arXiv research

This paper proposes a new architecture for speaker adaptation of multi-speaker neural-network speech synthesis systems, in which an unseen speaker's voice can be built using a relatively small amount of speech data without transcriptions. This is sometimes called "unsupervised speaker adaptation". More specifically, we…

Most neural-network based speaker-adaptive acoustic models for speech synthesis can be categorized into either layer-based or input-code approaches. Although both approaches have their own pros and cons, most existing works on speaker adaptation focus on improving one or the other. In this paper, after we first systema…

Bayesian approach improves speech recognition with limited speaker data.

BOFFIN TTS optimizes hyper-parameters for new speaker adaptation.

Speech enhancement improved by adapting to unknown speakers without auxiliary signals.

Sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) based ASR systems have shown state-of-the-art performances while having clear advantages in terms of simplicity. However, comparisons are mostly done on speaker independent (SI) ASR systems, though speaker adapted conventional systems are commonly used in practice for improving robustness…

We present a meta-learning approach for adaptive text-to-speech (TTS) with few data. During training, we learn a multi-speaker model using a shared conditional WaveNet core and independent learned embeddings for each speaker. The aim of training is not to produce a neural network with fixed weights, which is then deplo…

We propose a novel adversarial speaker adaptation (ASA) scheme, in which adversarial learning is applied to regularize the distribution of deep hidden features in a speaker-dependent (SD) deep neural network (DNN) acoustic model to be close to that of a fixed speaker-independent (SI) DNN acoustic model during adaptatio…

Voice activity detection (VAD), which classifies frames as speech or non-speech, is an important module in many speech applications including speaker verification. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called self-adaptive soft VAD, to incorporate a deep neural network (DNN)-based VAD into a deep speaker embedding …

In this paper we propose a method to model speaker and session variability and able to generate likelihood ratios using neural networks in an end-to-end phrase dependent speaker verification system. As in Joint Factor Analysis, the model uses tied hidden variables to model speaker and session variability and a MAP adap…

Improved robustness in ASR systems with speaker adaptation.

Improves TTS accuracy by correcting context-dependent units.

Recently, voice conversion (VC) without parallel data has been successfully adapted to multi-target scenario in which a single model is trained to convert the input voice to many different speakers. However, such model suffers from the limitation that it can only convert the voice to the speakers in the training data, …

Learned feature representations and sub-phoneme posteriors from Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been used separately to produce significant performance gains for speaker and language recognition tasks. In this work we show how these gains are possible using a single DNN for both speaker and language recognition. The u…

In this paper we describe the recent advancements made in the IBM i-vector speaker recognition system for conversational speech. In particular, we identify key techniques that contribute to significant improvements in performance of our system, and quantify their contributions. The techniques include: 1) a nearest-neig…

State-of-the-art speaker recognition systems comprise an x-vector (or i-vector) speaker embedding front-end followed by a probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) backend. The effectiveness of these components relies on the availability of a large collection of labeled training data. In practice, it is common …

Improved far-field speaker verification for short utterances in noisy conditions.

State-of-the-art speaker recognition relays on models that need a large amount of training data. This models are successful in tasks like NIST SRE because there is sufficient data available. However, in real applications, we usually do not have so much data and, in many cases, the speaker labels are unknown. We present…

The teacher-student (T/S) learning has been shown to be effective for a variety of problems such as domain adaptation and model compression. One shortcoming of the T/S learning is that a teacher model, not always perfect, sporadically produces wrong guidance in form of posterior probabilities that misleads the student …

This paper addresses the robust speech recognition problem as an adaptation task. Specifically, we investigate the cumulative application of adaptation methods. A bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) based neural network, capable of learning temporal relationships and translation invariant representations, is u…

Multi-language speech datasets are scarce and often have small sample sizes in the medical domain. Robust transfer of linguistic features across languages could improve rates of early diagnosis and therapy for speakers of low-resource languages when detecting health conditions from speech. We utilize out-of-domain, unp…

This paper proposes novel algorithms for speaker embedding using subjective inter-speaker similarity based on deep neural networks (DNNs). Although conventional DNN-based speaker embedding such as a $d$-vector can be applied to multi-speaker modeling in speech synthesis, it does not correlate with the subjective inter-…

In this paper, we propose a new loss function called generalized end-to-end (GE2E) loss, which makes the training of speaker verification models more efficient than our previous tuple-based end-to-end (TE2E) loss function. Unlike TE2E, the GE2E loss function updates the network in a way that emphasizes examples that ar…

When the available data of a target speaker is insufficient to train a high quality speaker-dependent neural text-to-speech (TTS) system, we can combine data from multiple speakers and train a multi-speaker TTS model instead. Many studies have shown that neural multi-speaker TTS model trained with a small amount data f…

In this paper, we present a novel system that separates the voice of a target speaker from multi-speaker signals, by making use of a reference signal from the target speaker. We achieve this by training two separate neural networks: (1) A speaker recognition network that produces speaker-discriminative embeddings; (2) …

The paper proposes deep normalization to improve speaker recognition performance.

Speaker embedding models that utilize neural networks to map utterances to a space where distances reflect similarity between speakers have driven recent progress in the speaker recognition task. However, there is still a significant performance gap between recognizing speakers in the training set and unseen speakers. …

Graph neural networks refine speaker embeddings for better session-level diarization.

Improved neural speaker embeddings enhance ASR performance.

Paper improves speaker verification with federated learning and differential privacy.

This paper presents an end-to-end text-independent speaker verification framework by jointly considering the speaker embedding (SE) network and automatic speech recognition (ASR) network. The SE network learns to output an embedding vector which distinguishes the speaker characteristics of the input utterance, while th…

Paper explores using EEG for better speaker identification, even in noisy environments.

New models extrapolate false alarms in ASV without new data.

A new type of End-to-End system for text-dependent speaker verification is presented in this paper. Previously, using the phonetically discriminative/speaker discriminative DNNs as feature extractors for speaker verification has shown promising results. The extracted frame-level (DNN bottleneck, posterior or d-vector) …

We present the recent advances along with an error analysis of the IBM speaker recognition system for conversational speech. Some of the key advancements that contribute to our system include: a nearest-neighbor discriminant analysis (NDA) approach (as opposed to LDA) for intersession variability compensation in the i-…

Improves speaker verification for variable-duration utterances using a feature pyramid module.

The social media revolution has produced a plethora of web services to which users can easily upload and share multimedia documents. Despite the popularity and convenience of such services, the sharing of such inherently personal data, including speech data, raises obvious security and privacy concerns. In particular, …

Speech-driven visual speech synthesis involves mapping features extracted from acoustic speech to the corresponding lip animation controls for a face model. This mapping can take many forms, but a powerful approach is to use deep neural networks (DNNs). However, a limitation is the lack of synchronized audio, video, an…

New method separates multiple voices in mixed audio.

Improved multi-user VoiceFilter-Lite model for speech recognition.

The VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge 2019 aimed to assess how well current speaker recognition technology is able to identify speakers in unconstrained or `in the wild' data. It consisted of: (i) a publicly available speaker recognition dataset from YouTube videos together with ground truth annotation and standar…

Study shows emotion affects speaker recognition and vice versa.

The human auditory system is able to distinguish the vocal source of thousands of speakers, yet not much is known about what features the auditory system uses to do this. Fourier Transforms are capable of capturing the pitch and harmonic structure of the speaker but this alone proves insufficient at identifying speaker…

In this paper, we propose a fully supervised speaker diarization approach, named unbounded interleaved-state recurrent neural networks (UIS-RNN). Given extracted speaker-discriminative embeddings (a.k.a. d-vectors) from input utterances, each individual speaker is modeled by a parameter-sharing RNN, while the RNN state…

In this paper, we propose a new pooling method called spatial pyramid encoding (SPE) to generate speaker embeddings for text-independent speaker verification. We first partition the output feature maps from a deep residual network (ResNet) into increasingly fine sub-regions and extract speaker embeddings from each sub-…

In this paper, we propose "personal VAD", a system to detect the voice activity of a target speaker at the frame level. This system is useful for gating the inputs to a streaming on-device speech recognition system, such that it only triggers for the target user, which helps reduce the computational cost and battery co…

WEEND uses a neural network to recognize speech and assign speakers to words.

In this paper we study speaker linking (a.k.a.\ partitioning) given constraints of the distribution of speaker identities over speech recordings. Specifically, we show that the intractable partitioning problem becomes tractable when the constraints pre-partition the data in smaller cliques with non-overlapping speakers…