Analysing the Masked predictive coding training criterion for pre-training a Speech Representation Model

Recent developments in pre-trained speech representation utilizing self-supervised learning (SSL) have yielded exceptional results on a variety of downstream tasks. One such technique, known as masked predictive coding (MPC), has been employed by some of the most high-performing models. In this study, we investigate the impact of MPC loss on the type of information learnt at various layers in the HuBERT model, using nine probing tasks. Our findings indicate that the amount of content information learned at various layers of the HuBERT model has a positive correlation to the MPC loss. Additionally, it is also observed that any speaker-related information learned at intermediate layers of the model, is an indirect consequence of the learning process, and therefore cannot be controlled using the MPC loss. These findings may serve as inspiration for further research in the speech community, specifically in the development of new pre-training tasks or the exploration of new pre-training criterion's that directly preserves both speaker and content information at various layers of a learnt model

Mind Your Language: Abuse and Offense Detection for Code-Switched Languages

In multilingual societies like the Indian subcontinent, use of code-switched languages is much popular and convenient for the users. In this paper, we study offense and abuse detection in the code-switched pair of Hindi and English (i.e. Hinglish), the pair that is the most spoken. The task is made difficult due to non-fixed grammar, vocabulary, semantics and spellings of Hinglish language. We apply transfer learning and make a LSTM based model for hate speech classification. This model surpasses the performance shown by the current best models to establish itself as the state-of-the-art in the unexplored domain of Hinglish offensive text classification.We also release our model and the embeddings trained for research purpose

IceBreaker: Solving Cold Start Problem for Video Recommendation Engines

Internet has brought about a tremendous increase in content of all forms and, in that, video content constitutes the major backbone of the total content being published as well as watched. Thus it becomes imperative for video recommendation engines such as Hulu to look for novel and innovative ways to recommend the newly added videos to their users. However, the problem with new videos is that they lack any sort of metadata and user interaction so as to be able to rate the videos for the consumers. To this effect, this paper introduces the several techniques we develop for the Content Based Video Relevance Prediction (CBVRP) Challenge being hosted by Hulu for the ACM Multimedia Conference 2018. We employ different architectures on the CBVRP dataset to make use of the provided frame and video level features and generate predictions of videos that are similar to the other videos. We also implement several ensemble strategies to explore complementarity between both the types of provided features. The obtained results are encouraging and will impel the boundaries of research for multimedia based video recommendation systems

GANTouch: An Attack-Resilient Framework for Touch-based Continuous Authentication System

Previous studies have shown that commonly studied (vanilla) implementations of touch-based continuous authentication systems (V-TCAS) are susceptible to active adversarial attempts. This study presents a novel Generative Adversarial Network assisted TCAS (G-TCAS) framework and compares it to the V-TCAS under three active adversarial environments viz. Zero-effort, Population, and Random-vector. The Zero-effort environment was implemented in two variations viz. Zero-effort (same-dataset) and Zero-effort (cross-dataset). The first involved a Zero-effort attack from the same dataset, while the second used three different datasets. G-TCAS showed more resilience than V-TCAS under the Population and Random-vector, the more damaging adversarial scenarios than the Zero-effort. On average, the increase in the false accept rates (FARs) for V-TCAS was much higher (27.5% and 21.5%) than for G-TCAS (14% and 12.5%) for Population and Random-vector attacks, respectively. Moreover, we performed a fairness analysis of TCAS for different genders and found TCAS to be fair across genders. The findings suggest that we should evaluate TCAS under active adversarial environments and affirm the usefulness of GANs in the TCAS pipeline.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables, 3 algorithms, in IEEE TBIOM 202