16,607 research outputs found
Performance analysis and optimization of automatic speech recognition
© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Fast and accurate Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is emerging as a key application for mobile devices. Delivering ASR on such devices is challenging due to the compute-intensive nature of the problem and the power constraints of embedded systems. In this paper, we provide a performance and energy characterization of Pocketsphinx, a popular toolset for ASR that targets mobile devices. We identify the computation of the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) as the main bottleneck, consuming more than 80 percent of the execution time. The CPI stack analysis shows that branches and main memory accesses are the main performance limiting factors for GMM computation. We propose several software-level optimizations driven by the power/performance analysis. Unlike previous proposals that trade accuracy for performance by reducing the number of Gaussians evaluated, we maintain accuracy and improve performance by effectively using the underlying CPU microarchitecture. First, we use a refactored implementation of the innermost loop of the GMM evaluation code to ameliorate the impact of branches. Second, we exploit the vector unit available on most modern CPUs to boost GMM computation, introducing a novel memory layout for storing the means and variances of the Gaussians in order to maximize the effectiveness of vectorization. Third, we compute the Gaussians for multiple frames in parallel, so means and variances can be fetched once in the on-chip caches and reused across multiple frames, significantly reducing memory bandwidth usage. We evaluate our optimizations using both hardware counters on real CPUs and simulations. Our experimental results show that the proposed optimizations provide 2.68x speedup over the baseline Pocketsphinx decoder on a high-end Intel Skylake CPU, while achieving 61 percent energy savings. On a modern ARM Cortex-A57 mobile processor our techniques improve performance by 1.85x, while providing 59 percent energy savings without any loss in the accuracy of the ASR system.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Compressing Recurrent Neural Network with Tensor Train
Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) are a popular choice for modeling temporal and
sequential tasks and achieve many state-of-the-art performance on various
complex problems. However, most of the state-of-the-art RNNs have millions of
parameters and require many computational resources for training and predicting
new data. This paper proposes an alternative RNN model to reduce the number of
parameters significantly by representing the weight parameters based on Tensor
Train (TT) format. In this paper, we implement the TT-format representation for
several RNN architectures such as simple RNN and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). We
compare and evaluate our proposed RNN model with uncompressed RNN model on
sequence classification and sequence prediction tasks. Our proposed RNNs with
TT-format are able to preserve the performance while reducing the number of RNN
parameters significantly up to 40 times smaller.Comment: Accepted at IJCNN 201
Joint Bayesian Gaussian discriminant analysis for speaker verification
State-of-the-art i-vector based speaker verification relies on variants of
Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis (PLDA) for discriminant analysis. We
are mainly motivated by the recent work of the joint Bayesian (JB) method,
which is originally proposed for discriminant analysis in face verification. We
apply JB to speaker verification and make three contributions beyond the
original JB. 1) In contrast to the EM iterations with approximated statistics
in the original JB, the EM iterations with exact statistics are employed and
give better performance. 2) We propose to do simultaneous diagonalization (SD)
of the within-class and between-class covariance matrices to achieve efficient
testing, which has broader application scope than the SVD-based efficient
testing method in the original JB. 3) We scrutinize similarities and
differences between various Gaussian PLDAs and JB, complementing the previous
analysis of comparing JB only with Prince-Elder PLDA. Extensive experiments are
conducted on NIST SRE10 core condition 5, empirically validating the
superiority of JB with faster convergence rate and 9-13% EER reduction compared
with state-of-the-art PLDA.Comment: accepted by ICASSP201
Language Modeling with Power Low Rank Ensembles
We present power low rank ensembles (PLRE), a flexible framework for n-gram
language modeling where ensembles of low rank matrices and tensors are used to
obtain smoothed probability estimates of words in context. Our method can be
understood as a generalization of n-gram modeling to non-integer n, and
includes standard techniques such as absolute discounting and Kneser-Ney
smoothing as special cases. PLRE training is efficient and our approach
outperforms state-of-the-art modified Kneser Ney baselines in terms of
perplexity on large corpora as well as on BLEU score in a downstream machine
translation task
A hierarchy of recurrent networks for speech recognition
Generative models for sequential data based on directed graphs of Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) are able to accurately model high dimensional sequences as recently shown. In these models, temporal dependencies in the input are discovered by either buffering previous visible variables or by recurrent connections of the hidden variables. Here we propose a modification of these models, the Temporal Reservoir Machine (TRM). It utilizes a recurrent artificial neural network (ANN) for integrating information from the input over
time. This information is then fed into a RBM at each time step. To avoid difficulties of recurrent network learning, the ANN remains untrained and hence can be thought of as a random feature extractor. Using the architecture of multi-layer RBMs (Deep Belief Networks), the TRMs can be used as a building block for complex hierarchical models. This approach unifies RBM-based approaches for sequential data modeling and the Echo State Network, a powerful approach for black-box system identification. The TRM is tested on a spoken digits task under noisy conditions, and competitive performances compared to previous models are observed
Autoregressive Kernels For Time Series
We propose in this work a new family of kernels for variable-length time
series. Our work builds upon the vector autoregressive (VAR) model for
multivariate stochastic processes: given a multivariate time series x, we
consider the likelihood function p_{\theta}(x) of different parameters \theta
in the VAR model as features to describe x. To compare two time series x and
x', we form the product of their features p_{\theta}(x) p_{\theta}(x') which is
integrated out w.r.t \theta using a matrix normal-inverse Wishart prior. Among
other properties, this kernel can be easily computed when the dimension d of
the time series is much larger than the lengths of the considered time series x
and x'. It can also be generalized to time series taking values in arbitrary
state spaces, as long as the state space itself is endowed with a kernel
\kappa. In that case, the kernel between x and x' is a a function of the Gram
matrices produced by \kappa on observations and subsequences of observations
enumerated in x and x'. We describe a computationally efficient implementation
of this generalization that uses low-rank matrix factorization techniques.
These kernels are compared to other known kernels using a set of benchmark
classification tasks carried out with support vector machines
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