Deep neural nets with a large number of parameters are very powerful machine learning systems. However, overfitting is a serious problem in such networks. Large networks are also slow to use, making it difficult to deal with overfitting by combining the predictions of many different large neural nets at test time. Dropout is a technique for addressing this problem. The key idea is to randomly drop units (along with their connections) from the neural network during training. This prevents units from co-adapting too much. During training, dropout samples from an exponential number of different "thinned" networks. At test time, it is easy to approximate the effect of averaging the predictions of all these thinned networks by simply using a single unthinned network that has smaller weights. This significantly reduces overfitting and gives major improvements over other regularization methods. We show that dropout improves the performance of neural networks on supervised learning tasks in vision, speech recognition, document classification and computational biology, obtaining state-of-the-art results on many benchmark data sets.

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Dropout: a simple way to prevent neural networks from overfitting

Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

While supervised learning has enabled great progress in many applications, unsupervised learning has not seen such widespread adoption, and remains an important and challenging endeavor for artificial intelligence. In this work, we propose a universal unsupervised learning approach to extract useful representations from high-dimensional data, which we call Contrastive Predictive Coding. The key insight of our model is to learn such representations by predicting the future in latent space by using powerful autoregressive models. We use a probabilistic contrastive loss which induces the latent space to capture information that is maximally useful to predict future samples. It also makes the model tractable by using negative sampling. While most prior work has focused on evaluating representations for a particular modality, we demonstrate that our approach is able to learn useful representations achieving strong performance on four distinct domains: speech, images, text and reinforcement learning in 3D environments.

Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding

This paper introduces a new corpus of read English speech, suitable for training and evaluating speech recognition systems. The LibriSpeech corpus is derived from audiobooks that are part of the LibriVox project, and contains 1000 hours of speech sampled at 16 kHz. We have made the corpus freely available for download, along with separately prepared language-model training data and pre-built language models. We show that acoustic models trained on LibriSpeech give lower error rate on the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) test sets than models trained on WSJ itself. We are also releasing Kaldi scripts that make it easy to build these systems.

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Librispeech: An ASR corpus based on public domain audio books

This monograph provides an overview of general deep learning methodology and its applications to a variety of signal and information processing tasks. The application areas are chosen with the following three criteria in mind: (1) expertise or knowledge of the authors; (2) the application areas that have already been transformed by the successful use of deep learning technology, such as speech recognition and computer vision; and (3) the application areas that have the potential to be impacted significantly by deep learning and that have been experiencing research growth, including natural language and text processing, information retrieval, and multimodal information processing empowered by multi-task deep learning.

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Deep Learning: Methods and Applications

We describe the design of Kaldi, a free, open-source toolkit for speech recognition research. Kaldi provides a speech recognition system based on finite-state automata (using the freely available OpenFst), together with detailed documentation and a comprehensive set of scripts for building complete recognition systems. Kaldi is written is C++, and the core library supports modeling of arbitrary phonetic-context sizes, acoustic modeling with subspace Gaussian mixture models (SGMM) as well as standard Gaussian mixture models, together with all commonly used linear and affine transforms. Kaldi is released under the Apache License v2.0, which is highly nonrestrictive, making it suitable for a wide community of users.

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The Kaldi Speech Recognition Toolkit

In this paper we present novel language-independent bottleneck (BN) feature extraction framework. In our experiments we have used Multilingual Artificial Neural Network (ANN), where each language is modelled by separate output layer, while all the hidden layers jointly model the variability of all the source languages. The key idea is that the entire ANN is trained on all the languages simultaneously, thus the BN-features are not biased towards any of the languages. Exactly for this reason, the final BN-features are considered as language independent. In the experiments with GlobalPhone database, we show that Multilingual BN-features consistently outperform Monolingual BN-features. Also, cross-lingual generalization is evaluated, where we train on 5 source languages and test on 3 other languages. The results show that the ANN can produce very good BN-features even for unseen languages, in some cases even better than if we trained the ANN on the target language only.

The language-independent bottleneck features

In this paper we search for an optimal strategy for semi-supervised Deep Neural Network (DNN) training. We assume that a small part of the data is transcribed, while the majority of the data is untranscribed. We explore self-training strategies with data selection based on both the utterance-level and frame-level confidences. Further on, we study the interactions between semi-supervised frame-discriminative training and sequence-discriminative sMBR training. We found it beneficial to reduce the disproportion in amounts of transcribed and untranscribed data by including the transcribed data several times, as well as to do a frame-selection based on per-frame confidences derived from confusion in a lattice. For the experiments, we used the Limited language pack condition for the Surprise language task (Vietnamese) from the IARPA Babel program. The absolute Word Error Rate (WER) improvement for frame cross-entropy training is 2.2%, this corresponds to WER recovery of 36% when compared to the identical system, where the DNN is built on the fully transcribed data.

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Semi-supervised training of Deep Neural Networks

We describe a lattice generation method that is exact, i.e. it satisfies all the natural properties we would want from a lattice of alternative transcriptions of an utterance. This method does not introduce substantial overhead above one-best decoding. Our method is most directly applicable when using WFST decoders where the WFST is “fully expanded”, i.e. where the arcs correspond to HMM transitions. It outputs lattices that include HMM-state-level alignments as well as word labels. The general idea is to create a state-level lattice during decoding, and to do a special form of determinization that retains only the best-scoring path for each word sequence. This special determinization algorithm is a solution to the following problem: Given a WFST A, compute a WFST B that, for each input-symbol-sequence of A, contains just the lowest-cost path through A.

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Generating exact lattices in the WFST framework

In this paper, we focus on improvements of the bottleneck ANN in a Tandem LVCSR system. First, the influence of training set size and the ANN size is evaluated. Second, a very positive effect of linear bottleneck is shown. Finally a Convolutive Bottleneck Network is proposed as extension of the current state-of-the-art Universal Context Network. The proposed training method leads to 5.5% relative reduction of WER, compared to the Universal Context ANN baseline. The relative improvement compared to the 5-layer single-bottleneck network is 17.7%. The dataset ctstrain07 composed of more than 2000 hours of English Conversational Telephone Speech was used for the experiments. The TNet toolkit with CUDA GPGPU implementation was used for fast training.

Karel Vesely

Papers

The Kaldi Speech Recognition Toolkit

The language-independent bottleneck features

Semi-supervised training of Deep Neural Networks

Generating exact lattices in the WFST framework

Convolutive Bottleneck Network features for LVCSR