Aswin Subramanian

Efthymios Tzinis, Gordon Wichern, Aswin Subramanian et al.

We introduce a new paradigm for single-channel target source separation where the sources of interest can be distinguished using non-mutually exclusive concepts (e.g., loudness, gender, language, spatial location, etc). Our proposed heterogeneous separation framework can seamlessly leverage datasets with large distribution shifts and learn cross-domain representations under a variety of concepts used as conditioning. Our experiments show that training separation models with heterogeneous conditions facilitates the generalization to new concepts with unseen out-of-domain data while also performing substantially higher than single-domain specialist models. Notably, such training leads to more robust learning of new harder source separation discriminative concepts and can yield improvements over permutation invariant training with oracle source selection. We analyze the intrinsic behavior of source separation training with heterogeneous metadata and propose ways to alleviate emerging problems with challenging separation conditions. We release the collection of preparation recipes for all datasets used to further promote research towards this challenging task.

Zexu Pan, Gordon Wichern, François G. Germain et al.

Speaker diarization is well studied for constrained audios but little explored for challenging in-the-wild videos, which have more speakers, shorter utterances, and inconsistent on-screen speakers. We address this gap by proposing an audio-visual diarization model which combines audio-only and visual-centric sub-systems via late fusion. For audio, we show that an attractor-based end-to-end system (EEND-EDA) performs remarkably well when trained with our proposed recipe of a simulated proxy dataset, and propose an improved version, EEND-EDA++, that uses attention in decoding and a speaker recognition loss during training to better handle the larger number of speakers. The visual-centric sub-system leverages facial attributes and lip-audio synchrony for identity and speech activity estimation of on-screen speakers. Both sub-systems surpass the state of the art (SOTA) by a large margin, with the fused audio-visual system achieving a new SOTA on the AVA-AVD benchmark.