Leveraging Content and Acoustic Representations for Efficient Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech emotion recognition (SER), the task of identifying the expression of emotion from spoken content, is challenging due to the difficulty in extracting representations that capture emotional attributes from speech. The scarcity of large labeled datasets further complicates the challenge where large models are prone to over-fitting. In this paper, we propose CARE (Content and Acoustic Representations of Emotions), where we design a dual encoding scheme which emphasizes semantic and acoustic factors of speech. While the semantic encoder is trained with the distillation of utterance-level text representation model, the acoustic encoder is trained to predict low-level frame-wise features of the speech signal. The proposed dual encoding scheme is a base-sized model trained only on unsupervised raw speech. With a simple light-weight classification model trained on the downstream task, we show that the CARE embeddings provide effective emotion recognition on a variety of tasks. We compare the proposal with several other self-supervised models as well as recent large-language model based approaches. In these evaluations, the proposed CARE model is shown to be the best performing model based on average performance across 8 diverse datasets. We also conduct several ablation studies to analyze the importance of various design choices.

Uncertainty-Informed Volume Visualization using Implicit Neural Representation

The increasing adoption of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has led to their application in many challenging scientific visualization tasks. While advanced DNNs offer impressive generalization capabilities, understanding factors such as model prediction quality, robustness, and uncertainty is crucial. These insights can enable domain scientists to make informed decisions about their data. However, DNNs inherently lack ability to estimate prediction uncertainty, necessitating new research to construct robust uncertainty-aware visualization techniques tailored for various visualization tasks. In this work, we propose uncertainty-aware implicit neural representations to model scalar field data sets effectively and comprehensively study the efficacy and benefits of estimated uncertainty information for volume visualization tasks. We evaluate the effectiveness of two principled deep uncertainty estimation techniques: (1) Deep Ensemble and (2) Monte Carlo Dropout (MCDropout). These techniques enable uncertainty-informed volume visualization in scalar field data sets. Our extensive exploration across multiple data sets demonstrates that uncertainty-aware models produce informative volume visualization results. Moreover, integrating prediction uncertainty enhances the trustworthiness of our DNN model, making it suitable for robustly analyzing and visualizing real-world scientific volumetric data sets.

Uncertainty-Aware Deep Neural Representations for Visual Analysis of Vector Field Data

The widespread use of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has recently resulted in their application to challenging scientific visualization tasks. While advanced DNNs demonstrate impressive generalization abilities, understanding factors like prediction quality, confidence, robustness, and uncertainty is crucial. These insights aid application scientists in making informed decisions. However, DNNs lack inherent mechanisms to measure prediction uncertainty, prompting the creation of distinct frameworks for constructing robust uncertainty-aware models tailored to various visualization tasks. In this work, we develop uncertainty-aware implicit neural representations to model steady-state vector fields effectively. We comprehensively evaluate the efficacy of two principled deep uncertainty estimation techniques: (1) Deep Ensemble and (2) Monte Carlo Dropout, aimed at enabling uncertainty-informed visual analysis of features within steady vector field data. Our detailed exploration using several vector data sets indicate that uncertainty-aware models generate informative visualization results of vector field features. Furthermore, incorporating prediction uncertainty improves the resilience and interpretability of our DNN model, rendering it applicable for the analysis of non-trivial vector field data sets.

Zero Shot Audio to Audio Emotion Transfer With Speaker Disentanglement

The problem of audio-to-audio (A2A) style transfer involves replacing the style features of the source audio with those from the target audio while preserving the content related attributes of the source audio. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach, termed as Zero-shot Emotion Style Transfer (ZEST), that allows the transfer of emotional content present in the given source audio with the one embedded in the target audio while retaining the speaker and speech content from the source. The proposed system builds upon decomposing speech into semantic tokens, speaker representations and emotion embeddings. Using these factors, we propose a framework to reconstruct the pitch contour of the given speech signal and train a decoder that reconstructs the speech signal. The model is trained using a self-supervision based reconstruction loss. During conversion, the emotion embedding is alone derived from the target audio, while rest of the factors are derived from the source audio. In our experiments, we show that, even without using parallel training data or labels from the source or target audio, we illustrate zero shot emotion transfer capabilities of the proposed ZEST model using objective and subjective quality evaluations.

Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Summarization using Information Based Fusion

In the era of burgeoning data generation, managing and storing large-scale time-varying datasets poses significant challenges. With the rise of supercomputing capabilities, the volume of data produced has soared, intensifying storage and I/O overheads. To address this issue, we propose a dynamic spatio-temporal data summarization technique that identifies informative features in key timesteps and fuses less informative ones. This approach minimizes storage requirements while preserving data dynamics. Unlike existing methods, our method retains both raw and summarized timesteps, ensuring a comprehensive view of information changes over time. We utilize information-theoretic measures to guide the fusion process, resulting in a visual representation that captures essential data patterns. We demonstrate the versatility of our technique across diverse datasets, encompassing particle-based flow simulations, security and surveillance applications, and biological cell interactions within the immune system. Our research significantly contributes to the realm of data management, introducing enhanced efficiency and deeper insights across diverse multidisciplinary domains. We provide a streamlined approach for handling massive datasets that can be applied to in situ analysis as well as post hoc analysis. This not only addresses the escalating challenges of data storage and I/O overheads but also unlocks the potential for informed decision-making. Our method empowers researchers and experts to explore essential temporal dynamics while minimizing storage requirements, thereby fostering a more effective and intuitive understanding of complex data behaviors.

HCAM -- Hierarchical Cross Attention Model for Multi-modal Emotion Recognition

Emotion recognition in conversations is challenging due to the multi-modal nature of the emotion expression. We propose a hierarchical cross-attention model (HCAM) approach to multi-modal emotion recognition using a combination of recurrent and co-attention neural network models. The input to the model consists of two modalities, i) audio data, processed through a learnable wav2vec approach and, ii) text data represented using a bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model. The audio and text representations are processed using a set of bi-directional recurrent neural network layers with self-attention that converts each utterance in a given conversation to a fixed dimensional embedding. In order to incorporate contextual knowledge and the information across the two modalities, the audio and text embeddings are combined using a co-attention layer that attempts to weigh the utterance level embeddings relevant to the task of emotion recognition. The neural network parameters in the audio layers, text layers as well as the multi-modal co-attention layers, are hierarchically trained for the emotion classification task. We perform experiments on three established datasets namely, IEMOCAP, MELD and CMU-MOSI, where we illustrate that the proposed model improves significantly over other benchmarks and helps achieve state-of-art results on all these datasets.