ESRGAN+ : Further Improving Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network

Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (ESRGAN) is a perceptual-driven approach for single image super resolution that is able to produce photorealistic images. Despite the visual quality of these generated images, there is still room for improvement. In this fashion, the model is extended to further improve the perceptual quality of the images. We have designed a novel block to replace the one used by the original ESRGAN. Moreover, we introduce noise inputs to the generator network in order to exploit stochastic variation. The resulting images present more realistic textures. The code is available at https://github.com/ncarraz/ESRGANplus .Comment: ICASSP 202

Towards hate speech detection in low-resource languages: Comparing ASR to acoustic word embeddings on Wolof and Swahili

We consider hate speech detection through keyword spotting on radio broadcasts. One approach is to build an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for the target low-resource language. We compare this to using acoustic word embedding (AWE) models that map speech segments to a space where matching words have similar vectors. We specifically use a multilingual AWE model trained on labelled data from well-resourced languages to spot keywords in data in the unseen target language. In contrast to ASR, the AWE approach only requires a few keyword exemplars. In controlled experiments on Wolof and Swahili where training and test data are from the same domain, an ASR model trained on just five minutes of data outperforms the AWE approach. But in an in-the-wild test on Swahili radio broadcasts with actual hate speech keywords, the AWE model (using one minute of template data) is more robust, giving similar performance to an ASR system trained on 30 hours of labelled data.Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 202

Many-Objective Optimization for Diverse Image Generation

In image generation, where diversity is critical, people can express their preferences by choosing among several proposals. Thus, the image generation system can be refined to satisfy the user's needs. In this paper, we focus on multi-objective optimization as a tool for proposing diverse solutions. Multiobjective optimization is the area of research that deals with optimizing several objective functions simultaneously. In particular, it provides numerous solutions corresponding to trade-offs between different objective functions. The goal is to have enough diversity and quality to satisfy the user. However, in computer vision, the choice of objective functions is part of the problem: typically, we have several criteria, and their mixture approximates what we need. We propose a criterion for quantifying the performance in multi-objective optimization based on cross-validation: when optimizing n−1 of the n criteria, the Pareto front should include at least one good solution for the removed n th criterion. After providing evidence for the validity and usefulness of the proposed criterion, we show that the diversity provided by multiobjective optimization is helpful in diverse image generation, namely super-resolution and inspirational generation