A main challenge in applying deep learning to music processing is the availability of training data. One potential solution is Multi-task Learning, in which the model also learns to solve related auxiliary tasks on additional datasets to exploit their correlation. While intuitive in principle, it can be challenging to identify related tasks and construct the model to optimally share information between tasks. In this paper, we explore vocal activity detection as an additional task to stabilise and improve the performance of vocal separation. Further, we identify problematic biases specific to each dataset that could limit the generalisation capability of separation and detection models, to which our proposed approach is robust. Experiments show improved performance in separation as well as vocal detection compared to single-task baselines. However, we find that the commonly used Signal-to-Distortion Ratio (SDR) metrics did not capture the improvement on non-vocal sections, indicating the need for improved evaluation methodologies.
aims to circumvent this problem by providing additional information to the separation model, e.g. the musical score @cite_18 . This way, the problem can be simplified, which often leads to improved results on small, annotated datasets. On the other hand, such approaches can only be employed if suitable side information is indeed available, which is often not the case for musical scores. In this paper, we thus focus on a more readily available and more easily created type of side information: vocal activity labels.
@cite_18
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Many success stories involving deep neural networks are instances of supervised learning, where available labels power gradient-based learning methods. Creating such labels, however, can be expensive and thus there is increasing interest in weak labels which only provide coarse information, with uncertainty regarding time, location or value. Using such labels often leads to considerable challenges for the learning process. Current methods for weak-label training often employ standard supervised approaches that additionally reassign or prune labels during the learning process. The information gain, however, is often limited as only the importance of labels where the network already yields reasonable results is boosted. We propose treating weak-label training as an unsupervised problem and use the labels to guide the representation learning to induce structure. To this end, we propose two autoencoder extensions: class activity penalties and structured dropout. We demonstrate the capabilities of our approach in the context of score-informed source separation of music.