TR2022-115

Heterogeneous Target Speech Separation


Abstract:

Heterogeneous Target Speech Separation Efthymios Tzinis1,2, Gordon Wichern1, Aswin Subramanian1, Paris Smaragdis2, Jonathan Le Roux1 1Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), Cambridge, MA, USA 2University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA {etzinis2,paris}@illinois.edu,{wichern,subramanian,leroux} @merl.com Abstract We introduce a new paradigm for single-channel target source separation where the sources of interest can be distinguished using non-mutually exclusive concepts (e.g., loudness, gen- der, language, spatial location, etc). Our proposed heteroge- neous separation framework can seamlessly leverage datasets with large distribution shifts and learn cross-domain represen- tations under a variety of concepts used as conditioning. Our ex- periments show that training separation models with heteroge- neous conditions facilitates the generalization to new concepts with unseen out-of-domain data while also performing substan- tially higher than single-domain specialist models. Notably, such training leads to more robust learning of new harder source separation discriminative concepts and can yield improvements over permutation invariant training with oracle source selection. We analyze the intrinsic behavior of source separation train- ing with heterogeneous metadata and propose ways to alleviate emerging problems with challenging separation conditions. We release the collection of preparation recipes for all datasets used to further promote research towards this challenging task.

 

  • Related News & Events

    •  NEWS    Jonathan Le Roux gives invited talk at CMU's Language Technology Institute Colloquium
      Date: December 9, 2022
      Where: Pittsburg, PA
      MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • MERL Senior Principal Research Scientist and Speech and Audio Senior Team Leader, Jonathan Le Roux, was invited by Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technology Institute (LTI) to give an invited talk as part of the LTI Colloquium Series. The LTI Colloquium is a prestigious series of talks given by experts from across the country related to different areas of language technologies. Jonathan's talk, entitled "Towards general and flexible audio source separation", presented an overview of techniques developed at MERL towards the goal of robustly and flexibly decomposing and analyzing an acoustic scene, describing in particular the Speech and Audio Team's efforts to extend MERL's early speech separation and enhancement methods to more challenging environments, and to more general and less supervised scenarios.
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