Benefiting from the development of deep learning, text-to-speech (TTS) techniques using clean speech have achieved significant performance improvements. The data collected from real scenes often contains noise and generally needs to be denoised by speech enhancement models. Noise-robust TTS models are often trained using the enhanced speech, which thus suffer from speech distortion and background noise that affect the quality of the synthesized speech. Meanwhile, it was shown that self-supervised pre-trained models exhibit excellent noise robustness on many speech tasks, implying that the learned representation has a better tolerance for noise perturbations. In this work, we therefore explore pre-trained models to improve the noise robustness of TTS models. Based on HiFi-GAN, we first propose a representation-to-waveform vocoder, which aims to learn to map the representation of pre-trained models to the waveform. We then propose a text-to-representation FastSpeech2 model, which aims to learn to map text to pre-trained model representations. Experimental results on the LJSpeech and LibriTTS datasets show that our method outperforms those using speech enhancement methods in both subjective and objective metrics. Audio samples are available at: //zqs01.github.io/rep2wav.
Despite their better convergence properties compared to first-order optimizers, second-order optimizers for deep learning have been less popular due to their significant computational costs. The primary efficiency bottleneck in such optimizers is matrix inverse calculations in the preconditioning step, which are expensive to compute on GPUs. In this paper, we introduce Jorge, a second-order optimizer that promises the best of both worlds -- rapid convergence benefits of second-order methods, and high computational efficiency typical of first-order methods. We address the primary computational bottleneck of computing matrix inverses by completely eliminating them using an approximation of the preconditioner computation. This makes Jorge extremely efficient on GPUs in terms of wall-clock time. Further, we describe an approach to determine Jorge's hyperparameters directly from a well-tuned SGD baseline, thereby significantly minimizing tuning efforts. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate the distinct advantages of using Jorge, outperforming state-of-the-art optimizers such as SGD, AdamW, and Shampoo across multiple deep learning models, both in terms of sample efficiency and wall-clock time.
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to classify objects that are not observed or seen during training. It relies on class semantic description to transfer knowledge from the seen classes to the unseen classes. Existing methods of obtaining class semantics include manual attributes or automatic word vectors from language models (like word2vec). We know attribute annotation is costly, whereas automatic word-vectors are relatively noisy. To address this problem, we explore how ChatGPT, a large language model, can enhance class semantics for ZSL tasks. ChatGPT can be a helpful source to obtain text descriptions for each class containing related attributes and semantics. We use the word2vec model to get a word vector using the texts from ChatGPT. Then, we enrich word vectors by combining the word embeddings from class names and descriptions generated by ChatGPT. More specifically, we leverage ChatGPT to provide extra supervision for the class description, eventually benefiting ZSL models. We evaluate our approach on various 2D image (CUB and AwA) and 3D point cloud (ModelNet10, ModelNet40, and ScanObjectNN) datasets and show that it improves ZSL performance. Our work contributes to the ZSL literature by applying ChatGPT for class semantics enhancement and proposing a novel word vector fusion method.
The Conformer has become the most popular encoder model for automatic speech recognition (ASR). It adds convolution modules to a transformer to learn both local and global dependencies. In this work we describe a faster, more memory-efficient, and better-performing transformer, called Zipformer. Modeling changes include: 1) a U-Net-like encoder structure where middle stacks operate at lower frame rates; 2) reorganized block structure with more modules, within which we re-use attention weights for efficiency; 3) a modified form of LayerNorm called BiasNorm allows us to retain some length information; 4) new activation functions SwooshR and SwooshL work better than Swish. We also propose a new optimizer, called ScaledAdam, which scales the update by each tensor's current scale to keep the relative change about the same, and also explictly learns the parameter scale. It achieves faster convergence and better performance than Adam. Extensive experiments on LibriSpeech, Aishell-1, and WenetSpeech datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed Zipformer over other state-of-the-art ASR models. Our code is publicly available at //github.com/k2-fsa/icefall.
Despite deep learning (DL) has achieved remarkable progress in various domains, the DL models are still prone to making mistakes. This issue necessitates effective debugging tools for DL practitioners to interpret the decision-making process within the networks. However, existing debugging methods often demand extra data or adjustments to the decision process, limiting their applicability. To tackle this problem, we present NeuroInspect, an interpretable neuron-based debugging framework with three key stages: counterfactual explanations, feature visualizations, and false correlation mitigation. Our debugging framework first pinpoints neurons responsible for mistakes in the network and then visualizes features embedded in the neurons to be human-interpretable. To provide these explanations, we introduce CLIP-Illusion, a novel feature visualization method that generates images representing features conditioned on classes to examine the connection between neurons and the decision layer. We alleviate convoluted explanations of the conventional visualization approach by employing class information, thereby isolating mixed properties. This process offers more human-interpretable explanations for model errors without altering the trained network or requiring additional data. Furthermore, our framework mitigates false correlations learned from a dataset under a stochastic perspective, modifying decisions for the neurons considered as the main causes. We validate the effectiveness of our framework by addressing false correlations and improving inferences for classes with the worst performance in real-world settings. Moreover, we demonstrate that NeuroInspect helps debug the mistakes of DL models through evaluation for human understanding. The code is openly available at //github.com/yeongjoonJu/NeuroInspect.
Following unprecedented success on the natural language tasks, Transformers have been successfully applied to several computer vision problems, achieving state-of-the-art results and prompting researchers to reconsider the supremacy of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as {de facto} operators. Capitalizing on these advances in computer vision, the medical imaging field has also witnessed growing interest for Transformers that can capture global context compared to CNNs with local receptive fields. Inspired from this transition, in this survey, we attempt to provide a comprehensive review of the applications of Transformers in medical imaging covering various aspects, ranging from recently proposed architectural designs to unsolved issues. Specifically, we survey the use of Transformers in medical image segmentation, detection, classification, reconstruction, synthesis, registration, clinical report generation, and other tasks. In particular, for each of these applications, we develop taxonomy, identify application-specific challenges as well as provide insights to solve them, and highlight recent trends. Further, we provide a critical discussion of the field's current state as a whole, including the identification of key challenges, open problems, and outlining promising future directions. We hope this survey will ignite further interest in the community and provide researchers with an up-to-date reference regarding applications of Transformer models in medical imaging. Finally, to cope with the rapid development in this field, we intend to regularly update the relevant latest papers and their open-source implementations at \url{//github.com/fahadshamshad/awesome-transformers-in-medical-imaging}.
Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) as an emerging technique have shown superior capacity of dealing with heterogeneous information network (HIN). However, most HGNNs follow a semi-supervised learning manner, which notably limits their wide use in reality since labels are usually scarce in real applications. Recently, contrastive learning, a self-supervised method, becomes one of the most exciting learning paradigms and shows great potential when there are no labels. In this paper, we study the problem of self-supervised HGNNs and propose a novel co-contrastive learning mechanism for HGNNs, named HeCo. Different from traditional contrastive learning which only focuses on contrasting positive and negative samples, HeCo employs cross-viewcontrastive mechanism. Specifically, two views of a HIN (network schema and meta-path views) are proposed to learn node embeddings, so as to capture both of local and high-order structures simultaneously. Then the cross-view contrastive learning, as well as a view mask mechanism, is proposed, which is able to extract the positive and negative embeddings from two views. This enables the two views to collaboratively supervise each other and finally learn high-level node embeddings. Moreover, two extensions of HeCo are designed to generate harder negative samples with high quality, which further boosts the performance of HeCo. Extensive experiments conducted on a variety of real-world networks show the superior performance of the proposed methods over the state-of-the-arts.
Self-supervised learning methods are gaining increasing traction in computer vision due to their recent success in reducing the gap with supervised learning. In natural language processing (NLP) self-supervised learning and transformers are already the methods of choice. The recent literature suggests that the transformers are becoming increasingly popular also in computer vision. So far, the vision transformers have been shown to work well when pretrained either using a large scale supervised data or with some kind of co-supervision, e.g. in terms of teacher network. These supervised pretrained vision transformers achieve very good results in downstream tasks with minimal changes. In this work we investigate the merits of self-supervised learning for pretraining image/vision transformers and then using them for downstream classification tasks. We propose Self-supervised vIsion Transformers (SiT) and discuss several self-supervised training mechanisms to obtain a pretext model. The architectural flexibility of SiT allows us to use it as an autoencoder and work with multiple self-supervised tasks seamlessly. We show that a pretrained SiT can be finetuned for a downstream classification task on small scale datasets, consisting of a few thousand images rather than several millions. The proposed approach is evaluated on standard datasets using common protocols. The results demonstrate the strength of the transformers and their suitability for self-supervised learning. We outperformed existing self-supervised learning methods by large margin. We also observed that SiT is good for few shot learning and also showed that it is learning useful representation by simply training a linear classifier on top of the learned features from SiT. Pretraining, finetuning, and evaluation codes will be available under: //github.com/Sara-Ahmed/SiT.
Most object recognition approaches predominantly focus on learning discriminative visual patterns while overlooking the holistic object structure. Though important, structure modeling usually requires significant manual annotations and therefore is labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose to "look into object" (explicitly yet intrinsically model the object structure) through incorporating self-supervisions into the traditional framework. We show the recognition backbone can be substantially enhanced for more robust representation learning, without any cost of extra annotation and inference speed. Specifically, we first propose an object-extent learning module for localizing the object according to the visual patterns shared among the instances in the same category. We then design a spatial context learning module for modeling the internal structures of the object, through predicting the relative positions within the extent. These two modules can be easily plugged into any backbone networks during training and detached at inference time. Extensive experiments show that our look-into-object approach (LIO) achieves large performance gain on a number of benchmarks, including generic object recognition (ImageNet) and fine-grained object recognition tasks (CUB, Cars, Aircraft). We also show that this learning paradigm is highly generalizable to other tasks such as object detection and segmentation (MS COCO). Project page: //github.com/JDAI-CV/LIO.
Most existing knowledge graphs suffer from incompleteness, which can be alleviated by inferring missing links based on known facts. One popular way to accomplish this is to generate low-dimensional embeddings of entities and relations, and use these to make inferences. ConvE, a recently proposed approach, applies convolutional filters on 2D reshapings of entity and relation embeddings in order to capture rich interactions between their components. However, the number of interactions that ConvE can capture is limited. In this paper, we analyze how increasing the number of these interactions affects link prediction performance, and utilize our observations to propose InteractE. InteractE is based on three key ideas -- feature permutation, a novel feature reshaping, and circular convolution. Through extensive experiments, we find that InteractE outperforms state-of-the-art convolutional link prediction baselines on FB15k-237. Further, InteractE achieves an MRR score that is 9%, 7.5%, and 23% better than ConvE on the FB15k-237, WN18RR and YAGO3-10 datasets respectively. The results validate our central hypothesis -- that increasing feature interaction is beneficial to link prediction performance. We make the source code of InteractE available to encourage reproducible research.
Recently, ensemble has been applied to deep metric learning to yield state-of-the-art results. Deep metric learning aims to learn deep neural networks for feature embeddings, distances of which satisfy given constraint. In deep metric learning, ensemble takes average of distances learned by multiple learners. As one important aspect of ensemble, the learners should be diverse in their feature embeddings. To this end, we propose an attention-based ensemble, which uses multiple attention masks, so that each learner can attend to different parts of the object. We also propose a divergence loss, which encourages diversity among the learners. The proposed method is applied to the standard benchmarks of deep metric learning and experimental results show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on image retrieval tasks.