No Arabic abstract
This paper presents a generative approach to speech enhancement based on a recurrent variational autoencoder (RVAE). The deep generative speech model is trained using clean speech signals only, and it is combined with a nonnegative matrix factorization noise model for speech enhancement. We propose a variational expectation-maximization algorithm where the encoder of the RVAE is fine-tuned at test time, to approximate the distribution of the latent variables given the noisy speech observations. Compared with previous approaches based on feed-forward fully-connected architectures, the proposed recurrent deep generative speech model induces a posterior temporal dynamic over the latent variables, which is shown to improve the speech enhancement results.
Learning disentangled representations leads to interpretable models and facilitates data generation with style transfer, which has been extensively studied on static data such as images in an unsupervised learning framework. However, only a few works have explored unsupervised disentangled sequential representation learning due to challenges of generating sequential data. In this paper, we propose recurrent Wasserstein Autoencoder (R-WAE), a new framework for generative modeling of sequential data. R-WAE disentangles the representation of an input sequence into static and dynamic factors (i.e., time-invariant and time-varying parts). Our theoretical analysis shows that, R-WAE minimizes an upper bound of a penalized form of the Wasserstein distance between model distribution and sequential data distribution, and simultaneously maximizes the mutual information between input data and different disentangled latent factors, respectively. This is superior to (recurrent) VAE which does not explicitly enforce mutual information maximization between input data and disentangled latent representations. When the number of actions in sequential data is available as weak supervision information, R-WAE is extended to learn a categorical latent representation of actions to improve its disentanglement. Experiments on a variety of datasets show that our models outperform other baselines with the same settings in terms of disentanglement and unconditional video generation both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have shown clear superiority in sequence modeling, particularly the ones with gated units, such as long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU). However, the dynamic properties behind the remarkable performance remain unclear in many applications, e.g., automatic speech recognition (ASR). This paper employs visualization techniques to study the behavior of LSTM and GRU when performing speech recognition tasks. Our experiments show some interesting patterns in the gated memory, and some of them have inspired simple yet effective modifications on the network structure. We report two of such modifications: (1) lazy cell update in LSTM, and (2) shortcut connections for residual learning. Both modifications lead to more comprehensible and powerful networks.
Botnets are increasingly used by malicious actors, creating increasing threat to a large number of internet users. To address this growing danger, we propose to study methods to detect botnets, especially those that are hard to capture with the commonly used methods, such as the signature based ones and the existing anomaly-based ones. More specifically, we propose a novel machine learning based method, named Recurrent Variational Autoencoder (RVAE), for detecting botnets through sequential characteristics of network traffic flow data including attacks by botnets. We validate robustness of our method with the CTU-13 dataset, where we have chosen the testing dataset to have different types of botnets than those of training dataset. Tests show that RVAE is able to detect botnets with the same accuracy as the best known results published in literature. In addition, we propose an approach to assign anomaly score based on probability distributions, which allows us to detect botnets in streaming mode as the new networking statistics becomes available. This on-line detection capability would enable real-time detection of unknown botnets.
Dynamical variational auto-encoders (DVAEs) are a class of deep generative models with latent variables, dedicated to time series data modeling. DVAEs can be considered as extensions of the variational autoencoder (VAE) that include the modeling of temporal dependencies between successive observed and/or latent vectors in data sequences. Previous work has shown the interest of DVAEs and their better performance over the VAE for speech signals (spectrogram) modeling. Independently, the VAE has been successfully applied to speech enhancement in noise, in an unsupervised noise-agnostic set-up that does not require the use of a parallel dataset of clean and noisy speech samples for training, but only requires clean speech signals. In this paper, we extend those works to DVAE-based single-channel unsupervised speech enhancement, hence exploiting both speech signals unsupervised representation learning and dynamics modeling. We propose an unsupervised speech enhancement algorithm based on the most general form of DVAEs, that we then adapt to three specific DVAE models to illustrate the versatility of the framework. More precisely, we combine DVAE-based speech priors with a noise model based on nonnegative matrix factorization, and we derive a variational expectation-maximization (VEM) algorithm to perform speech enhancement. Experimental results show that the proposed approach based on DVAEs outperforms its VAE counterpart and a supervised speech enhancement baseline.
This paper proposes Dirichlet Variational Autoencoder (DirVAE) using a Dirichlet prior for a continuous latent variable that exhibits the characteristic of the categorical probabilities. To infer the parameters of DirVAE, we utilize the stochastic gradient method by approximating the Gamma distribution, which is a component of the Dirichlet distribution, with the inverse Gamma CDF approximation. Additionally, we reshape the component collapsing issue by investigating two problem sources, which are decoder weight collapsing and latent value collapsing, and we show that DirVAE has no component collapsing; while Gaussian VAE exhibits the decoder weight collapsing and Stick-Breaking VAE shows the latent value collapsing. The experimental results show that 1) DirVAE models the latent representation result with the best log-likelihood compared to the baselines; and 2) DirVAE produces more interpretable latent values with no collapsing issues which the baseline models suffer from. Also, we show that the learned latent representation from the DirVAE achieves the best classification accuracy in the semi-supervised and the supervised classification tasks on MNIST, OMNIGLOT, and SVHN compared to the baseline VAEs. Finally, we demonstrated that the DirVAE augmented topic models show better performances in most cases.