Mismatching problem between the source and target noisy corpora severely hinder the practical use of the machine-learning-based voice activity detection (VAD). In this paper, we try to address this problem in the transfer learning prospective. Transfer learning tries to find a common learning machine or a common feature subspace that is shared by both the source corpus and the target corpus. The denoising deep neural network is used as the learning machine. Three transfer techniques, which aim to learn common feature representations, are used for analysis. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the transfer learning schemes on the mismatch problem.
In respect of the VAD study, the distribution difference between different noise scenarios has been mentioned in traditional VADs. For example, in @cite_15 , Chang used different statistical models for modeling the speech and noise distributions in different noise scenarios. Another related topic with domain adaptation is the online learning methods @cite_5 , they update the model parameters according to the historical domain information of the speech signals. Traditional statistical-model-based VADs @cite_15 can also be regarded as unsupervised online learning methods. But to our knowledge, how to combine multiple features effectively is still an open problem in the online learning methods. On the other side, although the domain-adaptation-based VAD works in batch mode, it can combine multiple features effectively and yield a high accuracy without a requirement of heavy manual labeling.
@cite_5 @cite_15
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How to construct models for speech nonspeech discrimination is a crucial point for voice activity detectors (VADs). Semi-supervised learning is the most popular way for model construction in conventional VADs. In this correspondence, we propose an unsupervised learning framework to construct statistical models for VAD. This framework is realized by a sequential Gaussian mixture model. It comprises an initialization process and an updating process. At each subband, the GMM is firstly initialized using EM algorithm, and then sequentially updated frame by frame. From the GMM, a self-regulatory threshold for discrimination is derived at each subband. Some constraints are introduced to this GMM for the sake of reliability. For the reason of unsupervised learning, the proposed VAD does not rely on an assumption that the first several frames of an utterance are nonspeech, which is widely used in most VADs. Moreover, the speech presence probability in the time-frequency domain is a byproduct of this VAD. We tested it on speech from TIMIT database and noise from NOISEX-92 database. The evaluations effectively showed its promising performance in comparison with VADs such as ITU G.729B, GSM AMR, and a typical semi-supervised VAD. Domain adaptation refers to the problem of leveraging labeled data in a source domain to learn an accurate model in a target domain where labels are scarce or unavailable. A recent approach for finding a common representation of the two domains is via domain adversarial training (Ganin & Lempitsky, 2015), which attempts to induce a feature extractor that matches the source and target feature distributions in some feature space. However, domain adversarial training faces two critical limitations: 1) if the feature extraction function has high-capacity, then feature distribution matching is a weak constraint, 2) in non-conservative domain adaptation (where no single classifier can perform well in both the source and target domains), training the model to do well on the source domain hurts performance on the target domain. In this paper, we address these issues through the lens of the cluster assumption, i.e., decision boundaries should not cross high-density data regions. We propose two novel and related models: 1) the Virtual Adversarial Domain Adaptation (VADA) model, which combines domain adversarial training with a penalty term that punishes the violation the cluster assumption; 2) the Decision-boundary Iterative Refinement Training with a Teacher (DIRT-T) model, which takes the VADA model as initialization and employs natural gradient steps to further minimize the cluster assumption violation. Extensive empirical results demonstrate that the combination of these two models significantly improve the state-of-the-art performance on several visual domain adaptation benchmarks. Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to mitigate the domain shift when transferring knowledge from a supervised source domain to an unsupervised target domain. Adversarial Feature Alignment has been successfully explored to minimize the domain discrepancy. However, existing methods are usually struggling to optimize mixed learning objectives and vulnerable to negative transfer when two domains do not share the identical label space. In this paper, we empirically reveal that the erratic discrimination of target domain mainly reflects in its much lower feature norm value with respect to that of the source domain. We present a non-parametric Adaptive Feature Norm AFN approach, which is independent of the association between label spaces of the two domains. We demonstrate that adapting feature norms of source and target domains to achieve equilibrium over a large range of values can result in significant domain transfer gains. Without bells and whistles but a few lines of code, our method largely lifts the discrimination of target domain (23.7 from the Source Only in VisDA2017) and achieves the new state of the art under the vanilla setting. Furthermore, as our approach does not require to deliberately align the feature distributions, it is robust to negative transfer and can outperform the existing approaches under the partial setting by an extremely large margin (9.8 on Office-Home and 14.1 on VisDA2017). Code is available at this https URL. We are responsible for the reproducibility of our method. Fusing the advantages of multiple acoustic features is important for the robustness of voice activity detection (VAD). Recently, the machine-learning-based VADs have shown a superiority to traditional VADs on multiple feature fusion tasks. However, existing machine-learning-based VADs only utilize shallow models, which cannot explore the underlying manifold of the features. In this paper, we propose to fuse multiple features via a deep model, called deep belief network (DBN). DBN is a powerful hierarchical generative model for feature extraction. It can describe highly variant functions and discover the manifold of the features. We take the multiple serially-concatenated features as the input layer of DBN, and then extract a new feature by transferring these features through multiple nonlinear hidden layers. Finally, we predict the class of the new feature by a linear classifier. We further analyze that even a single-hidden-layer-based belief network is as powerful as the state-of-the-art models in the machine-learning-based VADs. In our empirical comparison, ten common features are used for performance analysis. Extensive experimental results on the AURORA2 corpus show that the DBN-based VAD not only outperforms eleven referenced VADs, but also can meet the real-time detection demand of VAD. The results also show that the DBN-based VAD can fuse the advantages of multiple features effectively.