Beyond Speech and More: Investigating the Emergent Ability of Speech Foundation Models for Classifying Physiological Time-Series Signals

Despite being trained exclusively on speech data, speech foundation models (SFMs) like Whisper have shown impressive performance in non-speech tasks such as audio classification. This is partly because speech shares some common traits with audio, enabling SFMs to transfer effectively. In this study, we push the boundaries by evaluating SFMs on a more challenging out-of-domain (OOD) task: classifying physiological time-series signals. We test two key hypotheses: first, that SFMs can generalize to physiological signals by capturing shared temporal patterns; second, that multilingual SFMs will outperform others due to their exposure to greater variability during pre-training, leading to more robust, generalized representations. Our experiments, conducted for stress recognition using ECG (Electrocardiogram), EMG (Electromyography), and EDA (Electrodermal Activity) signals, reveal that models trained on SFM-derived representations outperform those trained on raw physiological signals. Among all models, multilingual SFMs achieve the highest accuracy, supporting our hypothesis and demonstrating their OOD capabilities. This work positions SFMs as promising tools for new uncharted domains beyond speech.

Multi-View Multi-Task Modeling with Speech Foundation Models for Speech Forensic Tasks

Speech forensic tasks (SFTs), such as automatic speaker recognition (ASR), speech emotion recognition (SER), gender recognition (GR), and age estimation (AE), find use in different security and biometric applications. Previous works have applied various techniques, with recent studies focusing on applying speech foundation models (SFMs) for improved performance. However, most prior efforts have centered on building individual models for each task separately, despite the inherent similarities among these tasks. This isolated approach results in higher computational resource requirements, increased costs, time consumption, and maintenance challenges. In this study, we address these challenges by employing a multi-task learning strategy. Firstly, we explore the various state-of-the-art (SOTA) SFMs by extracting their representations for learning these SFTs and investigating their effectiveness at each task specifically. Secondly, we analyze the performance of the extracted representations on the SFTs in a multi-task learning framework. We observe a decline in performance when SFTs are modeled together compared to individual task-specific models, and as a remedy, we propose multi-view learning (MVL). Views are representations from different SFMs transformed into distinct abstract spaces by characteristics unique to each SFM. By leveraging MVL, we integrate these diverse representations to capture complementary information across tasks, enhancing the shared learning process. We introduce a new framework called TANGO (Task Alignment with iNter-view Gated Optimal transport) to implement this approach. With TANGO, we achieve the topmost performance in comparison to individual SFM representations as well as baseline fusion techniques across benchmark datasets such as CREMA-D, emo-DB, and BAVED.

SeQuiFi: Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Speech Emotion Recognition with Sequential Class-Finetuning

In this work, we introduce SeQuiFi, a novel approach for mitigating catastrophic forgetting (CF) in speech emotion recognition (SER). SeQuiFi adopts a sequential class-finetuning strategy, where the model is fine-tuned incrementally on one emotion class at a time, preserving and enhancing retention for each class. While various state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, such as regularization-based, memory-based, and weight-averaging techniques, have been proposed to address CF, it still remains a challenge, particularly with diverse and multilingual datasets. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that SeQuiFi significantly outperforms both vanilla fine-tuning and SOTA continual learning techniques in terms of accuracy and F1 scores on multiple benchmark SER datasets, including CREMA-D, RAVDESS, Emo-DB, MESD, and SHEMO, covering different languages.

Representation Loss Minimization with Randomized Selection Strategy for Efficient Environmental Fake Audio Detection

The adaptation of foundation models has significantly advanced environmental audio deepfake detection (EADD), a rapidly growing area of research. These models are typically fine-tuned or utilized in their frozen states for downstream tasks. However, the dimensionality of their representations can substantially lead to a high parameter count of downstream models, leading to higher computational demands. So, a general way is to compress these representations by leveraging state-of-the-art (SOTA) unsupervised dimensionality reduction techniques (PCA, SVD, KPCA, GRP) for efficient EADD. However, with the application of such techniques, we observe a drop in performance. So in this paper, we show that representation vectors contain redundant information, and randomly selecting 40-50% of representation values and building downstream models on it preserves or sometimes even improves performance. We show that such random selection preserves more performance than the SOTA dimensionality reduction techniques while reducing model parameters and inference time by almost over half.

Avengers Assemble: Amalgamation of Non-Semantic Features for Depression Detection

In this study, we address the challenge of depression detection from speech, focusing on the potential of non-semantic features (NSFs) to capture subtle markers of depression. While prior research has leveraged various features for this task, NSFs-extracted from pre-trained models (PTMs) designed for non-semantic tasks such as paralinguistic speech processing (TRILLsson), speaker recognition (x-vector), and emotion recognition (emoHuBERT)-have shown significant promise. However, the potential of combining these diverse features has not been fully explored. In this work, we demonstrate that the amalgamation of NSFs results in complementary behavior, leading to enhanced depression detection performance. Furthermore, to our end, we introduce a simple novel framework, FuSeR, designed to effectively combine these features. Our results show that FuSeR outperforms models utilizing individual NSFs as well as baseline fusion techniques and obtains state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in E-DAIC benchmark with RMSE of 5.51 and MAE of 4.48, establishing it as a robust approach for depression detection.

Strong Alone, Stronger Together: Synergizing Modality-Binding Foundation Models with Optimal Transport for Non-Verbal Emotion Recognition

In this study, we investigate multimodal foundation models (MFMs) for emotion recognition from non-verbal sounds. We hypothesize that MFMs, with their joint pre-training across multiple modalities, will be more effective in non-verbal sounds emotion recognition (NVER) by better interpreting and differentiating subtle emotional cues that may be ambiguous in audio-only foundation models (AFMs). To validate our hypothesis, we extract representations from state-of-the-art (SOTA) MFMs and AFMs and evaluated them on benchmark NVER datasets. We also investigate the potential of combining selected foundation model representations to enhance NVER further inspired by research in speech recognition and audio deepfake detection. To achieve this, we propose a framework called MATA (Intra-Modality Alignment through Transport Attention). Through MATA coupled with the combination of MFMs: LanguageBind and ImageBind, we report the topmost performance with accuracies of 76.47%, 77.40%, 75.12% and F1-scores of 70.35%, 76.19%, 74.63% for ASVP-ESD, JNV, and VIVAE datasets against individual FMs and baseline fusion techniques and report SOTA on the benchmark datasets.

Are Music Foundation Models Better at Singing Voice Deepfake Detection? Far-Better Fuse them with Speech Foundation Models

In this study, for the first time, we extensively investigate whether music foundation models (MFMs) or speech foundation models (SFMs) work better for singing voice deepfake detection (SVDD), which has recently attracted attention in the research community. For this, we perform a comprehensive comparative study of state-of-the-art (SOTA) MFMs (MERT variants and music2vec) and SFMs (pre-trained for general speech representation learning as well as speaker recognition). We show that speaker recognition SFM representations perform the best amongst all the foundation models (FMs), and this performance can be attributed to its higher efficacy in capturing the pitch, tone, intensity, etc, characteristics present in singing voices. To our end, we also explore the fusion of FMs for exploiting their complementary behavior for improved SVDD, and we propose a novel framework, FIONA for the same. With FIONA, through the synchronization of x-vector (speaker recognition SFM) and MERT-v1-330M (MFM), we report the best performance with the lowest Equal Error Rate (EER) of 13.74 %, beating all the individual FMs as well as baseline FM fusions and achieving SOTA results.

Towards identifying Source credibility on Information Leakage in Digital Gadget Market

The use of Social media to share content is on a constant rise. One of the capsize effect of information sharing on Social media includes the spread of sensitive information on the public domain. With the digital gadget market becoming highly competitive and ever-evolving, the trend of an increasing number of sensitive posts leaking information on devices in social media is observed. Many web-blogs on digital gadget market have mushroomed recently, making the problem of information leak all pervasive. Credible leaks on specifics of an upcoming device can cause a lot of financial damage to the respective organization. Hence, it is crucial to assess the credibility of the platforms that continuously post about a smartphone or digital gadget leaks. In this work, we analyze the headlines of leak web-blog posts and their corresponding official press-release. We first collect 54, 495 leak and press-release headlines for different smartphones. We train our custom NER model to capture the evolving smartphone names with an accuracy of 82.14% on manually annotated results. We further propose a credibility score metric for the web-blog, based on the number of falsified and authentic smartphone leak posts.

FGA: Fourier-Guided Attention Network for Crowd Count Estimation

Crowd counting is gaining societal relevance, particularly in domains of Urban Planning, Crowd Management, and Public Safety. This paper introduces Fourier-guided attention (FGA), a novel attention mechanism for crowd count estimation designed to address the inefficient full-scale global pattern capture in existing works on convolution-based attention networks. FGA efficiently captures multi-scale information, including full-scale global patterns, by utilizing Fast-Fourier Transformations (FFT) along with spatial attention for global features and convolutions with channel-wise attention for semi-global and local features. The architecture of FGA involves a dual-path approach: (1) a path for processing full-scale global features through FFT, allowing for efficient extraction of information in the frequency domain, and (2) a path for processing remaining feature maps for semi-global and local features using traditional convolutions and channel-wise attention. This dual-path architecture enables FGA to seamlessly integrate frequency and spatial information, enhancing its ability to capture diverse crowd patterns. We apply FGA in the last layers of two popular crowd-counting works, CSRNet and CANNet, to evaluate the module's performance on benchmark datasets such as ShanghaiTech-A, ShanghaiTech-B, UCF-CC-50, and JHU++ crowd. The experiments demonstrate a notable improvement across all datasets based on Mean-Squared-Error (MSE) and Mean-Absolute-Error (MAE) metrics, showing comparable performance to recent state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we illustrate the interpretability using qualitative analysis, leveraging Grad-CAM heatmaps, to show the effectiveness of FGA in capturing crowd patterns.

AVR: Synergizing Foundation Models for Audio-Visual Humor Detection

In this work, we present, AVR application for audio-visual humor detection. While humor detection has traditionally centered around textual analysis, recent advancements have spotlighted multimodal approaches. However, these methods lean on textual cues as a modality, necessitating the use of ASR systems for transcribing the audio-data. This heavy reliance on ASR accuracy can pose challenges in real-world applications. To address this bottleneck, we propose an innovative audio-visual humor detection system that circumvents textual reliance, eliminating the need for ASR models. Instead, the proposed approach hinges on the intricate interplay between audio and visual content for effective humor detection.