Jiaxin Ye

Xin-Cheng Wen, Jia-Xin Ye, Yan Luo et al.

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) has become a growing focus of research in human-computer interaction. An essential challenge in SER is to extract common attributes from different speakers or languages, especially when a specific source corpus has to be trained to recognize the unknown data coming from another speech corpus. To address this challenge, a Capsule Network (CapsNet) and Transfer Learning based Mixed Task Net (CTLMTNet) are proposed to deal with both the singlecorpus and cross-corpus SER tasks simultaneously in this paper. For the single-corpus task, the combination of Convolution-Pooling and Attention CapsNet module CPAC) is designed by embedding the self-attention mechanism to the CapsNet, guiding the module to focus on the important features that can be fed into different capsules. The extracted high-level features by CPAC provide sufficient discriminative ability. Furthermore, to handle the cross-corpus task, CTL-MTNet employs a Corpus Adaptation Adversarial Module (CAAM) by combining CPAC with Margin Disparity Discrepancy (MDD), which can learn the domain-invariant emotion representations through extracting the strong emotion commonness. Experiments including ablation studies and visualizations on both singleand cross-corpus tasks using four well-known SER datasets in different languages are conducted for performance evaluation and comparison. The results indicate that in both tasks the CTL-MTNet showed better performance in all cases compared to a number of state-of-the-art methods. The source code and the supplementary materials are available at: https://github.com/MLDMXM2017/CTLMTNet

Yujie Wei, Jiaxin Ye, Zhizhong Huang et al.

Online continual learning (CL) studies the problem of learning continuously from a single-pass data stream while adapting to new data and mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Recently, by storing a small subset of old data, replay-based methods have shown promising performance. Unlike previous methods that focus on sample storage or knowledge distillation against catastrophic forgetting, this paper aims to understand why the online learning models fail to generalize well from a new perspective of shortcut learning. We identify shortcut learning as the key limiting factor for online CL, where the learned features may be biased, not generalizable to new tasks, and may have an adverse impact on knowledge distillation. To tackle this issue, we present the online prototype learning (OnPro) framework for online CL. First, we propose online prototype equilibrium to learn representative features against shortcut learning and discriminative features to avoid class confusion, ultimately achieving an equilibrium status that separates all seen classes well while learning new classes. Second, with the feedback of online prototypes, we devise a novel adaptive prototypical feedback mechanism to sense the classes that are easily misclassified and then enhance their boundaries. Extensive experimental results on widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of OnPro over the state-of-the-art baseline methods. Source code is available at https://github.com/weilllllls/OnPro.

Jiaxin Ye, Junping Zhang, Hongming Shan

Depression is a common mental disorder that affects millions of people worldwide. Although promising, current multimodal methods hinge on aligned or aggregated multimodal fusion, suffering two significant limitations: (i) inefficient long-range temporal modeling, and (ii) sub-optimal multimodal fusion between intermodal fusion and intramodal processing. In this paper, we propose an audio-visual progressive fusion Mamba for multimodal depression detection, termed DepMamba. DepMamba features two core designs: hierarchical contextual modeling and progressive multimodal fusion. On the one hand, hierarchical modeling introduces convolution neural networks and Mamba to extract the local-to-global features within long-range sequences. On the other hand, the progressive fusion first presents a multimodal collaborative State Space Model (SSM) extracting intermodal and intramodal information for each modality, and then utilizes a multimodal enhanced SSM for modality cohesion. Extensive experimental results on two large-scale depression datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our DepMamba over existing state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Jiaxin-Ye/DepMamba.

Jia-Xin Ye, Xin-Cheng Wen, Xuan-Ze Wang et al.

In human-computer interaction, Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) plays an essential role in understanding the user's intent and improving the interactive experience. While similar sentimental speeches own diverse speaker characteristics but share common antecedents and consequences, an essential challenge for SER is how to produce robust and discriminative representations through causality between speech emotions. In this paper, we propose a Gated Multi-scale Temporal Convolutional Network (GM-TCNet) to construct a novel emotional causality representation learning component with a multi-scale receptive field. GM-TCNet deploys a novel emotional causality representation learning component to capture the dynamics of emotion across the time domain, constructed with dilated causal convolution layer and gating mechanism. Besides, it utilizes skip connection fusing high-level features from different gated convolution blocks to capture abundant and subtle emotion changes in human speech. GM-TCNet first uses a single type of feature, mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, as inputs and then passes them through the gated temporal convolutional module to generate the high-level features. Finally, the features are fed to the emotion classifier to accomplish the SER task. The experimental results show that our model maintains the highest performance in most cases compared to state-of-the-art techniques.

Ziyang Ma, Zhisheng Zheng, Jiaxin Ye et al.

We propose emotion2vec, a universal speech emotion representation model. emotion2vec is pre-trained on open-source unlabeled emotion data through self-supervised online distillation, combining utterance-level loss and frame-level loss during pre-training. emotion2vec outperforms state-of-the-art pre-trained universal models and emotion specialist models by only training linear layers for the speech emotion recognition task on the mainstream IEMOCAP dataset. In addition, emotion2vec shows consistent improvements among 10 different languages of speech emotion recognition datasets. emotion2vec also shows excellent results on other emotion tasks, such as song emotion recognition, emotion prediction in conversation, and sentiment analysis. Comparison experiments, ablation experiments, and visualization comprehensively demonstrate the universal capability of the proposed emotion2vec. To the best of our knowledge, emotion2vec is the first universal representation model in various emotion-related tasks, filling a gap in the field.

Jiaxin Ye, Boyuan Cao, Hongming Shan

How much can we infer about an emotional voice solely from an expressive face? This intriguing question holds great potential for applications such as virtual character dubbing and aiding individuals with expressive language disorders. Existing face-to-speech methods offer great promise in capturing identity characteristics but struggle to generate diverse vocal styles with emotional expression. In this paper, we explore a new task, termed emotional face-to-speech, aiming to synthesize emotional speech directly from expressive facial cues. To that end, we introduce DEmoFace, a novel generative framework that leverages a discrete diffusion transformer (DiT) with curriculum learning, built upon a multi-level neural audio codec. Specifically, we propose multimodal DiT blocks to dynamically align text and speech while tailoring vocal styles based on facial emotion and identity. To enhance training efficiency and generation quality, we further introduce a coarse-to-fine curriculum learning algorithm for multi-level token processing. In addition, we develop an enhanced predictor-free guidance to handle diverse conditioning scenarios, enabling multi-conditional generation and disentangling complex attributes effectively. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that DEmoFace generates more natural and consistent speech compared to baselines, even surpassing speech-driven methods. Demos are shown at https://demoface-ai.github.io/.

Jiaxin Ye, Hongming Shan

Vision-guided speech generation aims to produce authentic speech from facial appearance or lip motions without relying on auditory signals, offering significant potential for applications such as dubbing in filmmaking and assisting individuals with aphonia. Despite recent progress, existing methods struggle to achieve unified cross-modal alignment across semantics, timbre, and emotional prosody from visual cues, prompting us to propose Consistent Video-to-Speech (CV2S) as an extended task to enhance cross-modal consistency. To tackle emerging challenges, we introduce ImaginTalk, a novel cross-modal diffusion framework that generates faithful speech using only visual input, operating within a discrete space. Specifically, we propose a discrete lip aligner that predicts discrete speech tokens from lip videos to capture semantic information, while an error detector identifies misaligned tokens, which are subsequently refined through masked language modeling with BERT. To further enhance the expressiveness of the generated speech, we develop a style diffusion transformer equipped with a face-style adapter that adaptively customizes identity and prosody dynamics across both the channel and temporal dimensions while ensuring synchronization with lip-aware semantic features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ImaginTalk can generate high-fidelity speech with more accurate semantic details and greater expressiveness in timbre and emotion compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Demos are shown at our project page: https://imagintalk.github.io.

Ziyang Ma, Mingjie Chen, Hezhao Zhang et al.

Speech emotion recognition (SER) is an important part of human-computer interaction, receiving extensive attention from both industry and academia. However, the current research field of SER has long suffered from the following problems: 1) There are few reasonable and universal splits of the datasets, making comparing different models and methods difficult. 2) No commonly used benchmark covers numerous corpus and languages for researchers to refer to, making reproduction a burden. In this paper, we propose EmoBox, an out-of-the-box multilingual multi-corpus speech emotion recognition toolkit, along with a benchmark for both intra-corpus and cross-corpus settings. For intra-corpus settings, we carefully designed the data partitioning for different datasets. For cross-corpus settings, we employ a foundation SER model, emotion2vec, to mitigate annotation errors and obtain a test set that is fully balanced in speakers and emotions distributions. Based on EmoBox, we present the intra-corpus SER results of 10 pre-trained speech models on 32 emotion datasets with 14 languages, and the cross-corpus SER results on 4 datasets with the fully balanced test sets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest SER benchmark, across language scopes and quantity scales. We hope that our toolkit and benchmark can facilitate the research of SER in the community.