arXiv subjects

Arun Balaji Buduru

Publications and source records attributed to Arun Balaji Buduru.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Towards Machine Unlearning for Paralinguistic Speech Processing

In this work, we pioneer the study of Machine Unlearning (MU) for Paralinguistic Speech Processing (PSP). We focus on two key PSP tasks: Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) and Depression Detection (DD). To this end, we propose, SISA++, a novel extension to previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) MU method, SISA by merging models trained on different shards with weight-averaging. With such modifications, we show that SISA++ preserves performance more in comparison to SISA after unlearning in benchmark SER (CREMA-D) and DD (E-DAIC) datasets. Also, to guide future research for easier adoption of MU for PSP, we present ``cookbook recipes'' - actionable recommendations for selecting optimal feature representations and downstream architectures that can mitigate performance degradation after the unlearning process.

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arXiv2025

Investigating the Reasonable Effectiveness of Speaker Pre-Trained Models and their Synergistic Power for SingMOS Prediction

In this study, we focus on Singing Voice Mean Opinion Score (SingMOS) prediction. Previous research have shown the performance benefit with the use of state-of-the-art (SOTA) pre-trained models (PTMs). However, they haven't explored speaker recognition speech PTMs (SPTMs) such as x-vector, ECAPA and we hypothesize that it will be the most effective for SingMOS prediction. We believe that due to their speaker recognition pre-training, it equips them to capture fine-grained vocal features (e.g., pitch, tone, intensity) from synthesized singing voices in a much more better way than other PTMs. Our experiments with SOTA PTMs including SPTMs and music PTMs validates the hypothesis. Additionally, we introduce a novel fusion framework, BATCH that uses Bhattacharya Distance for fusion of PTMs. Through BATCH with the fusion of speaker recognition SPTMs, we report the topmost performance comparison to all the individual PTMs and baseline fusion techniques as well as setting SOTA.

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arXiv2025

Are Mamba-based Audio Foundation Models the Best Fit for Non-Verbal Emotion Recognition?

In this work, we focus on non-verbal vocal sounds emotion recognition (NVER). We investigate mamba-based audio foundation models (MAFMs) for the first time for NVER and hypothesize that MAFMs will outperform attention-based audio foundation models (AAFMs) for NVER by leveraging its state-space modeling to capture intrinsic emotional structures more effectively. Unlike AAFMs, which may amplify irrelevant patterns due to their attention mechanisms, MAFMs will extract more stable and context-aware representations, enabling better differentiation of subtle non-verbal emotional cues. Our experiments with state-of-the-art (SOTA) AAFMs and MAFMs validates our hypothesis. Further, motivated from related research such as speech emotion recognition, synthetic speech detection, where fusion of foundation models (FMs) have showed improved performance, we also explore fusion of FMs for NVER. To this end, we propose, RENO, that uses renyi-divergence as a novel loss function for effective alignment of the FMs. It also makes use of self-attention for better intra-representation interaction of the FMs. With RENO, through the heterogeneous fusion of MAFMs and AAFMs, we show the topmost performance in comparison to individual FMs, its fusion and also setting SOTA in comparison to previous SOTA work.

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arXiv2025

PARROT: Synergizing Mamba and Attention-based SSL Pre-Trained Models via Parallel Branch Hadamard Optimal Transport for Speech Emotion Recognition

The emergence of Mamba as an alternative to attention-based architectures has led to the development of Mamba-based self-supervised learning (SSL) pre-trained models (PTMs) for speech and audio processing. Recent studies suggest that these models achieve comparable or superior performance to state-of-the-art (SOTA) attention-based PTMs for speech emotion recognition (SER). Motivated by prior work demonstrating the benefits of PTM fusion across different speech processing tasks, we hypothesize that leveraging the complementary strengths of Mamba-based and attention-based PTMs will enhance SER performance beyond the fusion of homogenous attention-based PTMs. To this end, we introduce a novel framework, PARROT that integrates parallel branch fusion with Optimal Transport and Hadamard Product. Our approach achieves SOTA results against individual PTMs, homogeneous PTMs fusion, and baseline fusion techniques, thus, highlighting the potential of heterogeneous PTM fusion for SER.

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arXiv2025

Towards Fusion of Neural Audio Codec-based Representations with Spectral for Heart Murmur Classification via Bandit-based Cross-Attention Mechanism

In this study, we focus on heart murmur classification (HMC) and hypothesize that combining neural audio codec representations (NACRs) such as EnCodec with spectral features (SFs), such as MFCC, will yield superior performance. We believe such fusion will trigger their complementary behavior as NACRs excel at capturing fine-grained acoustic patterns such as rhythm changes, spectral features focus on frequency-domain properties such as harmonic structure, spectral energy distribution crucial for analyzing the complex of heart sounds. To this end, we propose, BAOMI, a novel framework banking on novel bandit-based cross-attention mechanism for effective fusion. Here, a agent provides more weightage to most important heads in multi-head cross-attention mechanism and helps in mitigating the noise. With BAOMI, we report the topmost performance in comparison to individual NACRs, SFs, and baseline fusion techniques and setting new state-of-the-art.

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arXiv2025

Source Tracing of Synthetic Speech Systems Through Paralinguistic Pre-Trained Representations

In this work, we focus on source tracing of synthetic speech generation systems (STSGS). Each source embeds distinctive paralinguistic features--such as pitch, tone, rhythm, and intonation--into their synthesized speech, reflecting the underlying design of the generation model. While previous research has explored representations from speech pre-trained models (SPTMs), the use of representations from SPTM pre-trained for paralinguistic speech processing, which excel in paralinguistic tasks like synthetic speech detection, speech emotion recognition has not been investigated for STSGS. We hypothesize that representations from paralinguistic SPTM will be more effective due to its ability to capture source-specific paralinguistic cues attributing to its paralinguistic pre-training. Our comparative study of representations from various SOTA SPTMs, including paralinguistic, monolingual, multilingual, and speaker recognition, validates this hypothesis. Furthermore, we explore fusion of representations and propose TRIO, a novel framework that fuses SPTMs using a gated mechanism for adaptive weighting, followed by canonical correlation loss for inter-representation alignment and self-attention for feature refinement. By fusing TRILLsson (Paralinguistic SPTM) and x-vector (Speaker recognition SPTM), TRIO outperforms individual SPTMs, baseline fusion methods, and sets new SOTA for STSGS in comparison to previous works.

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arXiv2024

Investigating Prosodic Signatures via Speech Pre-Trained Models for Audio Deepfake Source Attribution

In this work, we investigate various state-of-the-art (SOTA) speech pre-trained models (PTMs) for their capability to capture prosodic signatures of the generative sources for audio deepfake source attribution (ADSD). These prosodic characteristics can be considered one of major signatures for ADSD, which is unique to each source. So better is the PTM at capturing prosodic signs better the ADSD performance. We consider various SOTA PTMs that have shown top performance in different prosodic tasks for our experiments on benchmark datasets, ASVSpoof 2019 and CFAD. x-vector (speaker recognition PTM) attains the highest performance in comparison to all the PTMs considered despite consisting lowest model parameters. This higher performance can be due to its speaker recognition pre-training that enables it for capturing unique prosodic characteristics of the sources in a better way. Further, motivated from tasks such as audio deepfake detection and speech recognition, where fusion of PTMs representations lead to improved performance, we explore the same and propose FINDER for effective fusion of such representations. With fusion of Whisper and x-vector representations through FINDER, we achieved the topmost performance in comparison to all the individual PTMs as well as baseline fusion techniques and attaining SOTA performance.

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arXiv2024

SeQuiFi: Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Speech Emotion Recognition with Sequential Class-Finetuning

In this work, we introduce SeQuiFi, a novel approach for mitigating catastrophic forgetting (CF) in speech emotion recognition (SER). SeQuiFi adopts a sequential class-finetuning strategy, where the model is fine-tuned incrementally on one emotion class at a time, preserving and enhancing retention for each class. While various state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, such as regularization-based, memory-based, and weight-averaging techniques, have been proposed to address CF, it still remains a challenge, particularly with diverse and multilingual datasets. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that SeQuiFi significantly outperforms both vanilla fine-tuning and SOTA continual learning techniques in terms of accuracy and F1 scores on multiple benchmark SER datasets, including CREMA-D, RAVDESS, Emo-DB, MESD, and SHEMO, covering different languages.

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arXiv2024

Beyond Speech and More: Investigating the Emergent Ability of Speech Foundation Models for Classifying Physiological Time-Series Signals

Despite being trained exclusively on speech data, speech foundation models (SFMs) like Whisper have shown impressive performance in non-speech tasks such as audio classification. This is partly because speech shares some common traits with audio, enabling SFMs to transfer effectively. In this study, we push the boundaries by evaluating SFMs on a more challenging out-of-domain (OOD) task: classifying physiological time-series signals. We test two key hypotheses: first, that SFMs can generalize to physiological signals by capturing shared temporal patterns; second, that multilingual SFMs will outperform others due to their exposure to greater variability during pre-training, leading to more robust, generalized representations. Our experiments, conducted for stress recognition using ECG (Electrocardiogram), EMG (Electromyography), and EDA (Electrodermal Activity) signals, reveal that models trained on SFM-derived representations outperform those trained on raw physiological signals. Among all models, multilingual SFMs achieve the highest accuracy, supporting our hypothesis and demonstrating their OOD capabilities. This work positions SFMs as promising tools for new uncharted domains beyond speech.

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arXiv2024

Multi-View Multi-Task Modeling with Speech Foundation Models for Speech Forensic Tasks

Speech forensic tasks (SFTs), such as automatic speaker recognition (ASR), speech emotion recognition (SER), gender recognition (GR), and age estimation (AE), find use in different security and biometric applications. Previous works have applied various techniques, with recent studies focusing on applying speech foundation models (SFMs) for improved performance. However, most prior efforts have centered on building individual models for each task separately, despite the inherent similarities among these tasks. This isolated approach results in higher computational resource requirements, increased costs, time consumption, and maintenance challenges. In this study, we address these challenges by employing a multi-task learning strategy. Firstly, we explore the various state-of-the-art (SOTA) SFMs by extracting their representations for learning these SFTs and investigating their effectiveness at each task specifically. Secondly, we analyze the performance of the extracted representations on the SFTs in a multi-task learning framework. We observe a decline in performance when SFTs are modeled together compared to individual task-specific models, and as a remedy, we propose multi-view learning (MVL). Views are representations from different SFMs transformed into distinct abstract spaces by characteristics unique to each SFM. By leveraging MVL, we integrate these diverse representations to capture complementary information across tasks, enhancing the shared learning process. We introduce a new framework called TANGO (Task Alignment with iNter-view Gated Optimal transport) to implement this approach. With TANGO, we achieve the topmost performance in comparison to individual SFM representations as well as baseline fusion techniques across benchmark datasets such as CREMA-D, emo-DB, and BAVED.

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arXiv2024

Representation Loss Minimization with Randomized Selection Strategy for Efficient Environmental Fake Audio Detection

The adaptation of foundation models has significantly advanced environmental audio deepfake detection (EADD), a rapidly growing area of research. These models are typically fine-tuned or utilized in their frozen states for downstream tasks. However, the dimensionality of their representations can substantially lead to a high parameter count of downstream models, leading to higher computational demands. So, a general way is to compress these representations by leveraging state-of-the-art (SOTA) unsupervised dimensionality reduction techniques (PCA, SVD, KPCA, GRP) for efficient EADD. However, with the application of such techniques, we observe a drop in performance. So in this paper, we show that representation vectors contain redundant information, and randomly selecting 40-50% of representation values and building downstream models on it preserves or sometimes even improves performance. We show that such random selection preserves more performance than the SOTA dimensionality reduction techniques while reducing model parameters and inference time by almost over half.

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arXiv2024

Avengers Assemble: Amalgamation of Non-Semantic Features for Depression Detection

In this study, we address the challenge of depression detection from speech, focusing on the potential of non-semantic features (NSFs) to capture subtle markers of depression. While prior research has leveraged various features for this task, NSFs-extracted from pre-trained models (PTMs) designed for non-semantic tasks such as paralinguistic speech processing (TRILLsson), speaker recognition (x-vector), and emotion recognition (emoHuBERT)-have shown significant promise. However, the potential of combining these diverse features has not been fully explored. In this work, we demonstrate that the amalgamation of NSFs results in complementary behavior, leading to enhanced depression detection performance. Furthermore, to our end, we introduce a simple novel framework, FuSeR, designed to effectively combine these features. Our results show that FuSeR outperforms models utilizing individual NSFs as well as baseline fusion techniques and obtains state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in E-DAIC benchmark with RMSE of 5.51 and MAE of 4.48, establishing it as a robust approach for depression detection.

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arXiv2024

Are Music Foundation Models Better at Singing Voice Deepfake Detection? Far-Better Fuse them with Speech Foundation Models

In this study, for the first time, we extensively investigate whether music foundation models (MFMs) or speech foundation models (SFMs) work better for singing voice deepfake detection (SVDD), which has recently attracted attention in the research community. For this, we perform a comprehensive comparative study of state-of-the-art (SOTA) MFMs (MERT variants and music2vec) and SFMs (pre-trained for general speech representation learning as well as speaker recognition). We show that speaker recognition SFM representations perform the best amongst all the foundation models (FMs), and this performance can be attributed to its higher efficacy in capturing the pitch, tone, intensity, etc, characteristics present in singing voices. To our end, we also explore the fusion of FMs for exploiting their complementary behavior for improved SVDD, and we propose a novel framework, FIONA for the same. With FIONA, through the synchronization of x-vector (speaker recognition SFM) and MERT-v1-330M (MFM), we report the best performance with the lowest Equal Error Rate (EER) of 13.74 %, beating all the individual FMs as well as baseline FM fusions and achieving SOTA results.

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arXiv2024

Strong Alone, Stronger Together: Synergizing Modality-Binding Foundation Models with Optimal Transport for Non-Verbal Emotion Recognition

In this study, we investigate multimodal foundation models (MFMs) for emotion recognition from non-verbal sounds. We hypothesize that MFMs, with their joint pre-training across multiple modalities, will be more effective in non-verbal sounds emotion recognition (NVER) by better interpreting and differentiating subtle emotional cues that may be ambiguous in audio-only foundation models (AFMs). To validate our hypothesis, we extract representations from state-of-the-art (SOTA) MFMs and AFMs and evaluated them on benchmark NVER datasets. We also investigate the potential of combining selected foundation model representations to enhance NVER further inspired by research in speech recognition and audio deepfake detection. To achieve this, we propose a framework called MATA (Intra-Modality Alignment through Transport Attention). Through MATA coupled with the combination of MFMs: LanguageBind and ImageBind, we report the topmost performance with accuracies of 76.47%, 77.40%, 75.12% and F1-scores of 70.35%, 76.19%, 74.63% for ASVP-ESD, JNV, and VIVAE datasets against individual FMs and baseline fusion techniques and report SOTA on the benchmark datasets.

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arXiv2024

Towards identifying Source credibility on Information Leakage in Digital Gadget Market

The use of Social media to share content is on a constant rise. One of the capsize effect of information sharing on Social media includes the spread of sensitive information on the public domain. With the digital gadget market becoming highly competitive and ever-evolving, the trend of an increasing number of sensitive posts leaking information on devices in social media is observed. Many web-blogs on digital gadget market have mushroomed recently, making the problem of information leak all pervasive. Credible leaks on specifics of an upcoming device can cause a lot of financial damage to the respective organization. Hence, it is crucial to assess the credibility of the platforms that continuously post about a smartphone or digital gadget leaks. In this work, we analyze the headlines of leak web-blog posts and their corresponding official press-release. We first collect 54, 495 leak and press-release headlines for different smartphones. We train our custom NER model to capture the evolving smartphone names with an accuracy of 82.14% on manually annotated results. We further propose a credibility score metric for the web-blog, based on the number of falsified and authentic smartphone leak posts.

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arXiv2024

Are Paralinguistic Representations all that is needed for Speech Emotion Recognition?

Availability of representations from pre-trained models (PTMs) have facilitated substantial progress in speech emotion recognition (SER). Particularly, representations from PTM trained for paralinguistic speech processing have shown state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for SER. However, such paralinguistic PTM representations haven't been evaluated for SER in linguistic environments other than English. Also, paralinguistic PTM representations haven't been investigated in benchmarks such as SUPERB, EMO-SUPERB, ML-SUPERB for SER. This makes it difficult to access the efficacy of paralinguistic PTM representations for SER in multiple languages. To fill this gap, we perform a comprehensive comparative study of five SOTA PTM representations. Our results shows that paralinguistic PTM (TRILLsson) representations performs the best and this performance can be attributed to its effectiveness in capturing pitch, tone and other speech characteristics more effectively than other PTM representations.

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arXiv2024

VoxMed: One-Step Respiratory Disease Classifier using Digital Stethoscope Sounds

As respiratory illnesses become more common, it is crucial to quickly and accurately detect them to improve patient care. There is a need for improved diagnostic methods for immediate medical assessments for optimal patient outcomes. This paper introduces VoxMed, a UI-assisted one-step classifier that uses digital stethoscope recordings to diagnose respiratory diseases. It employs an Audio Spectrogram Transformer(AST) for feature extraction and a 1-D CNN-based architecture to classify respiratory diseases, offering professionals information regarding their patients respiratory health in seconds. We use the ICBHI dataset, which includes stethoscope recordings collected from patients in Greece and Portugal, to classify respiratory diseases. GitHub repository: https://github.com/Sample-User131001/VoxMed

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arXiv2024

ASGIR: Audio Spectrogram Transformer Guided Classification And Information Retrieval For Birds

Recognition and interpretation of bird vocalizations are pivotal in ornithological research and ecological conservation efforts due to their significance in understanding avian behaviour, performing habitat assessment and judging ecological health. This paper presents an audio spectrogram-guided classification framework called ASGIR for improved bird sound recognition and information retrieval. Our work is accompanied by a simple-to-use, two-step information retrieval system that uses geographical location and bird sounds to localize and retrieve relevant bird information by scraping Wikipedia page information of recognized birds. ASGIR offers a substantial performance on a random subset of 51 classes of Xeno-Canto dataset Bird sounds from European countries with a median of 100\% performance on F1, Precision and Sensitivity metrics. Our code is available as follows: https://github.com/MainSample1234/AS-GIR .

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