Qing Wang

Chao-Han Huck Yang, Sreyan Ghosh, Qing Wang et al.

We present Task 5 of the DCASE 2025 Challenge: an Audio Question Answering (AQA) benchmark spanning multiple domains of sound understanding. This task defines three QA subsets (Bioacoustics, Temporal Soundscapes, and Complex QA) to test audio-language models on interactive question-answering over diverse acoustic scenes. We describe the dataset composition (from marine mammal calls to soundscapes and complex real-world clips), the evaluation protocol (top-1 accuracy with answer-shuffling robustness), and baseline systems (Qwen2-Audio-7B, AudioFlamingo 2, Gemini-2-Flash). Preliminary results on the development set are compared, showing strong variation across models and subsets. This challenge aims to advance the audio understanding and reasoning capabilities of audio-language models toward human-level acuity, which are crucial for enabling AI agents to perceive and interact about the world effectively.

Guirui Zhong, Qing Wang, Jun Du et al.

Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) aims at identifying anomalous sounds from machines and has gained extensive research interests from both academia and industry. However, the uncertainty of anomaly location and much redundant information such as noise in machine sounds hinder the improvement of ASD system performance. This paper proposes a novel audio feature of filter banks with evenly distributed intervals, ensuring equal attention to all frequency ranges in the audio, which enhances the detection of anomalies in machine sounds. Moreover, based on pre-trained models, this paper presents a parameter-free feature enhancement approach to remove redundant information in machine audio. It is believed that this parameter-free strategy facilitates the effective transfer of universal knowledge from pre-trained tasks to the ASD task during model fine-tuning. Evaluation results on the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2024 Challenge dataset demonstrate significant improvements in ASD performance with our proposed methods.

Xin Fang, Guirui Zhong, Qing Wang et al.

Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) is often formulated as a machine attribute classification task, a strategy necessitated by the common scenario where only normal data is available for training. However, the exhaustive collection of machine attribute labels is laborious and impractical. To address the challenge of missing attribute labels, this paper proposes an agglomerative hierarchical clustering method for the assignment of pseudo-attribute labels using representations derived from a domain-adaptive pre-trained model, which are expected to capture machine attribute characteristics. We then apply model adaptation to this pre-trained model through supervised fine-tuning for machine attribute classification, resulting in a new state-of-the-art performance. Evaluation on the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2025 Challenge dataset demonstrates that our proposed approach yields significant performance gains, ultimately outperforming our previous top-ranking system in the challenge.

Li Zhang, Qing Wang, Lei Xie

The use of channel-wise attention in CNN based speaker representation networks has achieved remarkable performance in speaker verification (SV). But these approaches do simple averaging on time and frequency feature maps before channel-wise attention learning and ignore the essential mutual interaction among temporal, channel as well as frequency scales. To address this problem, we propose the Duality Temporal-Channel-Frequency (DTCF) attention to re-calibrate the channel-wise features with aggregation of global context on temporal and frequency dimensions. Specifically, the duality attention - time-channel (T-C) attention as well as frequency-channel (F-C) attention - aims to focus on salient regions along the T-C and F-C feature maps that may have more considerable impact on the global context, leading to more discriminative speaker representations. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed DTCF attention on the CN-Celeb and VoxCeleb datasets. On the CN-Celeb evaluation set, the EER/minDCF of ResNet34-DTCF are reduced by 0.63%/0.0718 compared with those of ResNet34-SE. On VoxCeleb1-O, VoxCeleb1-E and VoxCeleb1-H evaluation sets, the EER/minDCF of ResNet34-DTCF achieve 0.36%/0.0263, 0.39%/0.0382 and 0.74%/0.0753 reductions compared with those of ResNet34-SE.

Li Zhang, Qing Wang, Kong Aik Lee et al.

In far-field speaker verification, the performance of speaker embeddings is susceptible to degradation when there is a mismatch between the conditions of enrollment and test speech. To solve this problem, we propose the feature-level and instance-level transfer learning in the teacher-student framework to learn a domain-invariant embedding space. For the feature-level knowledge transfer, we develop the contrastive loss to transfer knowledge from teacher model to student model, which can not only decrease the intra-class distance, but also enlarge the inter-class distance. Moreover, we propose the instance-level pairwise distance transfer method to force the student model to preserve pairwise instances distance from the well optimized embedding space of the teacher model. On FFSVC 2020 evaluation set, our EER on Full-eval trials is relatively reduced by 13.9% compared with the fusion system result on Partial-eval trials of Task2. On Task1, compared with the winner's DenseNet result on Partial-eval trials, our minDCF on Full-eval trials is relatively reduced by 6.3%. On Task3, the EER and minDCF of our proposed method on Full-eval trials are very close to the result of the fusion system on Partial-eval trials. Our results also outperform other competitive domain adaptation methods.

Jingyong Hou, Li Zhang, Yihui Fu et al.

This paper describes the system developed by the NPU team for the 2020 personalized voice trigger challenge. Our submitted system consists of two independently trained subsystems: a small footprint keyword spotting (KWS) system and a speaker verification (SV) system. For the KWS system, a multi-scale dilated temporal convolutional (MDTC) network is proposed to detect wake-up word (WuW). For SV system, Write something here. The KWS predicts posterior probabilities of whether an audio utterance contains WuW and estimates the location of WuW at the same time. When the posterior probability ofWuW reaches a predefined threshold, the identity information of triggered segment is determined by the SV system. On evaluation dataset, our submitted system obtains detection costs of 0.081and 0.091 in close talking and far-field tasks, respectively.

Qing Wang, Wei Rao, Pengcheng Guo et al.

In real-life applications, the performance of speaker recognition systems always degrades when there is a mismatch between training and evaluation data. Many domain adaptation methods have been successfully used for eliminating the domain mismatches in speaker recognition. However, usually both training and evaluation data themselves can be composed of several subsets. These inner variances of each dataset can also be considered as different domains. Different distributed subsets in source or target domain dataset can also cause multi-domain mismatches, which are influential to speaker recognition performance. In this study, we propose to use adversarial training for multi-domain speaker recognition to solve the domain mismatch and the dataset variance problems. By adopting the proposed method, we are able to obtain both multi-domain-invariant and speaker-discriminative speech representations for speaker recognition. Experimental results on DAC13 dataset indicate that the proposed method is not only effective to solve the multi-domain mismatch problem, but also outperforms the compared unsupervised domain adaptation methods.

Qing Wang, Pengcheng Guo, Lei Xie

Speaker recognition is a popular topic in biometric authentication and many deep learning approaches have achieved extraordinary performances. However, it has been shown in both image and speech applications that deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples. In this study, we aim to exploit this weakness to perform targeted adversarial attacks against the x-vector based speaker recognition system. We propose to generate inaudible adversarial perturbations achieving targeted white-box attacks to speaker recognition system based on the psychoacoustic principle of frequency masking. Specifically, we constrict the perturbation under the masking threshold of original audio, instead of using a common l_p norm to measure the perturbations. Experiments on Aishell-1 corpus show that our approach yields up to 98.5% attack success rate to arbitrary gender speaker targets, while retaining indistinguishable attribute to listeners. Furthermore, we also achieve an effective speaker attack when applying the proposed approach to a completely irrelevant waveform, such as music.

Peng Sun, Xinghai Sun, Lei Han et al.

Starcraft II (SC2) is widely considered as the most challenging Real Time Strategy (RTS) game. The underlying challenges include a large observation space, a huge (continuous and infinite) action space, partial observations, simultaneous move for all players, and long horizon delayed rewards for local decisions. To push the frontier of AI research, Deepmind and Blizzard jointly developed the StarCraft II Learning Environment (SC2LE) as a testbench of complex decision making systems. SC2LE provides a few mini games such as MoveToBeacon, CollectMineralShards, and DefeatRoaches, where some AI agents have achieved the performance level of human professional players. However, for full games, the current AI agents are still far from achieving human professional level performance. To bridge this gap, we present two full game AI agents in this paper - the AI agent TStarBot1 is based on deep reinforcement learning over a flat action structure, and the AI agent TStarBot2 is based on hard-coded rules over a hierarchical action structure. Both TStarBot1 and TStarBot2 are able to defeat the built-in AI agents from level 1 to level 10 in a full game (1v1 Zerg-vs-Zerg game on the AbyssalReef map), noting that level 8, level 9, and level 10 are cheating agents with unfair advantages such as full vision on the whole map and resource harvest boosting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first public work to investigate AI agents that can defeat the built-in AI in the StarCraft II full game.