arXiv subjects

Yuhang Cao

Publications and source records attributed to Yuhang Cao.

65 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

DiaCorrect: End-to-end error correction for speaker diarization

In recent years, speaker diarization has attracted widespread attention. To achieve better performance, some studies propose to diarize speech in multiple stages. Although these methods might bring additional benefits, most of them are quite complex. Motivated by spelling correction in automatic speech recognition (ASR), in this paper, we propose an end-to-end error correction framework, termed DiaCorrect, to refine the initial diarization results in a simple but efficient way. By exploiting the acoustic interactions between input mixture and its corresponding speaker activity, DiaCorrect could automatically adapt the initial speaker activity to minimize the diarization errors. Without bells and whistles, experiments on LibriSpeech based 2-speaker meeting-like data show that, the self-attentitive end-to-end neural diarization (SA-EEND) baseline with DiaCorrect could reduce its diarization error rate (DER) by over 62.4% from 12.31% to 4.63%. Our source code is available online at https://github.com/jyhan03/diacorrect.

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arXiv2023

DiaCorrect: Error Correction Back-end For Speaker Diarization

In this work, we propose an error correction framework, named DiaCorrect, to refine the output of a diarization system in a simple yet effective way. This method is inspired by error correction techniques in automatic speech recognition. Our model consists of two parallel convolutional encoders and a transform-based decoder. By exploiting the interactions between the input recording and the initial system's outputs, DiaCorrect can automatically correct the initial speaker activities to minimize the diarization errors. Experiments on 2-speaker telephony data show that the proposed DiaCorrect can effectively improve the initial model's results. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/BUTSpeechFIT/diacorrect.

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arXiv2022

Few-Shot Object Detection via Association and DIscrimination

Object detection has achieved substantial progress in the last decade. However, detecting novel classes with only few samples remains challenging, since deep learning under low data regime usually leads to a degraded feature space. Existing works employ a holistic fine-tuning paradigm to tackle this problem, where the model is first pre-trained on all base classes with abundant samples, and then it is used to carve the novel class feature space. Nonetheless, this paradigm is still imperfect. Durning fine-tuning, a novel class may implicitly leverage the knowledge of multiple base classes to construct its feature space, which induces a scattered feature space, hence violating the inter-class separability. To overcome these obstacles, we propose a two-step fine-tuning framework, Few-shot object detection via Association and DIscrimination (FADI), which builds up a discriminative feature space for each novel class with two integral steps. 1) In the association step, in contrast to implicitly leveraging multiple base classes, we construct a compact novel class feature space via explicitly imitating a specific base class feature space. Specifically, we associate each novel class with a base class according to their semantic similarity. After that, the feature space of a novel class can readily imitate the well-trained feature space of the associated base class. 2) In the discrimination step, to ensure the separability between the novel classes and associated base classes, we disentangle the classification branches for base and novel classes. To further enlarge the inter-class separability between all classes, a set-specialized margin loss is imposed. Extensive experiments on Pascal VOC and MS-COCO datasets demonstrate FADI achieves new SOTA performance, significantly improving the baseline in any shot/split by +18.7. Notably, the advantage is most announced on extremely few-shot scenarios.

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arXiv2022

MINI: Mining Implicit Novel Instances for Few-Shot Object Detection

Learning from a few training samples is a desirable ability of an object detector, inspiring the explorations of Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD). Most existing approaches employ a pretrain-transfer paradigm. The model is first pre-trained on base classes with abundant data and then transferred to novel classes with a few annotated samples. Despite the substantial progress, the FSOD performance is still far behind satisfactory. During pre-training, due to the co-occurrence between base and novel classes, the model is learned to treat the co-occurred novel classes as backgrounds. During transferring, given scarce samples of novel classes, the model suffers from learning discriminative features to distinguish novel instances from backgrounds and base classes. To overcome the obstacles, we propose a novel framework, Mining Implicit Novel Instances (MINI), to mine the implicit novel instances as auxiliary training samples, which widely exist in abundant base data but are not annotated. MINI comprises an offline mining mechanism and an online mining mechanism. The offline mining mechanism leverages a self-supervised discriminative model to collaboratively mine implicit novel instances with a trained FSOD network. Taking the mined novel instances as auxiliary training samples, the online mining mechanism takes a teacher-student framework to simultaneously update the FSOD network and the mined implicit novel instances on the fly. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO datasets show MINI achieves new state-of-the-art performance on any shot and split. The significant performance improvements demonstrate the superiority of our method.

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arXiv2022

The USTC-Ximalaya system for the ICASSP 2022 multi-channel multi-party meeting transcription (M2MeT) challenge

We propose two improvements to target-speaker voice activity detection (TS-VAD), the core component in our proposed speaker diarization system that was submitted to the 2022 Multi-Channel Multi-Party Meeting Transcription (M2MeT) challenge. These techniques are designed to handle multi-speaker conversations in real-world meeting scenarios with high speaker-overlap ratios and under heavy reverberant and noisy condition. First, for data preparation and augmentation in training TS-VAD models, speech data containing both real meetings and simulated indoor conversations are used. Second, in refining results obtained after TS-VAD based decoding, we perform a series of post-processing steps to improve the VAD results needed to reduce diarization error rates (DERs). Tested on the ALIMEETING corpus, the newly released Mandarin meeting dataset used in M2MeT, we demonstrate that our proposed system can decrease the DER by up to 66.55/60.59% relatively when compared with classical clustering based diarization on the Eval/Test set.

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arXiv2021

Seesaw Loss for Long-Tailed Instance Segmentation

Instance segmentation has witnessed a remarkable progress on class-balanced benchmarks. However, they fail to perform as accurately in real-world scenarios, where the category distribution of objects naturally comes with a long tail. Instances of head classes dominate a long-tailed dataset and they serve as negative samples of tail categories. The overwhelming gradients of negative samples on tail classes lead to a biased learning process for classifiers. Consequently, objects of tail categories are more likely to be misclassified as backgrounds or head categories. To tackle this problem, we propose Seesaw Loss to dynamically re-balance gradients of positive and negative samples for each category, with two complementary factors, i.e., mitigation factor and compensation factor. The mitigation factor reduces punishments to tail categories w.r.t. the ratio of cumulative training instances between different categories. Meanwhile, the compensation factor increases the penalty of misclassified instances to avoid false positives of tail categories. We conduct extensive experiments on Seesaw Loss with mainstream frameworks and different data sampling strategies. With a simple end-to-end training pipeline, Seesaw Loss obtains significant gains over Cross-Entropy Loss, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on LVIS dataset without bells and whistles. Code is available at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection.

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arXiv2021

WSSOD: A New Pipeline for Weakly- and Semi-Supervised Object Detection

The performance of object detection, to a great extent, depends on the availability of large annotated datasets. To alleviate the annotation cost, the research community has explored a number of ways to exploit unlabeled or weakly labeled data. However, such efforts have met with limited success so far. In this work, we revisit the problem with a pragmatic standpoint, trying to explore a new balance between detection performance and annotation cost by jointly exploiting fully and weakly annotated data. Specifically, we propose a weakly- and semi-supervised object detection framework (WSSOD), which involves a two-stage learning procedure. An agent detector is first trained on a joint dataset and then used to predict pseudo bounding boxes on weakly-annotated images. The underlying assumptions in the current as well as common semi-supervised pipelines are also carefully examined under a unified EM formulation. On top of this framework, weakly-supervised loss (WSL), label attention and random pseudo-label sampling (RPS) strategies are introduced to relax these assumptions, bringing additional improvement on the efficacy of the detection pipeline. The proposed framework demonstrates remarkable performance on PASCAL-VOC and MSCOCO benchmark, achieving a high performance comparable to those obtained in fully-supervised settings, with only one third of the annotations.

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arXiv2020

Side-Aware Boundary Localization for More Precise Object Detection

Current object detection frameworks mainly rely on bounding box regression to localize objects. Despite the remarkable progress in recent years, the precision of bounding box regression remains unsatisfactory, hence limiting performance in object detection. We observe that precise localization requires careful placement of each side of the bounding box. However, the mainstream approach, which focuses on predicting centers and sizes, is not the most effective way to accomplish this task, especially when there exists displacements with large variance between the anchors and the targets. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach, named as Side-Aware Boundary Localization (SABL), where each side of the bounding box is respectively localized with a dedicated network branch. To tackle the difficulty of precise localization in the presence of displacements with large variance, we further propose a two-step localization scheme, which first predicts a range of movement through bucket prediction and then pinpoints the precise position within the predicted bucket. We test the proposed method on both two-stage and single-stage detection frameworks. Replacing the standard bounding box regression branch with the proposed design leads to significant improvements on Faster R-CNN, RetinaNet, and Cascade R-CNN, by 3.0%, 1.7%, and 0.9%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection.

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arXiv2020

Feature Pyramid Grids

Feature pyramid networks have been widely adopted in the object detection literature to improve feature representations for better handling of variations in scale. In this paper, we present Feature Pyramid Grids (FPG), a deep multi-pathway feature pyramid, that represents the feature scale-space as a regular grid of parallel bottom-up pathways which are fused by multi-directional lateral connections. FPG can improve single-pathway feature pyramid networks by significantly increasing its performance at similar computation cost, highlighting importance of deep pyramid representations. In addition to its general and uniform structure, over complicated structures that have been found with neural architecture search, it also compares favorably against such approaches without relying on search. We hope that FPG with its uniform and effective nature can serve as a strong component for future work in object recognition.

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arXiv2019

Prime Sample Attention in Object Detection

It is a common paradigm in object detection frameworks to treat all samples equally and target at maximizing the performance on average. In this work, we revisit this paradigm through a careful study on how different samples contribute to the overall performance measured in terms of mAP. Our study suggests that the samples in each mini-batch are neither independent nor equally important, and therefore a better classifier on average does not necessarily mean higher mAP. Motivated by this study, we propose the notion of Prime Samples, those that play a key role in driving the detection performance. We further develop a simple yet effective sampling and learning strategy called PrIme Sample Attention (PISA) that directs the focus of the training process towards such samples. Our experiments demonstrate that it is often more effective to focus on prime samples than hard samples when training a detector. Particularly, On the MSCOCO dataset, PISA outperforms the random sampling baseline and hard mining schemes, e.g., OHEM and Focal Loss, consistently by around 2% on both single-stage and two-stage detectors, even with a strong backbone ResNeXt-101.

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arXiv2019

MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark

We present MMDetection, an object detection toolbox that contains a rich set of object detection and instance segmentation methods as well as related components and modules. The toolbox started from a codebase of MMDet team who won the detection track of COCO Challenge 2018. It gradually evolves into a unified platform that covers many popular detection methods and contemporary modules. It not only includes training and inference codes, but also provides weights for more than 200 network models. We believe this toolbox is by far the most complete detection toolbox. In this paper, we introduce the various features of this toolbox. In addition, we also conduct a benchmarking study on different methods, components, and their hyper-parameters. We wish that the toolbox and benchmark could serve the growing research community by providing a flexible toolkit to reimplement existing methods and develop their own new detectors. Code and models are available at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection. The project is under active development and we will keep this document updated.

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