Auto-KWS 2021 Challenge: Task, Datasets, and Baselines
Paradigm Inc.（第四范式公司）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；National Taiwan University（台湾大学）
Jingsong Wang, Yuxuan He, Chunyu Zhao, Qijie Shao, Wei-Wei Tu, Tom Ko, Hung-yi Lee, Lei Xie
Auto-KWS 2021 challenge calls for automated machine learning (AutoML) solutions to automate the process of applying machine learning to a customized keyword spotting task. Compared with other keyword spotting tasks, Auto-KWS challenge has the following three characteristics: 1) The challenge focuses on the problem of customized keyword spotting, where the target device can only be awakened by an enrolled speaker with his specified keyword. The speaker can use any language and accent to define his keyword. 2) All dataset of the challenge is recorded in realistic environment. It is to simulate different user scenarios. 3) Auto-KWS is a "code competition", where participants need to submit AutoML solutions, then the platform automatically runs the enrollment and prediction steps with the submitted code.This challenge aims at promoting the development of a more personalized and flexible keyword spotting system. Two baseline systems are provided to all participants as references.
The performance of keyword spotting (KWS), measured in false alarms and false rejects, degrades significantly under the far field and noisy conditions. In this paper, we propose a multi-look neural network modeling for speech enhancement which simultaneously steers to listen to multiple sampled look directions. The multi-look enhancement is then jointly trained with KWS to form an end-to-end KWS model which integrates the enhanced signals from multiple look directions and leverages an attention mechanism to dynamically tune the model's attention to the reliable sources. We demonstrate, on our …
KFC-KWS: Keyframe Fusion with CTC for User-Defined Keyword Spotting
School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学电子信息学院）；School of Communication Engineering, Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学通信工程学院）
This paper introduces the system submitted by the Yidun NISP team to the video keyword wakeup challenge. We propose a mandarin keyword spotting system (KWS) with several novel and effective improvements, including a big backbone (B) model, a keyword biasing (B) mechanism and the introduction of syllable modeling units (S). By considering this, we term the total system BBS-KWS as an abbreviation. The BBS-KWS system consists of an end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) module and a KWS module. The ASR module converts speech features to text representations, which applies a big backbone ne…
Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Catastrophic forgetting is a thorny challenge when updating keyword spotting (KWS) models after deployment. To tackle such challenges, we propose a progressive continual learning strategy for small-footprint spoken keyword spotting (PCL-KWS). Specifically, the proposed PCL-KWS framework introduces a network instantiator to generate the task-specific sub-networks for remembering previously learned keywords. As a result, the PCL-KWS approach incrementally learns new keywords without forgetting prior knowledge. Besides, the keyword-aware network scaling mechanism of PCL-KWS constrains the growth …
MFA-KWS: Effective Keyword Spotting with Multi-head Frame-asynchronous Decoding
X-LANCE Lab, School of Computer Science & MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（X-LANCE实验室，计算机科学学院及教育部人工智能重点实验室，上海交通大学）；Jiangsu Key Lab of Language Computing（江苏省语言计算重点实验室）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore（电气与计算机工程系，新加坡国立大学）
Streaming Keyword Spotting Boosted by Cross-layer Discrimination Consistency
MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, AI Institute, X-LANCE Lab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学人工智能研究院、教育部人工智能重点实验室）；AISpeech Ltd（思必驰科技有限公司）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Newcastle University（纽卡斯尔大学）；University of Agder（阿格德尔大学）；Nokia Bell Labs（诺基亚贝尔实验室）
The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven Keyword Spotting (KWS) technologies has revolutionized human to machine interaction. Yet, the challenge of end-to-end energy efficiency, memory footprint and system complexity of current Neural Network (NN) powered AI-KWS pipelines has remained ever present. This paper evaluates KWS utilizing a learning automata powered machine learning algorithm called the Tsetlin Machine (TM). Through significant reduction in parameter requirements and choosing logic over arithmetic based processing, the TM offers new opportunities for low-power KWS while …
Spoken keyword spotting (KWS) deals with the identification of keywords in audio streams and has become a fast-growing technology thanks to the paradigm shift introduced by deep learning a few years ago. This has allowed the rapid embedding of deep KWS in a myriad of small electronic devices with different purposes like the activation of voice assistants. Prospects suggest a sustained growth in terms of social use of this technology. Thus, it is not surprising that deep KWS has become a hot research topic among speech scientists, who constantly look for KWS performance improvement and computat…
Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Continuous Speech Keyword Spotting (CSKWS) is a task to detect predefined keywords in a continuous speech. In this paper, we regard CSKWS as a one-dimensional object detection task and propose a novel anchor-free detector, named AF-KWS, to solve the problem. AF-KWS directly regresses the center locations and lengths of the keywords through a single-stage deep neural network. In particular, AF-KWS is tailored for this speech task as we introduce an auxiliary unknown class to exclude other words from non-speech or silent background. We have built two benchmark datasets named LibriTop-20 and cont…
Keyword spotting (KWS) plays a critical role in enabling speech-based user interactions on smart devices. Recent developments in the field of deep learning have led to wide adoption of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in KWS systems due to their exceptional accuracy and robustness. The main challenge faced by KWS systems is the trade-off between high accuracy and low latency. Unfortunately, there has been little quantitative analysis of the actual latency of KWS models on mobile devices. This is especially concerning since conventional convolution-based KWS approaches are known to require …
Keyword spotting (KWS) is an important technique for speech applications, which enables users to activate devices by speaking a keyword phrase. Although a phoneme classifier can be used for KWS, exploiting a large amount of transcribed data for automatic speech recognition (ASR), there is a mismatch between the training criterion (phoneme recognition) and the target task (KWS). Recently, multi-task learning has been applied to KWS to exploit both ASR and KWS training data. In this approach, an output of an acoustic model is split into two branches for the two tasks, one for phoneme transcripti…
Masked Self-distilled Transducer-based Keyword Spotting with Semi-autoregressive Decoding
MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, AI Institute, X-LANCE Lab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China（人工智能大模型实验室、人工智能研究院、X-LANCE实验室、上海交通大学）；Taobao & Tmall Group of Alibaba, China（阿里巴巴淘宝与天猫集团）
In this work we explore the latency and accuracy of keyword spotting (KWS) models in streaming and non-streaming modes on mobile phones. NN model conversion from non-streaming mode (model receives the whole input sequence and then returns the classification result) to streaming mode (model receives portion of the input sequence and classifies it incrementally) may require manual model rewriting. We address this by designing a Tensorflow/Keras based library which allows automatic conversion of non-streaming models to streaming ones with minimum effort. With this library we benchmark multiple KW…
Keyword spotting (KWS) and speaker verification (SV) have been studied independently although it is known that acoustic and speaker domains are complementary. In this paper, we propose a multi-task network that performs KWS and SV simultaneously to fully utilize the interrelated domain information. The multi-task network tightly combines sub-networks aiming at performance improvement in challenging conditions such as noisy environments, open-vocabulary KWS, and short-duration SV, by introducing novel techniques of connectionist temporal classification (CTC)-based soft voice activity detection …
Keyword spotting (KWS) is beneficial for voice-based user interactions with low-power devices at the edge. The edge devices are usually always-on, so edge computing brings bandwidth savings and privacy protection. The devices typically have limited memory spaces, computational performances, power and costs, for example, Cortex-M based microcontrollers. The challenge is to meet the high computation and low-latency requirements of deep learning on these devices. This paper firstly shows our small-footprint KWS system running on STM32F7 microcontroller with Cortex-M7 core @216MHz and 512KB static…
Personalized Keyword Spotting for User-Defined Keywords Leveraging Text-Independent Speaker Verification
Dept. Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan（计算机科学与信息工程系，台湾国立台湾师范大学）；United Link Co., Ltd., Taiwan（台湾联链公司）
In this paper, we propose an attention-based end-to-end model for multi-channel keyword spotting (KWS), which is trained to optimize the KWS result directly. As a result, our model outperforms the baseline model with signal pre-processing techniques in both the clean and noisy testing data. We also found that multi-task learning results in a better performance when the training and testing data are similar. Transfer learning and multi-target spectral mapping can dramatically enhance the robustness to the noisy environment. At 0.1 false alarm (FA) per hour, the model with transfer learning and …
In this paper, we present the XMUSPEECH system for Task 1 of 2020 Personalized Voice Trigger Challenge (PVTC2020). Task 1 is a joint wake-up word detection with speaker verification on close talking data. The whole system consists of a keyword spotting (KWS) sub-system and a speaker verification (SV) sub-system. For the KWS system, we applied a Temporal Depthwise Separable Convolution Residual Network (TDSC-ResNet) to improve the system's performance. For the SV system, we proposed a multi-task learning network, where phonetic branch is trained with the character label of the utterance, and sp…
Evaluation of keyword spotting (KWS) systems that detect keywords in speech is a challenging task under realistic privacy constraints. The KWS is designed to only collect data when the keyword is present, limiting the availability of hard samples that may contain false negatives, and preventing direct estimation of model recall from production data. Alternatively, complementary data collected from other sources may not be fully representative of the real application. In this work, we propose an evaluation technique which we call AB/BA analysis. Our framework evaluates a candidate KWS model B a…
Catastrophic forgetting is a thorny challenge when updating keyword spotting (KWS) models after deployment. This problem will be more challenging if KWS models are further required for edge devices due to their limited memory. To alleviate such an issue, we propose a novel diversity-aware incremental learning method named Rainbow Keywords (RK). Specifically, the proposed RK approach introduces a diversity-aware sampler to select a diverse set from historical and incoming keywords by calculating classification uncertainty. As a result, the RK approach can incrementally learn new tasks without f…
Stellenbosch University（斯泰伦博斯大学）；UN Global Pulse（联合国全球脉动）；Makerere University（马凯雷雷大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
We compare features for dynamic time warping (DTW) when used to bootstrap keyword spotting (KWS) in an almost zero-resource setting. Such quickly-deployable systems aim to support United Nations (UN) humanitarian relief efforts in parts of Africa with severely under-resourced languages. Our objective is to identify acoustic features that provide acceptable KWS performance in such environments. As supervised resource, we restrict ourselves to a small, easily acquired and independently compiled set of isolated keywords. For feature extraction, a multilingual bottleneck feature (BNF) extractor, t…
This paper introduces neural architecture search (NAS) for the automatic discovery of end-to-end keyword spotting (KWS) models in limited resource environments. We employ a differentiable NAS approach to optimize the structure of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) operating on raw audio waveforms. After a suitable KWS model is found with NAS, we conduct quantization of weights and activations to reduce the memory footprint. We conduct extensive experiments on the Google speech commands dataset. In particular, we compare our end-to-end approach to mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) bas…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Agency for Science, Technology and Research（科学技术研究局）
In this paper we explore the possibility of maximizing the information represented in spectrograms by making the spectrogram basis functions trainable. We experiment with two different tasks, namely keyword spotting (KWS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR). For most neural network models, the architecture and hyperparameters are typically fine-tuned and optimized in experiments. Input features, however, are often treated as fixed. In the case of audio, signals can be mainly expressed in two main ways: raw waveforms (time-domain) or spectrograms (time-frequency-domain). In addition, differe…
In many speech-enabled human-machine interaction scenarios, user speech can overlap with the device playback audio. In these instances, the performance of tasks such as keyword-spotting (KWS) and device-directed speech detection (DDD) can degrade significantly. To address this problem, we propose an implicit acoustic echo cancellation (iAEC) framework where a neural network is trained to exploit the additional information from a reference microphone channel to learn to ignore the interfering signal and improve detection performance. We study this framework for the tasks of KWS and DDD on, resp…
The IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT) 2021 Alpha-mini Speech Challenge (ASC) is intended to improve research on keyword spotting (KWS) and sound source location (SSL) on humanoid robots. Many publications report significant improvements in deep learning based KWS and SSL on open source datasets in recent years. For deep learning model training, it is necessary to expand the data coverage to improve the robustness of model. Thus, simulating multi-channel noisy and reverberant data from single-channel speech, noise, echo and room impulsive response (RIR) is widely adopted. However, …
MT-HuBERT: Self-Supervised Mix-Training for Few-Shot Keyword Spotting in Mixed Speech
School of Computer Science and Technology, Xinjiang University, China（新疆大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Center for Speech and Language Technologies, BNRist, Tsinghua University, China（清华大学语音与语言技术中心）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, China（哈尔滨工业大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China（北京邮电大学人工智能学院）
Segment Anything for Satellite Imagery: A Strong Baseline and a Regional Dataset for Automatic Field Delineation
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳和雷吉奥艾米利亚大学）；ABACO Group SpA（ABACO集团）；Institute of Informatics and Telematics, National Research Council（信息与电信研究所，国家研究 council）
We present MedMNIST, a collection of 10 pre-processed medical open datasets. MedMNIST is standardized to perform classification tasks on lightweight 28x28 images, which requires no background knowledge. Covering the primary data modalities in medical image analysis, it is diverse on data scale (from 100 to 100,000) and tasks (binary/multi-class, ordinal regression and multi-label). MedMNIST could be used for educational purpose, rapid prototyping, multi-modal machine learning or AutoML in medical image analysis. Moreover, MedMNIST Classification Decathlon is designed to benchmark AutoML algori…
In this work, we introduce a simple yet efficient post-processing model for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Our model has Transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture which "translates" ASR model output into grammatically and semantically correct text. We investigate different strategies for regularizing and optimizing the model and show that extensive data augmentation and the initialization with pre-trained weights are required to achieve good performance. On the LibriSpeech benchmark, our method demonstrates significant improvement in word error rate over the baseline acoustic model w…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
In this article, we provide a model to estimate a real-valued measure of the intelligibility of individual speech segments. We trained regression models based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for stop consonants \textipa{/p,t,k,b,d,g/} associated with vowel \textipa{/A/}, to estimate the corresponding Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) at which the Consonant-Vowel (CV) sound becomes intelligible for Normal Hearing (NH) ears. The intelligibility measure for each sound is called SNR$_{90}$, and is defined to be the SNR level at which human participants are able to recognize the consonant at least…
Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University（名古屋大学信息科学研究生院）；Information Technology Center, Nagoya University（名古屋大学信息技术中心）
In this paper, we present a description of the baseline system of Voice Conversion Challenge (VCC) 2020 with a cyclic variational autoencoder (CycleVAE) and Parallel WaveGAN (PWG), i.e., CycleVAEPWG. CycleVAE is a nonparallel VAE-based voice conversion that utilizes converted acoustic features to consider cyclically reconstructed spectra during optimization. On the other hand, PWG is a non-autoregressive neural vocoder that is based on a generative adversarial network for a high-quality and fast waveform generator. In practice, the CycleVAEPWG system can be straightforwardly developed with the…
