Efficient Speech Processing with Discrete Speech Units: Techniques and Insights from the Interspeech 2024 Challenge

Conceitos essenciais

The authors present their systems developed for the Interspeech 2024 Speech Processing Using Discrete Speech Unit Challenge, including techniques for text-to-speech, singing voice synthesis, and automatic speech recognition using discrete speech tokens. Their approaches demonstrate the potential of discrete speech representations to achieve high-quality and low-bitrate speech processing.

Resumo

The authors describe their systems developed for the Interspeech 2024 Speech Processing Using Discrete Speech Unit Challenge, which covers text-to-speech (TTS), singing voice synthesis (SVS), and automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks.
For the TTS track, the authors used two types of discrete tokens - semantic tokens from wav2vec2.0 and acoustic tokens from FunCodec. They developed a modified VQTTS system with a conformer-based acoustic model and a discrete unit-based vocoder. Their best submission achieved the top rank on the leaderboard with a low bitrate of 250bps.
In the SVS track, the authors used Descript Audio Codec (DAC) as the discrete tokens and a modified VALL-E system as the SVS pipeline. They found that utilizing only the initial layer of DAC features as discrete tokens provided a good balance between bitrate and perceptual quality.
For the ASR track, the authors used k-means clusters of WavLM features as the discrete tokens and a Zipformer-based neural transducer architecture. Their system achieved a relative character error rate reduction of up to 13% compared to the baseline, albeit at a higher bitrate.
The authors conclude that their experimental findings can promote better understanding and utilization of discrete speech tokens in the speech community.

Estatísticas

The authors used the following datasets:

LJSpeech for the TTS track
Opencpop and M4Singer for the SVS track
LibriSpeech and ML-SUPERB for the ASR track

Citações

None.

Principais Insights Extraídos De

The X-LANCE Technical Report for Interspeech 2024 Speech Processing Using Discrete Speech Unit Challenge

by Yiwei Guo,Ch... às arxiv.org 04-10-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.06079.pdf

Perguntas Mais Profundas

How can the discrete speech token representations be further improved to achieve even lower bitrates while maintaining high quality in speech processing tasks?

In order to enhance discrete speech token representations for achieving lower bitrates while upholding high quality in speech processing tasks, several strategies can be implemented:

Optimized Quantization Techniques: Exploring advanced quantization methods can help in reducing the number of bits required to represent each token without compromising quality. Techniques like vector quantization and entropy coding can be fine-tuned to efficiently encode speech information.

Model Compression: Implementing model compression techniques such as pruning, distillation, or quantization on the neural networks responsible for token generation can lead to more compact models, thereby reducing the overall bitrate.

Hybrid Tokenization Approaches: Combining the strengths of semantic and acoustic tokens can lead to more efficient representations. By leveraging the benefits of both types of tokens, a hybrid approach can potentially reduce redundancy and improve compression.

Dynamic Bit Allocation: Implementing dynamic bit allocation mechanisms can allocate more bits to tokens that require higher fidelity representation while assigning fewer bits to less critical tokens. This adaptive approach can optimize the overall bitrate.

Incorporating Contextual Information: Utilizing contextual information from surrounding tokens can aid in more efficient encoding. Context-aware tokenization can help in capturing dependencies and correlations within the speech data, leading to better compression.

Iterative Refinement: Employing iterative refinement techniques where tokens are progressively refined or updated based on feedback loops can enhance the quality of representations while potentially reducing the required bitrate.

By integrating these strategies and potentially exploring new avenues in research and development, the quality of discrete speech token representations can be further improved to achieve lower bitrates in speech processing tasks.

What are the potential applications and implications of using discrete speech tokens beyond the specific tasks covered in this challenge?

The utilization of discrete speech tokens extends beyond the tasks outlined in the challenge, offering a wide array of applications and implications in the field of speech processing:

Multimodal Integration: Discrete speech tokens can be integrated with other modalities such as text, images, or gestures to enable multimodal communication systems. This integration can enhance human-computer interaction and facilitate more natural and intuitive interfaces.

Personalized Speech Synthesis: By leveraging discrete speech tokens, personalized speech synthesis systems can be developed to cater to individual preferences and styles. This customization can be beneficial in applications like virtual assistants, audiobooks, and voice avatars.

Emotion Recognition: Discrete speech tokens can aid in emotion recognition from speech signals by capturing subtle variations in prosody and intonation. This capability can be valuable in affective computing, mental health monitoring, and human-computer emotional interaction.

Cross-Lingual Communication: Discrete speech tokens can facilitate cross-lingual communication by enabling efficient translation and synthesis across different languages. This can be instrumental in breaking language barriers and promoting global communication.

Medical Applications: In healthcare, discrete speech tokens can be utilized for speech analysis and pathology detection. Applications include speech therapy, early diagnosis of neurological disorders, and monitoring of vocal health.

Security and Forensics: Discrete speech tokens can play a role in speaker verification, forensic analysis, and voice biometrics. The unique characteristics captured by these tokens can enhance the accuracy and reliability of speaker recognition systems.

The implications of using discrete speech tokens are vast, spanning various domains and offering innovative solutions to complex challenges in speech processing and related fields.

How can the insights from this work be extended to multilingual or cross-lingual speech processing scenarios?

The insights gained from the work on discrete speech tokens can be extended to multilingual or cross-lingual speech processing scenarios through the following approaches:

Language-Agnostic Tokenization: Developing tokenization methods that are language-agnostic can enable the representation of speech information in a universal format, facilitating seamless processing across multiple languages.

Transfer Learning: Leveraging transfer learning techniques can allow models trained on one language to be adapted to others with minimal additional data. Fine-tuning token representations based on multilingual datasets can enhance the model's ability to handle diverse languages.

Code-Switching Handling: Designing tokenization strategies that can effectively handle code-switching scenarios where multiple languages are used within the same utterance. This capability is crucial for applications in multilingual environments.

Cross-Lingual Embeddings: Integrating cross-lingual embeddings with discrete speech tokens can enable the sharing of information and features across languages, promoting interoperability and knowledge transfer between different language models.

Phonetic Alignment: Incorporating phonetic alignment techniques into tokenization processes can aid in aligning phonemes and linguistic units across languages, ensuring consistency and accuracy in multilingual speech processing tasks.

Domain Adaptation: Implementing domain adaptation methods to fine-tune models for specific languages or dialects can enhance the performance of multilingual speech processing systems in diverse linguistic contexts.

By applying these strategies and adapting the insights from the work on discrete speech tokens to multilingual or cross-lingual scenarios, researchers and practitioners can develop robust and versatile speech processing solutions capable of handling linguistic diversity and complexity.