arXiv subjects

Shiliang Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Shiliang Zhang.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

MFCCA:Multi-Frame Cross-Channel attention for multi-speaker ASR in Multi-party meeting scenario

Recently cross-channel attention, which better leverages multi-channel signals from microphone array, has shown promising results in the multi-party meeting scenario. Cross-channel attention focuses on either learning global correlations between sequences of different channels or exploiting fine-grained channel-wise information effectively at each time step. Considering the delay of microphone array receiving sound, we propose a multi-frame cross-channel attention, which models cross-channel information between adjacent frames to exploit the complementarity of both frame-wise and channel-wise knowledge. Besides, we also propose a multi-layer convolutional mechanism to fuse the multi-channel output and a channel masking strategy to combat the channel number mismatch problem between training and inference. Experiments on the AliMeeting, a real-world corpus, reveal that our proposed model outperforms single-channel model by 31.7\% and 37.0\% CER reduction on Eval and Test sets. Moreover, with comparable model parameters and training data, our proposed model achieves a new SOTA performance on the AliMeeting corpus, as compared with the top ranking systems in the ICASSP2022 M2MeT challenge, a recently held multi-channel multi-speaker ASR challenge.

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arXiv2022

A Comparative Study on Speaker-attributed Automatic Speech Recognition in Multi-party Meetings

In this paper, we conduct a comparative study on speaker-attributed automatic speech recognition (SA-ASR) in the multi-party meeting scenario, a topic with increasing attention in meeting rich transcription. Specifically, three approaches are evaluated in this study. The first approach, FD-SOT, consists of a frame-level diarization model to identify speakers and a multi-talker ASR to recognize utterances. The speaker-attributed transcriptions are obtained by aligning the diarization results and recognized hypotheses. However, such an alignment strategy may suffer from erroneous timestamps due to the modular independence, severely hindering the model performance. Therefore, we propose the second approach, WD-SOT, to address alignment errors by introducing a word-level diarization model, which can get rid of such timestamp alignment dependency. To further mitigate the alignment issues, we propose the third approach, TS-ASR, which trains a target-speaker separation module and an ASR module jointly. By comparing various strategies for each SA-ASR approach, experimental results on a real meeting scenario corpus, AliMeeting, reveal that the WD-SOT approach achieves 10.7% relative reduction on averaged speaker-dependent character error rate (SD-CER), compared with the FD-SOT approach. In addition, the TS-ASR approach also outperforms the FD-SOT approach and brings 16.5% relative average SD-CER reduction.

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arXiv2022

Evaluation of Open-source Tools for Differential Privacy

Differential privacy (DP) defines privacy protection by promising quantified indistinguishability between individuals that consent to share their privacy-sensitive information and the ones that do not. DP aims to deliver this promise by including well-crafted elements of random noise in the published data and thus there is an inherent trade-off between the degree of privacy protection and the ability to utilize the protected data. Currently, several open-source tools were proposed for DP provision. To the best of our knowledge, there is no comprehensive study for comparing these open-source tools with respect to their ability to balance DP's inherent trade-off as well as the use of system resources. This work proposes an open-source evaluation framework for privacy protection solutions and offers evaluation for OpenDP Smartnoise, Google DP, PyTorch Opacus, Tensorflow Privacy, and Diffprivlib. In addition to studying their ability to balance the above trade-off, we consider discrete and continuous attributes by quantifying their performance under different data sizes. Our results reveal several patterns that developers should have in mind when selecting tools under different application needs and criteria. This evaluation survey can be the basis for an improved selection of open-source DP tools and quicker adaptation of DP.

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arXiv2022

MFGNet: Dynamic Modality-Aware Filter Generation for RGB-T Tracking

Many RGB-T trackers attempt to attain robust feature representation by utilizing an adaptive weighting scheme (or attention mechanism). Different from these works, we propose a new dynamic modality-aware filter generation module (named MFGNet) to boost the message communication between visible and thermal data by adaptively adjusting the convolutional kernels for various input images in practical tracking. Given the image pairs as input, we first encode their features with the backbone network. Then, we concatenate these feature maps and generate dynamic modality-aware filters with two independent networks. The visible and thermal filters will be used to conduct a dynamic convolutional operation on their corresponding input feature maps respectively. Inspired by residual connection, both the generated visible and thermal feature maps will be summarized with input feature maps. The augmented feature maps will be fed into the RoI align module to generate instance-level features for subsequent classification. To address issues caused by heavy occlusion, fast motion and out-of-view, we propose to conduct a joint local and global search by exploiting a new direction-aware target driven attention mechanism. The spatial and temporal recurrent neural network is used to capture the direction-aware context for accurate global attention prediction. Extensive experiments on three large-scale RGB-T tracking benchmark datasets validated the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. The source code of this paper is available at \textcolor{magenta}{\url{https://github.com/wangxiao5791509/MFG_RGBT_Tracking_PyTorch}}.

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arXiv2022

Speaker Embedding-aware Neural Diarization: an Efficient Framework for Overlapping Speech Diarization in Meeting Scenarios

Overlapping speech diarization has been traditionally treated as a multi-label classification problem. In this paper, we reformulate this task as a single-label prediction problem by encoding multiple binary labels into a single label with the power set, which represents the possible combinations of target speakers. This formulation has two benefits. First, the overlaps of target speakers are explicitly modeled. Second, threshold selection is no longer needed. Through this formulation, we propose the speaker embedding-aware neural diarization (SEND) framework, where a speech encoder, a speaker encoder, two similarity scorers, and a post-processing network are jointly optimized to predict the encoded labels according to the similarities between speech features and speaker embeddings. Experimental results show that SEND has a stable learning process and can be trained on highly overlapped data without extra initialization. More importantly, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance in real meeting scenarios with fewer model parameters and lower computational complexity.

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arXiv2022

Extended vehicle energy dataset (eVED): an enhanced large-scale dataset for deep learning on vehicle trip energy consumption

This work presents an extended version of the Vehicle Energy Dataset (VED), which is a openly released large-scale dataset for vehicle energy consumption analysis. Compared with its original version, the extended VED (eVED) dataset is enhanced with accurate vehicle trip GPS coordinates, serving as a basis to associate the VED trip records with external information, e.g., road speed limit and intersections, from accessible map services to accumulate attributes that is essential in analyzing vehicle energy consumption. In particularly, we calibrate all the GPS trace records in the original VED data, upon which we associated the VED data with attributes extracted from the Geographic Information System (QGIS), the Overpass API, the Open Street Map API, and Google Maps API. The associated attributes include 12,609,170 records of road elevation, 12,203,044 of speed limit, 12,281,719 of speed limit with direction (in case the road is bi-directional), 584,551 of intersections, 429,638 of bus stop, 312,196 of crossings, 195,856 of traffic signals, 29,397 of stop signs, 5,848 of turning loops, 4,053 of railway crossings (level crossing), 3,554 of turning circles, and 2,938 of motorway junctions. With the accurate GPS coordinates and enriched features of the vehicle trip record, the obtained eVED dataset can provide a precise and abundant medium to feed a learning engine, especially a deep learning engine that is more demanding on data sufficiency and richness. Moreover, our software work for data calibration and enrichment can be reused to generate further vehicle trip datasets for specific user cases, contributing to deep insights into vehicle behaviors and traffic dynamics analyses. We anticipate that the eVED dataset and our data enrichment software can serve the academic and industrial automotive section as apparatus in developing future technologies.

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arXiv2022

M2MeT: The ICASSP 2022 Multi-Channel Multi-Party Meeting Transcription Challenge

Recent development of speech processing, such as speech recognition, speaker diarization, etc., has inspired numerous applications of speech technologies. The meeting scenario is one of the most valuable and, at the same time, most challenging scenarios for the deployment of speech technologies. Specifically, two typical tasks, speaker diarization and multi-speaker automatic speech recognition have attracted much attention recently. However, the lack of large public meeting data has been a major obstacle for the advancement of the field. Therefore, we make available the AliMeeting corpus, which consists of 120 hours of recorded Mandarin meeting data, including far-field data collected by 8-channel microphone array as well as near-field data collected by headset microphone. Each meeting session is composed of 2-4 speakers with different speaker overlap ratio, recorded in rooms with different size. Along with the dataset, we launch the ICASSP 2022 Multi-channel Multi-party Meeting Transcription Challenge (M2MeT) with two tracks, namely speaker diarization and multi-speaker ASR, aiming to provide a common testbed for meeting rich transcription and promote reproducible research in this field. In this paper we provide a detailed introduction of the AliMeeting dateset, challenge rules, evaluation methods and baseline systems.

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arXiv2022

Summary On The ICASSP 2022 Multi-Channel Multi-Party Meeting Transcription Grand Challenge

The ICASSP 2022 Multi-channel Multi-party Meeting Transcription Grand Challenge (M2MeT) focuses on one of the most valuable and the most challenging scenarios of speech technologies. The M2MeT challenge has particularly set up two tracks, speaker diarization (track 1) and multi-speaker automatic speech recognition (ASR) (track 2). Along with the challenge, we released 120 hours of real-recorded Mandarin meeting speech data with manual annotation, including far-field data collected by 8-channel microphone array as well as near-field data collected by each participants' headset microphone. We briefly describe the released dataset, track setups, baselines and summarize the challenge results and major techniques used in the submissions.

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arXiv2022

Contextualize differential privacy in image database: a lightweight image differential privacy approach based on principle component analysis inverse

Differential privacy (DP) has been the de-facto standard to preserve privacy-sensitive information in database. Nevertheless, there lacks a clear and convincing contextualization of DP in image database, where individual images' indistinguishable contribution to a certain analysis can be achieved and observed when DP is exerted. As a result, the privacy-accuracy trade-off due to integrating DP is insufficiently demonstrated in the context of differentially-private image database. This work aims at contextualizing DP in image database by an explicit and intuitive demonstration of integrating conceptional differential privacy with images. To this end, we design a lightweight approach dedicating to privatizing image database as a whole and preserving the statistical semantics of the image database to an adjustable level, while making individual images' contribution to such statistics indistinguishable. The designed approach leverages principle component analysis (PCA) to reduce the raw image with large amount of attributes to a lower dimensional space whereby DP is performed, so as to decrease the DP load of calculating sensitivity attribute-by-attribute. The DP-exerted image data, which is not visible in its privatized format, is visualized through PCA inverse such that both a human and machine inspector can evaluate the privatization and quantify the privacy-accuracy trade-off in an analysis on the privatized image database. Using the devised approach, we demonstrate the contextualization of DP in images by two use cases based on deep learning models, where we show the indistinguishability of individual images induced by DP and the privatized images' retention of statistical semantics in deep learning tasks, which is elaborated by quantitative analyses on the privacy-accuracy trade-off under different privatization settings.

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arXiv2022

ProsoSpeech: Enhancing Prosody With Quantized Vector Pre-training in Text-to-Speech

Expressive text-to-speech (TTS) has become a hot research topic recently, mainly focusing on modeling prosody in speech. Prosody modeling has several challenges: 1) the extracted pitch used in previous prosody modeling works have inevitable errors, which hurts the prosody modeling; 2) different attributes of prosody (e.g., pitch, duration and energy) are dependent on each other and produce the natural prosody together; and 3) due to high variability of prosody and the limited amount of high-quality data for TTS training, the distribution of prosody cannot be fully shaped. To tackle these issues, we propose ProsoSpeech, which enhances the prosody using quantized latent vectors pre-trained on large-scale unpaired and low-quality text and speech data. Specifically, we first introduce a word-level prosody encoder, which quantizes the low-frequency band of the speech and compresses prosody attributes in the latent prosody vector (LPV). Then we introduce an LPV predictor, which predicts LPV given word sequence. We pre-train the LPV predictor on large-scale text and low-quality speech data and fine-tune it on the high-quality TTS dataset. Finally, our model can generate expressive speech conditioned on the predicted LPV. Experimental results show that ProsoSpeech can generate speech with richer prosody compared with baseline methods.

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arXiv2022

An Energy Consumption Model for Electrical Vehicle Networks via Extended Federated-learning

Electrical vehicle (EV) raises to promote an eco-sustainable society. Nevertheless, the "range anxiety" of EV hinders its wider acceptance among customers. This paper proposes a novel solution to range anxiety based on a federated-learning model, which is capable of estimating battery consumption and providing energy-efficient route planning for vehicle networks. Specifically, the new approach extends the federated-learning structure with two components: anomaly detection and sharing policy. The first component identifies preventing factors in model learning, while the second component offers guidelines for information sharing amongst vehicle networks when the sharing is necessary to preserve learning efficiency. The two components collaborate to enhance learning robustness against data heterogeneities in networks. Numerical experiments are conducted, and the results show that compared with considered solutions, the proposed approach could provide higher accuracy of battery-consumption estimation for vehicles under heterogeneous data distributions, without increasing the time complexity or transmitting raw data among vehicle networks.

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arXiv2021

Speaker Embedding-aware Neural Diarization for Flexible Number of Speakers with Textual Information

Overlapping speech diarization is always treated as a multi-label classification problem. In this paper, we reformulate this task as a single-label prediction problem by encoding the multi-speaker labels with power set. Specifically, we propose the speaker embedding-aware neural diarization (SEND) method, which predicts the power set encoded labels according to the similarities between speech features and given speaker embeddings. Our method is further extended and integrated with downstream tasks by utilizing the textual information, which has not been well studied in previous literature. The experimental results show that our method achieves lower diarization error rate than the target-speaker voice activity detection. When textual information is involved, the diarization errors can be further reduced. For the real meeting scenario, our method can achieve 34.11% relative improvement compared with the Bayesian hidden Markov model based clustering algorithm.

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arXiv2021

Large-Scale Spatio-Temporal Person Re-identification: Algorithms and Benchmark

Person re-identification (re-ID) in the scenario with large spatial and temporal spans has not been fully explored. This is partially because that, existing benchmark datasets were mainly collected with limited spatial and temporal ranges, e.g., using videos recorded in a few days by cameras in a specific region of the campus. Such limited spatial and temporal ranges make it hard to simulate the difficulties of person re-ID in real scenarios. In this work, we contribute a novel Large-scale Spatio-Temporal LaST person re-ID dataset, including 10,862 identities with more than 228k images. Compared with existing datasets, LaST presents more challenging and high-diversity re-ID settings, and significantly larger spatial and temporal ranges. For instance, each person can appear in different cities or countries, and in various time slots from daytime to night, and in different seasons from spring to winter. To our best knowledge, LaST is a novel person re-ID dataset with the largest spatio-temporal ranges. Based on LaST, we verified its challenge by conducting a comprehensive performance evaluation of 14 re-ID algorithms. We further propose an easy-to-implement baseline that works well on such challenging re-ID setting. We also verified that models pre-trained on LaST can generalize well on existing datasets with short-term and cloth-changing scenarios. We expect LaST to inspire future works toward more realistic and challenging re-ID tasks. More information about the dataset is available at https://github.com/shuxjweb/last.git.

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arXiv2021

BeamTransformer: Microphone Array-based Overlapping Speech Detection

We propose BeamTransformer, an efficient architecture to leverage beamformer's edge in spatial filtering and transformer's capability in context sequence modeling. BeamTransformer seeks to optimize modeling of sequential relationship among signals from different spatial direction. Overlapping speech detection is one of the tasks where such optimization is favorable. In this paper we effectively apply BeamTransformer to detect overlapping segments. Comparing to single-channel approach, BeamTransformer exceeds in learning to identify the relationship among different beam sequences and hence able to make predictions not only from the acoustic signals but also the localization of the source. The results indicate that a successful incorporation of microphone array signals can lead to remarkable gains. Moreover, BeamTransformer takes one step further, as speech from overlapped speakers have been internally separated into different beams.

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arXiv2021

Enhancing Social Relation Inference with Concise Interaction Graph and Discriminative Scene Representation

There has been a recent surge of research interest in attacking the problem of social relation inference based on images. Existing works classify social relations mainly by creating complicated graphs of human interactions, or learning the foreground and/or background information of persons and objects, but ignore holistic scene context. The holistic scene refers to the functionality of a place in images, such as dinning room, playground and office. In this paper, by mimicking human understanding on images, we propose an approach of \textbf{PR}actical \textbf{I}nference in \textbf{S}ocial r\textbf{E}lation (PRISE), which concisely learns interactive features of persons and discriminative features of holistic scenes. Technically, we develop a simple and fast relational graph convolutional network to capture interactive features of all persons in one image. To learn the holistic scene feature, we elaborately design a contrastive learning task based on image scene classification. To further boost the performance in social relation inference, we collect and distribute a new large-scale dataset, which consists of about 240 thousand unlabeled images. The extensive experimental results show that our novel learning framework significantly beats the state-of-the-art methods, e.g., PRISE achieves 6.8$\%$ improvement for domain classification in PIPA dataset.

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arXiv2021

Extremely Low Footprint End-to-End ASR System for Smart Device

Recently, end-to-end (E2E) speech recognition has become popular, since it can integrate the acoustic, pronunciation and language models into a single neural network, which outperforms conventional models. Among E2E approaches, attention-based models, e.g. Transformer, have emerged as being superior. Such models have opened the door to deployment of ASR on smart devices, however they still suffer from requiring a large number of model parameters. We propose an extremely low footprint E2E ASR system for smart devices, to achieve the goal of satisfying resource constraints without sacrificing recognition accuracy. We design cross-layer weight sharing to improve parameter efficiency and further exploit model compression methods including sparsification and quantization, to reduce memory storage and boost decoding efficiency. We evaluate our approaches on the public AISHELL-1 and AISHELL-2 benchmarks. On the AISHELL-2 task, the proposed method achieves more than 10x compression (model size reduces from 248 to 24MB), at the cost of only minor performance loss (CER reduces from 6.49% to 6.92%).

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arXiv2021

Graph Consistency Based Mean-Teaching for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Person Re-Identification

Recent works show that mean-teaching is an effective framework for unsupervised domain adaptive person re-identification. However, existing methods perform contrastive learning on selected samples between teacher and student networks, which is sensitive to noises in pseudo labels and neglects the relationship among most samples. Moreover, these methods are not effective in cooperation of different teacher networks. To handle these issues, this paper proposes a Graph Consistency based Mean-Teaching (GCMT) method with constructing the Graph Consistency Constraint (GCC) between teacher and student networks. Specifically, given unlabeled training images, we apply teacher networks to extract corresponding features and further construct a teacher graph for each teacher network to describe the similarity relationships among training images. To boost the representation learning, different teacher graphs are fused to provide the supervise signal for optimizing student networks. GCMT fuses similarity relationships predicted by different teacher networks as supervision and effectively optimizes student networks with more sample relationships involved. Experiments on three datasets, i.e., Market-1501, DukeMTMCreID, and MSMT17, show that proposed GCMT outperforms state-of-the-art methods by clear margin. Specially, GCMT even outperforms the previous method that uses a deeper backbone. Experimental results also show that GCMT can effectively boost the performance with multiple teacher and student networks. Our code is available at https://github.com/liu-xb/GCMT .

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arXiv2021

Intra-Inter Camera Similarity for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

Most of unsupervised person Re-Identification (Re-ID) works produce pseudo-labels by measuring the feature similarity without considering the distribution discrepancy among cameras, leading to degraded accuracy in label computation across cameras. This paper targets to address this challenge by studying a novel intra-inter camera similarity for pseudo-label generation. We decompose the sample similarity computation into two stage, i.e., the intra-camera and inter-camera computations, respectively. The intra-camera computation directly leverages the CNN features for similarity computation within each camera. Pseudo-labels generated on different cameras train the re-id model in a multi-branch network. The second stage considers the classification scores of each sample on different cameras as a new feature vector. This new feature effectively alleviates the distribution discrepancy among cameras and generates more reliable pseudo-labels. We hence train our re-id model in two stages with intra-camera and inter-camera pseudo-labels, respectively. This simple intra-inter camera similarity produces surprisingly good performance on multiple datasets, e.g., achieves rank-1 accuracy of 89.5% on the Market1501 dataset, outperforming the recent unsupervised works by 9+%, and is comparable with the latest transfer learning works that leverage extra annotations.

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