On Class Separability Pitfalls In Audio-Text Contrastive Zero-Shot Learning

Recent advances in audio-text cross-modal contrastive learning have shown its potential towards zero-shot learning. One possibility for this is by projecting item embeddings from pre-trained backbone neural networks into a cross-modal space in which item similarity can be calculated in either domain. This process relies on a strong unimodal pre-training of the backbone networks, and on a data-intensive training task for the projectors. These two processes can be biased by unintentional data leakage, which can arise from using supervised learning in pre-training or from inadvertently training the cross-modal projection using labels from the zero-shot learning evaluation. In this study, we show that a significant part of the measured zero-shot learning accuracy is due to strengths inherited from the audio and text backbones, that is, they are not learned in the cross-modal domain and are not transferred from one modality to another.

Rethinking Non-Negative Matrix Factorization with Implicit Neural Representations

Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is a powerful technique for analyzing regularly-sampled data, i.e., data that can be stored in a matrix. For audio, this has led to numerous applications using time-frequency (TF) representations like the Short-Time Fourier Transform. However extending these applications to irregularly-spaced TF representations, like the Constant-Q transform, wavelets, or sinusoidal analysis models, has not been possible since these representations cannot be directly stored in matrix form. In this paper, we formulate NMF in terms of continuous functions (instead of fixed vectors) and show that NMF can be extended to a wider variety of signal classes that need not be regularly sampled.

Scaling Up Adaptive Filter Optimizers

We introduce a new online adaptive filtering method called supervised multi-step adaptive filters (SMS-AF). Our method uses neural networks to control or optimize linear multi-delay or multi-channel frequency-domain filters and can flexibly scale-up performance at the cost of increased compute -- a property rarely addressed in the AF literature, but critical for many applications. To do so, we extend recent work with a set of improvements including feature pruning, a supervised loss, and multiple optimization steps per time-frame. These improvements work in a cohesive manner to unlock scaling. Furthermore, we show how our method relates to Kalman filtering and meta-adaptive filtering, making it seamlessly applicable to a diverse set of AF tasks. We evaluate our method on acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) and multi-channel speech enhancement tasks and compare against several baselines on standard synthetic and real-world datasets. Results show our method performance scales with inference cost and model capacity, yields multi-dB performance gains for both tasks, and is real-time capable on a single CPU core.

Sound Source Separation Using Latent Variational Block-Wise Disentanglement

While neural network approaches have made significant strides in resolving classical signal processing problems, it is often the case that hybrid approaches that draw insight from both signal processing and neural networks produce more complete solutions. In this paper, we present a hybrid classical digital signal processing/deep neural network (DSP/DNN) approach to source separation (SS) highlighting the theoretical link between variational autoencoder and classical approaches to SS. We propose a system that transforms the single channel under-determined SS task to an equivalent multichannel over-determined SS problem in a properly designed latent space. The separation task in the latent space is treated as finding a variational block-wise disentangled representation of the mixture. We show empirically, that the design choices and the variational formulation of the task at hand motivated by the classical signal processing theoretical results lead to robustness to unseen out-of-distribution data and reduction of the overfitting risk. To address the resulting permutation issue we explicitly incorporate a novel differentiable permutation loss function and augment the model with a memory mechanism to keep track of the statistics of the individual sources.

Meta-AF Echo Cancellation for Improved Keyword Spotting

Adaptive filters (AFs) are vital for enhancing the performance of downstream tasks, such as speech recognition, sound event detection, and keyword spotting. However, traditional AF design prioritizes isolated signal-level objectives, often overlooking downstream task performance. This can lead to suboptimal performance. Recent research has leveraged meta-learning to automatically learn AF update rules from data, alleviating the need for manual tuning when using simple signal-level objectives. This paper improves the Meta-AF framework by expanding it to support end-to-end training for arbitrary downstream tasks. We focus on classification tasks, where we introduce a novel training methodology that harnesses self-supervision and classifier feedback. We evaluate our approach on the combined task of acoustic echo cancellation and keyword spotting. Our findings demonstrate consistent performance improvements with both pre-trained and joint-trained keyword spotting models across synthetic and real playback. Notably, these improvements come without requiring additional tuning, increased inference-time complexity, or reliance on oracle signal-level training data.

Audio Editing with Non-Rigid Text Prompts

In this paper, we explore audio-editing with non-rigid text edits. We show that the proposed editing pipeline is able to create audio edits that remain faithful to the input audio. We explore text prompts that perform addition, style transfer, and in-painting. We quantitatively and qualitatively show that the edits are able to obtain results which outperform Audio-LDM, a recently released text-prompted audio generation model. Qualitative inspection of the results points out that the edits given by our approach remain more faithful to the input audio in terms of keeping the original onsets and offsets of the audio events.

Mechatronic Generation of Datasets for Acoustics Research

We address the challenge of making spatial audio datasets by proposing a shared mechanized recording space that can run custom acoustic experiments: a Mechatronic Acoustic Research System (MARS). To accommodate a wide variety of experiments, we implement an extensible architecture for wireless multi-robot coordination which enables synchronized robot motion for dynamic scenes with moving speakers and microphones. Using a virtual control interface, we can remotely design automated experiments to collect large-scale audio data. This data is shown to be similar across repeated runs, demonstrating the reliability of MARS. We discuss the potential for MARS to make audio data collection accessible for researchers without dedicated acoustic research spaces.

Noise-Robust DSP-Assisted Neural Pitch Estimation with Very Low Complexity

Pitch estimation is an essential step of many speech processing algorithms, including speech coding, synthesis, and enhancement. Recently, pitch estimators based on deep neural networks (DNNs) have have been outperforming well-established DSP-based techniques. Unfortunately, these new estimators can be impractical to deploy in real-time systems, both because of their relatively high complexity, and the fact that some require significant lookahead. We show that a hybrid estimator using a small deep neural network (DNN) with traditional DSP-based features can match or exceed the performance of pure DNN-based models, with a complexity and algorithmic delay comparable to traditional DSP-based algorithms. We further demonstrate that this hybrid approach can provide benefits for a neural vocoding task.

Complete and separate: Conditional separation with missing target source attribute completion

Recent approaches in source separation leverage semantic information about their input mixtures and constituent sources that when used in conditional separation models can achieve impressive performance. Most approaches along these lines have focused on simple descriptions, which are not always useful for varying types of input mixtures. In this work, we present an approach in which a model, given an input mixture and partial semantic information about a target source, is trained to extract additional semantic data. We then leverage this pre-trained model to improve the separation performance of an uncoupled multi-conditional separation network. Our experiments demonstrate that the separation performance of this multi-conditional model is significantly improved, approaching the performance of an oracle model with complete semantic information. Furthermore, our approach achieves performance levels that are comparable to those of the best performing specialized single conditional models, thus providing an easier to use alternative.

Unsupervised Improvement of Audio-Text Cross-Modal Representations

Recent advances in using language models to obtain cross-modal audio-text representations have overcome the limitations of conventional training approaches that use predefined labels. This has allowed the community to make progress in tasks like zero-shot classification, which would otherwise not be possible. However, learning such representations requires a large amount of human-annotated audio-text pairs. In this paper, we study unsupervised approaches to improve the learning framework of such representations with unpaired text and audio. We explore domain-unspecific and domain-specific curation methods to create audio-text pairs that we use to further improve the model. We also show that when domain-specific curation is used in conjunction with a soft-labeled contrastive loss, we are able to obtain significant improvement in terms of zero-shot classification performance on downstream sound event classification or acoustic scene classification tasks.