Target Speech Extraction with Pre-trained AV-HuBERT and Mask-And-Recover Strategy

Audio-visual target speech extraction (AV-TSE) is one of the enabling technologies in robotics and many audio-visual applications. One of the challenges of AV-TSE is how to effectively utilize audio-visual synchronization information in the process. AV-HuBERT can be a useful pre-trained model for lip-reading, which has not been adopted by AV-TSE. In this paper, we would like to explore the way to integrate a pre-trained AV-HuBERT into our AV-TSE system. We have good reasons to expect an improved performance. To benefit from the inter and intra-modality correlations, we also propose a novel Mask-And-Recover (MAR) strategy for self-supervised learning. The experimental results on the VoxCeleb2 dataset show that our proposed model outperforms the baselines both in terms of subjective and objective metrics, suggesting that the pre-trained AV-HuBERT model provides more informative visual cues for target speech extraction. Furthermore, through a comparative study, we confirm that the proposed Mask-And-Recover strategy is significantly effective.

Enhancing Expressiveness in Dance Generation via Integrating Frequency and Music Style Information

Dance generation, as a branch of human motion generation, has attracted increasing attention. Recently, a few works attempt to enhance dance expressiveness, which includes genre matching, beat alignment, and dance dynamics, from certain aspects. However, the enhancement is quite limited as they lack comprehensive consideration of the aforementioned three factors. In this paper, we propose ExpressiveBailando, a novel dance generation method designed to generate expressive dances, concurrently taking all three factors into account. Specifically, we mitigate the issue of speed homogenization by incorporating frequency information into VQ-VAE, thus improving dance dynamics. Additionally, we integrate music style information by extracting genre- and beat-related features with a pre-trained music model, hence achieving improvements in the other two factors. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can generate dances with high expressiveness and outperforms existing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Self-Alignment for Factuality: Mitigating Hallucinations in LLMs via Self-Evaluation

Despite showing increasingly human-like abilities, large language models (LLMs) often struggle with factual inaccuracies, i.e. "hallucinations", even when they hold relevant knowledge. To address these hallucinations, current approaches typically necessitate high-quality human factuality annotations. In this work, we explore Self-Alignment for Factuality, where we leverage the self-evaluation capability of an LLM to provide training signals that steer the model towards factuality. Specifically, we incorporate Self-Eval, a self-evaluation component, to prompt an LLM to validate the factuality of its own generated responses solely based on its internal knowledge. Additionally, we design Self-Knowledge Tuning (SK-Tuning) to augment the LLM's self-evaluation ability by improving the model's confidence estimation and calibration. We then utilize these self-annotated responses to fine-tune the model via Direct Preference Optimization algorithm. We show that the proposed self-alignment approach substantially enhances factual accuracy over Llama family models across three key knowledge-intensive tasks on TruthfulQA and BioGEN.

Exploiting Audio-Visual Features with Pretrained AV-HuBERT for Multi-Modal Dysarthric Speech Reconstruction

Dysarthric speech reconstruction (DSR) aims to transform dysarthric speech into normal speech by improving the intelligibility and naturalness. This is a challenging task especially for patients with severe dysarthria and speaking in complex, noisy acoustic environments. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multi-modal framework to utilize visual information, e.g., lip movements, in DSR as extra clues for reconstructing the highly abnormal pronunciations. The multi-modal framework consists of: (i) a multi-modal encoder to extract robust phoneme embeddings from dysarthric speech with auxiliary visual features; (ii) a variance adaptor to infer the normal phoneme duration and pitch contour from the extracted phoneme embeddings; (iii) a speaker encoder to encode the speaker's voice characteristics; and (iv) a mel-decoder to generate the reconstructed mel-spectrogram based on the extracted phoneme embeddings, prosodic features and speaker embeddings. Both objective and subjective evaluations conducted on the commonly used UASpeech corpus show that our proposed approach can achieve significant improvements over baseline systems in terms of speech intelligibility and naturalness, especially for the speakers with more severe symptoms. Compared with original dysarthric speech, the reconstructed speech achieves 42.1\% absolute word error rate reduction for patients with more severe dysarthria levels.

UNIT-DSR: Dysarthric Speech Reconstruction System Using Speech Unit Normalization

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.

SCNet: Sparse Compression Network for Music Source Separation

Deep learning-based methods have made significant achievements in music source separation. However, obtaining good results while maintaining a low model complexity remains challenging in super wide-band music source separation. Previous works either overlook the differences in subbands or inadequately address the problem of information loss when generating subband features. In this paper, we propose SCNet, a novel frequency-domain network to explicitly split the spectrogram of the mixture into several subbands and introduce a sparsity-based encoder to model different frequency bands. We use a higher compression ratio on subbands with less information to improve the information density and focus on modeling subbands with more information. In this way, the separation performance can be significantly improved using lower computational consumption. Experiment results show that the proposed model achieves a signal to distortion ratio (SDR) of 9.0 dB on the MUSDB18-HQ dataset without using extra data, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, SCNet's CPU inference time is only 48% of HT Demucs, one of the previous state-of-the-art models.

Multi-view MidiVAE: Fusing Track- and Bar-view Representations for Long Multi-track Symbolic Music Generation

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) constitute a crucial component of neural symbolic music generation, among which some works have yielded outstanding results and attracted considerable attention. Nevertheless, previous VAEs still encounter issues with overly long feature sequences and generated results lack contextual coherence, thus the challenge of modeling long multi-track symbolic music still remains unaddressed. To this end, we propose Multi-view MidiVAE, as one of the pioneers in VAE methods that effectively model and generate long multi-track symbolic music. The Multi-view MidiVAE utilizes the two-dimensional (2-D) representation, OctupleMIDI, to capture relationships among notes while reducing the feature sequences length. Moreover, we focus on instrumental characteristics and harmony as well as global and local information about the musical composition by employing a hybrid variational encoding-decoding strategy to integrate both Track- and Bar-view MidiVAE features. Objective and subjective experimental results on the CocoChorales dataset demonstrate that, compared to the baseline, Multi-view MidiVAE exhibits significant improvements in terms of modeling long multi-track symbolic music.

Cross-Speaker Encoding Network for Multi-Talker Speech Recognition

End-to-end multi-talker speech recognition has garnered great interest as an effective approach to directly transcribe overlapped speech from multiple speakers. Current methods typically adopt either 1) single-input multiple-output (SIMO) models with a branched encoder, or 2) single-input single-output (SISO) models based on attention-based encoder-decoder architecture with serialized output training (SOT). In this work, we propose a Cross-Speaker Encoding (CSE) network to address the limitations of SIMO models by aggregating cross-speaker representations. Furthermore, the CSE model is integrated with SOT to leverage both the advantages of SIMO and SISO while mitigating their drawbacks. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents an early effort to integrate SIMO and SISO for multi-talker speech recognition. Experiments on the two-speaker LibrispeechMix dataset show that the CES model reduces word error rate (WER) by 8% over the SIMO baseline. The CSE-SOT model reduces WER by 10% overall and by 16% on high-overlap speech compared to the SOT model.

Consistent and Relevant: Rethink the Query Embedding in General Sound Separation

The query-based audio separation usually employs specific queries to extract target sources from a mixture of audio signals. Currently, most query-based separation models need additional networks to obtain query embedding. In this way, separation model is optimized to be adapted to the distribution of query embedding. However, query embedding may exhibit mismatches with separation models due to inconsistent structures and independent information. In this paper, we present CaRE-SEP, a consistent and relevant embedding network for general sound separation to encourage a comprehensive reconsideration of query usage in audio separation. CaRE-SEP alleviates the potential mismatch between queries and separation in two aspects, including sharing network structure and sharing feature information. First, a Swin-Unet model with a shared encoder is conducted to unify query encoding and sound separation into one model, eliminating the network architecture difference and generating consistent distribution of query and separation features. Second, by initializing CaRE-SEP with a pretrained classification network and allowing gradient backpropagation, the query embedding is optimized to be relevant to the separation feature, further alleviating the feature mismatch problem. Experimental results indicate the proposed CaRE-SEP model substantially improves the performance of separation tasks. Moreover, visualizations validate the potential mismatch and how CaRE-SEP solves it.

StyleSpeech: Self-supervised Style Enhancing with VQ-VAE-based Pre-training for Expressive Audiobook Speech Synthesis

The expressive quality of synthesized speech for audiobooks is limited by generalized model architecture and unbalanced style distribution in the training data. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a self-supervised style enhancing method with VQ-VAE-based pre-training for expressive audiobook speech synthesis. Firstly, a text style encoder is pre-trained with a large amount of unlabeled text-only data. Secondly, a spectrogram style extractor based on VQ-VAE is pre-trained in a self-supervised manner, with plenty of audio data that covers complex style variations. Then a novel architecture with two encoder-decoder paths is specially designed to model the pronunciation and high-level style expressiveness respectively, with the guidance of the style extractor. Both objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that our proposed method can effectively improve the naturalness and expressiveness of the synthesized speech in audiobook synthesis especially for the role and out-of-domain scenarios.