Audio classification is an important task of mapping audio samples into their corresponding labels. Recently, the transformer model with self-attention mechanisms has been adopted in this field. However, existing audio transformers require large GPU memories and long training time, meanwhile relying on pretrained vision models to achieve high performance, which limits the model's scalability in audio tasks. To combat these problems, we introduce HTS-AT: an audio transformer with a hierarchical structure to reduce the model size and training time. It is further combined with a token-semantic module to map final outputs into class featuremaps, thus enabling the model for the audio event detection (i.e. localization in time). We evaluate HTS-AT on three datasets of audio classification where it achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on AudioSet and ESC-50, and equals the SOTA on Speech Command V2. It also achieves better performance in event localization than the previous CNN-based models. Moreover, HTS-AT requires only 35% model parameters and 15% training time of the previous audio transformer. These results demonstrate the high performance and high efficiency of HTS-AT.
This paper introduces the Procedural (audio) Variational autoEncoder (ProVE) framework as a general approach to learning Procedural Audio PA models of environmental sounds with an improvement to the realism of the synthesis while maintaining provision of control over the generated sound through adjustable parameters. The framework comprises two stages: (i) Audio Class Representation, in which a latent representation space is defined by training an audio autoencoder, and (ii) Control Mapping, in which a joint function of static/temporal control variables derived from the audio and a random samp…
Audio event detection is a widely studied audio processing task, with applications ranging from self-driving cars to healthcare. In-the-wild datasets such as Audioset have propelled research in this field. However, many efforts typically involve manual annotation and verification, which is expensive to perform at scale. Movies depict various real-life and fictional scenarios which makes them a rich resource for mining a wide-range of audio events. In this work, we present a dataset of audio events called Subtitle-Aligned Movie Sounds (SAM-S). We use publicly-available closed-caption transcript…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology（乔莫·肯雅塔农业技术大学）
Machine hearing of the environmental sound is one of the important issues in the audio recognition domain. It gives the machine the ability to discriminate between the different input sounds that guides its decision making. In this work we exploit the self-supervised contrastive technique and a shallow 1D CNN to extract the distinctive audio features (audio representations) without using any explicit annotations.We generate representations of a given audio using both its raw audio waveform and spectrogram and evaluate if the proposed learner is agnostic to the type of audio input. We further u…
We study the merit of transfer learning for two sound recognition problems, i.e., audio tagging and sound event detection. Employing feature fusion, we adapt a baseline system utilizing only spectral acoustic inputs to also make use of pretrained auditory and visual features, extracted from networks built for different tasks and trained with external data. We perform experiments with these modified models on an audiovisual multi-label data set, of which the training partition contains a large number of unlabeled samples and a smaller amount of clips with weak annotations, indicating the clip-l…
Recognizing sounds is a key aspect of computational audio scene analysis and machine perception. In this paper, we advocate that sound recognition is inherently a multi-modal audiovisual task in that it is easier to differentiate sounds using both the audio and visual modalities as opposed to one or the other. We present an audiovisual fusion model that learns to recognize sounds from weakly labeled video recordings. The proposed fusion model utilizes an attention mechanism to dynamically combine the outputs of the individual audio and visual models. Experiments on the large scale sound events…
Transfer learning is critical for efficient information transfer across multiple related learning problems. A simple, yet effective transfer learning approach utilizes deep neural networks trained on a large-scale task for feature extraction. Such representations are then used to learn related downstream tasks. In this paper, we investigate transfer learning capacity of audio representations obtained from neural networks trained on a large-scale sound event detection dataset. We build and evaluate these representations across a wide range of other audio tasks, via a simple linear classifier tr…
This technical report proposes an audio captioning system for DCASE 2021 Task 6 audio captioning challenge. Our proposed model is based on an encoder-decoder architecture with bi-directional Gated Recurrent Units (BiGRU) using pretrained audio features and sound event detection. A pretrained neural network (PANN) is used to extract audio features and Word2Vec is selected with the aim of extracting word embeddings from the audio captions. To create semantically meaningful captions, we extract sound events from the audio clips and feed the encoder-decoder architecture with sound events in additi…
In this paper, we propose the use of spatial and harmonic features in combination with long short term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) for automatic sound event detection (SED) task. Real life sound recordings typically have many overlapping sound events, making it hard to recognize with just mono channel audio. Human listeners have been successfully recognizing the mixture of overlapping sound events using pitch cues and exploiting the stereo (multichannel) audio signal available at their ears to spatially localize these events. Traditionally SED systems have only been using mono…
New York University（纽约大学）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）
Soundata is a Python library for loading and working with audio datasets in a standardized way, removing the need for writing custom loaders in every project, and improving reproducibility by providing tools to validate data against a canonical version. It speeds up research pipelines by allowing users to quickly download a dataset, load it into memory in a standardized and reproducible way, validate that the dataset is complete and correct, and more. Soundata is based and inspired on mirdata and design to complement mirdata by working with environmental sound, bioacoustic and speech datasets,…
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（日本产业技术综合研究所）；Waseda University（早稻田大学）
Detecting sound source objects within visual observation is important for autonomous robots to comprehend surrounding environments. Since sounding objects have a large variety with different appearances in our living environments, labeling all sounding objects is impossible in practice. This calls for self-supervised learning which does not require manual labeling. Most of conventional self-supervised learning uses monaural audio signals and images and cannot distinguish sound source objects having similar appearances due to poor spatial information in audio signals. To solve this problem, thi…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学高瓴人工智能学院）；S-Lab, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学S-Lab）
The task of audio-visual sound source localization has been well studied under constrained scenes, where the audio recordings are clean. However, in real-world scenarios, audios are usually contaminated by off-screen sound and background noise. They will interfere with the procedure of identifying desired sources and building visual-sound connections, making previous studies non-applicable. In this work, we propose the Interference Eraser (IEr) framework, which tackles the problem of audio-visual sound source localization in the wild. The key idea is to eliminate the interference by redefining…
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Fictional University（虚构大学）；University of the Imagination（想象大学）
The Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2019 challenge focuses on audio tagging, sound event detection and spatial localisation. DCASE 2019 consists of five tasks: 1) acoustic scene classification, 2) audio tagging with noisy labels and minimal supervision, 3) sound event localisation and detection, 4) sound event detection in domestic environments, and 5) urban sound tagging. In this paper, we propose generic cross-task baseline systems based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The motivation is to investigate the performance of a variety of models across s…
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…
The Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2019 challenge focuses on audio tagging, sound event detection and spatial localisation. DCASE 2019 consists of five tasks: 1) acoustic scene classification, 2) audio tagging with noisy labels and minimal supervision, 3) sound event localisation and detection, 4) sound event detection in domestic environments, and 5) urban sound tagging. In this paper, we propose generic cross-task baseline systems based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The motivation is to investigate the performance of a variety of models across s…
POSTECH（浦项科技大学）；KAIST（韩国科学技术院）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Yonsei University（延世大学）
How does audio describe the world around us? In this paper, we propose a method for generating an image of a scene from sound. Our method addresses the challenges of dealing with the large gaps that often exist between sight and sound. We design a model that works by scheduling the learning procedure of each model component to associate audio-visual modalities despite their information gaps. The key idea is to enrich the audio features with visual information by learning to align audio to visual latent space. We translate the input audio to visual features, then use a pre-trained generator to …
Source separation (SS) aims to separate individual sources from an audio recording. Sound event detection (SED) aims to detect sound events from an audio recording. We propose a joint separation-classification (JSC) model trained only on weakly labelled audio data, that is, only the tags of an audio recording are known but the time of the events are unknown. First, we propose a separation mapping from the time-frequency (T-F) representation of an audio to the T-F segmentation masks of the audio events. Second, a classification mapping is built from each T-F segmentation mask to the presence pr…
Source separation is the task to separate an audio recording into individual sound sources. Source separation is fundamental for computational auditory scene analysis. Previous work on source separation has focused on separating particular sound classes such as speech and music. Many of previous work require mixture and clean source pairs for training. In this work, we propose a source separation framework trained with weakly labelled data. Weakly labelled data only contains the tags of an audio clip, without the occurrence time of sound events. We first train a sound event detection system wi…
In this work we propose approaches to effectively transfer knowledge from weakly labeled web audio data. We first describe a convolutional neural network (CNN) based framework for sound event detection and classification using weakly labeled audio data. Our model trains efficiently from audios of variable lengths; hence, it is well suited for transfer learning. We then propose methods to learn representations using this model which can be effectively used for solving the target task. We study both transductive and inductive transfer learning tasks, showing the effectiveness of our methods for …
LS2N（南特数字科学实验室）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Ecole Centrale de Nantes（南特中央理工学院）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）
As part of the 2016 public evaluation challenge on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE 2016), the second task focused on evaluating sound event detection systems using synthetic mixtures of office sounds. This task, which follows the `Event Detection - Office Synthetic' task of DCASE 2013, studies the behaviour of tested algorithms when facing controlled levels of audio complexity with respect to background noise and polyphony/density, with the added benefit of a very accurate ground truth. This paper presents the task formulation, evaluation metrics, submitted sy…
Epic-Sounds: A Large-scale Dataset of Actions That Sound
Visual Geometry Group, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, UK（牛津大学视觉几何组）；Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol, UK（布里斯托大学计算机科学系）；CIIRC, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic（布拉格捷克技术大学CIIRC）
Automated Audio Captioning is a cross-modal task, generating natural language descriptions to summarize the audio clips' sound events. However, grounding the actual sound events in the given audio based on its corresponding caption has not been investigated. This paper contributes an AudioGrounding dataset, which provides the correspondence between sound events and the captions provided in Audiocaps, along with the location (timestamps) of each present sound event. Based on such, we propose the text-to-audio grounding (TAG) task, which interactively considers the relationship between audio pro…
Spooky Audio；University of Victoria（维多利亚大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
We release synth1B1, a multi-modal audio corpus consisting of 1 billion 4-second synthesized sounds, paired with the synthesis parameters used to generate them. The dataset is 100x larger than any audio dataset in the literature. We also introduce torchsynth, an open source modular synthesizer that generates the synth1B1 samples on-the-fly at 16200x faster than real-time (714MHz) on a single GPU. Finally, we release two new audio datasets: FM synth timbre and subtractive synth pitch. Using these datasets, we demonstrate new rank-based evaluation criteria for existing audio representations. Fin…
The rise of deep learning algorithms has led many researchers to withdraw from using classic signal processing methods for sound generation. Deep learning models have achieved expressive voice synthesis, realistic sound textures, and musical notes from virtual instruments. However, the most suitable deep learning architecture is still under investigation. The choice of architecture is tightly coupled to the audio representations. A sound's original waveform can be too dense and rich for deep learning models to deal with efficiently - and complexity increases training time and computational cos…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Recent progress in deep learning has enabled many advances in sound separation and visual scene understanding. However, extracting sound sources which are apparent in natural videos remains an open problem. In this work, we present AudioScope, a novel audio-visual sound separation framework that can be trained without supervision to isolate on-screen sound sources from real in-the-wild videos. Prior audio-visual separation work assumed artificial limitations on the domain of sound classes (e.g., to speech or music), constrained the number of sources, and required strong sound separation or vis…
Recent work on audio-visual navigation targets a single static sound in noise-free audio environments and struggles to generalize to unheard sounds. We introduce the novel dynamic audio-visual navigation benchmark in which an embodied AI agent must catch a moving sound source in an unmapped environment in the presence of distractors and noisy sounds. We propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning approach that relies on a multi-modal architecture that fuses the spatial audio-visual information from a binaural audio signal and spatial occupancy maps to encode the features needed to learn a rob…
Sony CSL（索尼计算机科学实验室）；CentraleSupélec（巴黎中央理工-高等电力学院）
In this paper, we propose a novel score-base generative model for unconditional raw audio synthesis. Our proposal builds upon the latest developments on diffusion process modeling with stochastic differential equations, which already demonstrated promising results on image generation. We motivate novel heuristics for the choice of the diffusion processes better suited for audio generation, and consider the use of a conditional U-Net to approximate the score function. While previous approaches on diffusion models on audio were mainly designed as speech vocoders in medium resolution, our method …
Audio-visual navigation combines sight and hearing to navigate to a sound-emitting source in an unmapped environment. While recent approaches have demonstrated the benefits of audio input to detect and find the goal, they focus on clean and static sound sources and struggle to generalize to unheard sounds. In this work, we propose the novel dynamic audio-visual navigation benchmark which requires catching a moving sound source in an environment with noisy and distracting sounds, posing a range of new challenges. We introduce a reinforcement learning approach that learns a robust navigation pol…
Generating Diverse Audio-Visual 360 Soundscapes for Sound Event Localization and Detection
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México（墨西哥国立自治大学）；Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas（塔毛利帕斯自治大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦大学玛丽皇后学院）
DOA-Aware Audio-Visual Self-Supervised Learning for Sound Event Localization and Detection
Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University（京都大学情报学研究科）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（独立行政法人产业技术综合研究所）；Faculty of Science and Engineering, Doshisha University（同志社大学理工学部）
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories（三菱电机研究实验室）
State-of-the-art approaches for visually-guided audio source separation typically assume sources that have characteristic sounds, such as musical instruments. These approaches often ignore the visual context of these sound sources or avoid modeling object interactions that may be useful to better characterize the sources, especially when the same object class may produce varied sounds from distinct interactions. To address this challenging problem, we propose Audio Visual Scene Graph Segmenter (AVSGS), a novel deep learning model that embeds the visual structure of the scene as a graph and seg…
UT Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）
We explore active audio-visual separation for dynamic sound sources, where an embodied agent moves intelligently in a 3D environment to continuously isolate the time-varying audio stream being emitted by an object of interest. The agent hears a mixed stream of multiple audio sources (e.g., multiple people conversing and a band playing music at a noisy party). Given a limited time budget, it needs to extract the target sound accurately at every step using egocentric audio-visual observations. We propose a reinforcement learning agent equipped with a novel transformer memory that learns motion p…
Text Prompt is Not Enough: Sound Event Enhanced Prompt Adapter for Target Style Audio Generation
SDU-ANU Joint Science College, Shandong University（山东大学SDU-ANU联合科学学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；AI Lab, Tencent（腾讯AI实验室）
