arXiv subjects

Yanze Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Yanze Xu.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Exploring Second-Order Pattern Recognition in Speaker Recognition

In classical pattern recognition tasks, neural networks are trained to recognise human-defined patterns for model inputs. Some Explainable AI (XAI) methods can explain other latent patterns that underlie the network's recognition of inputs as human-defined patterns; in this work, we call these latent patterns second-order patterns, and we propose to discover them. To this end, we apply a hierarchical clustering algorithm to analyse whether representations learned by a speaker recognition network from utterances naturally form hierarchical clusters. Each resulting cluster represents a second-order pattern that characterises how the network recognises some known utterances as speaker identities. All the resulting second-order patterns are then semantically interpreted using the existing Hierarchical Cluster-Class Matching (HCCM) method. Furthermore, we propose a new task, second-order pattern recognition, to identify which discovered second-order patterns characterising known utterances are exhibited by an unseen utterance. To achieve this, we design the Hierarchical Cluster Navigation and Assignment (HCNA) method. HCNA recognises a known second-order pattern as applying to an unseen utterance when the unseen utterance's network representation lies within the extrapolation space of the cluster regarded as that second-order pattern. Our experiments show that the extrapolation mechanism introduced by HCNA substantially improves performance on the second-order pattern recognition task.

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arXiv2026

Explainable AI in Speaker Recognition -- Attention Map Visualisation and Evaluation

Explaining and understanding the decision-making process of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, particularly those implemented by neural networks, falls within the field of explainable AI (XAI). Analogous to the human attention mechanism, neural networks are assumed to possess their own attention mechanisms that selectively process information during decision-making. This work proposes to study one XAI topic: analysing and visualising the attention mechanisms of neural networks. Our experiments are performed on speaker recognition neural networks that are trained to identify speaker identity from a given utterance. Previous studies have widely used class activation map (CAM)-based methods to analyse and visualise the attention mechanisms of neural networks. Each of these methods produces an attention map for each network input, highlighting which input regions are selectively processed when the speaker recognition network makes decisions. However, the evaluation of attention maps produced by these methods remains largely underexplored. This work systematically reviews an existing attention map evaluation algorithm, establishing key concepts and identifying its shortcomings. On the basis of this existing evaluation algorithm, a new version is then proposed to address the identified shortcomings, called the Modified Randomised Input Sampling for Explanation - Evaluation algorithm (Modified RISE-eval). Using Modified RISE-eval, we evaluate the attention maps produced by two representative CAM-based methods, GradCAM and LayerCAM, applied to a certain speaker recognition network. The evaluation results demonstrate that GradCAM and LayerCAM each exhibit distinct advantages when applied under different experimental conditions in the speaker recognition task.

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arXiv2026

Explainable AI in Speaker Recognition -- Making Latent Representations Understandable

Neural networks can be trained to learn task-relevant representations from data. Understanding how these networks make decisions falls within the Explainable AI (XAI) domain. This paper proposes to study an XAI topic: analysing, visualising and understanding the unknown organisation of network representations, particularly those a speaker recognition network learns from utterances, for recognising speaker identity. Past studies have employed algorithms (e.g. K-means) to analyse the different ways in which network representations can be naturally grouped into clusters, i.e. to analyse different flat clustering phenomena within the space defined by those representations. In contrast, this work applies two algorithms -- Single-Linkage Clustering (SLINK) and Hierarchical Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (HDBSCAN) -- to analyse the different ways in which representations from the speaker recognition network can form clusters with hierarchical relationships, i.e., to analyse different hierarchical clustering phenomena within the representation space of the speaker recognition network. Furthermore, an algorithm called Hierarchical Cluster-Class Matching (HCCM) is designed to semantically interpret one of the above hierarchical clustering phenomena analysed using SLINK. Given the clusters representing this phenomenon, HCCM identifies which ones best match individual semantic classes related to gender and nationality (e.g.\ male, female, Ireland, UK) and and-logic conjunctions of these classes (e.g.\ female and Ireland). The Liebig score metric is also proposed within HCCM to quantify the matching quality of each cluster-class pair and diagnose the factor that limits each match.

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arXiv2021

Detecting Escalation Level from Speech with Transfer Learning and Acoustic-Lexical Information Fusion

Textual escalation detection has been widely applied to e-commerce companies' customer service systems to pre-alert and prevent potential conflicts. Similarly, in public areas such as airports and train stations, where many impersonal conversations frequently take place, acoustic-based escalation detection systems are also useful to enhance passengers' safety and maintain public order. To this end, we introduce a system based on acoustic-lexical features to detect escalation from speech, Voice Activity Detection (VAD) and label smoothing are adopted to further enhance the performance in our experiments. Considering a small set of training and development data, we also employ transfer learning on several wellknown emotional detection datasets, i.e. RAVDESS, CREMA-D, to learn advanced emotional representations that is then applied to the conversational escalation detection task. On the development set, our proposed system achieves 81.5% unweighted average recall (UAR) which significantly outperforms the baseline with 72.2% UAR.

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arXiv2021

Lightweight Dual-channel Target Speaker Separation for Mobile Voice Communication

Nowadays, there is a strong need to deploy the target speaker separation (TSS) model on mobile devices with a limitation of the model size and computational complexity. To better perform TSS for mobile voice communication, we first make a dual-channel dataset based on a specific scenario, LibriPhone. Specifically, to better mimic the real-case scenario, instead of simulating from the single-channel dataset, LibriPhone is made by simultaneously replaying pairs of utterances from LibriSpeech by two professional artificial heads and recording by two built-in microphones of the mobile. Then, we propose a lightweight time-frequency domain separation model, LSTM-Former, which is based on the LSTM framework with source-to-noise ratio (SI-SNR) loss. For the experiments on Libri-Phone, we explore the dual-channel LSTMFormer model and a single-channel version by a random single channel of Libri-Phone. Experimental result shows that the dual-channel LSTM-Former outperforms the single-channel LSTMFormer with relative 25% improvement. This work provides a feasible solution for the TSS task on mobile devices, playing back and recording multiple data sources in real application scenarios for getting dual-channel real data can assist the lightweight model to achieve higher performance.

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