The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) has proven to be an effective model for producing semantically meaningful latent representations for natural data. However, it has thus far seen limited application to sequential data, and, as we demonstrate, existing recurrent VAE models have difficulty modeling sequences with long-term structure. To address this issue, we propose the use of a hierarchical decoder, which first outputs embeddings for subsequences of the input and then uses these embeddings to generate each subsequence independently. This structure encourages the model to utilize its latent code, thereby avoiding the "posterior collapse" problem which remains an issue for recurrent VAEs. We apply this architecture to modeling sequences of musical notes and find that it exhibits dramatically better sampling, interpolation, and reconstruction performance than a "flat" baseline model. An implementation of our "MusicVAE" is available online at this http URL
More broadly, our model can be considered in the sequence-to-sequence framework @cite_17 , where an encoder produces a compressed representation of an input sequence which is then used to condition a decoder to generate an output sequence. For example, the NSynth model learns embeddings by compressing audio waveforms with a downsampling convolutional encoder and then reconstructing audio with a WaveNet-style decoder @cite_29 . Recurrent sequence-to-sequence models are most often applied to sequence tasks where the input and output sequences are different. Nevertheless, sequence-to-sequence autoencoders have been occasionally considered, e.g., as an auxiliary unsupervised training method for semi-supervised learning @cite_39 or in the paragraph autoencoder described above. Again, our approach differs in that we impose structure on the compressed representation (our latent vector) so that we can perform sampling and interpolation.
@cite_29 @cite_39 @cite_17
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Acoustic Event Classification (AEC) has become a significant task for machines to perceive the surrounding auditory scene. However, extracting effective representations that capture the underlying characteristics of the acoustic events is still challenging. Previous methods mainly focused on designing the audio features in a 'hand-crafted' manner. Interestingly, data-learnt features have been recently reported to show better performance. Up to now, these were only considered on the frame-level. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised learning framework to learn a vector representation of an audio sequence for AEC. This framework consists of a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) encoder and a RNN decoder, which respectively transforms the variable-length audio sequence into a fixed-length vector and reconstructs the input sequence on the generated vector. After training the encoder-decoder, we feed the audio sequences to the encoder and then take the learnt vectors as the audio sequence representations. Compared with previous methods, the proposed method can not only deal with the problem of arbitrary-lengths of audio streams, but also learn the salient information of the sequence. Extensive evaluation on a large-size acoustic event database is performed, and the empirical results demonstrate that the learnt audio sequence representation yields a significant performance improvement by a large margin compared with other state-of-the-art hand-crafted sequence features for AEC. The vector representations of fixed dimensionality for words (in text) offered by Word2Vec have been shown to be very useful in many application scenarios, in particular due to the semantic information they carry. This paper proposes a parallel version, the Audio Word2Vec. It offers the vector representations of fixed dimensionality for variable-length audio segments. These vector representations are shown to describe the sequential phonetic structures of the audio segments to a good degree, with very attractive real world applications such as query-by-example Spoken Term Detection (STD). In this STD application, the proposed approach significantly outperformed the conventional Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) based approaches at significantly lower computation requirements. We propose unsupervised learning of Audio Word2Vec from audio data without human annotation using Sequence-to-sequence Audoencoder (SA). SA consists of two RNNs equipped with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) units: the first RNN (encoder) maps the input audio sequence into a vector representation of fixed dimensionality, and the second RNN (decoder) maps the representation back to the input audio sequence. The two RNNs are jointly trained by minimizing the reconstruction error. Denoising Sequence-to-sequence Autoencoder (DSA) is furthered proposed offering more robust learning. The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) has proven to be an effective model for producing semantically meaningful latent representations for natural data. However, it has thus far seen limited application to sequential data, and, as we demonstrate, existing recurrent VAE models have difficulty modeling sequences with long-term structure. To address this issue, we propose the use of a hierarchical decoder, which first outputs embeddings for subsequences of the input and then uses these embeddings to generate each subsequence independently. This structure encourages the model to utilize its latent code, thereby avoiding the "posterior collapse" problem which remains an issue for recurrent VAEs. We apply this architecture to modeling sequences of musical notes and find that it exhibits dramatically better sampling, interpolation, and reconstruction performance than a "flat" baseline model. An implementation of our "MusicVAE" is available online at this http URL