OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Retrieval Augmented End-to-End Spoken Dialog Models
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

We recently developed SLM, a joint speech and language model, which fuses a pretrained foundational speech model and a large language model (LLM), while preserving the in-context learning capability intrinsic to the pretrained LLM. In this paper, we apply SLM to speech dialog applications where the dialog states are inferred directly from the audio signal. Task-oriented dialogs often contain domain-specific entities, i.e., restaurants, hotels, train stations, and city names, which are difficult to recognize, however, critical for the downstream applications. Inspired by the RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) paradigm, we propose a retrieval augmented SLM (ReSLM) that overcomes this weakness. We first train a speech retriever to retrieve text entities mentioned in the audio. The retrieved entities are then added as text inputs to the underlying SLM to bias model predictions. We evaluated ReSLM on speech MultiWoz task (DSTC-11 challenge), and found that this retrieval augmentation boosts model performance, achieving joint goal accuracy (38.6% vs 32.7%), slot error rate (20.6% vs 24.8%) and ASR word error rate (5.5% vs 6.7%). While demonstrated on dialog state tracking, our approach is broadly applicable to other speech tasks requiring contextual information or domain-specific entities, such as contextual ASR with biasing capability.
Deep Neighbor Layer Aggregation for Lightweight Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

With the frequent use of self-supervised monocular depth estimation in robotics and autonomous driving, the model's efficiency is becoming increasingly important. Most current approaches apply much larger and more complex networks to improve the precision of depth estimation. Some researchers incorporated Transformer into self-supervised monocular depth estimation to achieve better performance. However, this method leads to high parameters and high computation. We present a fully convolutional depth estimation network using contextual feature fusion. Compared to UNet++ and HRNet, we use high-resolution and low-resolution features to reserve information on small targets and fast-moving objects instead of long-range fusion. We further promote depth estimation results employing lightweight channel attention based on convolution in the decoder stage. Our method reduces the parameters without sacrificing accuracy. Experiments on the KITTI benchmark show that our method can get better results than many large models, such as Monodepth2, with only 30 parameters. The source code is available at https://github.com/boyagesmile/DNA-Depth.
SPY-Watermark: Robust Invisible Watermarking for Backdoor Attack
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Backdoor attack aims to deceive a victim model when facing backdoor instances while maintaining its performance on benign data. Current methods use manual patterns or special perturbations as triggers, while they often overlook the robustness against data corruption, making backdoor attacks easy to defend in practice. To address this issue, we propose a novel backdoor attack method named Spy-Watermark, which remains effective when facing data collapse and backdoor defense. Therein, we introduce a learnable watermark embedded in the latent domain of images, serving as the trigger. Then, we search for a watermark that can withstand collapse during image decoding, cooperating with several anti-collapse operations to further enhance the resilience of our trigger against data corruption. Extensive experiments are conducted on CIFAR10, GTSRB, and ImageNet datasets, demonstrating that Spy-Watermark overtakes ten state-of-the-art methods in terms of robustness and stealthiness.
UNIT-DSR: Dysarthric Speech Reconstruction System Using Speech Unit Normalization
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Dysarthric speech reconstruction (DSR) systems aim to automatically convert dysarthric speech into normal-sounding speech. The technology eases communication with speakers affected by the neuromotor disorder and enhances their social inclusion. NED-based (Neural Encoder-Decoder) systems have significantly improved the intelligibility of the reconstructed speech as compared with GAN-based (Generative Adversarial Network) approaches, but the approach is still limited by training inefficiency caused by the cascaded pipeline and auxiliary tasks of the content encoder, which may in turn affect the quality of reconstruction. Inspired by self-supervised speech representation learning and discrete speech units, we propose a Unit-DSR system, which harnesses the powerful domain-adaptation capacity of HuBERT for training efficiency improvement and utilizes speech units to constrain the dysarthric content restoration in a discrete linguistic space. Compared with NED approaches, the Unit-DSR system only consists of a speech unit normalizer and a Unit HiFi-GAN vocoder, which is considerably simpler without cascaded sub-modules or auxiliary tasks. Results on the UASpeech corpus indicate that Unit-DSR outperforms competitive baselines in terms of content restoration, reaching a 28.2% relative average word error rate reduction when compared to original dysarthric speech, and shows robustness against speed perturbation and noise.
DACR: Distribution-Augmented Contrastive Reconstruction for Time-Series Anomaly Detection
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Anomaly detection in time-series data is crucial for identifying faults, failures, threats, and outliers across a range of applications. Recently, deep learning techniques have been applied to this topic, but they often struggle in real-world scenarios that are complex and highly dynamic, e.g., the normal data may consist of multiple distributions, and various types of anomalies may differ from the normal data to different degrees. In this work, to tackle these challenges, we propose Distribution-Augmented Contrastive Reconstruction (DACR). DACR generates extra data disjoint from the normal data distribution to compress the normal data's representation space, and enhances the feature extractor through contrastive learning to better capture the intrinsic semantics from time-series data. Furthermore, DACR employs an attention mechanism to model the semantic dependencies among multivariate time-series features, thereby achieving more robust reconstruction for anomaly detection. Extensive experiments conducted on nine benchmark datasets in various anomaly detection scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of DACR in achieving new state-of-the-art time-series anomaly detection.
Profile-Error-Tolerant Target-Speaker Voice Activity Detection
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Target-Speaker Voice Activity Detection (TS-VAD) utilizes a set of speaker profiles alongside an input audio signal to perform speaker diarization. While its superiority over conventional methods has been demonstrated, the method can suffer from errors in speaker profiles, as those profiles are typically obtained by running a traditional clustering-based diarization method over the input signal. This paper proposes an extension to TS-VAD, called Profile-Error-Tolerant TS-VAD (PET-TSVAD), which is robust to such speaker profile errors. This is achieved by employing transformer-based TS-VAD that can handle a variable number of speakers and further introducing a set of additional pseudo-speaker profiles to handle speakers undetected during the first pass diarization. During training, we use speaker profiles estimated by multiple different clustering algorithms to reduce the mismatch between the training and testing conditions regarding speaker profiles. Experimental results show that PET-TSVAD consistently outperforms the existing TS-VAD method on both the VoxConverse and DIHARD-I datasets.
Benchmarking Adversarial Robustness of Image Shadow Removal with Shadow-Adaptive Attacks
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Shadow removal is a task aimed at erasing regional shadows present in images and reinstating visually pleasing natural scenes with consistent illumination. While recent deep learning techniques have demonstrated impressive performance in image shadow removal, their robustness against adversarial attacks remains largely unexplored. Furthermore, many existing attack frameworks typically allocate a uniform budget for perturbations across the entire input image, which may not be suitable for attacking shadow images. This is primarily due to the unique characteristic of spatially varying illumination within shadow images. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, called shadow-adaptive adversarial attack. Different from standard adversarial attacks, our attack budget is adjusted based on the pixel intensity in different regions of shadow images. Consequently, the optimized adversarial noise in the shadowed regions becomes visually less perceptible while permitting a greater tolerance for perturbations in non-shadow regions. The proposed shadow-adaptive attacks naturally align with the varying illumination distribution in shadow images, resulting in perturbations that are less conspicuous. Building on this, we conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of existing shadow removal methods, subjecting them to various levels of attack on publicly available datasets.
Enhancing Image-Text Matching with Adaptive Feature Aggregation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Image-text matching aims to find matched cross-modal pairs accurately. While current methods often rely on projecting cross-modal features into a common embedding space, they frequently suffer from imbalanced feature representations across different modalities, leading to unreliable retrieval results. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel Feature Enhancement Module that adaptively aggregates single-modal features for more balanced and robust image-text retrieval. Additionally, we propose a new loss function that overcomes the shortcomings of original triplet ranking loss, thereby significantly improving retrieval performance. The proposed model has been evaluated on two public datasets and achieves competitive retrieval performance when compared with several state-of-the-art models. Implementation codes can be found here.
An Empirical Investigation of Domain Adaptation Ability for Chinese Spelling Check Models
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) is a meaningful task in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) which aims at detecting spelling errors in Chinese texts and then correcting these errors. However, CSC models are based on pretrained language models, which are trained on a general corpus. Consequently, their performance may drop when confronted with downstream tasks involving domain-specific terms. In this paper, we conduct a thorough evaluation about the domain adaption ability of various typical CSC models by building three new datasets encompassing rich domain-specific terms from the financial, medical, and legal domains. Then we conduct empirical investigations in the corresponding domain-specific test datasets to ascertain the cross-domain adaptation ability of several typical CSC models. We also test the performance of the popular large language model ChatGPT. As shown in our experiments, the performances of the CSC models drop significantly in the new domains.
Fast Graph-Based Denoising For Point Cloud Color Information
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Point clouds are utilized in various 3D applications such as cross-reality (XR) and realistic 3D displays. In some applications, e.g., for live streaming using a 3D point cloud, real-time point cloud denoising methods are required to enhance the visual quality. However, conventional high-precision denoising methods cannot be executed in real time for large-scale point clouds owing to the complexity of graph constructions with K nearest neighbors and noise level estimation. This paper proposes a fast graph-based denoising (FGBD) for a large-scale point cloud. First, high-speed graph construction is achieved by scanning a point cloud in various directions and searching adjacent neighborhoods on the scanning lines. Second, we propose a fast noise level estimation method using eigenvalues of the covariance matrix on a graph. Finally, we also propose a new low-cost filter selection method to enhance denoising accuracy to compensate for the degradation caused by the acceleration algorithms. In our experiments, we succeeded in reducing the processing time dramatically while maintaining accuracy relative to conventional denoising methods. Denoising was performed at 30fps, with frames containing approximately 1 million points.
Transferring Structure Knowledge: A New Task to Fake News Detection towards Cold-Start Propagation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Many fake news detection studies have achieved promising performance by extracting effective semantic and structure features from both content and propagation trees. However, it is challenging to apply them to practical situations, especially when using the trained propagation-based models to detect news with no propagation data. Towards this scenario, we study a new task named cold-start fake news detection, which aims to detect content-only samples with missing propagation. To achieve the task, we design a simple but effective Structure Adversarial Net (SAN) framework to learn transferable features from available propagation to boost the detection of content-only samples. SAN introduces a structure discriminator to estimate dissimilarities among learned features with and without propagation, and further learns structure-invariant features to enhance the generalization of existing propagation-based methods for content-only samples. We conduct qualitative and quantitative experiments on three datasets. Results show the challenge of the new task and the effectiveness of our SAN framework.
DJCM: A Deep Joint Cascade Model for Singing Voice Separation and Vocal Pitch Estimation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Singing voice separation and vocal pitch estimation are pivotal tasks in music information retrieval. Existing methods for simultaneous extraction of clean vocals and vocal pitches can be classified into two categories: pipeline methods and naive joint learning methods. However, the efficacy of these methods is limited by the following problems: On the one hand, pipeline methods train models for each task independently, resulting a mismatch between the data distributions at the training and testing time. On the other hand, naive joint learning methods simply add the losses of both tasks, possibly leading to a misalignment between the distinct objectives of each task. To solve these problems, we propose a Deep Joint Cascade Model (DJCM) for singing voice separation and vocal pitch estimation. DJCM employs a novel joint cascade model structure to concurrently train both tasks. Moreover, task-specific weights are used to align different objectives of both tasks. Experimental results show that DJCM achieves state-of-the-art performance on both tasks, with great improvements of 0.45 in terms of Signal-to-Distortion Ratio (SDR) for singing voice separation and 2.86% in terms of Overall Accuracy (OA) for vocal pitch estimation. Furthermore, extensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each design of our proposed model. The code of DJCM is available at https://github.com/Dream-High/DJCM .
Elevating Skeleton-Based Action Recognition with Efficient Multi-Modality Self-Supervision
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Self-supervised representation learning for human action recognition has developed rapidly in recent years. Most of the existing works are based on skeleton data while using a multi-modality setup. These works overlooked the differences in performance among modalities, which led to the propagation of erroneous knowledge between modalities while only three fundamental modalities, i.e., joints, bones, and motions are used, hence no additional modalities are explored. In this work, we first propose an Implicit Knowledge Exchange Module (IKEM) which alleviates the propagation of erroneous knowledge between low-performance modalities. Then, we further propose three new modalities to enrich the complementary information between modalities. Finally, to maintain efficiency when introducing new modalities, we propose a novel teacher-student framework to distill the knowledge from the secondary modalities into the mandatory modalities considering the relationship constrained by anchors, positives, and negatives, named relational cross-modality knowledge distillation. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, unlocking the efficient use of skeleton-based multi-modality data. Source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/desehuileng0o0/IKEM.
DCL-Net: Dual Contrastive Learning Network for Semi-Supervised Multi-Organ Segmentation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Semi-supervised learning is a sound measure to relieve the strict demand of abundant annotated datasets, especially for challenging multi-organ segmentation . However, most existing SSL methods predict pixels in a single image independently, ignoring the relations among images and categories. In this paper, we propose a two-stage Dual Contrastive Learning Network for semi-supervised MoS, which utilizes global and local contrastive learning to strengthen the relations among images and classes. Concretely, in Stage 1, we develop a similarity-guided global contrastive learning to explore the implicit continuity and similarity among images and learn global context. Then, in Stage 2, we present an organ-aware local contrastive learning to further attract the class representations. To ease the computation burden, we introduce a mask center computation algorithm to compress the category representations for local contrastive learning. Experiments conducted on the public 2017 ACDC dataset and an in-house RC-OARs dataset has demonstrated the superior performance of our method.
HaltingVT: Adaptive Token Halting Transformer for Efficient Video Recognition
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Action recognition in videos poses a challenge due to its high computational cost, especially for Joint Space-Time video transformers (Joint VT). Despite their effectiveness, the excessive number of tokens in such architectures significantly limits their efficiency. In this paper, we propose HaltingVT, an efficient video transformer adaptively removing redundant video patch tokens, which is primarily composed of a Joint VT and a Glimpser module. Specifically, HaltingVT applies data-adaptive token reduction at each layer, resulting in a significant reduction in the overall computational cost. Besides, the Glimpser module quickly removes redundant tokens in shallow transformer layers, which may even be misleading for video recognition tasks based on our observations. To further encourage HaltingVT to focus on the key motion-related information in videos, we design an effective Motion Loss during training. HaltingVT acquires video analysis capabilities and token halting compression strategies simultaneously in a unified training process, without requiring additional training procedures or sub-networks. On the Mini-Kinetics dataset, we achieved 75.0% top-1 ACC with 24.2 GFLOPs, as well as 67.2% top-1 ACC with an extremely low 9.9 GFLOPs. The code is available at https://github.com/dun-research/HaltingVT.
Generalizable Two-Branch Framework for Image Class-Incremental Learning
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Deep neural networks often severely forget previously learned knowledge when learning new knowledge. Various continual learning (CL) methods have been proposed to handle such a catastrophic forgetting issue from different perspectives and achieved substantial improvements. In this paper, a novel two-branch continual learning framework is proposed to further enhance most existing CL methods. Specifically, the main branch can be any existing CL model and the newly introduced side branch is a lightweight convolutional network. The output of each main branch block is modulated by the output of the corresponding side branch block. Such a simple two-branch model can then be easily implemented and learned with the vanilla optimization setting without whistles and bells. Extensive experiments with various settings on multiple image datasets show that the proposed framework yields consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods.
Improving Audio Captioning Models with Fine-Grained Audio Features, Text Embedding Supervision, and LLM Mix-Up Augmentation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

Automated audio captioning (AAC) aims to generate informative descriptions for various sounds from nature and/or human activities. In recent years, AAC has quickly attracted research interest, with state-of-the-art systems now relying on a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) backbone powered by strong models such as Transformers. Following the macro-trend of applied machine learning research, in this work, we strive to improve the performance of seq2seq AAC models by extensively leveraging pretrained models and large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we utilize BEATs to extract fine-grained audio features. Then, we employ Instructor LLM to fetch text embeddings of captions, and infuse their language-modality knowledge into BEATs audio features via an auxiliary InfoNCE loss function. Moreover, we propose a novel data augmentation method that uses ChatGPT to produce caption mix-ups (i.e., grammatical and compact combinations of two captions) which, together with the corresponding audio mixtures, increase not only the amount but also the complexity and diversity of training data. During inference, we propose to employ nucleus sampling and a hybrid reranking algorithm, which has not been explored in AAC research. Combining our efforts, our model achieves a new state-of-the-art 32.6 SPIDEr-FL score on the Clotho evaluation split, and wins the 2023 DCASE AAC challenge.
Self-Distilled Dynamic Fusion Network for Language-Based Fashion Retrieval
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2024
Year: 2024

In the domain of language-based fashion image retrieval, pinpointing the desired fashion item using both a reference image and its accompanying textual description is an intriguing challenge. Existing approaches lean heavily on static fusion techniques, intertwining image and text. Despite their commendable advancements, these approaches are still limited by a deficiency in flexibility. In response, we propose a Self-distilled Dynamic Fusion Network to compose the multi-granularity features dynamically by considering the consistency of routing path and modality-specific information simultaneously. Two new modules are included in our proposed method: (1) Dynamic Fusion Network with Modality Specific Routers. The dynamic network enables a flexible determination of the routing for each reference image and modification text, taking into account their distinct semantics and distributions. (2) Self Path Distillation Loss. A stable path decision for queries benefits the optimization of feature extraction as well as routing, and we approach this by progressively refine the path decision with previous path information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model compared to existing methods.