Abstract

We present a method to control the emotional prosody of Text to Speech (TTS) systems by us- ing phoneme-level intermediate features (pitch, energy, and duration) as levers. As a key idea, we propose Differential Scaling (DS) to dis- entangle features relating to affective prosody from those arising due to acoustics conditions and speaker identity. With thorough exper- imental studies, we show that the proposed method improves over the prior art in accu- rately emulating the desired emotions while retaining the naturalness of speech. We ex- tend the traditional evaluation of using indi- vidual sentences for a more complete evalua- tion of HCI systems. We present a novel ex- perimental setup by replacing an actor with a TTS system in offline and live conversa- tions. The emotion to be rendered is either predicted or manually assigned. The results show that the proposed method is strongly pre- ferred over the state-of-the-art TTS system and adds the much-coveted “human touch” in ma- chine dialogue. Audio samples for our exper- iments and the code are available at: https: //emtts.github.io/tts-demo/

Abstract

No Results Found

Abstract

Despite existing works of Audio-Visual Saliency Prediction (AVSP) models claiming to achieve promising results by fusing audio modality over visual-only models, these models fail to leverage audio information. In this paper, we investigate the relevance of audio cues in conjunction with the visual ones and conduct extensive analysis by employing well-established audio modules and fusion techniques from diverse correlated audio-visual tasks. Our analysis on ten diverse saliency datasets suggests that none of the methods worked for incorporating audio. Furthermore, we bring to light, why AVSP models show a gain in performance over visual-only models, though the audio branch is agnostic at inference. Our work questions the role of audio in current deep AVSP models and motivates the community to a clear avenue for reconsideration of the complex architectures by demonstrating that simpler alternatives work equally well.

Abstract

We investigate Referring Image Segmentation (RIS), which outputs a segmentation map corresponding to the natural language description. Addressing RIS efficiently requires considering the interactions happening across visual and linguistic modalities and the interactions within each modality. Existing methods are limited because they either compute different forms of interactions sequentially (leading to error propagation) or ignore intramodal interactions. We address this limitation by performing all three interactions simultaneously through a Synchronous Multi-Modal Fusion Module (SFM). Moreover, to produce refined segmentation masks, we propose a novel Hierarchical Cross-Modal Aggregation Module (HCAM), where linguistic features facilitate the exchange of contextual information across the visual hierarchy. We present thorough ablation studies and validate our approach’s performance on four benchmark datasets, showing considerable performance gains over the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

Abstract

The prose storyboard language is a formal language for de- scribing movies shot by shot, where each shot is described with a unique sentence. The language uses a simple syntax and limited vocabulary borrowed from working practices in traditional movie-making, and is intended to be readable both by machines and humans. The language is designed to serve as a high-level user interface for intelligent cinematog- raphy and editing systems

Abstract

There has been increasing interest in building deep hierarchy-aware classifiers that aim to quantify and reduce the severity of mistakes, and not just reduce the number of errors. The idea is to exploit the label hierarchy (e.g., the WordNet ontology) and consider graph distances as a proxy for mistake severity. Surprisingly, on examining mistake-severity distributions of the top-1 prediction, we find that current state-of-the-art hierarchy-aware deep classifiers do not always show practical improvement over the standard cross-entropy baseline in making better mistakes. The reason for the reduction in average mistake-severity can be attributed to the increase in low-severity mistakes, which may also explain the noticeable drop in their accuracy. To this end, we use the classical Conditional Risk Minimization (CRM) framework for hierarchy-aware classification. Given a cost matrix and a reliable estimate of likelihoods (obtained from a trained network), CRM simply amends mistakes at inference time; it needs no extra hyperparameters and requires adding just a few lines of code to the standard cross-entropy baseline. It significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art and consistently obtains large reductions in the average hierarchical distance of top- predictions across datasets, with very little loss in accuracy. CRM, because of its simplicity, can be used with any off-the-shelf trained model that provides reliable likelihood estimates.

Abstract

We propose the ViNet architecture for audiovisual saliency prediction. ViNet is a fully convolutional encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder uses visual features from a network trained for action recognition, and the decoder infers a saliency map via trilinear interpolation and 3D convolutions, combining features from multiple hierarchies. The overall architecture of ViNet is conceptually simple; it is causal and runs in real-time (60 fps). ViNet does not use audio as input and still outperforms the state-of-the-art audio-visual saliency prediction models on nine different datasets (three visual-only and six audio-visual datasets). ViNet also surpasses human performance on the CC, SIM and AUC metrics for the AVE dataset, and to our knowledge, it is the first model to do so. We also explore a variation of ViNet architecture by augmenting audio features into the decoder. To our surprise, upon sufficient training, the network becomes agnostic to the input audio and provides the same output irrespective of the input. Interestingly, we also observe similar behaviour in the previous state-of-the-art models [1] for audio-visual saliency prediction. Our findings contrast with previous works on deep learning-based audio-visual saliency prediction, suggesting a clear avenue for future explorations incorporating audio in a more effective manner. The code and pre-trained models are

Abstract

main generalization (DG) of machine learning algorithms is defined as their ability to learn a domain agnostic hypothesis from multiple training distributions, which generalizes onto data from an unseen domain. DG is vital in scenarios where the target domain with distinct characteristics has sparse data for training. Aligning with recent work [9], we find that a straightforward Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) baseline consistently outperforms existing DG methods. We present ablation studies indicating that the choice of backbone, data augmentation, and optimization algorithms overshadows the many tricks and trades explored in the prior art. Our work leads to a new state of the art on the four popular DG datasets, surpassing previous methods by large margins. Furthermore, as a key contribution, we propose a classwise-DG formulation, where for each class, we randomly select one of the domains and keep it aside for testing. We argue that this benchmarking is closer to human learning and relevant in real-world scenarios. We comprehensively benchmark classwise-DG on the DomainBed [9] and propose a method combining ERM and reverse gradients to achieve the state-of-the-art results. To our surprise, despite being exposed to all domains during training, the classwise DG is more challenging than traditional DG evaluation and motivates more fundamental rethinking on the problem of DG.

Abstract

Machine-generated speech is characterized by its limited or unnatural emotional variation. Current text to speech systems generates speech with either a flat emotion, emotion selected from a predefined set, average variation learned from prosody sequences in training data or transferred from a source style. We propose a text to speech(TTS) system, where a user can choose the emotion of generated speech from a continuous and meaningful emotion space (Arousal-Valence space). The proposed TTS system can generate speech from the text in any speaker’s style, with fine control of emotion. We show that the system works on emotion unseen during training and can scale to previously unseen speakers given his/her speech sample. Our work expands the horizon of the state-of-the-art FastSpeech2 backbone to a multi-speaker setting and gives it much-coveted continuous (and interpretable) affective control, without any observable degradation in the quality of the synthesized speech. Audio samples are available at https://researchweb.iiit.ac. in/˜sarath.s/emotts/

Abstract

No Results Found