A Language Model With Million Context Length For Raw Audio
This addresses the challenge of handling long audio sequences for audio generation and modeling, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing Transformer and CNN methods.
The paper tackles modeling long-term dependencies in raw audio by proposing a generative auto-regressive architecture that achieves state-of-the-art performance on a standard dataset, with a context length exceeding 500,000 samples.
Modeling long-term dependencies for audio signals is a particularly challenging problem, as even small-time scales yield on the order of a hundred thousand samples. With the recent advent of Transformers, neural architectures became good at modeling dependencies over longer time scales, but they suffered from quadratic constraints to scale them. We propose a generative auto-regressive architecture that can model audio waveforms over quite a large context, greater than 500,000 samples. Our work is adapted to learn time dependencies by learning a latent representation by a CNN front-end, and then learning dependencies over these representations using Transformer encoders, fully trained end-to-end: thereby allowing to learn representations as it deems fit for the next sample. Unlike previous works that compared different time scales to show improvement, we use a standard dataset, with the same number of parameters/context to show improvements. We achieve a state-of-the-art performance as compared to other approaches such as Wavenet, SaSHMI, and Sample-RNN on a standard dataset for modeling long-term structure. This work gives very exciting direction for the field, given improvements in context modeling that can be scaled with more data, as well as potentially better results by using billions/trillions of parameters.