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Jianhua Tao

Publications and source records attributed to Jianhua Tao.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

ADD 2023: the Second Audio Deepfake Detection Challenge

Audio deepfake detection is an emerging topic in the artificial intelligence community. The second Audio Deepfake Detection Challenge (ADD 2023) aims to spur researchers around the world to build new innovative technologies that can further accelerate and foster research on detecting and analyzing deepfake speech utterances. Different from previous challenges (e.g. ADD 2022), ADD 2023 focuses on surpassing the constraints of binary real/fake classification, and actually localizing the manipulated intervals in a partially fake speech as well as pinpointing the source responsible for generating any fake audio. Furthermore, ADD 2023 includes more rounds of evaluation for the fake audio game sub-challenge. The ADD 2023 challenge includes three subchallenges: audio fake game (FG), manipulation region location (RL) and deepfake algorithm recognition (AR). This paper describes the datasets, evaluation metrics, and protocols. Some findings are also reported in audio deepfake detection tasks.

cs.SD↗

Efficient Multimodal Transformer with Dual-Level Feature Restoration for Robust Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

With the proliferation of user-generated online videos, Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) has attracted increasing attention recently. Despite significant progress, there are still two major challenges on the way towards robust MSA: 1) inefficiency when modeling cross-modal interactions in unaligned multimodal data; and 2) vulnerability to random modality feature missing which typically occurs in realistic settings. In this paper, we propose a generic and unified framework to address them, named Efficient Multimodal Transformer with Dual-Level Feature Restoration (EMT-DLFR). Concretely, EMT employs utterance-level representations from each modality as the global multimodal context to interact with local unimodal features and mutually promote each other. It not only avoids the quadratic scaling cost of previous local-local cross-modal interaction methods but also leads to better performance. To improve model robustness in the incomplete modality setting, on the one hand, DLFR performs low-level feature reconstruction to implicitly encourage the model to learn semantic information from incomplete data. On the other hand, it innovatively regards complete and incomplete data as two different views of one sample and utilizes siamese representation learning to explicitly attract their high-level representations. Comprehensive experiments on three popular datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in both complete and incomplete modality settings.

cs.LG↗

ALIM: Adjusting Label Importance Mechanism for Noisy Partial Label Learning

Noisy partial label learning (noisy PLL) is an important branch of weakly supervised learning. Unlike PLL where the ground-truth label must conceal in the candidate label set, noisy PLL relaxes this constraint and allows the ground-truth label may not be in the candidate label set. To address this challenging problem, most of the existing works attempt to detect noisy samples and estimate the ground-truth label for each noisy sample. However, detection errors are unavoidable. These errors can accumulate during training and continuously affect model optimization. To this end, we propose a novel framework for noisy PLL with theoretical guarantees, called ``Adjusting Label Importance Mechanism (ALIM)''. It aims to reduce the negative impact of detection errors by trading off the initial candidate set and model outputs. ALIM is a plug-in strategy that can be integrated with existing PLL approaches. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on noisy PLL. \textcolor[rgb]{0.93,0.0,0.47}{Our code can be found in Supplementary Material}.

cs.CV↗

VRA: Variational Rectified Activation for Out-of-distribution Detection

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical to building reliable machine learning systems in the open world. Researchers have proposed various strategies to reduce model overconfidence on OOD data. Among them, ReAct is a typical and effective technique to deal with model overconfidence, which truncates high activations to increase the gap between in-distribution and OOD. Despite its promising results, is this technique the best choice for widening the gap? To answer this question, we leverage the variational method to find the optimal operation and verify the necessity of suppressing abnormally low and high activations and amplifying intermediate activations in OOD detection, rather than focusing only on high activations like ReAct. This motivates us to propose a novel technique called ``Variational Rectified Activation (VRA)'', which simulates these suppression and amplification operations using piecewise functions. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing post-hoc strategies. Meanwhile, VRA is compatible with different scoring functions and network architectures. \textcolor[rgb]{0.93,0.0,0.47}{Our code can be found in Supplementary Material}.

cs.LG↗

M2-CTTS: End-to-End Multi-scale Multi-modal Conversational Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Conversational text-to-speech (TTS) aims to synthesize speech with proper prosody of reply based on the historical conversation. However, it is still a challenge to comprehensively model the conversation, and a majority of conversational TTS systems only focus on extracting global information and omit local prosody features, which contain important fine-grained information like keywords and emphasis. Moreover, it is insufficient to only consider the textual features, and acoustic features also contain various prosody information. Hence, we propose M2-CTTS, an end-to-end multi-scale multi-modal conversational text-to-speech system, aiming to comprehensively utilize historical conversation and enhance prosodic expression. More specifically, we design a textual context module and an acoustic context module with both coarse-grained and fine-grained modeling. Experimental results demonstrate that our model mixed with fine-grained context information and additionally considering acoustic features achieves better prosody performance and naturalness in CMOS tests.

cs.SD↗

UnifySpeech: A Unified Framework for Zero-shot Text-to-Speech and Voice Conversion

Text-to-speech (TTS) and voice conversion (VC) are two different tasks both aiming at generating high quality speaking voice according to different input modality. Due to their similarity, this paper proposes UnifySpeech, which brings TTS and VC into a unified framework for the first time. The model is based on the assumption that speech can be decoupled into three independent components: content information, speaker information, prosody information. Both TTS and VC can be regarded as mining these three parts of information from the input and completing the reconstruction of speech. For TTS, the speech content information is derived from the text, while in VC it's derived from the source speech, so all the remaining units are shared except for the speech content extraction module in the two tasks. We applied vector quantization and domain constrain to bridge the gap between the content domains of TTS and VC. Objective and subjective evaluation shows that by combining the two task, TTS obtains better speaker modeling ability while VC gets hold of impressive speech content decoupling capability.

cs.SD↗

GCNet: Graph Completion Network for Incomplete Multimodal Learning in Conversation

Conversations have become a critical data format on social media platforms. Understanding conversation from emotion, content and other aspects also attracts increasing attention from researchers due to its widespread application in human-computer interaction. In real-world environments, we often encounter the problem of incomplete modalities, which has become a core issue of conversation understanding. To address this problem, researchers propose various methods. However, existing approaches are mainly designed for individual utterances rather than conversational data, which cannot fully exploit temporal and speaker information in conversations. To this end, we propose a novel framework for incomplete multimodal learning in conversations, called "Graph Complete Network (GCNet)", filling the gap of existing works. Our GCNet contains two well-designed graph neural network-based modules, "Speaker GNN" and "Temporal GNN", to capture temporal and speaker dependencies. To make full use of complete and incomplete data, we jointly optimize classification and reconstruction tasks in an end-to-end manner. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we conduct experiments on three benchmark conversational datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our GCNet is superior to existing state-of-the-art approaches in incomplete multimodal learning. Code is available at https://github.com/zeroQiaoba/GCNet.

cs.LG↗

Emotion Selectable End-to-End Text-based Speech Editing

Text-based speech editing allows users to edit speech by intuitively cutting, copying, and pasting text to speed up the process of editing speech. In the previous work, CampNet (context-aware mask prediction network) is proposed to realize text-based speech editing, significantly improving the quality of edited speech. This paper aims at a new task: adding emotional effect to the editing speech during the text-based speech editing to make the generated speech more expressive. To achieve this task, we propose Emo-CampNet (emotion CampNet), which can provide the option of emotional attributes for the generated speech in text-based speech editing and has the one-shot ability to edit unseen speakers' speech. Firstly, we propose an end-to-end emotion-selectable text-based speech editing model. The key idea of the model is to control the emotion of generated speech by introducing additional emotion attributes based on the context-aware mask prediction network. Secondly, to prevent the emotion of the generated speech from being interfered by the emotional components in the original speech, a neutral content generator is proposed to remove the emotion from the original speech, which is optimized by the generative adversarial framework. Thirdly, two data augmentation methods are proposed to enrich the emotional and pronunciation information in the training set, which can enable the model to edit the unseen speaker's speech. The experimental results that 1) Emo-CampNet can effectively control the emotion of the generated speech in the process of text-based speech editing; And can edit unseen speakers' speech. 2) Detailed ablation experiments further prove the effectiveness of emotional selectivity and data augmentation methods. The demo page is available at https://hairuo55.github.io/Emo-CampNet/

cs.SD↗

Text Enhancement for Paragraph Processing in End-to-End Code-switching TTS

Current end-to-end code-switching Text-to-Speech (TTS) can already generate high quality two languages speech in the same utterance with single speaker bilingual corpora. When the speakers of the bilingual corpora are different, the naturalness and consistency of the code-switching TTS will be poor. The cross-lingual embedding layers structure we proposed makes similar syllables in different languages relevant, thus improving the naturalness and consistency of generated speech. In the end-to-end code-switching TTS, there exists problem of prosody instability when synthesizing paragraph text. The text enhancement method we proposed makes the input contain prosodic information and sentence-level context information, thus improving the prosody stability of paragraph text. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in the naturalness, consistency, and prosody stability. In addition to Mandarin and English, we also apply these methods to Shanghaiese and Cantonese corpora, proving that the methods we proposed can be extended to other languages to build end-to-end code-switching TTS system.

cs.SD↗

An Overview of Affective Speech Synthesis and Conversion in the Deep Learning Era

Speech is the fundamental mode of human communication, and its synthesis has long been a core priority in human-computer interaction research. In recent years, machines have managed to master the art of generating speech that is understandable by humans. But the linguistic content of an utterance encompasses only a part of its meaning. Affect, or expressivity, has the capacity to turn speech into a medium capable of conveying intimate thoughts, feelings, and emotions -- aspects that are essential for engaging and naturalistic interpersonal communication. While the goal of imparting expressivity to synthesised utterances has so far remained elusive, following recent advances in text-to-speech synthesis, a paradigm shift is well under way in the fields of affective speech synthesis and conversion as well. Deep learning, as the technology which underlies most of the recent advances in artificial intelligence, is spearheading these efforts. In the present overview, we outline ongoing trends and summarise state-of-the-art approaches in an attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of this exciting field.

cs.SD↗

Fully Automated End-to-End Fake Audio Detection

The existing fake audio detection systems often rely on expert experience to design the acoustic features or manually design the hyperparameters of the network structure. However, artificial adjustment of the parameters can have a relatively obvious influence on the results. It is almost impossible to manually set the best set of parameters. Therefore this paper proposes a fully automated end-toend fake audio detection method. We first use wav2vec pre-trained model to obtain a high-level representation of the speech. Furthermore, for the network structure, we use a modified version of the differentiable architecture search (DARTS) named light-DARTS. It learns deep speech representations while automatically learning and optimizing complex neural structures consisting of convolutional operations and residual blocks. The experimental results on the ASVspoof 2019 LA dataset show that our proposed system achieves an equal error rate (EER) of 1.08%, which outperforms the state-of-the-art single system.

cs.SD↗

An Initial Investigation for Detecting Vocoder Fingerprints of Fake Audio

Many effective attempts have been made for fake audio detection. However, they can only provide detection results but no countermeasures to curb this harm. For many related practical applications, what model or algorithm generated the fake audio also is needed. Therefore, We propose a new problem for detecting vocoder fingerprints of fake audio. Experiments are conducted on the datasets synthesized by eight state-of-the-art vocoders. We have preliminarily explored the features and model architectures. The t-SNE visualization shows that different vocoders generate distinct vocoder fingerprints.

cs.SD↗

Audio Deepfake Detection Based on a Combination of F0 Information and Real Plus Imaginary Spectrogram Features

Recently, pioneer research works have proposed a large number of acoustic features (log power spectrogram, linear frequency cepstral coefficients, constant Q cepstral coefficients, etc.) for audio deepfake detection, obtaining good performance, and showing that different subbands have different contributions to audio deepfake detection. However, this lacks an explanation of the specific information in the subband, and these features also lose information such as phase. Inspired by the mechanism of synthetic speech, the fundamental frequency (F0) information is used to improve the quality of synthetic speech, while the F0 of synthetic speech is still too average, which differs significantly from that of real speech. It is expected that F0 can be used as important information to discriminate between bonafide and fake speech, while this information cannot be used directly due to the irregular distribution of F0. Insteadly, the frequency band containing most of F0 is selected as the input feature. Meanwhile, to make full use of the phase and full-band information, we also propose to use real and imaginary spectrogram features as complementary input features and model the disjoint subbands separately. Finally, the results of F0, real and imaginary spectrogram features are fused. Experimental results on the ASVspoof 2019 LA dataset show that our proposed system is very effective for the audio deepfake detection task, achieving an equivalent error rate (EER) of 0.43%, which surpasses almost all systems.

cs.SD↗

Two-Aspect Information Fusion Model For ABAW4 Multi-task Challenge

In this paper, we propose the solution to the Multi-Task Learning (MTL) Challenge of the 4th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) competition. The task of ABAW is to predict frame-level emotion descriptors from videos: discrete emotional state; valence and arousal; and action units. Although researchers have proposed several approaches and achieved promising results in ABAW, current works in this task rarely consider interactions between different emotion descriptors. To this end, we propose a novel end to end architecture to achieve full integration of different types of information. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solution.

cs.CV↗

Reducing language context confusion for end-to-end code-switching automatic speech recognition

Code-switching deals with alternative languages in communication process. Training end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for code-switching is especially challenging as code-switching training data are always insufficient to combat the increased multilingual context confusion due to the presence of more than one language. We propose a language-related attention mechanism to reduce multilingual context confusion for the E2E code-switching ASR model based on the Equivalence Constraint (EC) Theory. The linguistic theory requires that any monolingual fragment that occurs in the code-switching sentence must occur in one of the monolingual sentences. The theory establishes a bridge between monolingual data and code-switching data. We leverage this linguistics theory to design the code-switching E2E ASR model. The proposed model efficiently transfers language knowledge from rich monolingual data to improve the performance of the code-switching ASR model. We evaluate our model on ASRU 2019 Mandarin-English code-switching challenge dataset. Compared to the baseline model, our proposed model achieves a 17.12% relative error reduction.

cs.CL↗

Adaptive Pseudo-Siamese Policy Network for Temporal Knowledge Prediction

Temporal knowledge prediction is a crucial task for the event early warning that has gained increasing attention in recent years, which aims to predict the future facts by using relevant historical facts on the temporal knowledge graphs. There are two main difficulties in this prediction task. First, from the historical facts point of view, how to model the evolutionary patterns of the facts to predict the query accurately. Second, from the query perspective, how to handle the two cases where the query contains seen and unseen entities in a unified framework. Driven by the two problems, we propose a novel adaptive pseudo-siamese policy network for temporal knowledge prediction based on reinforcement learning. Specifically, we design the policy network in our model as a pseudo-siamese policy network that consists of two sub-policy networks. In sub-policy network I, the agent searches for the answer for the query along the entity-relation paths to capture the static evolutionary patterns. And in sub-policy network II, the agent searches for the answer for the query along the relation-time paths to deal with unseen entities. Moreover, we develop a temporal relation encoder to capture the temporal evolutionary patterns. Finally, we design a gating mechanism to adaptively integrate the results of the two sub-policy networks to help the agent focus on the destination answer. To assess our model performance, we conduct link prediction on four benchmark datasets, the experimental results demonstrate that our method obtains considerable performance compared with existing methods.

cs.AI↗

CampNet: Context-Aware Mask Prediction for End-to-End Text-Based Speech Editing

The text-based speech editor allows the editing of speech through intuitive cutting, copying, and pasting operations to speed up the process of editing speech. However, the major drawback of current systems is that edited speech often sounds unnatural due to cut-copy-paste operation. In addition, it is not obvious how to synthesize records according to a new word not appearing in the transcript. This paper proposes a novel end-to-end text-based speech editing method called context-aware mask prediction network (CampNet). The model can simulate the text-based speech editing process by randomly masking part of speech and then predicting the masked region by sensing the speech context. It can solve unnatural prosody in the edited region and synthesize the speech corresponding to the unseen words in the transcript. Secondly, for the possible operation of text-based speech editing, we design three text-based operations based on CampNet: deletion, insertion, and replacement. These operations can cover various situations of speech editing. Thirdly, to synthesize the speech corresponding to long text in insertion and replacement operations, a word-level autoregressive generation method is proposed. Fourthly, we propose a speaker adaptation method using only one sentence for CampNet and explore the ability of few-shot learning based on CampNet, which provides a new idea for speech forgery tasks. The subjective and objective experiments on VCTK and LibriTTS datasets show that the speech editing results based on CampNet are better than TTS technology, manual editing, and VoCo method. We also conduct detailed ablation experiments to explore the effect of the CampNet structure on its performance. Finally, the experiment shows that speaker adaptation with only one sentence can further improve the naturalness of speech. Examples of generated speech can be found at https://hairuo55.github.io/CampNet.

cs.SD↗

NeuralDPS: Neural Deterministic Plus Stochastic Model with Multiband Excitation for Noise-Controllable Waveform Generation

The traditional vocoders have the advantages of high synthesis efficiency, strong interpretability, and speech editability, while the neural vocoders have the advantage of high synthesis quality. To combine the advantages of two vocoders, inspired by the traditional deterministic plus stochastic model, this paper proposes a novel neural vocoder named NeuralDPS which can retain high speech quality and acquire high synthesis efficiency and noise controllability. Firstly, this framework contains four modules: a deterministic source module, a stochastic source module, a neural V/UV decision module and a neural filter module. The input required by the vocoder is just the spectral parameter, which avoids the error caused by estimating additional parameters, such as F0. Secondly, to solve the problem that different frequency bands may have different proportions of deterministic components and stochastic components, a multiband excitation strategy is used to generate a more accurate excitation signal and reduce the neural filter's burden. Thirdly, a method to control noise components of speech is proposed. In this way, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of speech can be adjusted easily. Objective and subjective experimental results show that our proposed NeuralDPS vocoder can obtain similar performance with the WaveNet and it generates waveforms at least 280 times faster than the WaveNet vocoder. It is also 28% faster than WaveGAN's synthesis efficiency on a single CPU core. We have also verified through experiments that this method can effectively control the noise components in the predicted speech and adjust the SNR of speech. Examples of generated speech can be found at https://hairuo55.github.io/NeuralDPS.

cs.SD↗