111–120 of 151 posts
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.
https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/6/4594482/xerox-copiers-rand...
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.
I wouldn't consider this a matter of ethics, and more of a technology limitations or ignorance.
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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.
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.
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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.
A nice story about Xerox discovering this issue in 2003, when their copiers began slightly changing random numbers in copied documents https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/6/4594482/xerox-copiers-rand...
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This is a great question! Here's a related failure case that I think illustrates the issue. In my country, public restroom facilities replaced all the buttons and levers on faucets, towel dispensers, etc. with sensors that detect your hand under the faucet. Black people tell me they aren't able to easily use these restrooms. I was surprised when I heard this, but if you google this, it's apparently a thing. Why does…
What if it is a pareto improvement: better improvement for some dialects but no worse than the earlier version for anyone. Should it be shelved or tuned down so all improvement for each dialect see gains by an exactly equal percentage?
If the codec has the intention of working best for human voice in general, then it is simply not possible to define sensible subsets of the user base to optimize for. Curating an appropriate training set has therefore technical impact on the performance of the codec. Realistically, I admit that the percentages of speech samples of languages in such a dataset would be according to the relative amount of speakers. This is of course a very fuzzy number with many sources of systematic error (like what counts as one language, do non-native speakers count, which level of proficiency is considered relevant, etc.), and ultimately English is a bit more important since it is de-facto the international lingua franca of this era.
In short, a good training set is important unless one opines that certain subsets of humanity will never ever use the codec, which is equivalent to being blind to the reality that more and more parts of the world are getting access to the internet.
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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.
A nice story about Xerox discovering this issue in 2003, when their copiers began slightly changing random numbers in copied documents https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/6/4594482/xerox-copiers-rand...
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.