Sample-level CNN Architectures for Music Auto-tagging Using Raw Waveforms

Recent work has shown that the end-to-end approach using convolutional neural network (CNN) is effective in various types of machine learning tasks. For audio signals, the approach takes raw waveforms as input using an 1-D convolution layer. In this paper, we improve the 1-D CNN architecture for music auto-tagging by adopting building blocks from state-of-the-art image classification models, ResNets and SENets, and adding multi-level feature aggregation to it. We compare different combinations of the modules in building CNN architectures. The results show that they achieve significant improvements over previous state-of-the-art models on the MagnaTagATune dataset and comparable results on Million Song Dataset. Furthermore, we analyze and visualize our model to show how the 1-D CNN operates.Comment: Accepted for publication at ICASSP 201

Temporal Feedback Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks for Keyword Spotting

While end-to-end learning has become a trend in deep learning, the model architecture is often designed to incorporate domain knowledge. We propose a novel convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) architecture with temporal feedback connections, inspired by the feedback pathways from the brain to ears in the human auditory system. The proposed architecture uses a hidden state of the RNN module at the previous time to control the sensitivity of channel-wise feature activations in the CNN blocks at the current time, which is analogous to the mechanism of the outer hair-cell. We apply the proposed model to keyword spotting where the speech commands have sequential nature. We show the proposed model consistently outperforms the compared model without temporal feedback for different input/output settings in the CRNN framework. We also investigate the details of the performance improvement by conducting a failure analysis of the keyword spotting task and a visualization of the channel-wise feature scaling in each CNN block.Comment: This paper is submitted to ICASSP 202