OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
MHSCNET: A Multimodal Hierarchical Shot-Aware Convolutional Network for Video Summarization
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Video summarization intends to produce a concise video summary by effectively capturing and combining the most informative parts of the whole content. Existing approaches for video summarization regard the task as a frame-wise keyframe selection problem and generally construct the frame-wise representation by combining the long-range temporal dependency with the unimodal or bimodal information. However, the optimal video summaries need to reflect the most valuable keyframe with its own information, and one with semantic power of the whole content. Thus, it is critical to construct a more powerful and robust frame-wise representation and predict the frame-level importance score in a fair and comprehensive manner. To tackle the above issues, we propose a multimodal hierarchical shot-aware convolutional network, denoted as MHSCNet, to enhance the frame-wise representation via combining the comprehensive available multimodal information. Specifically, we design a hierarchical ShotConv network to incorporate the adaptive shot-aware frame-level representation by considering the short-range and long-range temporal dependency. Based on the learned shot-aware representations, MHSCNet can predict the frame-level importance score in the local and global view of the video. Extensive experiments on two standard video summarization datasets demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Source code will be made publicly available.
M2-CTTS: End-to-End Multi-Scale Multi-Modal Conversational Text-to-Speech Synthesis
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Conversational text-to-speech (TTS) aims to synthesize speech with proper prosody of reply based on the historical conversation. However, it is still a challenge to comprehensively model the conversation, and a majority of conversational TTS systems only focus on extracting global information and omit local prosody features, which contain important fine-grained information like keywords and emphasis. Moreover, it is insufficient to only consider the textual features, and acoustic features also contain various prosody information. Hence, we propose M2-CTTS, an end-to-end multi-scale multi-modal conversational text-to-speech system, aiming to comprehensively utilize historical conversation and enhance prosodic expression. More specifically, we design a textual context module and an acoustic context module with both coarse-grained and fine-grained modeling. Experimental results demonstrate that our model mixed with fine-grained context information and additionally considering acoustic features achieves better prosody performance and naturalness in CMOS tests.
Learning From Yourself: A Self-Distillation Method For Fake Speech Detection
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we propose a novel self-distillation method for fake speech detection (FSD), which can significantly improve the performance of FSD without increasing the model complexity. For FSD, some fine-grained information is very important, such as spectrogram defects, mute segments, and so on, which are often perceived by shallow networks. However, shallow networks have much noise, which can not capture this very well. To address this problem, we propose using the deepest network instruct shallow network for enhancing shallow networks. Specifically, the networks of FSD are divided into several segments, the deepest network being used as the teacher model, and all shallow networks become multiple student models by adding classifiers. Meanwhile, the distillation path between the deepest network feature and shallow network features is used to reduce the feature difference. A series of experimental results on the ASVspoof 2019 LA and PA datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method, with significant improvements compared to the baseline.
Dual Path Modeling for Semantic Matching by Perceiving Subtle Conflicts
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Transformer-based pre-trained models have achieved great improvements in semantic matching. However, existing models still suffer from insufficient ability to capture subtle differences. The modification, addition and deletion of words in sentence pairs may make it difficult for the model to predict their relationship. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel Dual Path Modeling Framework to enhance the model's ability to perceive subtle differences in sentence pairs by separately modeling affinity and difference semantics. Based on dual-path modeling framework we design the Dual Path Modeling Network (DPM-Net) to recognize semantic relations. And we conduct extensive experiments on 10 well-studied semantic matching and robustness test datasets, and the experimental results show that our proposed method achieves consistent improvements over baselines.
Contrast-PLC: Contrastive Learning for Packet Loss Concealment
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Packet loss concealment (PLC) is challenging in concealing missing contents both plausibly and naturally when there are only limited available context to use. Recently deep-learning based PLC algorithms have demonstrated their superiority over traditional counterparts; but their concealment ability is still mostly limited to a maximum of 120ms loss. Even with strong GAN-based generative models, it is still very challenging to predict long burst losses that could happen within/in-between phonemes. In this paper, we propose to use contrastive learning to learn a loss-robust semantic representation for PLC. A hybrid neural PLC architecture combining the semantic prediction and GAN-based generative model is designed to verify its effectiveness. Results on the blind test set of Interspeech2022 PLC Challenge show its superiority over commonly used UNet-style framework and the one without contrastive learning, especially for the longer burst loss at (120, 220] ms.
Gaussian Prior Reinforcement Learning for Nested Named Entity Recognition
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a well and widely studied task in natural language processing. Recently, the nested NER has attracted more attention since its practicality and difficulty. Existing works for nested NER ignore the recognition order and boundary position relation of nested entities. To address these issues, we propose a novel seq2seq model named GPRL, which formulates the nested NER task as an entity triplet sequence generation process. GPRL adopts the reinforcement learning method to generate entity triplets decoupling the entity order in gold labels and expects to learn a reasonable recognition order of entities via trial and error. Based on statistics of boundary distance for nested entities, GPRL designs a Gaussian prior to represent the boundary distance distribution between nested entities and adjust the output probability distribution of nested boundary tokens. Experiments on three nested NER datasets demonstrate that GPRL outperforms previous nested NER models.
Mutually Guided Few-Shot Learning For Relational Triple Extraction
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Knowledge graphs (KGs), containing many entity-relation-entity triples, provide rich information for downstream applications. Although extracting triples from unstructured texts has been widely explored, most of them require a large number of labeled instances. The performance will drop dramatically when only few labeled data are available. To tackle this problem, we propose the Mutually Guided Few-shot learning framework for Relational Triple Extraction (MG-FTE). Specifically, our method consists of an entity-guided relation proto-decoder to classify the relations firstly and a relation-guided entity proto-decoder to extract entities based on the classified relations. To draw the connection between entity and relation, we design a proto-level fusion module to boost the performance of both entity extraction and relation classification. Moreover, a new cross-domain few-shot triple extraction task is introduced. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms many state-of-the-art methods by 12.6 F1 score on FewRel 1.0 (single-domain) and 20.5 F1 score on FewRel 2.0 (cross-domain).
Paaploss: A Phonetic-Aligned Acoustic Parameter Loss for Speech Enhancement
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Despite rapid advancement in recent years, current speech enhancement models often produce speech that differs in perceptual quality from real clean speech. We propose a learning objective that formalizes differences in perceptual quality, by using domain knowledge of acoustic-phonetics. We identify temporal acoustic parameters -- such as spectral tilt, spectral flux, shimmer, etc. -- that are non-differentiable, and we develop a neural network estimator that can accurately predict their time-series values across an utterance. We also model phoneme-specific weights for each feature, as the acoustic parameters are known to show different behavior in different phonemes. We can add this criterion as an auxiliary loss to any model that produces speech, to optimize speech outputs to match the values of clean speech in these features. Experimentally we show that it improves speech enhancement workflows in both time-domain and time-frequency domain, as measured by standard evaluation metrics. We also provide an analysis of phoneme-dependent improvement on acoustic parameters, demonstrating the additional interpretability that our method provides. This analysis can suggest which features are currently the bottleneck for improvement.
DMSA: Dynamic Multi-Scale Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation Based On Adaptive Affinity
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

The proposed method in this paper proposes an end-to-end unsupervised semantic segmentation architecture DMSA based on four loss functions. The framework uses Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) module to enhance feature extraction. At the same time, a dynamic dilation strategy is designed to better capture multi-scale context information. Secondly, a Pixel-Adaptive Refinement (PAR) module is introduced, which can adaptively refine the initial pseudo labels after feature fusion to obtain high quality pseudo labels. Experiments show that the proposed DSMA framework is superior to the existing methods on the saliency dataset. On the COCO 80 dataset, the MIoU is improved by 2.0, and the accuracy is improved by 5.39. On the Pascal VOC 2012 Augmented dataset, the MIoU is improved by 4.9, and the accuracy is improved by 3.4. In addition, the convergence speed of the model is also greatly improved after the introduction of the PAR module.
Improving CTC-Based ASR Models With Gated Interlayer Collaboration
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

The CTC-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models without the external language model usually lack the capacity to model conditional dependencies and textual interactions. In this paper, we present a Gated Interlayer Collaboration (GIC) mechanism to improve the performance of CTC-based models, which introduces textual information into the model and thus relaxes the conditional independence assumption of CTC-based models. Specifically, we consider the weighted sum of token embeddings as the textual representation for each position, where the position-specific weights are the softmax probability distribution constructed via inter-layer auxiliary CTC losses. The textual representations are then fused with acoustic features by developing a gate unit. Experiments on AISHELL-1, TEDLIUM2, and AIDATATANG corpora show that the proposed method outperforms several strong baselines.
Backdoor Defense via Suppressing Model Shortcuts
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Recent studies have demonstrated that deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks during the training process. Specifically, the adversaries intend to embed hidden backdoors in DNNs so that malicious model predictions can be activated through pre-defined trigger patterns. In this paper, we explore the backdoor mechanism from the angle of the model structure. We select the skip connection for discussions, inspired by the understanding that it helps the learning of model `shortcuts' where backdoor triggers are usually easier to be learned. Specifically, we demonstrate that the attack success rate (ASR) decreases significantly when reducing the outputs of some key skip connections. Based on this observation, we design a simple yet effective backdoor removal method by suppressing the skip connections in critical layers selected by our method. We also implement fine-tuning on these layers to recover high benign accuracy and to further reduce ASR. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our method.
A Novel Efficient Multi-View Traffic-Related Object Detection Framework
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

With the rapid development of intelligent transportation system applications, a tremendous amount of multi-view video data has emerged to enhance vehicle perception. However, performing video analytics efficiently by exploiting the spatial-temporal redundancy from video data remains challenging. Accordingly, we propose a novel traffic-related framework named CEVAS to achieve efficient object detection using multi-view video data. Briefly, a fine-grained input filtering policy is introduced to produce a reasonable region of interest from the captured images. Also, we design a sharing object manager to manage the information of objects with spatial redundancy and share their results with other vehicles. We further derive a content-aware model selection policy to select detection methods adaptively. Experimental results show that our framework significantly reduces response latency while achieving the same detection accuracy as the state-of-the-art methods.
From English to More Languages: Parameter-Efficient Model Reprogramming for Cross-Lingual Speech Recognition
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

In this work, we propose a new parameter-efficient learning framework based on neural model reprogramming for cross-lingual speech recognition, which can \textbf{re-purpose} well-trained English automatic speech recognition (ASR) models to recognize the other languages. We design different auxiliary neural architectures focusing on learnable pre-trained feature enhancement that, for the first time, empowers model reprogramming on ASR. Specifically, we investigate how to select trainable components (i.e., encoder) of a conformer-based RNN-Transducer, as a frozen pre-trained backbone. Experiments on a seven-language multilingual LibriSpeech speech (MLS) task show that model reprogramming only requires 4.2% (11M out of 270M) to 6.8% (45M out of 660M) of its original trainable parameters from a full ASR model to perform competitive results in a range of 11.9% to 8.1% WER averaged across different languages. In addition, we discover different setups to make large-scale pre-trained ASR succeed in both monolingual and multilingual speech recognition. Our methods outperform existing ASR tuning architectures and their extension with self-supervised losses (e.g., w2v-bert) in terms of lower WER and better training efficiency.
CANet: Curved Guide Line Network with Adaptive Decoder for Lane Detection
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Lane detection is challenging due to the complicated on road scenarios and line deformation from different camera perspectives. Lots of solutions were proposed, but can not deal with corner lanes well. To address this problem, this paper proposes a new top-down deep learning lane detection approach, CANET. A lane instance is first responded by the heat-map on the U-shaped curved guide line at global semantic level, thus the corresponding features of each lane are aggregated at the response point. Then CANET obtains the heat-map response of the entire lane through conditional convolution, and finally decodes the point set to describe lanes via adaptive decoder. The experimental results show that CANET reaches SOTA in different metrics. Our code will be released soon.
Designing A 3d-Aware Stylenerf Encoder for Face Editing
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

GAN inversion has been exploited in many face manipulation tasks, but 2D GANs often fail to generate multi-view 3D consistent images. The encoders designed for 2D GANs are not able to provide sufficient 3D information for the inversion and editing. Therefore, 3D-aware GAN inversion is proposed to increase the 3D editing capability of GANs. However, the 3D-aware GAN inversion remains under-explored. To tackle this problem, we propose a 3D-aware (3Da) encoder for GAN inversion and face editing based on the powerful StyleNeRF model. Our proposed 3Da encoder combines a parametric 3D face model with a learnable detail representation model to generate geometry, texture and view direction codes. For more flexible face manipulation, we then design a dual-branch StyleFlow module to transfer the StyleNeRF codes with disentangled geometry and texture flows. Extensive experiments demonstrate that we realize 3D consistent face manipulation in both facial attribute editing and texture transfer. Furthermore, for video editing, we make the sequence of frame codes share a common canonical manifold, which improves the temporal consistency of the edited attributes.
Efficient Uncertainty Estimation with Gaussian Process for Reliable Dialog Response Retrieval
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable performance in retrieval-based dialogue systems, but they are shown to be ill calibrated. Though basic calibration methods like Monte Carlo Dropout and Ensemble can calibrate well, these methods are time-consuming in the training or inference stages. To tackle these challenges, we propose an efficient uncertainty calibration framework GPF-BERT for BERT-based conversational search, which employs a Gaussian Process layer and the focal loss on top of the BERT architecture to achieve a high-quality neural ranker. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of our method. In comparison with basic calibration methods, GPF-BERT achieves the lowest empirical calibration error (ECE) in three in-domain datasets and the distributional shift tasks, while yielding the highest $R_{10}@1$ and MAP performance on most cases. In terms of time consumption, our GPF-BERT has an 8$\times$ speedup.
Temporal Modeling Matters: A Novel Temporal Emotional Modeling Approach for Speech Emotion Recognition
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Speech emotion recognition (SER) plays a vital role in improving the interactions between humans and machines by inferring human emotion and affective states from speech signals. Whereas recent works primarily focus on mining spatiotemporal information from hand-crafted features, we explore how to model the temporal patterns of speech emotions from dynamic temporal scales. Towards that goal, we introduce a novel temporal emotional modeling approach for SER, termed Temporal-aware bI-direction Multi-scale Network (TIM-Net), which learns multi-scale contextual affective representations from various time scales. Specifically, TIM-Net first employs temporal-aware blocks to learn temporal affective representation, then integrates complementary information from the past and the future to enrich contextual representations, and finally, fuses multiple time scale features for better adaptation to the emotional variation. Extensive experimental results on six benchmark SER datasets demonstrate the superior performance of TIM-Net, gaining 2.34% and 2.61% improvements of the average UAR and WAR over the second-best on each corpus. The source code is available at https://github.com/Jiaxin-Ye/TIM-Net_SER.
Automatic Severity Classification of Dysarthric Speech by Using Self-Supervised Model with Multi-Task Learning
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Automatic assessment of dysarthric speech is essential for sustained treatments and rehabilitation. However, obtaining atypical speech is challenging, often leading to data scarcity issues. To tackle the problem, we propose a novel automatic severity assessment method for dysarthric speech, using the self-supervised model in conjunction with multi-task learning. Wav2vec 2.0 XLS-R is jointly trained for two different tasks: severity classification and auxiliary automatic speech recognition (ASR). For the baseline experiments, we employ hand-crafted acoustic features and machine learning classifiers such as SVM, MLP, and XGBoost. Explored on the Korean dysarthric speech QoLT database, our model outperforms the traditional baseline methods, with a relative percentage increase of 1.25% for F1-score. In addition, the proposed model surpasses the model trained without ASR head, achieving 10.61% relative percentage improvements. Furthermore, we present how multi-task learning affects the severity classification performance by analyzing the latent representations and regularization effect.
Multi-Temporal Lip-Audio Memory for Visual Speech Recognition
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) is a task to predict a sentence or word from lip movements. Some works have been recently presented which use audio signals to supplement visual information. However, existing methods utilize only limited information such as phoneme-level features and soft labels of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) networks. In this paper, we present a Multi-Temporal Lip-Audio Memory (MTLAM) that makes the best use of audio signals to complement insufficient information of lip movements. The proposed method is mainly composed of two parts: 1) MTLAM saves multi-temporal audio features produced from short- and long-term audio signals, and the MTLAM memorizes a visual-to-audio mapping to load stored multi-temporal audio features from visual features at the inference phase. 2) We design an audio temporal model to produce multi-temporal audio features capturing the context of neighboring words. In addition, to construct effective visual-to-audio mapping, the audio temporal models can generate audio features time-aligned with visual features. Through extensive experiments, we validate the effectiveness of the MTLAM achieving state-of-the-art performances on two public VSR datasets.
Raising The Limit of Image Rescaling Using Auxiliary Encoding
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2023
Year: 2023

Normalizing flow models using invertible neural networks (INN) have been widely investigated for successful generative image super-resolution (SR) by learning the transformation between the normal distribution of latent variable $z$ and the conditional distribution of high-resolution (HR) images gave a low-resolution (LR) input. Recently, image rescaling models like IRN utilize the bidirectional nature of INN to push the performance limit of image upscaling by optimizing the downscaling and upscaling steps jointly. While the random sampling of latent variable $z$ is useful in generating diverse photo-realistic images, it is not desirable for image rescaling when accurate restoration of the HR image is more important. Hence, in places of random sampling of $z$, we propose auxiliary encoding modules to further push the limit of image rescaling performance. Two options to store the encoded latent variables in downscaled LR images, both readily supported in existing image file format, are proposed. One is saved as the alpha-channel, the other is saved as meta-data in the image header, and the corresponding modules are denoted as suffixes -A and -M respectively. Optimal network architectural changes are investigated for both options to demonstrate their effectiveness in raising the rescaling performance limit on different baseline models including IRN and DLV-IRN.