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Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

opus-codec.org

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Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#101

Post by indolering »

yalok wrote: post #43

The main limitation for such codecs is CPU/battery life - and I like how they sparsely applied ML in it here and there, combining it with classic approach (non-ML algos) to achieve better tradeoff of CPU vs quality. E.g. for better low bitrate support/LACE - "we went for a different approach: start with the tried-and-true postfilter idea and sprinkle just enough DNN magic on top of it." The key was not to feed raw au…

It's a really smart application of ML: helping around the edges and not letting the ML algo invent pheonems or even whole words by accident. ML transcription has a similar trade-off of performing better on some benchmarks but also hallucinating results.

Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#102

Post by recursive »

kristopolous wrote: post #85
Dwedit wrote: post #77

I just want to mention that getting such good speech quality at 9kbps by using NoLACE is absolutely insane.

I wanted to see what it would sound like in comparison to a really early streaming audio codec, realaudio 1.0 $ ffmpeg -i female_ref.wav - acodec real_144 female_ref.ra And if you can't support that I put it back to wav and posted it: http://9ol.es/female_ref-ra.wav This was seen as "14.4" audio, for 14.4kb/s dialup in the mid-90s. The quality increase over those nearly 30 years for what you can get out of what's act…

I don't know any of the details but maybe the CPUs of the time would have struggled to stream the decoding.

Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#104

Post by [deleted] »

unixhero wrote: post #47
luplex wrote: post #27

I wonder: did they address common ML ethics questions? Specifically: Are the ML algorithms better/worse on male than on female speech? How about different languages or dialects? Are they specifically tuned for speech at all, or do they also work well for music or birdsong? That said, the examples are impressive and I can't wait for this level of understandability to become standard in my calls.

Why is the ethics question important? It is a new feature for an audio codec, not a new material to teach in your kids curriculum.

[deleted]

Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#105

Post by viraptor »

shwaj wrote: post #100
viraptor wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a question that should have the same/similar answer: Increasingly some part of the job interviews is being handled over the internet. All other things being equal, people are likely to have a more positive response to candidates with more pleasant voice. So if new ML-enhanced codecs become more common, we may find that some group X has a just slightly worse quality score than others. Over enough samples that w…

I don't think it's a given that we shouldn't keep using that codec. For example, maybe the improvement is due to an open source hacker working in their spare time to make the world a better place. Do we tell them their contribution isn't welcome until it meets the community's benchmark for equity? Your same argument can also be used to degrade the performance for all other groups, so that group X isn't unfairly disad…

A person creating a codec doesn't choose if it's globally adopted. System implementors (like for example Slack) do. You're don't have to tell the open source dev anything. You don't owe them to include their implementation.

And if their contribution was to the final system, sure, it's the owner's choice what the threshold for acceptable contribution is. In the same way they can set any other benchmark.

> Your same argument can also be used to degrade the performance for all other groups,

The context here was Pareto improvement. You're bringing a different situation.

Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#106

Post by viraptor »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #92
viraptor wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't do it more accurately. You can make up expected details which aren't encoded in the file. But that's explicitly less accurate.

If the encoders know what model the decoders will be running, they can improve accuracy. You could pretty easily make a codec that doesn't encode high resolution detail if the decoder NN will interpolate it correctly.

That's changing the encoder and sure, you could do that. But that's basically a new version of the format. It's not the JPEG we're using anymore + ML in decoder. It's JPEG-ML on both the encoder and decoder side. And with the speed that we adopt new image formats... That's going to take ages :(

Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#107

Post by [deleted] »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #58
radarsat1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important question. However, I'd like to point out that similar biases can easily exist for non-ML, hand-tuned algorithms. Even in the latter case test sets and often even "training" and "validation" sets are used for finding good parameters. Any of these can be a source of bias, as can the ears of evaluators making these decisions. It's true that bias questions often come up in ML context because fundamen…

Usually regular algorithms aren't generating data that pretends to be raw data. That's the significant difference here.

[deleted]

Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#108

Post by numpad0 »

The_Colonel wrote: post #48
unixhero wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the ethics question important? It is a new feature for an audio codec, not a new material to teach in your kids curriculum.

Imagine you release a codec which optimizes for cis white male voice, every other kind of voice has perceptibly lower fidelity (at low bitrates). That would not go well...

No offense/taken, but Codec2 seem to be affected a bit for this problem.

Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#109

Post by xcv123 »

claudiojulio wrote: post #7
mikae1 wrote: post #4

They’ll have my upvote just for writing ML instead AI. Seriously, this is very exciting developments for audio compression.

Machine Learning is Artificial Intelligence. Just look at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

Machine Learning is a subset of AI

Re: Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade

#110

Post by yt-anthr-acc-hn »

wilg wrote: post #32
sergiotapia wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as AI, is in fact, Machine Learning, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Machine Learning plus Traditional AI methods.

My point is very clearly that you should not spend any time or energy thinking about about the terminology.

Words have meaning. People spend cycles on it because it matters and I'm glad we do.
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