Haoqi Li

Alice Baird, Rachel Manzelli, Panagiotis Tzirakis et al.

The NeurIPS 2023 Machine Learning for Audio Workshop brings together machine learning (ML) experts from various audio domains. There are several valuable audio-driven ML tasks, from speech emotion recognition to audio event detection, but the community is sparse compared to other ML areas, e.g., computer vision or natural language processing. A major limitation with audio is the available data; with audio being a time-dependent modality, high-quality data collection is time-consuming and costly, making it challenging for academic groups to apply their often state-of-the-art strategies to a larger, more generalizable dataset. In this short white paper, to encourage researchers with limited access to large-datasets, the organizers first outline several open-source datasets that are available to the community, and for the duration of the workshop are making several propriety datasets available. Namely, three vocal datasets, Hume-Prosody, Hume-VocalBurst, an acted emotional speech dataset Modulate-Sonata, and an in-game streamer dataset Modulate-Stream. We outline the current baselines on these datasets but encourage researchers from across audio to utilize them outside of the initial baseline tasks.

Haoqi Li, Yelin Kim, Cheng-Hao Kuo et al.

Key challenges in developing generalized automatic emotion recognition systems include scarcity of labeled data and lack of gold-standard references. Even for the cues that are labeled as the same emotion category, the variability of associated expressions can be high depending on the elicitation context e.g., emotion elicited during improvised conversations vs. acted sessions with predefined scripts. In this work, we regard the emotion elicitation approach as domain knowledge, and explore domain transfer learning techniques on emotional utterances collected under different emotion elicitation approaches, particularly with limited labeled target samples. Our emotion recognition model combines the gradient reversal technique with an entropy loss function as well as the softlabel loss, and the experiment results show that domain transfer learning methods can be employed to alleviate the domain mismatch between different elicitation approaches. Our work provides new insights into emotion data collection, particularly the impact of its elicitation strategies, and the importance of domain adaptation in emotion recognition aiming for generalized systems.

Haoqi Li, Ming Tu, Jing Huang et al.

Representation learning for speech emotion recognition is challenging due to labeled data sparsity issue and lack of gold standard references. In addition, there is much variability from input speech signals, human subjective perception of the signals and emotion label ambiguity. In this paper, we propose a machine learning framework to obtain speech emotion representations by limiting the effect of speaker variability in the speech signals. Specifically, we propose to disentangle the speaker characteristics from emotion through an adversarial training network in order to better represent emotion. Our method combines the gradient reversal technique with an entropy loss function to remove such speaker information. Our approach is evaluated on both IEMOCAP and CMU-MOSEI datasets. We show that our method improves speech emotion classification and increases generalization to unseen speakers.

Haoqi Li, Brian Baucom, Panayiotis Georgiou

Human behavior refers to the way humans act and interact. Understanding human behavior is a cornerstone of observational practice, especially in psychotherapy. An important cue of behavior analysis is the dynamical changes of emotions during the conversation. Domain experts integrate emotional information in a highly nonlinear manner, thus, it is challenging to explicitly quantify the relationship between emotions and behaviors. In this work, we employ deep transfer learning to analyze their inferential capacity and contextual importance. We first train a network to quantify emotions from acoustic signals and then use information from the emotion recognition network as features for behavior recognition. We treat this emotion-related information as behavioral primitives and further train higher level layers towards behavior quantification. Through our analysis, we find that emotion-related information is an important cue for behavior recognition. Further, we investigate the importance of emotional-context in the expression of behavior by constraining (or not) the neural networks' contextual view of the data. This demonstrates that the sequence of emotions is critical in behavior expression. To achieve these frameworks we employ hybrid architectures of convolutional networks and recurrent networks to extract emotion-related behavior primitives and facilitate automatic behavior recognition from speech.

Sandeep Nallan Chakravarthula, Haoqi Li, Shao-Yen Tseng et al.

Cancer impacts the quality of life of those diagnosed as well as their spouse caregivers, in addition to potentially influencing their day-to-day behaviors. There is evidence that effective communication between spouses can improve well-being related to cancer but it is difficult to efficiently evaluate the quality of daily life interactions using manual annotation frameworks. Automated recognition of behaviors based on the interaction cues of speakers can help analyze interactions in such couples and identify behaviors which are beneficial for effective communication. In this paper, we present and detail a dataset of dyadic interactions in 85 real-life cancer-afflicted couples and a set of observational behavior codes pertaining to interpersonal communication attributes. We describe and employ neural network-based systems for classifying these behaviors based on turn-level acoustic and lexical speech patterns. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of controlling for factors such as gender, patient/caregiver role and conversation content on behavior classification. Analysis of our preliminary results indicates the challenges in this task due to the nature of the targeted behaviors and suggests that techniques incorporating contextual processing might be better suited to tackle this problem.