Shawn Hershey
Shawn Hershey is currently a software engineer at Google Research, working in the Machine Hearing Group on machine learning for speech and audio processing.
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Into the Wild with AudioScope: Unsupervised Audio-Visual Separation of On-Screen Sounds
Tal Remez
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2021
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Recent progress in deep learning has enabled many advances in sound separation and visual scene understanding. However, extracting sound sources which are apparent in natural videos remains an open problem. In this work, we present AudioScope, a novel audio-visual sound separation framework that can be trained without supervision to isolate on-screen sound sources from real in-the-wild videos. Prior audio-visual separation work assumed artificial limitations on the domain of sound classes (e.g., to speech or music), constrained the number of sources, and required strong sound separation or visual segmentation labels. AudioScope overcomes these limitations, operating on an open domain of sounds, with variable numbers of sources, and without labels or prior visual segmentation. The training procedure for AudioScope uses mixture invariant training (MixIT) to separate synthetic mixtures of mixtures (MoMs) into individual sources, where noisy labels for mixtures are provided by an unsupervised audio-visual coincidence model. Using the noisy labels, along with attention between video and audio features, AudioScope learns to identify audio-visual similarity and to suppress off-screen sounds. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using a dataset of video clips extracted from open-domain YFCC100m video data. This dataset contains a wide diversity of sound classes recorded in unconstrained conditions, making the application of previous methods unsuitable. For evaluation and semi-supervised experiments, we collected human labels for presence of on-screen and off-screen sounds on a small subset of clips.
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The Benefit of Temporally-Strong Labels in Audio Event Classification
Caroline Liu
Proceedings of ICASSP 2021 (2021)
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To reveal the importance of temporal precision in ground truth audio event labels, we collected precise (∼0.1 sec resolution) “strong” labels for a portion of the AudioSet dataset. We devised a temporally strong evaluation set (including explicit negatives of varying difficulty) and a small strong-labeled training subset of 67k clips (compared to the original dataset’s 1.8M clips labeled at 10 sec resolution). We show that fine-tuning with a mix of weak- and strongly-labeled data can substantially improve classifier performance, even when evaluated using only the original weak labels. For a ResNet50 architecture, d' on the strong evaluation data including explicit negatives improves from 1.13 to 1.41. The new labels are available as an update to AudioSet.
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Self-Supervised Learning from Automatically Separated Sound Scenes
Xavier Serra
WASPAA 2021 (2021)
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Real-world sound scenes consist of time-varying collections of sound sources, each generating characteristic sound events that are mixed together in audio recordings. The association of these constituent sound events with their mixture and each other is semantically-constrained: the sound scene contains the union of source classes and not all classes naturally co-occur. With this motivation, this paper explores the use of unsupervised automatic sound separation to decompose unlabeled sound scenes into multiple semantically-linked views for use in self-supervised contrastive learning. We find that learning to associate input mixtures with their automatically separated outputs yields stronger representations than past approaches that use the mixtures alone. Further, we discover that optimal source separation is not required for successful contrastive learning by demonstrating that a range of separation system convergence states all lead to useful and often complementary example transformations. Our best system incorporates these unsupervised separation models into a single augmentation front-end and jointly optimizes similarity maximization and coincidence prediction objectives across the views. The result is an unsupervised audio representation that rivals state-of-the-art alternatives on the established shallow AudioSet classification benchmark.
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Coincidence, Categorization, and Consolidation: Learning to Recognize Sounds with Minimal Supervision
Proceedings of ICASSP 2020 (2020) (to appear)
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Humans do not acquire perceptual abilities like we train machines. While machine learning algorithms typically operate on large collections of randomly-chosen, explicitly-labeled examples, human acquisition relies far greater on multimodal unsupervised learning (as infants) and active learning (as children). With this motivation, we present a learning framework for sound representation and recognition that combines (i) a self-supervised objective based on a general notion of unimodal and cross-modal coincidence, (ii) a novel clustering objective that reflects our need to impose categorical structure on our experiences, and (iii) a cluster-based active learning procedure that solicits targeted weak supervision to consolidate hypothesized categories into relevant semantic classes. By jointly training a single sound embedding/clustering/classification network according to these criteria, we achieve a new state-of-the-art unsupervised audio representation and demonstrate
up to 20-fold reduction in labels required to reach a desired classification performance.
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Self-Supervised Audio-Visual Separation of On-Screen Sounds from Unlabeled Videos
Tal Remez
NeurIPS 2020 Workshop on Self-Supervised Learning for Speech and Audio Processing
Preview abstract
Recent progress in deep learning has enabled many advances in sound separation and visual scene understanding. However, extracting sound sources which are apparent in natural videos remains an open problem. In this work, we present AudioScope, a novel audio-visual sound separation framework that can be trained without supervision to isolate on-screen sound sources from real in-the-wild videos. Prior audio-visual separation work assumed artificial limitations on the domain of sound classes (e.g., to speech or music), constrained the number of sources, and required strong sound separation or visual segmentation labels. AudioScope overcomes these limitations, operating on an open domain of sounds, with variable numbers of sources, and without labels or prior visual segmentation. The training procedure for AudioScope uses mixture invariant training (MixIT) to separate synthetic mixtures of mixtures (MoMs) into individual sources, where noisy labels for mixtures are provided by an unsupervised audio-visual coincidence model. Using the noisy labels, along with attention between video and audio features, AudioScope learns to identify audio-visual similarity and to suppress off-screen sounds. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using a dataset of video clips extracted from open-domain YFCC100m video data. This dataset contains a wide diversity of sound classes recorded in unconstrained conditions, making the application of previous methods unsuitable. For evaluation and semi-supervised experiments, we collected human labels for presence of on-screen and off-screen sounds on a small subset of clips.
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Unsupervised Learning of Semantic Audio Representations
Ratheet Pandya
Jiayang Liu
Proceedings of ICASSP 2018 (to appear)
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Even in the absence of any explicit semantic annotation, vast collections of audio recordings provide valuable information for learning the categorical structure of sounds. We consider several class-agnostic semantic constraints that apply to unlabeled nonspeech audio: (i) noise and translations in time do not change the underlying sound category, (ii) a mixture of two sound events inherits the categories of the constituents, and (iii) the categories of events in close temporal proximity are likely to be the same or related. Without labels to ground them, these constraints are incompatible with classification loss functions. However, they may still be leveraged to identify geometric inequalities needed for triplet loss-based training of convolutional neural networks. The result is low-dimensional embeddings of the input spectrograms that recover 41% and 84% of the performance of their fully-supervised counterparts when applied to downstream query-by-example sound retrieval and sound event classification tasks, respectively. Moreover, in limited-supervision settings, our unsupervised embeddings double the state-of-the-art classification performance.
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Towards Learning Semantic Audio Representations from Unlabeled Data
Ratheet Pandya
Jiayang Liu
NIPS Workshop on Machine Learning for Audio Signal Processing (ML4Audio) (2017) (to appear)
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Our goal is to learn semantically structured audio representations without relying on categorically labeled data. We consider several class-agnostic semantic constraints that are inherent to non-speech audio: (i) sound categories are invariant to additive noise and translations in time, (ii) mixtures of two sound events inherit the categories of the constituents, and (iii) the categories of events in close temporal proximity in a single recording are likely to be the same or related. We apply these invariants in the service of sampling training data for triplet-loss embedding models using a large unlabeled dataset of YouTube soundtracks. The resulting low-dimensional representations provide both greatly improved query-by-example retrieval performance and reduced labeled data and model complexity requirements for supervised sound classification.
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CNN Architectures for Large-Scale Audio Classification
Jort F. Gemmeke
Devin Platt
Malcolm Slaney
International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), IEEE (2017)
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Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have proven very effective
in image classification and have shown promise for audio classification.
We apply various CNN architectures to audio and investigate
their ability to classify videos with a very large scale data set of 70M
training videos (5.24 million hours) with 30,871 labels. We examine
fully connected Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), AlexNet [1],
VGG [2], Inception [3], and ResNet [4]. We explore the effects of
training with different sized subsets of the 70M training videos. Additionally
we report the effect of training over different subsets of
the 30,871 labels. While our dataset contains video-level labels, we
are also interested in Acoustic Event Detection (AED) and train a
classifier on embeddings learned from the video-level task on AudioSet
[5]. We find that derivatives of image classification networks
do well on our audio classification task, that increasing the number
of labels we train on provides some improved performance over subsets
of labels, that performance of models improves as we increase
training set size, and that a model using embeddings learned from
the video-level task do much better than a baseline on the AudioSet
classification task.
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