pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Exploring Timbre Disentanglement in Non-Autoregressive Cross-Lingual Text-to-Speech
Authors: Haoyue Zhan, Xinyuan Yu, Haitong Zhang, Yang Zhang, Yue Lin
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Voice Cloning

In this paper, we study the disentanglement of speaker and language representations in non-autoregressive cross-lingual TTS models from various aspects. We propose a phoneme length regulator that solves the length mismatch problem between IPA input sequence and monolingual alignment results. Using the phoneme length regulator, we present a FastPitch-based cross-lingual model with IPA symbols as input representations. Our experiments show that language-independent input representations (e.g. IPA symbols), an increasing number of training speakers, and explicit modeling of speech variance information all encourage non-autoregressive cross-lingual TTS model to disentangle speaker and language representations. The subjective evaluation shows that our proposed model can achieve decent naturalness and speaker similarity in cross-language voice cloning.
Revisiting IPA-based Cross-lingual Text-to-speech
Authors: Haitong Zhang, Haoyue Zhan, Yang Zhang, Xinyuan Yu, Yue Lin
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Voice Cloning

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) has been widely used in cross-lingual text-to-speech (TTS) to achieve cross-lingual voice cloning (CL VC). However, IPA itself has been understudied in cross-lingual TTS. In this paper, we report some empirical findings of building a cross-lingual TTS model using IPA as inputs. Experiments show that the way to process the IPA and suprasegmental sequence has a negligible impact on the CL VC performance. Furthermore, we find that using a dataset including one speaker per language to build an IPA-based TTS system would fail CL VC since the language-unique IPA and tone/stress symbols could leak the speaker information. In addition, we experiment with different combinations of speakers in the training dataset to further investigate the effect of the number of speakers on the CL VC performance.
Multi-ACCDOA: Localizing and Detecting Overlapping Sounds from the Same Class with Auxiliary Duplicating Permutation Invariant Training
Authors: Kazuki Shimada, Yuichiro Koyama, Shusuke Takahashi, Naoya Takahashi, Emiru Tsunoo, Yuki Mitsufuji
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Sound Event Localization and Detection

Sound event localization and detection (SELD) involves identifying the direction-of-arrival (DOA) and the event class. The SELD methods with a class-wise output format make the model predict activities of all sound event classes and corresponding locations. The class-wise methods can output activity-coupled Cartesian DOA (ACCDOA) vectors, which enable us to solve a SELD task with a single target using a single network. However, there is still a challenge in detecting the same event class from multiple locations. To overcome this problem while maintaining the advantages of the class-wise format, we extended ACCDOA to a multi one and proposed auxiliary duplicating permutation invariant training (ADPIT). The multi- ACCDOA format (a class- and track-wise output format) enables the model to solve the cases with overlaps from the same class. The class-wise ADPIT scheme enables each track of the multi-ACCDOA format to learn with the same target as the single-ACCDOA format. In evaluations with the DCASE 2021 Task 3 dataset, the model trained with the multi-ACCDOA format and with the class-wise ADPIT detects overlapping events from the same class while maintaining its performance in the other cases. Also, the proposed method performed comparably to state-of-the-art SELD methods with fewer parameters.
Auxiliary Loss of Transformer with Residual Connection for End-to-End Speaker Diarization
Authors: Yechan Yu, Dongkeon Park, Hong Kook Kim
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: speaker-diarization, Speaker Diarization

End-to-end neural diarization (EEND) with self-attention directly predicts speaker labels from inputs and enables the handling of overlapped speech. Although the EEND outperforms clustering-based speaker diarization (SD), it cannot be further improved by simply increasing the number of encoder blocks because the last encoder block is dominantly supervised compared with lower blocks. This paper proposes a new residual auxiliary EEND (RX-EEND) learning architecture for transformers to enforce the lower encoder blocks to learn more accurately. The auxiliary loss is applied to the output of each encoder block, including the last encoder block. The effect of auxiliary loss on the learning of the encoder blocks can be further increased by adding a residual connection between the encoder blocks of the EEND. Performance evaluation and ablation study reveal that the auxiliary loss in the proposed RX-EEND provides relative reductions in the diarization error rate (DER) by 50.3% and 21.0% on the simulated and CALLHOME (CH) datasets, respectively, compared with self-attentive EEND (SA-EEND). Furthermore, the residual connection used in RX-EEND further relatively reduces the DER by 8.1% for CH dataset.
Comparison of SVD and factorized TDNN approaches for speech to text
Authors: Jeffrey Josanne Michael, Nagendra Kumar Goel, Navneeth K, Jonas Robertson, Shravan Mishra
Date: 2021-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech-to-Text

This work concentrates on reducing the RTF and word error rate of a hybrid HMM-DNN. Our baseline system uses an architecture with TDNN and LSTM layers. We find this architecture particularly useful for lightly reverberated environments. However, these models tend to demand more computation than is desirable. In this work, we explore alternate architectures employing singular value decomposition (SVD) is applied to the TDNN layers to reduce the RTF, as well as to the affine transforms of every LSTM cell. We compare this approach with specifying bottleneck layers similar to those introduced by SVD before training. Additionally, we reduced the search space of the decoding graph to make it a better fit to operate in real-time applications. We report -61.57% relative reduction in RTF and almost 1% relative decrease in WER for our architecture trained on Fisher data along with reverberated versions of this dataset in order to match one of our target test distributions.
Study of positional encoding approaches for Audio Spectrogram Transformers
Authors: Leonardo Pepino, Pablo Riera, Luciana Ferrer
Date: 2021-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Classification

Transformers have revolutionized the world of deep learning, specially in the field of natural language processing. Recently, the Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST) was proposed for audio classification, leading to state of the art results in several datasets. However, in order for ASTs to outperform CNNs, pretraining with ImageNet is needed. In this paper, we study one component of the AST, the positional encoding, and propose several variants to improve the performance of ASTs trained from scratch, without ImageNet pretraining. Our best model, which incorporates conditional positional encodings, significantly improves performance on Audioset and ESC-50 compared to the original AST.
Diverse Audio Captioning via Adversarial Training
Authors: Xinhao Mei, Xubo Liu, Jianyuan Sun, Mark D. Plumbley, Wenwu Wang
Date: 2021-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio captioning, Diversity, Generative Adversarial Network, Sentence

Audio captioning aims at generating natural language descriptions for audio clips automatically. Existing audio captioning models have shown promising improvement in recent years. However, these models are mostly trained via maximum likelihood estimation (MLE),which tends to make captions generic, simple and deterministic. As different people may describe an audio clip from different aspects using distinct words and grammars, we argue that an audio captioning system should have the ability to generate diverse captions for a fixed audio clip and across similar audio clips. To address this problem, we propose an adversarial training framework for audio captioning based on a conditional generative adversarial network (C-GAN), which aims at improving the naturalness and diversity of generated captions. Unlike processing data of continuous values in a classical GAN, a sentence is composed of discrete tokens and the discrete sampling process is non-differentiable. To address this issue, policy gradient, a reinforcement learning technique, is used to back-propagate the reward to the generator. The results show that our proposed model can generate more diverse captions, as compared to state-of-the-art methods.
All-neural beamformer for continuous speech separation
Authors: Zhuohuang Zhang, Takuya Yoshioka, Naoyuki Kanda, Zhuo Chen, Xiaofei Wang, Dongmei Wang, Sefik Emre Eskimez
Date: 2021-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speech Extraction, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech Separation

Continuous speech separation (CSS) aims to separate overlapping voices from a continuous influx of conversational audio containing an unknown number of utterances spoken by an unknown number of speakers. A common application scenario is transcribing a meeting conversation recorded by a microphone array. Prior studies explored various deep learning models for time-frequency mask estimation, followed by a minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) filter to improve the automatic speech recognition (ASR) accuracy. The performance of these methods is fundamentally upper-bounded by MVDR's spatial selectivity. Recently, the all deep learning MVDR (ADL-MVDR) model was proposed for neural beamforming and demonstrated superior performance in a target speech extraction task using pre-segmented input. In this paper, we further adapt ADL-MVDR to the CSS task with several enhancements to enable end-to-end neural beamforming. The proposed system achieves significant word error rate reduction over a baseline spectral masking system on the LibriCSS dataset. Moreover, the proposed neural beamformer is shown to be comparable to a state-of-the-art MVDR-based system in real meeting transcription tasks, including AMI, while showing potentials to further simplify the runtime implementation and reduce the system latency with frame-wise processing.
Generalized Time Domain Velocity Vector
Authors: Srđan Kitić, Jérôme Daniel
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter estimation

We introduce and analyze Generalized Time Domain Velocity Vector (GTVV), an extension of the previously presented acoustic multipath footprint extracted from the Ambisonic recordings. GTVV is better adapted to adverse acoustic conditions, and enables efficient parameter estimation of multiple plane wave components in the recorded multichannel mixture. Experiments on simulated data confirm the predicted theoretical advantages of these new spatio-temporal features.
Looper: An end-to-end ML platform for product decisions
Authors: Igor L. Markov, Hanson Wang, Nitya Kasturi, Shaun Singh, Sze Wai Yuen, Mia Garrard, Sarah Tran, Yin Huang, Zehui Wang, Igor Glotov, Tanvi Gupta, Boshuang Huang, Peng Chen, Xiaowen Xie, Michael Belkin, Sal Uryasev, Sam Howie, Eytan Bakshy, Norm Zhou
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Modern software systems and products increasingly rely on machine learning models to make data-driven decisions based on interactions with users, infrastructure and other systems. For broader adoption, this practice must (i) accommodate product engineers without ML backgrounds, (ii) support finegrain product-metric evaluation and (iii) optimize for product goals. To address shortcomings of prior platforms, we introduce general principles for and the architecture of an ML platform, Looper, with simple APIs for decision-making and feedback collection. Looper covers the end-to-end ML lifecycle from collecting training data and model training to deployment and inference, and extends support to personalization, causal evaluation with heterogenous treatment effects, and Bayesian tuning for product goals. During the 2021 production deployment Looper simultaneously hosted 440-1,000 ML models that made 4-6 million real-time decisions per second. We sum up experiences of platform adopters and describe their learning curve.
DeepOrder: Deep Learning for Test Case Prioritization in Continuous Integration Testing
Authors: Aizaz Sharif, Dusica Marijan, Marius Liaaen
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Detection, regression

Continuous integration testing is an important step in the modern software engineering life cycle. Test prioritization is a method that can improve the efficiency of continuous integration testing by selecting test cases that can detect faults in the early stage of each cycle. As continuous integration testing produces voluminous test execution data, test history is a commonly used artifact in test prioritization. However, existing test prioritization techniques for continuous integration either cannot handle large test history or are optimized for using a limited number of historical test cycles. We show that such a limitation can decrease fault detection effectiveness of prioritized test suites. This work introduces DeepOrder, a deep learning-based model that works on the basis of regression machine learning. DeepOrder ranks test cases based on the historical record of test executions from any number of previous test cycles. DeepOrder learns failed test cases based on multiple factors including the duration and execution status of test cases. We experimentally show that deep neural networks, as a simple regression model, can be efficiently used for test case prioritization in continuous integration testing. DeepOrder is evaluated with respect to time-effectiveness and fault detection effectiveness in comparison with an industry practice and the state of the art approaches. The results show that DeepOrder outperforms the industry practice and state-of-the-art test prioritization approaches in terms of these two metrics.
Retrieval-guided Counterfactual Generation for QA
Authors: Bhargavi Paranjape, Matthew Lamm, Ian Tenney
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: counterfactual, Data Augmentation, Diversity, Question Answering, Question Generation, Question-Generation, Reading Comprehension, Retrieval, World Knowledge

Deep NLP models have been shown to learn spurious correlations, leaving them brittle to input perturbations. Recent work has shown that counterfactual or contrastive data -- i.e. minimally perturbed inputs -- can reveal these weaknesses, and that data augmentation using counterfactuals can help ameliorate them. Proposed techniques for generating counterfactuals rely on human annotations, perturbations based on simple heuristics, and meaning representation frameworks. We focus on the task of creating counterfactuals for question answering, which presents unique challenges related to world knowledge, semantic diversity, and answerability. To address these challenges, we develop a Retrieve-Generate-Filter(RGF) technique to create counterfactual evaluation and training data with minimal human supervision. Using an open-domain QA framework and question generation model trained on original task data, we create counterfactuals that are fluent, semantically diverse, and automatically labeled. Data augmentation with RGF counterfactuals improves performance on out-of-domain and challenging evaluation sets over and above existing methods, in both the reading comprehension and open-domain QA settings. Moreover, we find that RGF data leads to significant improvements in a model's robustness to local perturbations.
Compressibility of Distributed Document Representations
Authors: Blaž Škrlj, Matej Petkovič
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: text-classification, Text Classification

Contemporary natural language processing (NLP) revolves around learning from latent document representations, generated either implicitly by neural language models or explicitly by methods such as doc2vec or similar. One of the key properties of the obtained representations is their dimension. Whilst the commonly adopted dimensions of 256 and 768 offer sufficient performance on many tasks, it is many times unclear whether the default dimension is the most suitable choice for the subsequent downstream learning tasks. Furthermore, representation dimensions are seldom subject to hyperparameter tuning due to computational constraints. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that a surprisingly simple and efficient recursive compression procedure can be sufficient to both significantly compress the initial representation, but also potentially improve its performance when considering the task of text classification. Having smaller and less noisy representations is the desired property during deployment, as orders of magnitude smaller models can significantly reduce the computational overload and with it the deployment costs. We propose CoRe, a straightforward, representation learner-agnostic framework suitable for representation compression. The CoRe's performance is showcased and studied on a collection of 17 real-life corpora from biomedical, news, social media, and literary domains. We explored CoRe's behavior when considering contextual and non-contextual document representations, different compression levels, and 9 different compression algorithms. Current results based on more than 100,000 compression experiments indicate that recursive Singular Value Decomposition offers a very good trade-off between the compression efficiency and performance, making CoRe useful in many existing, representation-dependent NLP pipelines.
Graph Condensation for Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Wei Jin, Lingxiao Zhao, Shichang Zhang, Yozen Liu, Jiliang Tang, Neil Shah
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4

Given the prevalence of large-scale graphs in real-world applications, the storage and time for training neural models have raised increasing concerns. To alleviate the concerns, we propose and study the problem of graph condensation for graph neural networks (GNNs). Specifically, we aim to condense the large, original graph into a small, synthetic and highly-informative graph, such that GNNs trained on the small graph and large graph have comparable performance. We approach the condensation problem by imitating the GNN training trajectory on the original graph through the optimization of a gradient matching loss and design a strategy to condense node futures and structural information simultaneously. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed framework in condensing different graph datasets into informative smaller graphs. In particular, we are able to approximate the original test accuracy by 95.3% on Reddit, 99.8% on Flickr and 99.0% on Citeseer, while reducing their graph size by more than 99.9%, and the condensed graphs can be used to train various GNN architectures.Code is released at https://github.com/ChandlerBang/GCond.
UniPELT: A Unified Framework for Parameter-Efficient Language Model Tuning
Authors: Yuning Mao, Lambert Mathias, Rui Hou, Amjad Almahairi, Hao Ma, Jiawei Han, Wen-tau Yih, Madian Khabsa
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Diversity, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Model Selection

Recent parameter-efficient language model tuning (PELT) methods manage to match the performance of fine-tuning with much fewer trainable parameters and perform especially well when training data is limited. However, different PELT methods may perform rather differently on the same task, making it nontrivial to select the most appropriate method for a specific task, especially considering the fast-growing number of new PELT methods and tasks. In light of model diversity and the difficulty of model selection, we propose a unified framework, UniPELT, which incorporates different PELT methods as submodules and learns to activate the ones that best suit the current data or task setup via gating mechanism. On the GLUE benchmark, UniPELT consistently achieves 1~4% gains compared to the best individual PELT method that it incorporates and even outperforms fine-tuning under different setups. Moreover, UniPELT generally surpasses the upper bound that takes the best performance of all its submodules used individually on each task, indicating that a mixture of multiple PELT methods may be inherently more effective than single methods.
LAGr: Labeling Aligned Graphs for Improving Systematic Generalization in Semantic Parsing
Authors: Dora Jambor, Dzmitry Bahdanau
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Parsing, Systematic Generalization

Semantic parsing is the task of producing a structured meaning representation for natural language utterances or questions. Recent research has pointed out that the commonly-used sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) semantic parsers struggle to generalize systematically, i.e. to handle examples that require recombining known knowledge in novel settings. In this work, we show that better systematic generalization can be achieved by producing the meaning representation (MR) directly as a graph and not as a sequence. To this end we propose LAGr, the Labeling Aligned Graphs algorithm that produces semantic parses by predicting node and edge labels for a complete multi-layer input-aligned graph. The strongly-supervised LAGr algorithm requires aligned graphs as inputs, whereas weakly-supervised LAGr infers alignments for originally unaligned target graphs using an approximate MAP inference procedure. On the COGS and CFQ compositional generalization benchmarks the strongly- and weakly- supervised LAGr algorithms achieve significant improvements upon the baseline seq2seq parsers.
Practical Benefits of Feature Feedback Under Distribution Shift
Authors: Anurag Katakkar, Clay H. Yoo, Weiqin Wang, Zachary C. Lipton, Divyansh Kaushik
Date: 2021-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Inference, Sentiment Analysis

In attempts to develop sample-efficient and interpretable algorithms, researcher have explored myriad mechanisms for collecting and exploiting feature feedback (or rationales) auxiliary annotations provided for training (but not test) instances that highlight salient evidence. Examples include bounding boxes around objects and salient spans in text. Despite its intuitive appeal, feature feedback has not delivered significant gains in practical problems as assessed on iid holdout sets. However, recent works on counterfactually augmented data suggest an alternative benefit of supplemental annotations, beyond interpretability: lessening sensitivity to spurious patterns and consequently delivering gains in out-of-domain evaluations. We speculate that while existing methods for incorporating feature feedback have delivered negligible in-sample performance gains, they may nevertheless provide out-of-domain benefits. Our experiments addressing sentiment analysis, show that feature feedback methods perform significantly better on various natural out-of-domain datasets despite comparable in-domain evaluations. By contrast, performance on natural language inference remains comparable. Finally, we compare those tasks where feature feedback does (and does not) help.