explore the effectiveness of parameter efficient transfer learning for speech synthesis task such as Text-to-Speech (TTS).
T5-SR: A Unified Seq-to-Seq Decoding Strategy for Semantic Parsing
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Translating natural language queries into SQLs in a seq2seq manner has attracted much attention recently. However, compared with abstract-syntactic-tree-based SQL generation, seq2seq semantic parsers face much more challenges, including poor quality on schematical information prediction and poor semantic coherence between natural language queries and SQLs. This paper analyses the above difficulties and proposes a seq2seq-oriented decoding strategy called SR, which includes a new intermediate representation SSQL and a reranking method with score re-estimator to solve the above obstacles respectively. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed techniques and T5-SR-3b achieves new state-of-the-art results on the Spider dataset.
Single Domain Dynamic Generalization for Iris Presentation Attack Detection
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Iris presentation attack detection (PAD) has achieved great success under intra-domain settings but easily degrades on unseen domains. Conventional domain generalization methods mitigate the gap by learning domain-invariant features. However, they ignore the discriminative information in the domain-specific features. Moreover, we usually face a more realistic scenario with only one single domain available for training. To tackle the above issues, we propose a Single Domain Dynamic Generalization (SDDG) framework, which simultaneously exploits domain-invariant and domain-specific features on a per-sample basis and learns to generalize to various unseen domains with numerous natural images. Specifically, a dynamic block is designed to adaptively adjust the network with a dynamic adaptor. And an information maximization loss is further combined to increase diversity. The whole network is integrated into the meta-learning paradigm. We generate amplitude perturbed images and cover diverse domains with natural images. Therefore, the network can learn to generalize to the perturbed domains in the meta-test phase. Extensive experiments show the proposed method is effective and outperforms the state-of-the-art on LivDet-Iris 2017 dataset.
Inductive Relation Prediction from Relational Paths and Context with Hierarchical Transformers
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Relation prediction on knowledge graphs (KGs) is a key research topic. Dominant embedding-based methods mainly focus on the transductive setting and lack the inductive ability to generalize to new entities for inference. Existing methods for inductive reasoning mostly mine the connections between entities, i.e., relational paths, without considering the nature of head and tail entities contained in the relational context. This paper proposes a novel method that captures both connections between entities and the intrinsic nature of entities, by simultaneously aggregating RElational Paths and cOntext with a unified hieRarchical Transformer framework, namely REPORT. REPORT relies solely on relation semantics and can naturally generalize to the fully-inductive setting, where KGs for training and inference have no common entities. In the experiments, REPORT performs consistently better than all baselines on almost all the eight version subsets of two fully-inductive datasets. Moreover. REPORT is interpretable by providing each element's contribution to the prediction results.
Fine-Grained Private Knowledge Distillation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Knowledge distillation has emerged as a scalable and effective way for privacy-preserving machine learning. One remaining drawback is that it consumes privacy in a model-level (i.e., client-level) manner, every distillation query incurs privacy loss of one client's all records. In order to attain fine-grained privacy accountant and improve utility, this work proposes a model-free reverse $k$-NN labeling method towards record-level private knowledge distillation, where each record is employed for labeling at most $k$ queries. Theoretically, we provide bounds of labeling error rate under the centralized/local/shuffle model of differential privacy (w.r.t. the number of records per query, privacy budgets). Experimentally, we demonstrate that it achieves new state-of-the-art accuracy with one order of magnitude lower of privacy loss. Specifically, on the CIFAR-$10$ dataset, it reaches $82.1\%$ test accuracy with centralized privacy budget $1.0$; on the MNIST/SVHN dataset, it reaches $99.1\%$/$95.6\%$ accuracy respectively with budget $0.1$. It is the first time deep learning with differential privacy achieve comparable accuracy with reasonable data privacy protection (i.e., $\exp(ε)\leq 1.5$). Our code is available at https://github.com/liyuntong9/rknn.
Diverse and Vivid Sound Generation from Text Descriptions
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Previous audio generation mainly focuses on specified sound classes such as speech or music, whose form and content are greatly restricted. In this paper, we go beyond specific audio generation by using natural language description as a clue to generate broad sounds. Unlike visual information, a text description is concise by its nature but has rich hidden meanings beneath, which poses a higher possibility and complexity on the audio to be generated. A Variation-Quantized GAN is used to train a codebook learning discrete representations of spectrograms. For a given text description, its pre-trained embedding is fed to a Transformer to sample codebook indices to decode a spectrogram to be further transformed into waveform by a melgan vocoder. The generated waveform has high quality and fidelity while excellently corresponding to the given text. Experiments show that our proposed method is capable of generating natural, vivid audios, achieving superb quantitative and qualitative results.
Speech Privacy Leakage from Shared Gradients in Distributed Learning
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Distributed machine learning paradigms, such as federated learning, have been recently adopted in many privacy-critical applications for speech analysis. However, such frameworks are vulnerable to privacy leakage attacks from shared gradients. Despite extensive efforts in the image domain, the exploration of speech privacy leakage from gradients is quite limited. In this paper, we explore methods for recovering private speech/speaker information from the shared gradients in distributed learning settings. We conduct experiments on a keyword spotting model with two different types of speech features to quantify the amount of leaked information by measuring the similarity between the original and recovered speech signals. We further demonstrate the feasibility of inferring various levels of side-channel information, including speech content and speaker identity, under the distributed learning framework without accessing the user's data.
Locality Preserving Multiview Graph Hashing For Large Scale Remote Sensing Image Search
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Hashing is very popular for remote sensing image search. This article proposes a multiview hashing with learnable parameters to retrieve the queried images for a large-scale remote sensing dataset. Existing methods always neglect that real-world remote sensing data lies on a low-dimensional manifold embedded in high-dimensional ambient space. Unlike previous methods, this article proposes to learn the consensus compact codes in a view-specific low-dimensional subspace. Furthermore, we have added a hyperparameter learnable module to avoid complex parameter tuning. In order to prove the effectiveness of our method, we carried out experiments on three widely used remote sensing data sets and compared them with seven state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method can achieve competitive results compared to the other method.
Av-Sepformer: Cross-Attention Sepformer for Audio-Visual Target Speaker Extraction
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Visual information can serve as an effective cue for target speaker extraction (TSE) and is vital to improving extraction performance. In this paper, we propose AV-SepFormer, a SepFormer-based attention dual-scale model that utilizes cross- and self-attention to fuse and model features from audio and visual. AV-SepFormer splits the audio feature into a number of chunks, equivalent to the length of the visual feature. Then self- and cross-attention are employed to model and fuse the multi-modal features. Furthermore, we use a novel 2D positional encoding, that introduces the positional information between and within chunks and provides significant gains over the traditional positional encoding. Our model has two key advantages: the time granularity of audio chunked feature is synchronized to the visual feature, which alleviates the harm caused by the inconsistency of audio and video sampling rate; by combining self- and cross-attention, feature fusion and speech extraction processes are unified within an attention paradigm. The experimental results show that AV-SepFormer significantly outperforms other existing methods.
Zero-Shot Sound Event Classification Using a Sound Attribute Vector with Global and Local Feature Learning
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

This paper introduces a zero-shot sound event classification (ZS-SEC) method to identify sound events that have never occurred in training data. In our previous work, we proposed a ZS-SEC method using sound attribute vectors (SAVs), where a deep neural network model infers attribute information that describes the sound of an event class instead of inferring its class label directly. Our previous method showed that it could classify unseen events to some extent; however, the accuracy for unseen events was far inferior to that for seen events. In this paper, we propose a new ZS-SEC method that can learn discriminative global features and local features simultaneously to enhance SAV-based ZS-SEC. In the proposed method, while the global features are learned in order to discriminate the event classes in the training data, the spectro-temporal local features are learned in order to regress the attribute information using attribute prototypes. The experimental results show that our proposed method can improve the accuracy of SAV-based ZS-SEC and can visualize the region in the spectrogram related to each attribute.
A Magnetic Framelet-Based Convolutional Neural Network for Directed Graphs
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Spectral Graph Convolutional Networks (spectral GCNNs), a powerful tool for analyzing and processing graph data, typically apply frequency filtering via Fourier transform to obtain representations with selective information. Although research shows that spectral GCNNs can be enhanced by framelet-based filtering, the massive majority of such research only considers undirected graphs. In this paper, we introduce Framelet-MagNet, a magnetic framelet-based spectral GCNN for directed graphs (digraphs). The model applies the framelet transform to digraph signals to form a more sophisticated representation for filtering. Digraph framelets are constructed with the complex-valued magnetic Laplacian, simultaneously leading to signal processing in both real and complex domains. We empirically validate the predictive power of Framelet-MagNet over a range of state-of-the-art models in node classification, link prediction, and denoising.
LEAPT: Learning Adaptive Prefix-to-Prefix Translation For Simultaneous Machine Translation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Simultaneous machine translation, which aims at a real-time translation, is useful in many live scenarios but very challenging due to the trade-off between accuracy and latency. To achieve the balance for both, the model needs to wait for appropriate streaming text (READ policy) and then generates its translation (WRITE policy). However, WRITE policies of previous work either are specific to the method itself due to the end-to-end training or suffer from the input mismatch between training and decoding for the non-end-to-end training. Therefore, it is essential to learn a generic and better WRITE policy for simultaneous machine translation. Inspired by strategies utilized by human interpreters and "wait" policies, we propose a novel adaptive prefix-to-prefix training policy called LEAPT, which allows our machine translation model to learn how to translate source sentence prefixes and make use of the future context. Experiments show that our proposed methods greatly outperform competitive baselines and achieve promising results.
Exploring Vision Transformer Layer Choosing for Semantic Segmentation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Extensive work has demonstrated the effectiveness of Vision Transformers. The plain Vision Transformer tends to obtain multi-scale features by selecting fixed layers, or the last layer of features aiming to achieve higher performance in dense prediction tasks. However, this selection is often based on manual operation. And different samples often exhibit different features at different layers (e.g., edge, structure, texture, detail, etc.). This requires us to seek a dynamic adaptive fusion method to filter different layer features. In this paper, unlike previous encoder and decoder work, we design a neck network for adaptive fusion and feature selection, called ViTController. We validate the effectiveness of our method on different datasets and models and surpass previous state-of-the-art methods. Finally, our method can also be used as a plug-in module and inserted into different networks.
Multistage Spatial Context Models for Learned Image Compression
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Recent state-of-the-art Learned Image Compression methods feature spatial context models, achieving great rate-distortion improvements over hyperprior methods. However, the autoregressive context model requires serial decoding, limiting runtime performance. The Checkerboard context model allows parallel decoding at a cost of reduced RD performance. We present a series of multistage spatial context models allowing both fast decoding and better RD performance. We split the latent space into square patches and decode serially within each patch while different patches are decoded in parallel. The proposed method features a comparable decoding speed to Checkerboard while reaching the RD performance of Autoregressive and even also outperforming Autoregressive. Inside each patch, the decoding order must be carefully decided as a bad order negatively impacts performance; therefore, we also propose a decoding order optimization algorithm.
Weight-Sharing Supernet for Searching Specialized Acoustic Event Classification Networks Across Device Constraints
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Acoustic Event Classification (AEC) has been widely used in devices such as smart speakers and mobile phones for home safety or accessibility support. As AEC models run on more and more devices with diverse computation resource constraints, it became increasingly expensive to develop models that are tuned to achieve optimal accuracy/computation trade-off for each given computation resource constraint. In this paper, we introduce a Once-For-All (OFA) Neural Architecture Search (NAS) framework for AEC. Specifically, we first train a weight-sharing supernet that supports different model architectures, followed by automatically searching for a model given specific computational resource constraints. Our experimental results showed that by just training once, the resulting model from NAS significantly outperforms both models trained individually from scratch and knowledge distillation (25.4% and 7.3% relative improvement). We also found that the benefit of weight-sharing supernet training of ultra-small models comes not only from searching but from optimization.
Level-Line Guided Edge Drawing for Robust Line Segment Detection
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Line segment detection plays a cornerstone role in computer vision tasks. Among numerous detection methods that have been recently proposed, the ones based on edge drawing attract increasing attention owing to their excellent detection efficiency. However, the existing methods are not robust enough due to the inadequate usage of image gradients for edge drawing and line segment fitting. Based on the observation that the line segments should locate on the edge points with both consistent coordinates and level-line information, i.e., the unit vector perpendicular to the gradient orientation, this paper proposes a level-line guided edge drawing for robust line segment detection (GEDRLSD). The level-line information provides potential directions for edge tracking, which could be served as a guideline for accurate edge drawing. Additionally, the level-line information is fused in line segment fitting to improve the robustness. Numerical experiments show the superiority of the proposed GEDRLSD algorithm compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Picking the Underused Heads: A Network Pruning Perspective of Attention Head Selection for Fusing Dialogue Coreference Information
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

The Transformer-based models with the multi-head self-attention mechanism are widely used in natural language processing, and provide state-of-the-art results. While the pre-trained language backbones are shown to implicitly capture certain linguistic knowledge, explicitly incorporating structure-aware features can bring about further improvement on the downstream tasks. However, such enhancement often requires additional neural components and increases training parameter size. In this work, we investigate the attention head selection and manipulation strategy for feature injection from a network pruning perspective, and conduct a case study on dialogue summarization. We first rank attention heads in a Transformer-based summarizer with layer-wise importance. We then select the underused heads through extensive analysis, and inject structure-aware features by manipulating the selected heads. Experimental results show that the importance-based head selection is effective for feature injection, and dialogue summarization can be improved by incorporating coreference information via head manipulation.
Parallel Sentence-Level Explanation Generation for Real-World Low-Resource Scenarios
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

In order to reveal the rationale behind model predictions, many works have exploited providing explanations in various forms. Recently, to further guarantee readability, more and more works turn to generate sentence-level human language explanations. However, current works pursuing sentence-level explanations rely heavily on annotated training data, which limits the development of interpretability to only a few tasks. As far as we know, this paper is the first to explore this problem smoothly from weak-supervised learning to unsupervised learning. Besides, we also notice the high latency of autoregressive sentence-level explanation generation, which leads to asynchronous interpretability after prediction. Therefore, we propose a non-autoregressive interpretable model to facilitate parallel explanation generation and simultaneous prediction. Through extensive experiments on Natural Language Inference task and Spouse Prediction task, we find that users are able to train classifiers with comparable performance $10-15\times$ faster with parallel explanation generation using only a few or no annotated training data.