Multi-Scale Temporal Transformer For Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech emotion recognition plays a crucial role in human-machine interaction systems. Recently various optimized Transformers have been successfully applied to speech emotion recognition. However, the existing Transformer architectures focus more on global information and require large computation. On the other hand, abundant speech emotional representations exist locally on different parts of the input speech. To tackle these problems, we propose a Multi-Scale TRansfomer (MSTR) for speech emotion recognition. It comprises of three main components: (1) a multi-scale temporal feature operator, (2) a fractal self-attention module, and (3) a scale mixer module. These three components can effectively enhance the transformer's ability to learn multi-scale local emotion representations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MSTR model significantly outperforms a vanilla Transformer and other state-of-the-art methods across three speech emotion datasets: IEMOCAP, MELD and, CREMAD. In addition, it can greatly reduce the computational cost.

An inspection technology of inner surface of the fine hole based on machine vision

Fine holes are an important structural component of industrial components, and their inner surface quality is closely related to their function.In order to detect the quality of the inner surface of the fine hole,a special optical measurement system was investigated in this paper. A sight pipe is employed to guide the external illumination light into the fine hole and output the relevant images simultaneously. A flexible light array is introduced to suit the narrow space, and the effective field of view is analyzed. Besides, the arc surface projection error and manufacturing assembly error of the device are analyzed, then compensated or ignored if small enough. In the test of prefabricated circular defects with the diameter {\phi}0.1mm, {\phi}0.2mm, 0.4mm distance distribution and the fissure defects with the width 0.3mm, the maximum measurement error standard deviation are all about 10{\mu}m. The minimum diameter of the measured fine hole is 4mm and the depth can reach 47mm.

DWFormer: Dynamic Window transFormer for Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech emotion recognition is crucial to human-computer interaction. The temporal regions that represent different emotions scatter in different parts of the speech locally. Moreover, the temporal scales of important information may vary over a large range within and across speech segments. Although transformer-based models have made progress in this field, the existing models could not precisely locate important regions at different temporal scales. To address the issue, we propose Dynamic Window transFormer (DWFormer), a new architecture that leverages temporal importance by dynamically splitting samples into windows. Self-attention mechanism is applied within windows for capturing temporal important information locally in a fine-grained way. Cross-window information interaction is also taken into account for global communication. DWFormer is evaluated on both the IEMOCAP and the MELD datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves better performance than the previous state-of-the-art methods.

The CORAL++ Algorithm for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Speaker Recogntion

State-of-the-art speaker recognition systems are trained with a large amount of human-labeled training data set. Such a training set is usually composed of various data sources to enhance the modeling capability of models. However, in practical deployment, unseen condition is almost inevitable. Domain mismatch is a common problem in real-life applications due to the statistical difference between the training and testing data sets. To alleviate the degradation caused by domain mismatch, we propose a new feature-based unsupervised domain adaptation algorithm. The algorithm we propose is a further optimization based on the well-known CORrelation ALignment (CORAL), so we call it CORAL++. On the NIST 2019 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE19), we use SRE18 CTS set as the development set to verify the effectiveness of CORAL++. With the typical x-vector/PLDA setup, the CORAL++ outperforms the CORAL by 9.40% relatively on EER.

Internal language model estimation through explicit context vector learning for attention-based encoder-decoder ASR

An end-to-end (E2E) speech recognition model implicitly learns a biased internal language model (ILM) during training. To fused an external LM during inference, the scores produced by the biased ILM need to be estimated and subtracted. In this paper we propose two novel approaches to estimate the biased ILM based on Listen-Attend-Spell (LAS) models. The simpler method is to replace the context vector of the LAS decoder at every time step with a learnable vector. The other more advanced method is to use a simple feed-forward network to directly map query vectors to context vectors, making the generation of the context vectors independent of the LAS encoder. Both the learnable vector and the mapping network are trained on the transcriptions of the training data to minimize the perplexity while all the other parameters of the LAS model is fixed. Experiments show that the ILMs estimated by the proposed methods achieve the lowest perplexity. In addition, they also significantly outperform the shallow fusion method and two previously proposed Internal Language Model Estimation (ILME) approaches on multiple datasets.

Estimation of Covariance Matrix of Interference for Secure Spatial Modulation against a Malicious Full-duplex Attacker

In a secure spatial modulation with a malicious full-duplex attacker, how to obtain the interference space or channel state information (CSI) is very important for Bob to cancel or reduce the interference from Mallory. In this paper, different from existing work with a perfect CSI, the covariance matrix of malicious interference (CMMI) from Mallory is estimated and is used to construct the null-space of interference (NSI). Finally, the receive beamformer at Bob is designed to remove the malicious interference using the NSI. To improve the estimation accuracy, a rank detector relying on Akaike information criterion (AIC) is derived. To achieve a high-precision CMMI estimation, two methods are proposed as follows: principal component analysis-eigenvalue decomposition (PCA-EVD), and joint diagonalization (JD). The proposed PCA-EVD is a rank deduction method whereas the JD method is a joint optimization method with improved performance in low signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) region at the expense of increased complexities. Simulation results show that the proposed PCA-EVD performs much better than the existing method like sample estimated covariance matrix (SCM) and EVD in terms of normalized mean square error (NMSE) and secrecy rate (SR). Additionally, the proposed JD method has an excellent NMSE performance better than PCA-EVD in the low SINR region (SINR < 0dB) while in the high SINR region PCA-EVD performs better than JD.

Multi-head Monotonic Chunkwise Attention For Online Speech Recognition

The attention mechanism of the Listen, Attend and Spell (LAS) model requires the whole input sequence to calculate the attention context and thus is not suitable for online speech recognition. To deal with this problem, we propose multi-head monotonic chunk-wise attention (MTH-MoChA), an improved version of MoChA. MTH-MoChA splits the input sequence into small chunks and computes multi-head attentions over the chunks. We also explore useful training strategies such as LSTM pooling, minimum world error rate training and SpecAugment to further improve the performance of MTH-MoChA. Experiments on AISHELL-1 data show that the proposed model, along with the training strategies, improve the character error rate (CER) of MoChA from 8.96% to 7.68% on test set. On another 18000 hours in-car speech data set, MTH-MoChA obtains 7.28% CER, which is significantly better than a state-of-the-art hybrid system.

Vehicle Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Vehicle tracking has become one of the key applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in the fields of rescue, surveillance, traffic monitoring, etc. However, the increased tracking accuracy requires more energy consumption. In this letter, a decentralized vehicle tracking strategy is conceived for improving both tracking accuracy and energy saving, which is based on adjusting the intersection area between the fixed sensing area and the dynamic activation area. Then, two deep reinforcement learning (DRL) aided solutions are proposed relying on the dynamic selection of the activation area radius. Finally, simulation results show the superiority of our DRL aided design.

Essence Knowledge Distillation for Speech Recognition

It is well known that a speech recognition system that combines multiple acoustic models trained on the same data significantly outperforms a single-model system. Unfortunately, real time speech recognition using a whole ensemble of models is too computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose to distill the knowledge of essence in an ensemble of models (i.e. the teacher model) to a single model (i.e. the student model) that needs much less computation to deploy. Previously, all the soften outputs of the teacher model are used to optimize the student model. We argue that not all the outputs of the ensemble are necessary to be distilled. Some of the outputs may even contain noisy information that is useless or even harmful to the training of the student model. In addition, we propose to train the student model with a multitask learning approach by utilizing both the soften outputs of the teacher model and the correct hard labels. The proposed method achieves some surprising results on the Switchboard data set. When the student model is trained together with the correct labels and the essence knowledge from the teacher model, it not only significantly outperforms another single model with the same architecture that is trained only with the correct labels, but also consistently outperforms the teacher model that is used to generate the soft labels.