UNFUSED: UNsupervised Finetuning Using SElf supervised Distillation

In this paper, we introduce UnFuSeD, a novel approach to leverage self-supervised learning and reduce the need for large amounts of labeled data for audio classification. Unlike prior works, which directly fine-tune a self-supervised pre-trained encoder on a target dataset, we use the encoder to generate pseudo-labels for unsupervised fine-tuning before the actual fine-tuning step. We first train an encoder using a novel self-supervised learning algorithm (SSL) on an unlabeled audio dataset. Then, we use that encoder to generate pseudo-labels on our target task dataset via clustering the extracted representations. These pseudo-labels are then used to guide self-distillation on a randomly initialized model, which we call unsupervised fine-tuning. Finally, the resultant encoder is then fine-tuned on our target task dataset. Through UnFuSeD, we propose the first system that moves away from generic SSL paradigms in literature, which pre-train and fine-tune the same encoder, and present a novel self-distillation-based system to leverage SSL pre-training for low-resource audio classification. In practice, UnFuSeD achieves state-of-the-art results on the LAPE Benchmark, significantly outperforming all our baselines. Additionally, UnFuSeD allows us to achieve this at a 40% reduction in the number of parameters over the previous state-of-the-art system. We make all our codes publicly available.Comment: Under review at ICASSP 2023 SASB Worksho

Multi-learner based recursive supervised training

In this paper, we propose the Multi-Learner Based Recursive Supervised Training (MLRT) algorithm which uses the existing framework of recursive task decomposition, by training the entire dataset, picking out the best learnt patterns, and then repeating the process with the remaining patterns. Instead of having a single learner to classify all datasets during each recursion, an appropriate learner is chosen from a set of three learners, based on the subset of data being trained, thereby avoiding the time overhead associated with the genetic algorithm learner utilized in previous approaches. In this way MLRT seeks to identify the inherent characteristics of the dataset, and utilize it to train the data accurately and efficiently. We observed that empirically, MLRT performs considerably well as compared to RPHP and other systems on benchmark data with 11% improvement in accuracy on the SPAM dataset and comparable performances on the VOWEL and the TWO-SPIRAL problems. In addition, for most datasets, the time taken by MLRT is considerably lower than the other systems with comparable accuracy. Two heuristic versions, MLRT-2 and MLRT-3 are also introduced to improve the efficiency in the system, and to make it more scalable for future updates. The performance in these versions is similar to the original MLRT system

VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition

The objective of this paper is speaker recognition under noisy and unconstrained conditions. We make two key contributions. First, we introduce a very large-scale audio-visual speaker recognition dataset collected from open-source media. Using a fully automated pipeline, we curate VoxCeleb2 which contains over a million utterances from over 6,000 speakers. This is several times larger than any publicly available speaker recognition dataset. Second, we develop and compare Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models and training strategies that can effectively recognise identities from voice under various conditions. The models trained on the VoxCeleb2 dataset surpass the performance of previous works on a benchmark dataset by a significant margin.Comment: To appear in Interspeech 2018. The audio-visual dataset can be downloaded from http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/data/voxceleb2 . 1806.05622v2: minor fixes; 5 page

Identify, locate and separate: Audio-visual object extraction in large video collections using weak supervision

We tackle the problem of audiovisual scene analysis for weakly-labeled data. To this end, we build upon our previous audiovisual representation learning framework to perform object classification in noisy acoustic environments and integrate audio source enhancement capability. This is made possible by a novel use of non-negative matrix factorization for the audio modality. Our approach is founded on the multiple instance learning paradigm. Its effectiveness is established through experiments over a challenging dataset of music instrument performance videos. We also show encouraging visual object localization results