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Speech & Audio

Audio source separation, recognition, and understanding.

Our current research focuses on application of machine learning to estimation and inference problems in speech and audio processing. Topics include end-to-end speech recognition and enhancement, acoustic modeling and analysis, statistical dialog systems, as well as natural language understanding and adaptive multimodal interfaces.

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  • Awards

    •  AWARD   Best Poster Award and Best Video Award at the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR) 2020
      Date: October 15, 2020
      Awarded to: Ethan Manilow, Gordon Wichern, Jonathan Le Roux
      MERL Contacts: Jonathan Le Roux; Gordon Wichern
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • Former MERL intern Ethan Manilow and MERL researchers Gordon Wichern and Jonathan Le Roux won Best Poster Award and Best Video Award at the 2020 International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2020) for the paper "Hierarchical Musical Source Separation". The conference was held October 11-14 in a virtual format. The Best Poster Awards and Best Video Awards were awarded by popular vote among the conference attendees.

        The paper proposes a new method for isolating individual sounds in an audio mixture that accounts for the hierarchical relationship between sound sources. Many sounds we are interested in analyzing are hierarchical in nature, e.g., during a music performance, a hi-hat note is one of many such hi-hat notes, which is one of several parts of a drumkit, itself one of many instruments in a band, which might be playing in a bar with other sounds occurring. Inspired by this, the paper re-frames the audio source separation problem as hierarchical, combining similar sounds together at certain levels while separating them at other levels, and shows on a musical instrument separation task that a hierarchical approach outperforms non-hierarchical models while also requiring less training data. The paper, poster, and video can be seen on the paper page on the ISMIR website.
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    •  AWARD   Best Paper Award at the IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU) 2019
      Date: December 18, 2019
      Awarded to: Xuankai Chang, Wangyou Zhang, Yanmin Qian, Jonathan Le Roux, Shinji Watanabe
      MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • MERL researcher Jonathan Le Roux and co-authors Xuankai Chang, Shinji Watanabe (Johns Hopkins University), Wangyou Zhang, and Yanmin Qian (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) won the Best Paper Award at the 2019 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU 2019), for the paper "MIMO-Speech: End-to-End Multi-Channel Multi-Speaker Speech Recognition". MIMO-Speech is a fully neural end-to-end framework that can transcribe the text of multiple speakers speaking simultaneously from multi-channel input. The system is comprised of a monaural masking network, a multi-source neural beamformer, and a multi-output speech recognition model, which are jointly optimized only via an automatic speech recognition (ASR) criterion. The award was received by lead author Xuankai Chang during the conference, which was held in Sentosa, Singapore from December 14-18, 2019.
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    •  AWARD   Best Student Paper Award at IEEE ICASSP 2018
      Date: April 17, 2018
      Awarded to: Zhong-Qiu Wang
      MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
      Research Area: Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • Former MERL intern Zhong-Qiu Wang (Ph.D. Candidate at Ohio State University) has received a Best Student Paper Award at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2018) for the paper "Multi-Channel Deep Clustering: Discriminative Spectral and Spatial Embeddings for Speaker-Independent Speech Separation" by Zhong-Qiu Wang, Jonathan Le Roux, and John Hershey. The paper presents work performed during Zhong-Qiu's internship at MERL in the summer 2017, extending MERL's pioneering Deep Clustering framework for speech separation to a multi-channel setup. The award was received on behalf on Zhong-Qiu by MERL researcher and co-author Jonathan Le Roux during the conference, held in Calgary April 15-20.
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  • News & Events


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  • Research Highlights

  • Internships

    • CV1552: Multimodal Reasoning

      MERL is looking for a self-motivated intern to work on problems at the intersection of video understanding, audio processing, and language models. The ideal candidate would be a PhD student with a strong mathematical background in machine learning and computer vision. The candidate must have prior experience in using deep learning methods for image and video representations (such as using scene graphs) and deep audio analysis (such as source separation, localization, etc.). Proficiency in Python and flexibility in using different deep learning software (especially Pytorch) is expected. The intern is expected to collaborate with computer vision and speech teams at MERL to develop algorithms and prepare manuscripts for scientific publications. The internship is for 3 months with flexible start date. This internship is preferred to be onsite at MERL, but may be done remotely where you live if the COVID pandemic makes it necessary.


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  • Recent Publications

    •  Hori, T., Moritz, N., Hori, C., Le Roux, J., "Transformer-based Long-context End-to-end Speech Recognition", Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech), DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2020-2928, October 2020, pp. 5011-5015.
      BibTeX TR2020-139 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Hori2020oct,
      • author = {Hori, Takaaki and Moritz, Niko and Hori, Chiori and Le Roux, Jonathan},
      • title = {Transformer-based Long-context End-to-end Speech Recognition},
      • booktitle = {Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech)},
      • year = 2020,
      • pages = {5011--5015},
      • month = oct,
      • doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2020-2928},
      • issn = {1990-9772},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2020-139}
      • }
    •  Jayashankar, T., Le Roux, J., Moulin, P., "Detecting Audio Attacks on ASR Systems with Dropout Uncertainty", Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech), DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2020-1846, October 2020, pp. 4671-4675.
      BibTeX TR2020-137 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Jayashankar2020oct,
      • author = {Jayashankar, Tejas and Le Roux, Jonathan and Moulin, Pierre},
      • title = {Detecting Audio Attacks on ASR Systems with Dropout Uncertainty},
      • booktitle = {Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech)},
      • year = 2020,
      • pages = {4671--4675},
      • month = oct,
      • doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2020-1846},
      • issn = {1990-9772},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2020-137}
      • }
    •  Moritz, N., Wichern, G., Hori, T., Le Roux, J., "All-in-One Transformer: Unifying Speech Recognition, Audio Tagging, and Event Detection", Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech), DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2020-2757, October 2020, pp. 3112-3116.
      BibTeX TR2020-138 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Moritz2020oct,
      • author = {Moritz, Niko and Wichern, Gordon and Hori, Takaaki and Le Roux, Jonathan},
      • title = {All-in-One Transformer: Unifying Speech Recognition, Audio Tagging, and Event Detection},
      • booktitle = {Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech)},
      • year = 2020,
      • pages = {3112--3116},
      • month = oct,
      • doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2020-2757},
      • issn = {1990-9772},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2020-138}
      • }
    •  Manilow, E., Wichern, G., Le Roux, J., "Hierarchical Musical Instrument Separation", International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference, October 2020, pp. 376-383.
      BibTeX TR2020-136 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Manilow2020oct,
      • author = {Manilow, Ethan and Wichern, Gordon and Le Roux, Jonathan},
      • title = {Hierarchical Musical Instrument Separation},
      • booktitle = {International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference},
      • year = 2020,
      • pages = {376--383},
      • month = oct,
      • isbn = {978-0-9813537-0-8},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2020-136}
      • }
    •  Seetharaman, P., Wichern, G., Pardo, B., Le Roux, J., "Autoclip: Adaptive Gradient Clipping For Source Separation Networks", IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/MLSP49062.2020.9231926, September 2020.
      BibTeX TR2020-132 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Seetharaman2020sep,
      • author = {Seetharaman, Prem and Wichern, Gordon and Pardo, Bryan and Le Roux, Jonathan},
      • title = {Autoclip: Adaptive Gradient Clipping For Source Separation Networks},
      • booktitle = {IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP)},
      • year = 2020,
      • month = sep,
      • publisher = {IEEE},
      • doi = {https://doi.org/10.1109/MLSP49062.2020.9231926},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2020-132}
      • }
    •  Pishdadian, F., Wichern, G., Le Roux, J., "Finding Strength in Weakness: Learning to Separate Sounds with Weak Supervision", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, DOI: 10.1109/TASLP.2020.3013105, Vol. 28, pp. 2386-2399, September 2020.
      BibTeX TR2020-126 PDF
      • @article{Pishdadian2020sep,
      • author = {Pishdadian, Fatemeh and Wichern, Gordon and Le Roux, Jonathan},
      • title = {Finding Strength in Weakness: Learning to Separate Sounds with Weak Supervision},
      • journal = {IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing},
      • year = 2020,
      • volume = 28,
      • pages = {2386--2399},
      • month = sep,
      • doi = {10.1109/TASLP.2020.3013105},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2020-126}
      • }
    •  Seetharaman, P., Wichern, G., Le Roux, J., Pardo, B., "Bootstrapping Unsupervised Deep Music Separation from Primitive Auditory Grouping Principles", ICML 2020 Workshop on Self-supervision in Audio and Speech, July 2020.
      BibTeX TR2020-111 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Seetharaman2020jul,
      • author = {Seetharaman, Prem and Wichern, Gordon and Le Roux, Jonathan and Pardo, Bryan},
      • title = {Bootstrapping Unsupervised Deep Music Separation from Primitive Auditory Grouping Principles},
      • booktitle = {ICML 2020 Workshop on Self-supervision in Audio and Speech},
      • year = 2020,
      • month = jul,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2020-111}
      • }
    •  Chang, X., Zhang, W., Qian, Y., Le Roux, J., Watanabe, S., "End-To-End Multi-Speaker Speech Recognition with Transformer", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), DOI: 10.1109/ICASSP40776.2020.9054029, April 2020, pp. 6134-6138.
      BibTeX TR2020-043 PDF Video
      • @inproceedings{Chang2020apr,
      • author = {Chang, Xuankai and Zhang, Wangyou and Qian, Yanmin and Le Roux, Jonathan and Watanabe, Shinji},
      • title = {End-To-End Multi-Speaker Speech Recognition with Transformer},
      • booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
      • year = 2020,
      • pages = {6134--6138},
      • month = apr,
      • publisher = {IEEE},
      • doi = {10.1109/ICASSP40776.2020.9054029},
      • issn = {2379-190X},
      • isbn = {978-1-5090-6631-5},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2020-043}
      • }
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