Luca Della Libera

Open-Source Conversational AI with SpeechBrain 1.0

Mirco Ravanelli

Titouan Parcollet

Adel Moumen

Sylvain de Langen

Yingzhi Wang

Zeyu Zhao

Shucong Zhang

Georgios Karakasidis

Sung-Lin Yeh

Pierre Champion

Aku Rouhe

Rudolf Braun … (see 13 more)

Florian Mai

Juan Zuluaga-Gomez

Seyed Mahed Mousavi

Andreas Nautsch

Ha Nguyen

Xuechen Liu

Sangeet Sagar

Jarod Duret

Salima Mdhaffar

Gaëlle Laperrière

Mickael Rouvier

Renato De Mori

Yannick Estève

SpeechBrain is an open-source Conversational AI toolkit based on PyTorch, focused particularly on speech processing tasks such as speech rec… (see more)ognition, speech enhancement, speaker recognition, text-to-speech, and much more. It promotes transparency and replicability by releasing both the pre-trained models and the complete "recipes" of code and algorithms required for training them. This paper presents SpeechBrain 1.0, a significant milestone in the evolution of the toolkit, which now has over 200 recipes for speech, audio, and language processing tasks, and more than 100 models available on Hugging Face. SpeechBrain 1.0 introduces new technologies to support diverse learning modalities, Large Language Model (LLM) integration, and advanced decoding strategies, along with novel models, tasks, and modalities. It also includes a new benchmark repository, offering researchers a unified platform for evaluating models across diverse tasks.

2024-06-28

arXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

DASB -- Discrete Audio and Speech Benchmark

Pooneh Mousavi

Luca Della Libera

Jarod Duret

Artem Ploujnikov

Yusuf Cem Sübakan

Mirco Ravanaelli

Discrete audio tokens have recently gained considerable attention for their potential to connect audio and language processing, enabling the… (see more) creation of modern multimodal large language models. Ideal audio tokens must effectively preserve phonetic and semantic content along with paralinguistic information, speaker identity, and other details. While several types of audio tokens have been recently proposed, identifying the optimal tokenizer for various tasks is challenging due to the inconsistent evaluation settings in existing studies. To address this gap, we release the Discrete Audio and Speech Benchmark (DASB), a comprehensive leaderboard for benchmarking discrete audio tokens across a wide range of discriminative tasks, including speech recognition, speaker identification and verification, emotion recognition, keyword spotting, and intent classification, as well as generative tasks such as speech enhancement, separation, and text-to-speech. Our results show that, on average, semantic tokens outperform compression tokens across most discriminative and generative tasks. However, the performance gap between semantic tokens and standard continuous representations remains substantial, highlighting the need for further research in this field.

2024-06-19

ArXiv (preprint)

doi.org

openreview.net

Focal Modulation Networks for Interpretable Sound Classification

Luca Della Libera

Cem Subakan

Mirco Ravanelli

The increasing success of deep neural networks has raised concerns about their inherent black-box nature, posing challenges related to inter… (see more)pretability and trust. While there has been extensive exploration of interpretation techniques in vision and language, interpretability in the audio domain has received limited attention, primarily focusing on post-hoc explanations. This paper addresses the problem of interpretability by-design in the audio domain by utilizing the recently proposed attention-free focal modulation networks (FocalNets). We apply FocalNets to the task of environmental sound classification for the first time and evaluate their interpretability properties on the popular ESC-50 dataset. Our method outperforms a similarly sized vision transformer both in terms of accuracy and interpretability. Furthermore, it is competitive against PIQ, a method specifically designed for post-hoc interpretation in the audio domain.

2024-04-13

2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Workshops (ICASSPW) (published)

doi.org

arxiv.org

Resource-Efficient Separation Transformer

Luca Della Libera

Cem Subakan

Mirco Ravanelli

Samuele Cornell

Frédéric Lepoutre

François Grondin

Transformers have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance in speech separation. These models, however, are computationally demanding … (see more)and require a lot of learnable parameters. This paper explores Transformer-based speech separation with a reduced computational cost. Our main contribution is the development of the Resource-Efficient Separation Transformer (RE-SepFormer), a self-attention-based architecture that reduces the computational burden in two ways. First, it uses non-overlapping blocks in the latent space. Second, it operates on compact latent summaries calculated from each chunk. The RE-SepFormer reaches a competitive performance on the popular WSJ0-2Mix and WHAM! datasets in both causal and non-causal settings. Remarkably, it scales significantly better than the previous Transformer-based architectures in terms of memory and inference time, making it more suitable for processing long mixtures.

2024-04-13

ICASSP 2024 - 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (published)

doi.org

arxiv.org

CL-MASR: A Continual Learning Benchmark for Multilingual ASR

Luca Della Libera

Pooneh Mousavi

Salah Zaiem

Yusuf Cem Sübakan

Mirco Ravanaelli

2023-12-31

IEEE ACM Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process. (published)