Yu Pan

Yu Pan, Yuguang Yang, Yuheng Huang et al.

Despite notable progress, speech emotion recognition (SER) remains challenging due to the intricate and ambiguous nature of speech emotion, particularly in wild world. While current studies primarily focus on recognition and generalization abilities, our research pioneers an investigation into the reliability of SER methods in the presence of semantic data shifts and explores how to exert fine-grained control over various attributes inherent in speech signals to enhance speech emotion modeling. In this paper, we first introduce MSAC-SERNet, a novel unified SER framework capable of simultaneously handling both single-corpus and cross-corpus SER. Specifically, concentrating exclusively on the speech emotion attribute, a novel CNN-based SER model is presented to extract discriminative emotional representations, guided by additive margin softmax loss. Considering information overlap between various speech attributes, we propose a novel learning paradigm based on correlations of different speech attributes, termed Multiple Speech Attribute Control (MSAC), which empowers the proposed SER model to simultaneously capture fine-grained emotion-related features while mitigating the negative impact of emotion-agnostic representations. Furthermore, we make a first attempt to examine the reliability of the MSAC-SERNet framework using out-of-distribution detection methods. Experiments on both single-corpus and cross-corpus SER scenarios indicate that MSAC-SERNet not only consistently outperforms the baseline in all aspects, but achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art SER approaches.

Yu Pan, Xiang Zhang, Yuguang Yang et al.

Neural speech codecs have recently emerged as a focal point in the fields of speech compression and generation. Despite this progress, achieving high-quality speech reconstruction under low-bitrate scenarios remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose PSCodec, a series of neural speech codecs based on prompt encoders, comprising PSCodec-Base, PSCodec-DRL-ICT, and PSCodec-CasAN, which are capable of delivering high-performance speech reconstruction with low bandwidths. Specifically, we first introduce PSCodec-Base, which leverages a pretrained speaker verification model-based prompt encoder (VPP-Enc) and a learnable Mel-spectrogram-based prompt encoder (MelP-Enc) to effectively disentangle and integrate voiceprint and Mel-related features in utterances. To further enhance feature utilization efficiency, we propose PSCodec-DRL-ICT, incorporating a structural similarity (SSIM) based disentangled representation loss (DRL) and an incremental continuous training (ICT) strategy. While PSCodec-DRL-ICT demonstrates impressive performance, its reliance on extensive hyperparameter tuning and multi-stage training makes it somewhat labor-intensive. To circumvent these limitations, we propose PSCodec-CasAN, utilizing an advanced cascaded attention network (CasAN) to enhance representational capacity of the entire system. Extensive experiments show that our proposed PSCodec-Base, PSCodec-DRL-ICT, and PSCodec-CasAN all significantly outperform several state-of-the-art neural codecs, exhibiting substantial improvements in both speech reconstruction quality and speaker similarity under low-bitrate conditions.

Yu Pan, Yuguang Yang, Heng Lu et al.

The continuous evolution of pre-trained speech models has greatly advanced Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). However, current research typically relies on utterance-level emotion labels, inadequately capturing the complexity of emotions within a single utterance. In this paper, we introduce GMP-TL, a novel SER framework that employs gender-augmented multi-scale pseudo-label (GMP) based transfer learning to mitigate this gap. Specifically, GMP-TL initially uses the pre-trained HuBERT, implementing multi-task learning and multi-scale k-means clustering to acquire frame-level GMPs. Subsequently, to fully leverage frame-level GMPs and utterance-level emotion labels, a two-stage model fine-tuning approach is presented to further optimize GMP-TL. Experiments on IEMOCAP show that our GMP-TL attains a WAR of 80.0% and an UAR of 82.0%, achieving superior performance compared to state-of-the-art unimodal SER methods while also yielding comparable results to multimodal SER approaches.