The study of label noise in sound event recognition has recently gained attention with the advent of larger and noisier datasets. This work addresses the problem of missing labels, one of the big weaknesses of large audio datasets, and one of the most conspicuous issues for AudioSet. We propose a simple and model-agnostic method based on a teacher-student framework with loss masking to first identify the most critical missing label candidates, and then ignore their contribution during the learning process. We find that a simple optimisation of the training label set improves recognition performance without additional computation. We discover that most of the improvement comes from ignoring a critical tiny portion of the missing labels. We also show that the damage done by missing labels is larger as the training set gets smaller, yet it can still be observed even when training with massive amounts of audio. We believe these insights can generalize to other large-scale datasets.
Most efforts to improve spacesuits have been directed towards adding haptic feedback. However, sound transparency can also improve situational awareness at a relatively low cost. The extent of the improvement is unknown. We use the Fukuda-Unterberger stepping test to measure the accuracy of one's perception of self-location. We compare accuracy outcomes in two scenarios: one where hearing is impaired with sound masking with white noise and one where it is not. These scenarios are acoustic proxies for a sound muffling space suit and a sound transparent space suit respectively. The results show …
This work proposes a learnable filterbank based on a multi-channel masking framework for multi-channel source separation. The learnable filterbank is a 1D Conv layer, which transforms the raw waveform into a 2D representation. In contrast to the conventional single-channel masking method, we estimate a mask for each individual microphone channel. The estimated masks are then applied to the transformed waveform representation like in the traditional filter-and-sum beamforming operation. Specifically, each mask is used to multiply the corresponding channel's 2D representation, and the masked out…
Hohai University（河海大学）；RMIT University（皇家墨尔本理工大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Keyword spotting (KWS) has been widely used in various speech control scenarios. The training of KWS is usually based on deep neural networks and requires a large amount of data. Manufacturers often use third-party data to train KWS. However, deep neural networks are not sufficiently interpretable to manufacturers, and attackers can manipulate third-party training data to plant backdoors during the model training. An effective backdoor attack can force the model to make specified judgments under certain conditions, i.e., triggers. In this paper, we design a backdoor attack scheme based on Pitc…
The development of deep learning technology has greatly promoted the performance improvement of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology, which has demonstrated an ability comparable to human hearing in many tasks. Voice interfaces are becoming more and more widely used as input for many applications and smart devices. However, existing research has shown that DNN is easily disturbed by slight disturbances and makes false recognition, which is extremely dangerous for intelligent voice applications controlled by voice.
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely used in sound event detection (SED). However, traditional convolution is deficient in learning time-frequency domain representation of different sound events. To address this issue, we propose multi-dimensional frequency dynamic convolution (MFDConv), a new design that endows convolutional kernels with frequency-adaptive dynamic properties along multiple dimensions. MFDConv utilizes a novel multi-dimensional attention mechanism with a parallel strategy to learn complementary frequency-adaptive attentions, which substantially stren…
A sound event detection (SED) method typically takes as an input a sequence of audio frames and predicts the activities of sound events in each frame. In real-life recordings, the sound events exhibit some temporal structure: for instance, a "car horn" will likely be followed by a "car passing by". While this temporal structure is widely exploited in sequence prediction tasks (e.g., in machine translation), where language models (LM) are exploited, it is not satisfactorily modeled in SED. In this work we propose a method which allows a recurrent neural network (RNN) to learn an LM for the SED …
Semi-supervised learning and domain adaptation techniques have drawn increasing attention in the field of domestic sound event detection thanks to the availability of large amounts of unlabeled data and the relative ease to generate synthetic strongly-labeled data. In a previous work, several semi-supervised learning strategies were designed to boost the performance of a mean-teacher model. Namely, these strategies include shift consistency training (SCT), interpolation consistency training (ICT), and pseudo-labeling. However, adversarial domain adaptation (ADA) did not seem to improve the eve…
Sound Masking Strategies for Interference with Mosquito Hearing
Department of Physics \& Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA；University College London Ear Institute: London, UK；Cluster of Excellence Hearing4all, Sensory Physiology \& Behaviour Group, Department for Neuroscience, School of Medicine；California NanoSystems Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology（光州科学技术院）
This report proposes a polyphonic sound event detection (SED) method for the DCASE 2021 Challenge Task 4. The proposed SED model consists of two stages: a mean-teacher model for providing target labels regarding weakly labeled or unlabeled data and a self-training-based noisy student model for predicting strong labels for sound events. The mean-teacher model, which is based on the residual convolutional recurrent neural network (RCRNN) for the teacher and student model, is first trained using all the training data from a weakly labeled dataset, an unlabeled dataset, and a strongly labeled synt…
1 Integrated Graduate School of Medicine, Engineering；Agricultural Sciences, University of Yamanashi, Japan
This paper describes that semi-supervised learning called peer collaborative learning (PCL) can be applied to the polyphonic sound event detection (PSED) task, which is one of the tasks in the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) challenge. Many deep learning models have been studied to find out what kind of sound events occur where and for how long in a given audio clip. The characteristic of PCL used in this paper is the combination of ensemble-based knowledge distillation into sub-networks and student-teacher model-based knowledge distillation, which can train …
Many state-of-the-art systems for audio tagging and sound event detection employ convolutional recurrent neural architectures. Typically, they are trained in a mean teacher setting to deal with the heterogeneous annotation of the available data. In this work, we present a thorough analysis of how changing the temporal resolution of these convolutional recurrent neural networks - which can be done by simply adapting their pooling operations - impacts their performance. By using a variety of evaluation metrics, we investigate the effects of adapting this design parameter under several sound reco…
Environmental Sound Classification (ESC) is a challenging field of research in non-speech audio processing. Most of current research in ESC focuses on designing deep models with special architectures tailored for specific audio datasets, which usually cannot exploit the intrinsic patterns in the data. However recent studies have surprisingly shown that transfer learning from models trained on ImageNet is a very effective technique in ESC. Herein, we propose SoundCLR, a supervised contrastive learning method for effective environment sound classification with state-of-the-art performance, which…
Training a sound event detection algorithm on a heterogeneous dataset including both recorded and synthetic soundscapes that can have various labeling granularity is a non-trivial task that can lead to systems requiring several technical choices. These technical choices are often passed from one system to another without being questioned. We propose to perform a detailed analysis of DCASE 2020 task 4 sound event detection baseline with regards to several aspects such as the type of data used for training, the parameters of the mean-teacher or the transformations applied while generating the sy…
Sound event detection (SED) is an interesting but challenging task due to the scarcity of data and diverse sound events in real life. This paper presents a multi-grained based attention network (MGA-Net) for semi-supervised sound event detection. To obtain the feature representations related to sound events, a residual hybrid convolution (RH-Conv) block is designed to boost the vanilla convolution's ability to extract the time-frequency features. Moreover, a multi-grained attention (MGA) module is designed to learn temporal resolution features from coarse-level to fine-level. With the MGA modu…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Mila--Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute（Mila-魁北克人工智能研究所）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）
In this paper, we propose a two-step training procedure for source separation via a deep neural network. In the first step we learn a transform (and it's inverse) to a latent space where masking-based separation performance using oracles is optimal. For the second step, we train a separation module that operates on the previously learned space. In order to do so, we also make use of a scale-invariant signal to distortion ratio (SI-SDR) loss function that works in the latent space, and we prove that it lower-bounds the SI-SDR in the time domain. We run various sound separation experiments that …
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
In this paper, we describe in detail our system for DCASE 2022 Task4. The system combines two considerably different models: an end-to-end Sound Event Detection Transformer (SEDT) and a frame-wise model, Metric Learning and Focal Loss CNN (MLFL-CNN). The former is an event-wise model which learns event-level representations and predicts sound event categories and boundaries directly, while the latter is based on the widely adopted frame-classification scheme, under which each frame is classified into event categories and event boundaries are obtained by post-processing such as thresholding and…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；iFlytek（科大讯飞）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
In this paper, we propose a novel four-stage data augmentation approach to ResNet-Conformer based acoustic modeling for sound event localization and detection (SELD). First, we explore two spatial augmentation techniques, namely audio channel swapping (ACS) and multi-channel simulation (MCS), to deal with data sparsity in SELD. ACS and MDS focus on augmenting the limited training data with expanding direction of arrival (DOA) representations such that the acoustic models trained with the augmented data are robust to localization variations of acoustic sources. Next, time-domain mixing (TDM) an…
Weakly supervised learning algorithms are critical for scaling audio event detection to several hundreds of sound categories. Such learning models should not only disambiguate sound events efficiently with minimal class-specific annotation but also be robust to label noise, which is more apparent with weak labels instead of strong annotations. In this work, we propose a new framework for designing learning models with weak supervision by bridging ideas from sequential learning and knowledge distillation. We refer to the proposed methodology as SeCoST (pronounced Sequest) -- Sequential Co-super…
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) models are prevalent, particularly in applications for voice navigation and voice control of domestic appliances. The computational core of ASRs are deep neural networks (DNNs) that have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial perturbations; easily misused by attackers to generate malicious outputs. To help test the security and robustnesss of ASRS, we propose techniques that generate blackbox (agnostic to the DNN), untargeted adversarial attacks that are portable across ASRs. This is in contrast to existing work that focuses on whitebox targeted attacks …
This report proposes a polyphonic sound event detection (SED) method for the DCASE 2020 Challenge Task 4. The proposed SED method is based on semi-supervised learning to deal with the different combination of training datasets such as weakly labeled dataset, unlabeled dataset, and strongly labeled synthetic dataset. Especially, the target label of each audio clip from weakly labeled or unlabeled dataset is first predicted by using the mean teacher model that is the DCASE 2020 baseline. The data with predicted labels are used for training the proposed SED model, which consists of CNNs with skip…
HDA-SELD: Hierarchical Cross-Modal Distillation with Multi-Level Data Augmentation for Low-Resource Audio-Visual Sound Event Localization and Detection
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；University of Palermo（巴勒莫大学）；iFLYTEK Research（iFLYTEK研究院）
Indiana University（印第安纳大学）；Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute（韩国电子通信研究院）
Conventional audio coding technologies commonly leverage human perception of sound, or psychoacoustics, to reduce the bitrate while preserving the perceptual quality of the decoded audio signals. For neural audio codecs, however, the objective nature of the loss function usually leads to suboptimal sound quality as well as high run-time complexity due to the large model size. In this work, we present a psychoacoustic calibration scheme to re-define the loss functions of neural audio coding systems so that it can decode signals more perceptually similar to the reference, yet with a much lower m…
Self Training and Ensembling Frequency Dependent Networks with Coarse Prediction Pooling and Sound Event Bounding Boxes
Institute of Civil Military Technology Cooperation（军民技术合作研究所）；Defense Acquisition Program Administration（国防采计局）；Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy（产业通商资源部）；Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean engineering（韩国船舶海洋工程研究院）；Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries（海洋水产部）
In this technical report, the systems we submitted for subtask 4 of the DCASE 2021 challenge, regarding sound event detection, are described in detail. These models are closely related to the baseline provided for this problem, as they are essentially convolutional recurrent neural networks trained in a mean teacher setting to deal with the heterogeneous annotation of the supplied data. However, the time resolution of the predictions was adapted to deal with the fact that these systems are evaluated using two intersection-based metrics involving different needs in terms of temporal localizatio…
In this paper, we propose addressing the lack of strongly labeled data by using pseudo strongly labeled data approximated using Convolutive Nonnegative Matrix Factorization. Using this set of data, we then train a novel architecture called the Convolutional Macaron Net (CMN), which combines Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with MN, in a semi-supervised manner. Instead of training only a single model or using the Mean-teacher approach, we train two different CMNs synchronously using a curriculum consistency cost and a curriculum interpolated consistency cost. In the inference stage, one of th…
Bridging Ears and Eyes: Analyzing Audio and Visual Large Language Models to Humans in Visible Sound Recognition and Reducing Their Sensory Gap via Cross-Modal Distillation
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Language Models as Semantic Teachers: Post-Training Alignment for Medical Audio Understanding
Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands（埃因霍温理工大学，荷兰）；Kyutai, France（Kyutai公司，法国）；Eindhoven Artificial Intelligence Systems Institute, The Netherlands（埃因霍温人工智能系统研究所，荷兰）
