EmoBox: Multilingual Multi-corpus Speech Emotion Recognition Toolkit and Benchmark

Speech emotion recognition (SER) is an important part of human-computer interaction, receiving extensive attention from both industry and academia. However, the current research field of SER has long suffered from the following problems: 1) There are few reasonable and universal splits of the datasets, making comparing different models and methods difficult. 2) No commonly used benchmark covers numerous corpus and languages for researchers to refer to, making reproduction a burden. In this paper, we propose EmoBox, an out-of-the-box multilingual multi-corpus speech emotion recognition toolkit, along with a benchmark for both intra-corpus and cross-corpus settings. For intra-corpus settings, we carefully designed the data partitioning for different datasets. For cross-corpus settings, we employ a foundation SER model, emotion2vec, to mitigate annotation errors and obtain a test set that is fully balanced in speakers and emotions distributions. Based on EmoBox, we present the intra-corpus SER results of 10 pre-trained speech models on 32 emotion datasets with 14 languages, and the cross-corpus SER results on 4 datasets with the fully balanced test sets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest SER benchmark, across language scopes and quantity scales. We hope that our toolkit and benchmark can facilitate the research of SER in the community.

emotion2vec: Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Speech Emotion Representation

We propose emotion2vec, a universal speech emotion representation model. emotion2vec is pre-trained on open-source unlabeled emotion data through self-supervised online distillation, combining utterance-level loss and frame-level loss during pre-training. emotion2vec outperforms state-of-the-art pre-trained universal models and emotion specialist models by only training linear layers for the speech emotion recognition task on the mainstream IEMOCAP dataset. In addition, emotion2vec shows consistent improvements among 10 different languages of speech emotion recognition datasets. emotion2vec also shows excellent results on other emotion tasks, such as song emotion recognition, emotion prediction in conversation, and sentiment analysis. Comparison experiments, ablation experiments, and visualization comprehensively demonstrate the universal capability of the proposed emotion2vec. To the best of our knowledge, emotion2vec is the first universal representation model in various emotion-related tasks, filling a gap in the field.

Emo-DNA: Emotion Decoupling and Alignment Learning for Cross-Corpus Speech Emotion Recognition

Cross-corpus speech emotion recognition (SER) seeks to generalize the ability of inferring speech emotion from a well-labeled corpus to an unlabeled one, which is a rather challenging task due to the significant discrepancy between two corpora. Existing methods, typically based on unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), struggle to learn corpus-invariant features by global distribution alignment, but unfortunately, the resulting features are mixed with corpus-specific features or not class-discriminative. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel Emotion Decoupling aNd Alignment learning framework (EMO-DNA) for cross-corpus SER, a novel UDA method to learn emotion-relevant corpus-invariant features. The novelties of EMO-DNA are two-fold: contrastive emotion decoupling and dual-level emotion alignment. On one hand, our contrastive emotion decoupling achieves decoupling learning via a contrastive decoupling loss to strengthen the separability of emotion-relevant features from corpus-specific ones. On the other hand, our dual-level emotion alignment introduces an adaptive threshold pseudo-labeling to select confident target samples for class-level alignment, and performs corpus-level alignment to jointly guide model for learning class-discriminative corpus-invariant features across corpora. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of EMO-DNA over the state-of-the-art methods in several cross-corpus scenarios. Source code is available at https://github.com/Jiaxin-Ye/Emo-DNA.

Online Prototype Learning for Online Continual Learning

Online continual learning (CL) studies the problem of learning continuously from a single-pass data stream while adapting to new data and mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Recently, by storing a small subset of old data, replay-based methods have shown promising performance. Unlike previous methods that focus on sample storage or knowledge distillation against catastrophic forgetting, this paper aims to understand why the online learning models fail to generalize well from a new perspective of shortcut learning. We identify shortcut learning as the key limiting factor for online CL, where the learned features may be biased, not generalizable to new tasks, and may have an adverse impact on knowledge distillation. To tackle this issue, we present the online prototype learning (OnPro) framework for online CL. First, we propose online prototype equilibrium to learn representative features against shortcut learning and discriminative features to avoid class confusion, ultimately achieving an equilibrium status that separates all seen classes well while learning new classes. Second, with the feedback of online prototypes, we devise a novel adaptive prototypical feedback mechanism to sense the classes that are easily misclassified and then enhance their boundaries. Extensive experimental results on widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of OnPro over the state-of-the-art baseline methods. Source code is available at https://github.com/weilllllls/OnPro.

Temporal Modeling Matters: A Novel Temporal Emotional Modeling Approach for Speech Emotion Recognition

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. Remarkably, TIM-Net outperforms the latest domain-adaptation method on the cross-corpus SER tasks, demonstrating strong generalizability.