2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

Technical Program

Paper Detail

Paper IDSPE-43.2
Paper Title GENERALIZED KNOWLEDGE DISTILLATION FROM AN ENSEMBLE OF SPECIALIZED TEACHERS LEVERAGING UNSUPERVISED NEURAL CLUSTERING
Authors Takashi Fukuda, Gakuto Kurata, IBM Research AI, Japan
SessionSPE-43: Speech Recognition 15: Robust Speech Recognition 1
LocationGather.Town
Session Time:Thursday, 10 June, 16:30 - 17:15
Presentation Time:Thursday, 10 June, 16:30 - 17:15
Presentation Poster
Topic Speech Processing: [SPE-ROBU] Robust Speech Recognition
IEEE Xplore Open Preview  Click here to view in IEEE Xplore
Virtual Presentation  Click here to watch in the Virtual Conference
Abstract This paper proposes an improved generalized knowledge distillation framework with multiple dissimilar teacher networks, each of which is specialized for a specific domain, to make a deployable student network more robust to challenging acoustic environments. In this paper, we first address a method to partition the training data for constructing ensembles of the teachers from unsupervised neural clustering with features based on context-dependent phonemes representing each acoustic domain. Second, we illustrate how a single student network is effectively trained with multiple specialized teachers designed from partitioned data. During the training step, the weights of the student network are updated using a composite two-part cross entropy loss obtained from a pair consisting of a specialized teacher corresponding to input speech and a generalized teacher trained with a balanced data set. Unlike system combination methods, we aim to incorporate the benefits from multiple models into a single student network via knowledge distillation that does not increase any computational costs during the decoding time. The improvement of the proposed technique is shown on acoustically diverse signals contaminated by challenging practical noises.