Portrait de Mirco Ravanelli

Mirco Ravanelli

Membre académique associé
Professeur agrégé, Concordia University, École de génie et d'informatique Gina-Cody
Professeur associé, Université de Montréal, Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage profond

Biographie

Mirco Ravanelli est professeur adjoint à l'Université Concordia, professeur associé à l'Université de Montréal et membre associé de Mila – Institut québécois d’intelligence artificielle. Lauréat du prix Amazon Research 2022, il est expert en apprentissage profond et en IA conversationnelle, et a publié plus de 60 articles dans ces domaines. Il se concentre principalement sur les nouveaux algorithmes d'apprentissage profond, y compris l'apprentissage autosupervisé, continu, multimodal, coopératif et économe en énergie. Mirco Ravanelli a effectué son postdoctorat à Mila, sous la direction du professeur Yoshua Bengio. Il est notamment le fondateur et le chef de file de SpeechBrain, l'une des boîtes à outils en code source ouvert les plus largement adoptées dans le domaine du traitement de la parole et de l'IA conversationnelle.

Étudiants actuels

Baccalauréat - Concordia
Stagiaire de recherche - Concordia
Maîtrise recherche - Concordia University
Maîtrise recherche - Concordia
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - Concordia
Doctorat - Concordia
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - Concordia
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - Concordia
Maîtrise recherche - Concordia
Doctorat - Concordia
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - Concordia
Maîtrise recherche - Concordia University
Stagiaire de recherche - Université Laval
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - Université Laval
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise professionnelle - Concordia Univesity
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - University of Toulon
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Stagiaire de recherche - Concordia
Doctorat - Concordia
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Postdoctorat - McGill
Doctorat - UdeM
Postdoctorat - Concordia

Publications

Audio Prototypical Network For Controllable Music Recommendation
Traditional recommendation systems represent user preferences in dense representations obtained through black-box encoder models. While thes… (voir plus)e models often provide strong recommendation performance, they lack interpretability for users, leaving users unable to understand or control the system's modeling of their preferences. This limitation is especially challenging in music recommendation, where user preferences are highly personal and often evolve based on nuanced qualities like mood, genre, tempo, or instrumentation. In this paper, we propose an audio prototypical network for controllable music recommendation. This network expresses user preferences in terms of prototypes representative of semantically meaningful features pertaining to musical qualities. We show that the model obtains competitive recommendation performance compared to popular baseline models while also providing interpretable and controllable user profiles.
Generalization Limits of Graph Neural Networks in Identity Effects Learning
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for data-driven learning on various graph domains. They are usually based on a … (voir plus)message-passing mechanism and have gained increasing popularity for their intuitive formulation, which is closely linked to the Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) test for graph isomorphism to which they have been proven equivalent in terms of expressive power. In this work, we establish new generalization properties and fundamental limits of GNNs in the context of learning so-called identity effects, i.e., the task of determining whether an object is composed of two identical components or not. Our study is motivated by the need to understand the capabilities of GNNs when performing simple cognitive tasks, with potential applications in computational linguistics and chemistry. We analyze two case studies: (i) two-letters words, for which we show that GNNs trained via stochastic gradient descent are unable to generalize to unseen letters when utilizing orthogonal encodings like one-hot representations; (ii) dicyclic graphs, i.e., graphs composed of two cycles, for which we present positive existence results leveraging the connection between GNNs and the WL test. Our theoretical analysis is supported by an extensive numerical study.
A protocol for trustworthy EEG decoding with neural networks
SpeechBrain-MOABB: An open-source Python library for benchmarking deep neural networks applied to EEG signals
Listenable Maps for Zero-Shot Audio Classifiers
Interpreting the decisions of deep learning models, including audio classifiers, is crucial for ensuring the transparency and trustworthines… (voir plus)s of this technology. In this paper, we introduce LMAC-ZS (Listenable Maps for Audio Classifiers in the Zero-Shot context), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first decoder-based post-hoc interpretation method for explaining the decisions of zero-shot audio classifiers. The proposed method utilizes a novel loss function that maximizes the faithfulness to the original similarity between a given text-and-audio pair. We provide an extensive evaluation using the Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) model to showcase that our interpreter remains faithful to the decisions in a zero-shot classification context. Moreover, we qualitatively show that our method produces meaningful explanations that correlate well with different text prompts.
Audio Editing with Non-Rigid Text Prompts
In this paper, we explore audio-editing with non-rigid text edits. We show that the proposed editing pipeline is able to create audio edits … (voir plus)that remain faithful to the input audio. We explore text prompts that perform addition, style transfer, and in-painting. We quantitatively and qualitatively show that the edits are able to obtain results which outperform Audio-LDM, a recently released text-prompted audio generation model. Qualitative inspection of the results points out that the edits given by our approach remain more faithful to the input audio in terms of keeping the original onsets and offsets of the audio events.
Listenable Maps for Audio Classifiers
Despite the impressive performance of deep learning models across diverse tasks, their complexity poses challenges for interpretation. This … (voir plus)challenge is particularly evident for audio signals, where conveying interpretations becomes inherently difficult. To address this issue, we introduce Listenable Maps for Audio Classifiers (L-MAC), a posthoc interpretation method that generates faithful and listenable interpretations. L-MAC utilizes a decoder on top of a pretrained classifier to generate binary masks that highlight relevant portions of the input audio. We train the decoder with a loss function that maximizes the confidence of the classifier decision on the masked-in portion of the audio while minimizing the probability of model output for the masked-out portion. Quantitative evaluations on both in-domain and out-of-domain data demonstrate that L-MAC consistently produces more faithful interpretations than several gradient and masking-based methodologies. Furthermore, a user study confirms that, on average, users prefer the interpretations generated by the proposed technique.
Open-Source Conversational AI with SpeechBrain 1.0
Adel Moumen
Sylvain de Langen
Yingzhi Wang
Zeyu Zhao
Shucong Zhang
Georgios Karakasidis
Pierre Champion
Aku Rouhe
Rudolf Braun … (voir 13 de plus)
Florian Mai
Juan Zuluaga-Gomez
Seyed Mahed Mousavi
Andreas Nautsch
Ha Nguyen
Xuechen Liu
Sangeet Sagar
Jarod Duret
Salima Mdhaffar
Gaëlle Laperrière
Mickael Rouvier
Yannick Estève
SpeechBrain is an open-source Conversational AI toolkit based on PyTorch, focused particularly on speech processing tasks such as speech rec… (voir plus)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.
Phoneme Discretized Saliency Maps for Explainable Detection of AI-Generated Voice
In this paper, we propose Phoneme Discretized Saliency Maps (PDSM), a discretization algorithm for saliency maps that takes advantage of pho… (voir plus)neme boundaries for explainable detection of AI-generated voice. We experimentally show with two different Text-to-Speech systems (i.e., Tacotron2 and Fastspeech2) that the proposed algorithm produces saliency maps that result in more faithful explanations compared to standard posthoc explanation methods. Moreover, by associating the saliency maps to the phoneme representations, this methodology generates explanations that tend to be more understandable than standard saliency maps on magnitude spectrograms.
Towards Foundational Models for Molecular Learning on Large-Scale Multi-Task Datasets
Joao Alex Cunha
Zhiyi Li
Samuel Maddrell-Mander
Callum McLean
Jama Hussein Mohamud
Michael Craig
Cristian Gabellini
Kerstin Klaser
Josef Dean
Maciej Sypetkowski
Hadrien Mary
Therence Bois
Andrew Fitzgibbon
Błażej Banaszewski
Chad Martin
Dominic Masters
Recently, pre-trained foundation models have shown significant advancements in multiple fields. However, the lack of datasets with labeled f… (voir plus)eatures and codebases has hindered the development of a supervised foundation model for molecular tasks. Here, we have carefully curated seven datasets specifically tailored for node- and graph-level prediction tasks to facilitate supervised learning on molecules. Moreover, to support the development of multi-task learning on our proposed datasets, we created the Graphium graph machine learning library. Our dataset collection encompasses two distinct categories. Firstly, the TOYMIX category modifies three small existing datasets with additional data for multi-task learning. Secondly, the LARGEMIX category includes four large-scale datasets with 344M graph-level data points and 409M node-level data points from ∼5M unique molecules. Finally, the ultra-large dataset contains 2,210M graph-level data points and 2,031M node-level data points coming from 86M molecules. Hence our datasets represent an order of magnitude increase in data volume compared to other 2D-GNN datasets. In addition, recognizing that molecule-related tasks often span multiple levels, we have designed our library to explicitly support multi-tasking, offering a diverse range of multi-level representations, i.e., representations at the graph, node, edge, and node-pair level. We equipped the library with an extensive collection of models and features to cover different levels of molecule analysis. By combining our curated datasets with this versatile library, we aim to accelerate the development of molecule foundation models. Datasets and code are available at https://github.com/datamol-io/graphium.
Focal Modulation Networks for Interpretable Sound Classification
The increasing success of deep neural networks has raised concerns about their inherent black-box nature, posing challenges related to inter… (voir plus)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.
Resource-Efficient Separation Transformer
Samuele Cornell
Frédéric Lepoutre
François Grondin
Transformers have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance in speech separation. These models, however, are computationally demanding … (voir plus)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.