WenetSpeech: A 10000+ Hours Multi-domain Mandarin Corpus for Speech Recognition

In this paper, we present WenetSpeech, a multi-domain Mandarin corpus consisting of 10000+ hours high-quality labeled speech, 2400+ hours weakly labeled speech, and about 10000 hours unlabeled speech, with 22400+ hours in total. We collect the data from YouTube and Podcast, which covers a variety of speaking styles, scenarios, domains, topics, and noisy conditions. An optical character recognition (OCR) based method is introduced to generate the audio/text segmentation candidates for the YouTube data on its corresponding video captions, while a high-quality ASR transcription system is used to generate audio/text pair candidates for the Podcast data. Then we propose a novel end-to-end label error detection approach to further validate and filter the candidates. We also provide three manually labelled high-quality test sets along with WenetSpeech for evaluation -- Dev for cross-validation purpose in training, Test_Net, collected from Internet for matched test, and Test\_Meeting, recorded from real meetings for more challenging mismatched test. Baseline systems trained with WenetSpeech are provided for three popular speech recognition toolkits, namely Kaldi, ESPnet, and WeNet, and recognition results on the three test sets are also provided as benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, WenetSpeech is the current largest open-sourced Mandarin speech corpus with transcriptions, which benefits research on production-level speech recognition.

Learning Practically Feasible Policies for Online 3D Bin Packing

We tackle the Online 3D Bin Packing Problem, a challenging yet practically useful variant of the classical Bin Packing Problem. In this problem, the items are delivered to the agent without informing the full sequence information. Agent must directly pack these items into the target bin stably without changing their arrival order, and no further adjustment is permitted. Online 3D-BPP can be naturally formulated as Markov Decision Process (MDP). We adopt deep reinforcement learning, in particular, the on-policy actor-critic framework, to solve this MDP with constrained action space. To learn a practically feasible packing policy, we propose three critical designs. First, we propose an online analysis of packing stability based on a novel stacking tree. It attains a high analysis accuracy while reducing the computational complexity from $O(N^2)$ to $O(N \log N)$, making it especially suited for RL training. Second, we propose a decoupled packing policy learning for different dimensions of placement which enables high-resolution spatial discretization and hence high packing precision. Third, we introduce a reward function that dictates the robot to place items in a far-to-near order and therefore simplifies the collision avoidance in movement planning of the robotic arm. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive discussion on several key implemental issues. The extensive evaluation demonstrates that our learned policy outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly and is practically usable for real-world applications.

Unsupervised Video Person Re-identification via Noise and Hard frame Aware Clustering

Unsupervised video-based person re-identification (re-ID) methods extract richer features from video tracklets than image-based ones. The state-of-the-art methods utilize clustering to obtain pseudo-labels and train the models iteratively. However, they underestimate the influence of two kinds of frames in the tracklet: 1) noise frames caused by detection errors or heavy occlusions exist in the tracklet, which may be allocated with unreliable labels during clustering; 2) the tracklet also contains hard frames caused by pose changes or partial occlusions, which are difficult to distinguish but informative. This paper proposes a Noise and Hard frame Aware Clustering (NHAC) method. NHAC consists of a graph trimming module and a node re-sampling module. The graph trimming module obtains stable graphs by removing noise frame nodes to improve the clustering accuracy. The node re-sampling module enhances the training of hard frame nodes to learn rich tracklet information. Experiments conducted on two video-based datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed NHAC under the unsupervised re-ID setting.

A LiDAR Assisted Control Module with High Precision in Parking Scenarios for Autonomous Driving Vehicle

Autonomous driving has been quite promising in recent years. The public has seen Robotaxi delivered by Waymo, Baidu, Cruise, and so on. While autonomous driving vehicles certainly have a bright future, we have to admit that it is still a long way to go for products such as Robotaxi. On the other hand, in less complex scenarios autonomous driving may have the potentiality to reliably outperform humans. For example, humans are good at interactive tasks (while autonomous driving systems usually do not), but we are often incompetent for tasks with strict precision demands. In this paper, we introduce a real-world, industrial scenario of which human drivers are not capable. The task required the ego vehicle to keep a stationary lateral distance (i.e. 3? <= 5 centimeters) with respect to a reference. To address this challenge, we redesigned the control module from Baidu Apollo open-source autonomous driving system. A precise (3? <= 2 centimeters) Error Feedback System was first built to partly replace the localization module. Then we investigated the control module thoroughly and added a real-time calibration algorithm to gain extra precision. We also built a simulation to fine-tune the control parameters. After all those works, the results are encouraging, showing that an end-to-end lateral precision with 3? <= 5 centimeters has been achieved. Further, we show that the results not only outperformed original Apollo modules but also beat specially trained and highly experienced human test drivers.

Multi-objective Feature Selection with Missing Data in Classification

Feature selection (FS) is an important research topic in machine learning. Usually, FS is modelled as a+ bi-objective optimization problem whose objectives are: 1) classification accuracy; 2) number of features. One of the main issues in real-world applications is missing data. Databases with missing data are likely to be unreliable. Thus, FS performed on a data set missing some data is also unreliable. In order to directly control this issue plaguing the field, we propose in this study a novel modelling of FS: we include reliability as the third objective of the problem. In order to address the modified problem, we propose the application of the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-III (NSGA-III). We selected six incomplete data sets from the University of California Irvine (UCI) machine learning repository. We used the mean imputation method to deal with the missing data. In the experiments, k-nearest neighbors (K-NN) is used as the classifier to evaluate the feature subsets. Experimental results show that the proposed three-objective model coupled with NSGA-III efficiently addresses the FS problem for the six data sets included in this study.

AISHELL-4: An Open Source Dataset for Speech Enhancement, Separation, Recognition and Speaker Diarization in Conference Scenario

In this paper, we present AISHELL-4, a sizable real-recorded Mandarin speech dataset collected by 8-channel circular microphone array for speech processing in conference scenario. The dataset consists of 211 recorded meeting sessions, each containing 4 to 8 speakers, with a total length of 118 hours. This dataset aims to bride the advanced research on multi-speaker processing and the practical application scenario in three aspects. With real recorded meetings, AISHELL-4 provides realistic acoustics and rich natural speech characteristics in conversation such as short pause, speech overlap, quick speaker turn, noise, etc. Meanwhile, the accurate transcription and speaker voice activity are provided for each meeting in AISHELL-4. This allows the researchers to explore different aspects in meeting processing, ranging from individual tasks such as speech front-end processing, speech recognition and speaker diarization, to multi-modality modeling and joint optimization of relevant tasks. Given most open source dataset for multi-speaker tasks are in English, AISHELL-4 is the only Mandarin dataset for conversation speech, providing additional value for data diversity in speech community.

The Multi-speaker Multi-style Voice Cloning Challenge 2021

The Multi-speaker Multi-style Voice Cloning Challenge (M2VoC) aims to provide a common sizable dataset as well as a fair testbed for the benchmarking of the popular voice cloning task. Specifically, we formulate the challenge to adapt an average TTS model to the stylistic target voice with limited data from target speaker, evaluated by speaker identity and style similarity. The challenge consists of two tracks, namely few-shot track and one-shot track, where the participants are required to clone multiple target voices with 100 and 5 samples respectively. There are also two sub-tracks in each track. For sub-track a, to fairly compare different strategies, the participants are allowed to use only the training data provided by the organizer strictly. For sub-track b, the participants are allowed to use any data publicly available. In this paper, we present a detailed explanation on the tasks and data used in the challenge, followed by a summary of submitted systems and evaluation results.

INTERSPEECH 2021 ConferencingSpeech Challenge: Towards Far-field Multi-Channel Speech Enhancement for Video Conferencing

The ConferencingSpeech 2021 challenge is proposed to stimulate research on far-field multi-channel speech enhancement for video conferencing. The challenge consists of two separate tasks: 1) Task 1 is multi-channel speech enhancement with single microphone array and focusing on practical application with real-time requirement and 2) Task 2 is multi-channel speech enhancement with multiple distributed microphone arrays, which is a non-real-time track and does not have any constraints so that participants could explore any algorithms to obtain high speech quality. Targeting the real video conferencing room application, the challenge database was recorded from real speakers and all recording facilities were located by following the real setup of conferencing room. In this challenge, we open-sourced the list of open source clean speech and noise datasets, simulation scripts, and a baseline system for participants to develop their own system. The final ranking of the challenge will be decided by the subjective evaluation which is performed using Absolute Category Ratings (ACR) to estimate Mean Opinion Score (MOS), speech MOS (S-MOS), and noise MOS (N-MOS). This paper describes the challenge, tasks, datasets, and subjective evaluation. The baseline system which is a complex ratio mask based neural network and its experimental results are also presented.

CKNet: A Convolutional Neural Network Based on Koopman Operator for Modeling Latent Dynamics from Pixels

For systems with only known pixels, it is difficult to identify its dynamics, especially with a linear operator. In this work, we present a convolutional neural network (CNN) based on the Koopman operator (CKNet) to identify the latent dynamics from raw pixels. CKNet learned an encoder and decoder to play the role of the Koopman eigenfunctions and modes, respectively. The Koopman eigenvalues can be approximated by the eigenvalues of the learned system matrix. We present the deterministic and variational approaches to realize the encoder separately. Because CKNet is trained under the constraints of the Koopman theory, the identified dynamics is linear, controllable and physically-interpretable. Besides, the system matrix and control matrix are trained as trainable tensors. To improve the performance, we propose the auxiliary weight term for multi-step linearity and prediction losses. Experiments select two classic forced dynamical systems with continuous action space, and the results show that identified dynamics with 32-dim can predict validly 120 steps and generate clear images.