Utterance-level Aggregation For Speaker Recognition In The Wild

The objective of this paper is speaker recognition "in the wild"-where utterances may be of variable length and also contain irrelevant signals. Crucial elements in the design of deep networks for this task are the type of trunk (frame level) network, and the method of temporal aggregation. We propose a powerful speaker recognition deep network, using a "thin-ResNet" trunk architecture, and a dictionary-based NetVLAD or GhostVLAD layer to aggregate features across time, that can be trained end-to-end. We show that our network achieves state of the art performance by a significant margin on the VoxCeleb1 test set for speaker recognition, whilst requiring fewer parameters than previous methods. We also investigate the effect of utterance length on performance, and conclude that for "in the wild" data, a longer length is beneficial.Comment: To appear in: International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2019. (Oral Presentation

Apprentissage vidéo et langage naturel à grande échelle

The goal of this thesis is to build and train machine learning models capable of understanding the content of videos. Current video understanding approaches mainly rely on large-scale manually annotated video datasets for training. However, collecting and annotating such dataset is cumbersome, expensive and time-consuming. To address this issue, this thesis focuses on leveraging large amounts of readily-available, but noisy annotations in the form of natural language. In particular, we exploit a diverse corpus of textual metadata such as movie scripts, web video titles and descriptions or automatically transcribed speech obtained from narrated videos. Training video models on such readily-available textual data is challenging as such annotation is often imprecise or wrong. In this thesis, we introduce learning approaches to deal with weak annotation and design specialized training objectives and neural network architectures.Nous nous intéressons à l’apprentissage automatique d’algorithmes pour la compréhension automatique de vidéos. Une majorité des approaches en compréhension de vidéos dépend de large base de données de vidéos manuellement annotées pour l’entraînement. Cependant, la collection et l’annotation de telles base de données est fastidieuse, coûte cher et prend du temps. Pour palier à ce problème, cette thèse se concentre sur l’exploitation de large quantité d’annotations publiquement disponible, cependant bruitées, sous forme de language naturel. En particulier, nous nous intéressons à un corpus divers de métadonnées textuelles incluant des scripts de films, des titres et descriptions de vidéos internet ou encore des transcriptions de paroles. L’usage de ce type de données publiquement disponibles est difficile car l’annotation y est faible. Pour cela, nous introduisons différentes approches d’apprentissage telles que de nouvelles fonctions de coûts ou architectures de réseaux de neurones, adaptées à de faibles annotations

Learning Deep SPD Visual Representation for Image Classification

Symmetric positive definite (SPD) visual representations are effective due to their ability to capture high-order statistics to describe images. Reliable and efficient calculation of SPD matrix representation from small sized feature maps with a high number of channels in CNN is a challenging issue. This thesis presents three novel methods to address the above challenge. The first method, called Relation Dropout (ReDro), is inspired by the fact that eigen-decomposition of a block diagonal matrix can be efficiently obtained by eigendecomposition of each block separately. Thus, instead of using a full covariance matrix as in the literature, this thesis randomly group the channels and form a covariance matrix per group. ReDro is inserted as an additional layer preceding the matrix normalisation step and the random grouping is made transparent to all subsequent layers. ReDro can be seen as a dropout-related regularisation which discards some pair-wise channel relationships across each group. The second method, called FastCOV, exploits the intrinsic connection between eigensytems of XXT and XTX. Specifically, it computes position-wise covariance matrix upon convolutional feature maps instead of the typical channel-wise covariance matrix. As the spatial size of feature maps is usually much smaller than the channel number, conducting eigen-decomposition of the position-wise covariance matrix avoids rank-deficiency and it is faster than the decomposition of the channel-wise covariance matrix. The eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the normalised channel-wise covariance matrix can be retrieved by the connection of the XXT and XTX eigen-systems. The third method, iSICE, deals with the reliable covariance estimation from small sized and highdimensional CNN feature maps. It exploits the prior structure of the covariance matrix to estimate sparse inverse covariance which is developed in the literature to deal with the covariance matrix’s small sample issue. Given a covariance matrix, this thesis iteratively minimises its log-likelihood penalised by a sparsity with gradient descend. The resultant representation characterises partial correlation instead of indirect correlation characterised in covariance representation. As experimentally demonstrated, all three proposed methods improve the image classification performance, whereas the first two proposed methods reduce the computational cost of learning large SPD visual representations