SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2009.03658

AutoKWS: Keyword Spotting with Differentiable Architecture Search

Abstract

Smart audio devices are gated by an always-on lightweight keyword spotting program to reduce power consumption. It is however challenging to design models that have both high accuracy and low latency for accurate and fast responsiveness. Many efforts have been made to develop end-to-end neural networks, in which depthwise separable convolutions, temporal convolutions, and LSTMs are adopted as building units. Nonetheless, these networks designed with human expertise may not achieve an optimal trade-off in an expansive search space. In this paper, we propose to leverage recent advances in differentiable neural architecture search to discover more efficient networks. Our searched model attains 97.2% top-1 accuracy on Google Speech Command Dataset v1 with only nearly 100K parameters.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Bo Zhang, Wenfeng Li, Qingyuan Li, Weiji Zhuang, Xiangxiang Chu, Yujun Wang. 2021-02-22. AutoKWS: Keyword Spotting with Differentiable Architecture Search. https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.03658

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

LLMs and Speech: Integration vs. Combination

In this work, we study different approaches to utilize large language models (LLMs) for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Specifically, we compare the tight integration of an acoustic model (AM) with the LLM ("speech LLM") to the traditional way of combining AM and LLM via shallow fusion and provide ablations on the effect of different label units and LLM sizes. For tight integration, we further examine the effect of attention interfaces, encoder downsampling, and length normalization. Furthermore, we investigate joint recognition with a CTC model to mitigate hallucinations of speech LLMs and present effective optimizations. We train and evaluate on LibriSpeech and Loquacious and additionally evaluate on the HuggingFace ASR leaderboard. Across model sizes, we find that shallow fusion consistently outperforms tight integration of AM and LLM on in-domain data, highlighting the importance of strong shallow-fusion baselines when evaluating speech LLMs for ASR. On the more heterogeneous HuggingFace ASR leaderboard, however, the integrated prefix LLM achieves lower average WER than shallow fusion, with gains concentrated on out-of-domain corpora.

eess.AS

Vaani Benchmark V1.0: An Inclusive Multimodal Benchmark Dataset for Hindi

Benchmarking is critical for the systematic evaluation of machine learning systems. While several open-source datasets are available for Hindi, existing benchmarks remain limited in terms of modality, geographic diversity, demographic representation, and transcription robustness. We introduce an inclusive, multimodal Hindi benchmark dataset collected from 102 districts across India. The dataset consists of spontaneous speech elicited using image prompts and recorded under real-world acoustic conditions across diverse demographic groups. Each audio segment is associated with the image prompt that elicited it and is annotated with three independent transcriptions, enabling multi-reference evaluation that accounts for permissible orthographic and lexical variations. We show that single-reference evaluation overstates errors, while multi-reference evaluation provides a more robust, inclusive, and realistic assessment of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. The pairing of each utterance with its eliciting image further enables image retrieval evaluation using both speech and text queries. We evaluate multiple multimodal embedding models for image retrieval and report their performance on the combined speech--image and text--image retrieval tasks. The results reveal a performance gap between text-based and audio-based retrieval, with text-based retrieval consistently achieving higher performance.

eess.AS

Cover First, Disagree Softly: Rethinking Mismatch-First Active Learning for Frame-Level Audio Classification

Sound event detection relies on frame-level strong labels whose annotation is expensive. Active learning addresses this problem by selecting the audio segments whose labels help the classifier most. One of the prevailing acquisition strategies for this task, mismatch-first farthest-traversal (MFFT), combines the disagreement between two classifiers and the diversity of the selected segments through hard sequential decisions. It selects whole groups of high-disagreement segments first and spreads only the remaining budget by farthest traversal. On two multi-label datasets we show that this design is blind to the similarity among the selected segments and fails under low budgets, with every mismatch-first variant ending below the plain geometric strategy it builds on. We propose mismatch-weighted facility location (MW-FL), which spends the entire budget through a disagreement-weighted coverage objective that penalizes similarity among the selected segments. The disagreement signal from MFFT is used to obtain the nonnegative weights of this facility-location objective, using fixed smoothing without dataset-specific tuning. Experiments across two geometric mechanisms with three ways of using disagreement show that coverage of the selected segments is the dominant factor, hard disagreement gating of selection is harmful on both mechanisms, and soft disagreement weighting helps on top of coverage. MW-FL attains the best area under the learning curve on both datasets.

eess.AS