Traditionally, research in automated speech recognition has focused on local-first encoding of audio representations to predict the spoken phonemes in an utterance. Unfortunately, approaches relying on such hyper-local information tend to be vulnerable to both local-level corruption (such as audio-frame drops, or loud noises) and global-level noise (such as environmental noise, or background noise) that has not been seen during training. In this work, we introduce a novel approach which leverages a self-supervised learning technique based on masked language modeling to compute a global, multi-modal encoding of the environment in which the utterance occurs. We then use a new deep-fusion framework to integrate this global context into a traditional ASR method, and demonstrate that the resulting method can outperform baseline methods by up to 7% on Librispeech; gains on internal datasets range from 6% (on larger models) to 45% (on smaller models).
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It has been shown that the intelligibility of noisy speech can be improved by speech enhancement algorithms. However, speech enhancement has not been established as an effective front-end for robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) in comparison with an ASR model trained on noisy speech directly. The divide between speech enhancement and ASR impedes the progress of robust ASR systems especially as speech enhancement has made big strides in recent years. In this work, we focus on eliminating such divide with an ARN (attentive recurrent network) based time-domain enhancement model. The proposed system fully decouples speech enhancement and an acoustic model trained only on clean speech. Results on the CHiME-2 corpus show that ARN enhanced speech translates to improved ASR results. The proposed system achieves $6.28\%$ average word error rate, outperforming the previous best by $19.3\%$.
In this paper, we propose a Unified pre-training Framework for Online and Offline (UFO2) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), which 1) simplifies the two separate training workflows for online and offline modes into one process, and 2) improves the Word Error Rate (WER) performance with limited utterance annotating. Specifically, we extend the conventional offline-mode Self-Supervised Learning (SSL)-based ASR approach to a unified manner, where the model training is conditioned on both the full-context and dynamic-chunked inputs. To enhance the pre-trained representation model, stop-gradient operation is applied to decouple the online-mode objectives to the quantizer. Moreover, in both the pre-training and the downstream fine-tuning stages, joint losses are proposed to train the unified model with full-weight sharing for the two modes. Experimental results on the LibriSpeech dataset show that UFO2 outperforms the SSL-based baseline method by 29.7% and 18.2% relative WER reduction in offline and online modes, respectively.
Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC) is a representation learning method that maximizes the mutual information between intermediate latent representations and the output of a given model. It can be used to effectively initialize the encoder of an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model. We present a novel modification of CPC called Guided Contrastive Predictive Coding (GCPC). Our proposed method maximizes the mutual information between representations from a prior-knowledge model and the output of the model being pre-trained, allowing prior knowledge injection during pre-training. We validate our method on 3 ASR tasks: German, French and English. Our method outperforms CPC pre-training on all three datasets, reducing the Word Error Rate (WER) by 4.44%, 6.55% and 15.43% relative on the German, French and English (Librispeech) tasks respectively, compared to training from scratch, while CPC pre-training only brings 2.96%, 1.01% and 14.39% relative WER reduction respectively.
Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to segment unseen classes using a few annotated samples. Typically, a prototype representing the foreground class is extracted from annotated support image(s) and is matched to features representing each pixel in the query image. However, models learnt in this way are insufficiently discriminatory, and often produce false positives: misclassifying background pixels as foreground. Some FSS methods try to address this issue by using the background in the support image(s) to help identify the background in the query image. However, the backgrounds of theses images is often quite distinct, and hence, the support image background information is uninformative. This article proposes a method, QSR, that extracts the background from the query image itself, and as a result is better able to discriminate between foreground and background features in the query image. This is achieved by modifying the training process to associate prototypes with class labels including known classes from the training data and latent classes representing unknown background objects. This class information is then used to extract a background prototype from the query image. To successfully associate prototypes with class labels and extract a background prototype that is capable of predicting a mask for the background regions of the image, the machinery for extracting and using foreground prototypes is induced to become more discriminative between different classes. Experiments for both 1-shot and 5-shot FSS on both the PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i datasets demonstrate that the proposed method results in a significant improvement in performance for the baseline methods it is applied to. As QSR operates only during training, these improved results are produced with no extra computational complexity during testing.
In a sentence, certain words are critical for its semantic. Among them, named entities (NEs) are notoriously challenging for neural models. Despite their importance, their accurate handling has been neglected in speech-to-text (S2T) translation research, and recent work has shown that S2T models perform poorly for locations and notably person names, whose spelling is challenging unless known in advance. In this work, we explore how to leverage dictionaries of NEs known to likely appear in a given context to improve S2T model outputs. Our experiments show that we can reliably detect NEs likely present in an utterance starting from S2T encoder outputs. Indeed, we demonstrate that the current detection quality is sufficient to improve NE accuracy in the translation with a 31% reduction in person name errors.
Human-centric perception plays a vital role in vision and graphics. But their data annotations are prohibitively expensive. Therefore, it is desirable to have a versatile pre-train model that serves as a foundation for data-efficient downstream tasks transfer. To this end, we propose the Human-Centric Multi-Modal Contrastive Learning framework HCMoCo that leverages the multi-modal nature of human data (e.g. RGB, depth, 2D keypoints) for effective representation learning. The objective comes with two main challenges: dense pre-train for multi-modality data, efficient usage of sparse human priors. To tackle the challenges, we design the novel Dense Intra-sample Contrastive Learning and Sparse Structure-aware Contrastive Learning targets by hierarchically learning a modal-invariant latent space featured with continuous and ordinal feature distribution and structure-aware semantic consistency. HCMoCo provides pre-train for different modalities by combining heterogeneous datasets, which allows efficient usage of existing task-specific human data. Extensive experiments on four downstream tasks of different modalities demonstrate the effectiveness of HCMoCo, especially under data-efficient settings (7.16% and 12% improvement on DensePose Estimation and Human Parsing). Moreover, we demonstrate the versatility of HCMoCo by exploring cross-modality supervision and missing-modality inference, validating its strong ability in cross-modal association and reasoning.
Object detectors usually achieve promising results with the supervision of complete instance annotations. However, their performance is far from satisfactory with sparse instance annotations. Most existing methods for sparsely annotated object detection either re-weight the loss of hard negative samples or convert the unlabeled instances into ignored regions to reduce the interference of false negatives. We argue that these strategies are insufficient since they can at most alleviate the negative effect caused by missing annotations. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective mechanism, called Co-mining, for sparsely annotated object detection. In our Co-mining, two branches of a Siamese network predict the pseudo-label sets for each other. To enhance multi-view learning and better mine unlabeled instances, the original image and corresponding augmented image are used as the inputs of two branches of the Siamese network, respectively. Co-mining can serve as a general training mechanism applied to most of modern object detectors. Experiments are performed on MS COCO dataset with three different sparsely annotated settings using two typical frameworks: anchor-based detector RetinaNet and anchor-free detector FCOS. Experimental results show that our Co-mining with RetinaNet achieves 1.4%~2.1% improvements compared with different baselines and surpasses existing methods under the same sparsely annotated setting.
Named entity recognition (NER) is the task to identify text spans that mention named entities, and to classify them into predefined categories such as person, location, organization etc. NER serves as the basis for a variety of natural language applications such as question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Although early NER systems are successful in producing decent recognition accuracy, they often require much human effort in carefully designing rules or features. In recent years, deep learning, empowered by continuous real-valued vector representations and semantic composition through nonlinear processing, has been employed in NER systems, yielding stat-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review on existing deep learning techniques for NER. We first introduce NER resources, including tagged NER corpora and off-the-shelf NER tools. Then, we systematically categorize existing works based on a taxonomy along three axes: distributed representations for input, context encoder, and tag decoder. Next, we survey the most representative methods for recent applied techniques of deep learning in new NER problem settings and applications. Finally, we present readers with the challenges faced by NER systems and outline future directions in this area.
In this paper, we proposed to apply meta learning approach for low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR). We formulated ASR for different languages as different tasks, and meta-learned the initialization parameters from many pretraining languages to achieve fast adaptation on unseen target language, via recently proposed model-agnostic meta learning algorithm (MAML). We evaluated the proposed approach using six languages as pretraining tasks and four languages as target tasks. Preliminary results showed that the proposed method, MetaASR, significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art multitask pretraining approach on all target languages with different combinations of pretraining languages. In addition, since MAML's model-agnostic property, this paper also opens new research direction of applying meta learning to more speech-related applications.
In this paper we investigate the role of the dependency tree in a named entity recognizer upon using a set of GCN. We perform a comparison among different NER architectures and show that the grammar of a sentence positively influences the results. Experiments on the ontonotes dataset demonstrate consistent performance improvements, without requiring heavy feature engineering nor additional language-specific knowledge.
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