Masked Autoencoders that Listen

This paper studies a simple extension of image-based Masked Autoencoders (MAE) to self-supervised representation learning from audio spectrograms. Following the Transformer encoder-decoder design in MAE, our Audio-MAE first encodes audio spectrogram patches with a high masking ratio, feeding only the non-masked tokens through encoder layers. The decoder then re-orders and decodes the encoded context padded with mask tokens, in order to reconstruct the input spectrogram. We find it beneficial to incorporate local window attention in the decoder, as audio spectrograms are highly correlated in local time and frequency bands. We then fine-tune the encoder with a lower masking ratio on target datasets. Empirically, Audio-MAE sets new state-of-the-art performance on six audio and speech classification tasks, outperforming other recent models that use external supervised pre-training. The code and models will be at https://github.com/facebookresearch/AudioMAE.

On Adversarial Robustness of Large-scale Audio Visual Learning

As audio-visual systems are being deployed for safety-critical tasks such as surveillance and malicious content filtering, their robustness remains an under-studied area. Existing published work on robustness either does not scale to large-scale dataset, or does not deal with multiple modalities. This work aims to study several key questions related to multi-modal learning through the lens of robustness: 1) Are multi-modal models necessarily more robust than uni-modal models? 2) How to efficiently measure the robustness of multi-modal learning? 3) How to fuse different modalities to achieve a more robust multi-modal model? To understand the robustness of the multi-modal model in a large-scale setting, we propose a density-based metric, and a convexity metric to efficiently measure the distribution of each modality in high-dimensional latent space. Our work provides a theoretical intuition together with empirical evidence showing how multi-modal fusion affects adversarial robustness through these metrics. We further devise a mix-up strategy based on our metrics to improve the robustness of the trained model. Our experiments on AudioSet and Kinetics-Sounds verify our hypothesis that multi-modal models are not necessarily more robust than their uni-modal counterparts in the face of adversarial examples. We also observe our mix-up trained method could achieve as much protection as traditional adversarial training, offering a computationally cheap alternative. Implementation: https://github.com/lijuncheng16/AudioSetDoneRight