MuQ: Self-Supervised Music Representation Learning with Mel Residual Vector Quantization

Recent years have witnessed the success of foundation models pre-trained with self-supervised learning (SSL) in various music informatics understanding tasks, including music tagging, instrument classification, key detection, and more. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised music representation learning model for music understanding. Distinguished from previous studies adopting random projection or existing neural codec, the proposed model, named MuQ, is trained to predict tokens generated by Mel Residual Vector Quantization (Mel-RVQ). Our Mel-RVQ utilizes residual linear projection structure for Mel spectrum quantization to enhance the stability and efficiency of target extraction and lead to better performance. Experiments in a large variety of downstream tasks demonstrate that MuQ outperforms previous self-supervised music representation models with only 0.9K hours of open-source pre-training data. Scaling up the data to over 160K hours and adopting iterative training consistently improve the model performance. To further validate the strength of our model, we present MuQ-MuLan, a joint music-text embedding model based on contrastive learning, which achieves state-of-the-art performance in the zero-shot music tagging task on the MagnaTagATune dataset. Code and checkpoints are open source in https://github.com/tencent-ailab/MuQ.

SongEditor: Adapting Zero-Shot Song Generation Language Model as a Multi-Task Editor

The emergence of novel generative modeling paradigms, particularly audio language models, has significantly advanced the field of song generation. Although state-of-the-art models are capable of synthesizing both vocals and accompaniment tracks up to several minutes long concurrently, research about partial adjustments or editing of existing songs is still underexplored, which allows for more flexible and effective production. In this paper, we present SongEditor, the first song editing paradigm that introduces the editing capabilities into language-modeling song generation approaches, facilitating both segment-wise and track-wise modifications. SongEditor offers the flexibility to adjust lyrics, vocals, and accompaniments, as well as synthesizing songs from scratch. The core components of SongEditor include a music tokenizer, an autoregressive language model, and a diffusion generator, enabling generating an entire section, masked lyrics, or even separated vocals and background music. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed SongEditor achieves exceptional performance in end-to-end song editing, as evidenced by both objective and subjective metrics. Audio samples are available in \url{https://cypress-yang.github.io/SongEditor_demo/}.

WeSep: A Scalable and Flexible Toolkit Towards Generalizable Target Speaker Extraction

Target speaker extraction (TSE) focuses on isolating the speech of a specific target speaker from overlapped multi-talker speech, which is a typical setup in the cocktail party problem. In recent years, TSE draws increasing attention due to its potential for various applications such as user-customized interfaces and hearing aids, or as a crutial front-end processing technologies for subsequential tasks such as speech recognition and speaker recongtion. However, there are currently few open-source toolkits or available pre-trained models for off-the-shelf usage. In this work, we introduce WeSep, a toolkit designed for research and practical applications in TSE. WeSep is featured with flexible target speaker modeling, scalable data management, effective on-the-fly data simulation, structured recipes and deployment support. The toolkit is publicly avaliable at \url{https://github.com/wenet-e2e/WeSep.}

Comparing Discrete and Continuous Space LLMs for Speech Recognition

This paper investigates discrete and continuous speech representations in Large Language Model (LLM)-based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), organizing them by feature continuity and training approach into four categories: supervised and unsupervised for both discrete and continuous types. We further classify LLMs based on their input and autoregressive feedback into continuous and discrete-space models. Using specialized encoders and comparative analysis with a Joint-Training-From-Scratch Language Model (JTFS LM) and pre-trained LLaMA2-7b, we provide a detailed examination of their effectiveness. Our work marks the first extensive comparison of speech representations in LLM-based ASR and explores various modeling techniques. We present an open-sourced achievement of a state-of-the-art Word Error Rate (WER) of 1.69\% on LibriSpeech using a HuBERT encoder, offering valuable insights for advancing ASR and natural language processing (NLP) research.

Gull: A Generative Multifunctional Audio Codec

We introduce Gull, a generative multifunctional audio codec. Gull is a general purpose neural audio compression and decompression model which can be applied to a wide range of tasks and applications such as real-time communication, audio super-resolution, and codec language models. The key components of Gull include (1) universal-sample-rate modeling via subband modeling schemes motivated by recent progress in audio source separation, (2) gain-shape representations motivated by traditional audio codecs, (3) improved residual vector quantization modules for simpler training, (4) elastic decoder network that enables user-defined model size and complexity during inference time, (5) built-in ability for audio super-resolution without the increase of bitrate. We compare Gull with existing traditional and neural audio codecs and show that Gull is able to achieve on par or better performance across various sample rates, bitrates and model complexities in both subjective and objective evaluation metrics.

Continuous Target Speech Extraction: Enhancing Personalized Diarization and Extraction on Complex Recordings

Target speaker extraction (TSE) aims to extract the target speaker's voice from the input mixture. Previous studies have concentrated on high-overlapping scenarios. However, real-world applications usually meet more complex scenarios like variable speaker overlapping and target speaker absence. In this paper, we introduces a framework to perform continuous TSE (C-TSE), comprising a target speaker voice activation detection (TSVAD) and a TSE model. This framework significantly improves TSE performance on similar speakers and enhances personalization, which is lacking in traditional diarization methods. In detail, unlike conventional TSVAD deployed to refine the diarization results, the proposed Attention-target speaker voice activation detection (A-TSVAD) directly generates timestamps of the target speaker. We also explore some different integration methods of A-TSVAD and TSE by comparing the cascaded and parallel methods. The framework's effectiveness is assessed using a range of metrics, including diarization and enhancement metrics. Our experiments demonstrate that A-TSVAD outperforms conventional methods in reducing diarization errors. Furthermore, the integration of A-TSVAD and TSE in a sequential cascaded manner further enhances extraction accuracy.

Consistent and Relevant: Rethink the Query Embedding in General Sound Separation

The query-based audio separation usually employs specific queries to extract target sources from a mixture of audio signals. Currently, most query-based separation models need additional networks to obtain query embedding. In this way, separation model is optimized to be adapted to the distribution of query embedding. However, query embedding may exhibit mismatches with separation models due to inconsistent structures and independent information. In this paper, we present CaRE-SEP, a consistent and relevant embedding network for general sound separation to encourage a comprehensive reconsideration of query usage in audio separation. CaRE-SEP alleviates the potential mismatch between queries and separation in two aspects, including sharing network structure and sharing feature information. First, a Swin-Unet model with a shared encoder is conducted to unify query encoding and sound separation into one model, eliminating the network architecture difference and generating consistent distribution of query and separation features. Second, by initializing CaRE-SEP with a pretrained classification network and allowing gradient backpropagation, the query embedding is optimized to be relevant to the separation feature, further alleviating the feature mismatch problem. Experimental results indicate the proposed CaRE-SEP model substantially improves the performance of separation tasks. Moreover, visualizations validate the potential mismatch and how CaRE-SEP solves it.

SECap: Speech Emotion Captioning with Large Language Model

Speech emotions are crucial in human communication and are extensively used in fields like speech synthesis and natural language understanding. Most prior studies, such as speech emotion recognition, have categorized speech emotions into a fixed set of classes. Yet, emotions expressed in human speech are often complex, and categorizing them into predefined groups can be insufficient to adequately represent speech emotions. On the contrary, describing speech emotions directly by means of natural language may be a more effective approach. Regrettably, there are not many studies available that have focused on this direction. Therefore, this paper proposes a speech emotion captioning framework named SECap, aiming at effectively describing speech emotions using natural language. Owing to the impressive capabilities of large language models in language comprehension and text generation, SECap employs LLaMA as the text decoder to allow the production of coherent speech emotion captions. In addition, SECap leverages HuBERT as the audio encoder to extract general speech features and Q-Former as the Bridge-Net to provide LLaMA with emotion-related speech features. To accomplish this, Q-Former utilizes mutual information learning to disentangle emotion-related speech features and speech contents, while implementing contrastive learning to extract more emotion-related speech features. The results of objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that: 1) the SECap framework outperforms the HTSAT-BART baseline in all objective evaluations; 2) SECap can generate high-quality speech emotion captions that attain performance on par with human annotators in subjective mean opinion score tests.

Typing to Listen at the Cocktail Party: Text-Guided Target Speaker Extraction

Humans possess an extraordinary ability to selectively focus on the sound source of interest amidst complex acoustic environments, commonly referred to as cocktail party scenarios. In an attempt to replicate this remarkable auditory attention capability in machines, target speaker extraction (TSE) models have been developed. These models leverage the pre-registered cues of the target speaker to extract the sound source of interest. However, the effectiveness of these models is hindered in real-world scenarios due to the unreliable or even absence of pre-registered cues. To address this limitation, this study investigates the integration of natural language description to enhance the feasibility, controllability, and performance of existing TSE models. Specifically, we propose a model named LLM-TSE, wherein a large language model (LLM) extracts useful semantic cues from the user's typed text input. These cues can serve as independent extraction cues, task selectors to control the TSE process or complement the pre-registered cues. Our experimental results demonstrate competitive performance when only text-based cues are presented, the effectiveness of using input text as a task selector, and a new state-of-the-art when combining text-based cues with pre-registered cues. To our knowledge, this is the first study to successfully incorporate LLMs to guide target speaker extraction, which can be a cornerstone for cocktail party problem research.

Leveraging In-the-Wild Data for Effective Self-Supervised Pretraining in Speaker Recognition

Current speaker recognition systems primarily rely on supervised approaches, constrained by the scale of labeled datasets. To boost the system performance, researchers leverage large pretrained models such as WavLM to transfer learned high-level features to the downstream speaker recognition task. However, this approach introduces extra parameters as the pretrained model remains in the inference stage. Another group of researchers directly apply self-supervised methods such as DINO to speaker embedding learning, yet they have not explored its potential on large-scale in-the-wild datasets. In this paper, we present the effectiveness of DINO training on the large-scale WenetSpeech dataset and its transferability in enhancing the supervised system performance on the CNCeleb dataset. Additionally, we introduce a confidence-based data filtering algorithm to remove unreliable data from the pretraining dataset, leading to better performance with less training data. The associated pretrained models, confidence files, pretraining and finetuning scripts will be made available in the Wespeaker toolkit.