Noise-robust Speech Separation with Fast Generative Correction

Speech separation, the task of isolating multiple speech sources from a mixed audio signal, remains challenging in noisy environments. In this paper, we propose a generative correction method to enhance the output of a discriminative separator. By leveraging a generative corrector based on a diffusion model, we refine the separation process for single-channel mixture speech by removing noises and perceptually unnatural distortions. Furthermore, we optimize the generative model using a predictive loss to streamline the diffusion model's reverse process into a single step and rectify any associated errors by the reverse process. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the in-domain Libri2Mix noisy dataset, and out-of-domain WSJ with a variety of noises, improving SI-SNR by 22-35% relative to SepFormer, demonstrating robustness and strong generalization capabilities.

Unraveling Adversarial Examples against Speaker Identification -- Techniques for Attack Detection and Victim Model Classification

Adversarial examples have proven to threaten speaker identification systems, and several countermeasures against them have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a method to detect the presence of adversarial examples, i.e., a binary classifier distinguishing between benign and adversarial examples. We build upon and extend previous work on attack type classification by exploring new architectures. Additionally, we introduce a method for identifying the victim model on which the adversarial attack is carried out. To achieve this, we generate a new dataset containing multiple attacks performed against various victim models. We achieve an AUC of 0.982 for attack detection, with no more than a 0.03 drop in performance for unknown attacks. Our attack classification accuracy (excluding benign) reaches 86.48% across eight attack types using our LightResNet34 architecture, while our victim model classification accuracy reaches 72.28% across four victim models.

Time Scale Network: A Shallow Neural Network For Time Series Data

Time series data is often composed of information at multiple time scales, particularly in biomedical data. While numerous deep learning strategies exist to capture this information, many make networks larger, require more data, are more demanding to compute, and are difficult to interpret. This limits their usefulness in real-world applications facing even modest computational or data constraints and can further complicate their translation into practice. We present a minimal, computationally efficient Time Scale Network combining the translation and dilation sequence used in discrete wavelet transforms with traditional convolutional neural networks and back-propagation. The network simultaneously learns features at many time scales for sequence classification with significantly reduced parameters and operations. We demonstrate advantages in Atrial Dysfunction detection including: superior accuracy-per-parameter and accuracy-per-operation, fast training and inference speeds, and visualization and interpretation of learned patterns in atrial dysfunction detection on ECG signals. We also demonstrate impressive performance in seizure prediction using EEG signals. Our network isolated a few time scales that could be strategically selected to achieve 90.9% accuracy using only 1,133 active parameters and consistently converged on pulsatile waveform shapes. This method does not rest on any constraints or assumptions regarding signal content and could be leveraged in any area of time series analysis dealing with signals containing features at many time scales.

DPM-TSE: A Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Target Sound Extraction

Common target sound extraction (TSE) approaches primarily relied on discriminative approaches in order to separate the target sound while minimizing interference from the unwanted sources, with varying success in separating the target from the background. This study introduces DPM-TSE, a first generative method based on diffusion probabilistic modeling (DPM) for target sound extraction, to achieve both cleaner target renderings as well as improved separability from unwanted sounds. The technique also tackles common background noise issues with DPM by introducing a correction method for noise schedules and sample steps. This approach is evaluated using both objective and subjective quality metrics on the FSD Kaggle 2018 dataset. The results show that DPM-TSE has a significant improvement in perceived quality in terms of target extraction and purity.

Leveraging Pretrained Image-text Models for Improving Audio-Visual Learning

Visually grounded speech systems learn from paired images and their spoken captions. Recently, there have been attempts to utilize the visually grounded models trained from images and their corresponding text captions, such as CLIP, to improve speech-based visually grounded models' performance. However, the majority of these models only utilize the pretrained image encoder. Cascaded SpeechCLIP attempted to generate localized word-level information and utilize both the pretrained image and text encoders. Despite using both, they noticed a substantial drop in retrieval performance. We proposed Segmental SpeechCLIP which used a hierarchical segmental speech encoder to generate sequences of word-like units. We used the pretrained CLIP text encoder on top of these word-like unit representations and showed significant improvements over the cascaded variant of SpeechCLIP. Segmental SpeechCLIP directly learns the word embeddings as input to the CLIP text encoder bypassing the vocabulary embeddings. Here, we explore mapping audio to CLIP vocabulary embeddings via regularization and quantization. As our objective is to distill semantic information into the speech encoders, we explore the usage of large unimodal pretrained language models as the text encoders. Our method enables us to bridge image and text encoders e.g. DINO and RoBERTa trained with uni-modal data. Finally, we extend our framework in audio-only settings where only pairs of semantically related audio are available. Experiments show that audio-only systems perform close to the audio-visual system.

DuTa-VC: A Duration-aware Typical-to-atypical Voice Conversion Approach with Diffusion Probabilistic Model

We present a novel typical-to-atypical voice conversion approach (DuTa-VC), which (i) can be trained with nonparallel data (ii) first introduces diffusion probabilistic model (iii) preserves the target speaker identity (iv) is aware of the phoneme duration of the target speaker. DuTa-VC consists of three parts: an encoder transforms the source mel-spectrogram into a duration-modified speaker-independent mel-spectrogram, a decoder performs the reverse diffusion to generate the target mel-spectrogram, and a vocoder is applied to reconstruct the waveform. Objective evaluations conducted on the UASpeech show that DuTa-VC is able to capture severity characteristics of dysarthric speech, reserves speaker identity, and significantly improves dysarthric speech recognition as a data augmentation. Subjective evaluations by two expert speech pathologists validate that DuTa-VC can preserve the severity and type of dysarthria of the target speakers in the synthesized speech.

Regularizing Contrastive Predictive Coding for Speech Applications

Self-supervised methods such as Contrastive predictive Coding (CPC) have greatly improved the quality of the unsupervised representations. These representations significantly reduce the amount of labeled data needed for downstream task performance, such as automatic speech recognition. CPC learns representations by learning to predict future frames given current frames. Based on the observation that the acoustic information, e.g., phones, changes slower than the feature extraction rate in CPC, we propose regularization techniques that impose slowness constraints on the features. Here we propose two regularization techniques: Self-expressing constraint and Left-or-Right regularization. We evaluate the proposed model on ABX and linear phone classification tasks, acoustic unit discovery, and automatic speech recognition. The regularized CPC trained on 100 hours of unlabeled data matches the performance of the baseline CPC trained on 360 hours of unlabeled data. We also show that our regularization techniques are complementary to data augmentation and can further boost the system's performance. In monolingual, cross-lingual, or multilingual settings, with/without data augmentation, regardless of the amount of data used for training, our regularized models outperformed the baseline CPC models on the ABX task.

Self-FiLM: Conditioning GANs with self-supervised representations for bandwidth extension based speaker recognition

Speech super-resolution/Bandwidth Extension (BWE) can improve downstream tasks like Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV). We introduce a simple novel technique called Self-FiLM to inject self-supervision into existing BWE models via Feature-wise Linear Modulation. We hypothesize that such information captures domain/environment information, which can give zero-shot generalization. Self-FiLM Conditional GAN (CGAN) gives 18% relative improvement in Equal Error Rate and 8.5% in minimum Decision Cost Function using state-of-the-art ASV system on SRE21 test. We further by 1) deep feature loss from time-domain models and 2) re-training of data2vec 2.0 models on naturalistic wideband (VoxCeleb) and telephone data (SRE Superset etc.). Lastly, we integrate self-supervision with CycleGAN to present a completely unsupervised solution that matches the semi-supervised performance.

Stabilized training of joint energy-based models and their practical applications

The recently proposed Joint Energy-based Model (JEM) interprets discriminatively trained classifier $p(y|x)$ as an energy model, which is also trained as a generative model describing the distribution of the input observations $p(x)$. The JEM training relies on "positive examples" (i.e. examples from the training data set) as well as on "negative examples", which are samples from the modeled distribution $p(x)$ generated by means of Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD). Unfortunately, SGLD often fails to deliver negative samples of sufficient quality during the standard JEM training, which causes a very unbalanced contribution from the positive and negative examples when calculating gradients for JEM updates. As a consequence, the standard JEM training is quite unstable requiring careful tuning of hyper-parameters and frequent restarts when the training starts diverging. This makes it difficult to apply JEM to different neural network architectures, modalities, and tasks. In this work, we propose a training procedure that stabilizes SGLD-based JEM training (ST-JEM) by balancing the contribution from the positive and negative examples. We also propose to add an additional "regularization" term to the training objective -- MI between the input observations $x$ and output labels $y$ -- which encourages the JEM classifier to make more certain decisions about output labels. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 tasks. We also consider the task of classifying phonemes in a speech signal, for which we were not able to train JEM without the proposed stabilization. We show that a convincing speech can be generated from the trained model. Alternatively, corrupted speech can be de-noised by bringing it closer to the modeled speech distribution using a few SGLD iterations. We also propose and discuss additional applications of the trained model.

Time-domain speech super-resolution with GAN based modeling for telephony speaker verification

Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) technology has become commonplace in virtual assistants. However, its performance suffers when there is a mismatch between the train and test domains. Mixed bandwidth training, i.e., pooling training data from both domains, is a preferred choice for developing a universal model that works for both narrowband and wideband domains. We propose complementing this technique by performing neural upsampling of narrowband signals, also known as bandwidth extension. Our main goal is to discover and analyze high-performing time-domain Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based models to improve our downstream state-of-the-art ASV system. We choose GANs since they (1) are powerful for learning conditional distribution and (2) allow flexible plug-in usage as a pre-processor during the training of downstream task (ASV) with data augmentation. Prior works mainly focus on feature-domain bandwidth extension and limited experimental setups. We address these limitations by 1) using time-domain extension models, 2) reporting results on three real test sets, 2) extending training data, and 3) devising new test-time schemes. We compare supervised (conditional GAN) and unsupervised GANs (CycleGAN) and demonstrate average relative improvement in Equal Error Rate of 8.6% and 7.7%, respectively. For further analysis, we study changes in spectrogram visual quality, audio perceptual quality, t-SNE embeddings, and ASV score distributions. We show that our bandwidth extension leads to phenomena such as a shift of telephone (test) embeddings towards wideband (train) signals, a negative correlation of perceptual quality with downstream performance, and condition-independent score calibration.