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Recent efforts in Spoken Dialogue Modeling aim to synthesize spoken dialogue without the need for direct transcription, thereby preserving the wealth of non-textual information inherent in speech. However, this approach faces a challenge when speakers talk simultaneously, requiring stereo dialogue data with speakers recorded on separate channels, a notably scarce resource. To address this, we have developed an innovative pipeline capable of transforming single-channel dialogue data into pseudo-stereo data. This expanded our training dataset from a mere 2,000 to an impressive 17,600 hours, significantly enriching the diversity and quality of the training examples available. The inclusion of this pseudo-stereo data has proven to be effective in improving the performance of spoken dialogue language models. Additionally, we explored the use of discrete units of different speech foundation models for spoken dialogue generation., Comment: submitted to interspeech 2024

Recent learning methods for object pose estimation require resource-intensive training for each individual object instance or category, hampering their scalability in real applications when confronted with previously unseen objects. In this paper, we propose MatchU, a Fuse-Describe-Match strategy for 6D pose estimation from RGB-D images. MatchU is a generic approach that fuses 2D texture and 3D geometric cues for 6D pose prediction of unseen objects. We rely on learning geometric 3D descriptors that are rotation-invariant by design. By encoding pose-agnostic geometry, the learned descriptors naturally generalize to unseen objects and capture symmetries. To tackle ambiguous associations using 3D geometry only, we fuse additional RGB information into our descriptor. This is achieved through a novel attention-based mechanism that fuses cross-modal information, together with a matching loss that leverages the latent space learned from RGB data to guide the descriptor learning process. Extensive experiments reveal the generalizability of both the RGB-D fusion strategy as well as the descriptor efficacy. Benefiting from the novel designs, MatchU surpasses all existing methods by a significant margin in terms of both accuracy and speed, even without the requirement of expensive re-training or rendering.

This paper presents Chinese Poker Self-Playing Robot, an integrated system enabling a TM5-900 robotic arm to independently play the four-person card game Chinese poker. The robot uses a custom sucker mechanism to pick up and play cards. An object detection model based on YOLOv5 is utilized to recognize the suit and number of 13 cards dealt to the robot. A greedy algorithm is developed to divide the 13 cards into optimal hands of 3, 5, and 5 cards to play. Experiments demonstrate that the robot can successfully obtain the cards, identify them using computer vision, strategically select hands to play using the algorithm, and physically play the selected cards in the game. The system showcases effective integration of mechanical design, computer vision, algorithm design, and robotic control to accomplish the complex task of independently playing cards., Comment: 7 pages, 9 figures

We introduce a new zero resource code-switched speech benchmark designed to directly assess the code-switching capabilities of self-supervised speech encoders. We showcase a baseline system of language modeling on discrete units to demonstrate how the code-switching abilities of speech encoders can be assessed in a zero-resource manner. Our experiments encompass a variety of well-known speech encoders, including Wav2vec 2.0, HuBERT, XLSR, etc. We examine the impact of pre-training languages and model size on benchmark performance. Notably, though our results demonstrate that speech encoders with multilingual pre-training, exemplified by XLSR, outperform monolingual variants (Wav2vec 2.0, HuBERT) in code-switching scenarios, there is still substantial room for improvement in their code-switching linguistic abilities., Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 2024 (v2)

Most of the speech translation models heavily rely on parallel data, which is hard to collect especially for low-resource languages. To tackle this issue, we propose to build a cascaded speech translation system without leveraging any kind of paired data. We use fully unpaired data to train our unsupervised systems and evaluate our results on CoVoST 2 and CVSS. The results show that our work is comparable with some other early supervised methods in some language pairs. While cascaded systems always suffer from severe error propagation problems, we proposed denoising back-translation (DBT), a novel approach to building robust unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT). DBT successfully increases the BLEU score by 0.7--0.9 in all three translation directions. Moreover, we simplified the pipeline of our cascaded system to reduce inference latency and conducted a comprehensive analysis of every part of our work. We also demonstrate our unsupervised speech translation results on the established website.

Distilled self-supervised models have shown competitive performance and efficiency in recent years. However, there is a lack of experience in jointly distilling multiple self-supervised speech models. In our work, we performed Ensemble Knowledge Distillation (EKD) on various self-supervised speech models such as HuBERT, RobustHuBERT, and WavLM. We tried two different aggregation techniques, layerwise-average and layerwise-concatenation, to the representations of different teacher models and found that the former was more effective. On top of that, we proposed a multiple prediction head method for student models to predict different layer outputs of multiple teacher models simultaneously. The experimental results show that our method improves the performance of the distilled models on four downstream speech processing tasks, Phoneme Recognition, Speaker Identification, Emotion Recognition, and Automatic Speech Recognition in the hidden-set track of the SUPERB benchmark., Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 2023

Self-supervised learned (SSL) speech pre-trained models perform well across various speech processing tasks. Distilled versions of SSL models have been developed to match the needs of on-device speech applications. Though having similar performance as original SSL models, distilled counterparts suffer from performance degradation even more than their original versions in distorted environments. This paper proposes to apply Cross-Distortion Mapping and Domain Adversarial Training to SSL models during knowledge distillation to alleviate the performance gap caused by the domain mismatch problem. Results show consistent performance improvements under both in- and out-of-domain distorted setups for different downstream tasks while keeping efficient model size., Comment: Accepted by IEEE SLT2022

Speech distortions are a long-standing problem that degrades the performance of supervisely trained speech processing models. It is high time that we enhance the robustness of speech processing models to obtain good performance when encountering speech distortions while not hurting the original performance on clean speech. In this work, we propose to improve the robustness of speech processing models by domain adversarial training (DAT). We conducted experiments based on the SUPERB framework on five different speech processing tasks. In case we do not always have knowledge of the distortion types for speech data, we analyzed the binary-domain and multi-domain settings, where the former treats all distorted speech as one domain, and the latter views different distortions as different domains. In contrast to supervised training methods, we obtained promising results in target domains where speech data is distorted with different distortions including new unseen distortions introduced during testing., Comment: Accepted at Interspeech 2022

Code-switching (CS) is common in daily conversations where more than one language is used within a sentence. The difficulties of CS speech recognition lie in alternating languages and the lack of transcribed data. Therefore, this paper uses the recently successful self-supervised learning (SSL) methods to leverage many unlabeled speech data without CS. We show that hidden representations of SSL models offer frame-level language identity even if the models are trained with English speech only. Jointly training CTC and language identification modules with self-supervised speech representations improves CS speech recognition performance. Furthermore, using multilingual speech data for pre-training obtains the best CS speech recognition., Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 2022

Tactile perception is central to robot manipulation in unstructured environments. However, it requires contact, and a mature implementation must infer object models while also accounting for the motion induced by the interaction. In this work, we present a method to estimate both object shape and pose in real-time from a stream of tactile measurements. This is applied towards tactile exploration of an unknown object by planar pushing. We consider this as an online SLAM problem with a nonparametric shape representation. Our formulation of tactile inference alternates between Gaussian process implicit surface regression and pose estimation on a factor graph. Through a combination of local Gaussian processes and fixed-lag smoothing, we infer object shape and pose in real-time. We evaluate our system across different objects in both simulated and real-world planar pushing tasks., Comment: Camera-ready version to be presented at the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2021). For associated video file, see https://youtu.be/wdyagx5MM40

We develop a real-time state estimation system to recover the pose and contact formation of an object relative to its environment. In this paper, we focus on the application of inserting an object picked by a suction cup into a tight space, an enabling technology for robotic packaging. We propose a framework that fuses force and visual sensing for improved accuracy and robustness. Visual sensing is versatile and non-intrusive, but suffers from occlusions and limited accuracy, especially for tasks involving contact. Tactile sensing is local, but provides accuracy and robustness to occlusions. The proposed algorithm to fuse them is based on iSAM, an on-line optimization technique, which we use to incorporate kinematic measurements from the robot, contact geometry of the object and the container, and visual tracking. In this paper, we generalize previous results in planar settings to a 3D task with more complex contact interactions. A key challenge in using force sensing is that we do not observe contact point locations directly. We propose a data-driven method to infer the contact formation, which is then used in real-time by the state estimator. We demonstrate and evaluate the algorithm in a setup instrumented to provide groundtruth., Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures, submitted to IROS 2018

This paper presents a robotic pick-and-place system that is capable of grasping and recognizing both known and novel objects in cluttered environments. The key new feature of the system is that it handles a wide range of object categories without needing any task-specific training data for novel objects. To achieve this, it first uses a category-agnostic affordance prediction algorithm to select and execute among four different grasping primitive behaviors. It then recognizes picked objects with a cross-domain image classification framework that matches observed images to product images. Since product images are readily available for a wide range of objects (e.g., from the web), the system works out-of-the-box for novel objects without requiring any additional training data. Exhaustive experimental results demonstrate that our multi-affordance grasping achieves high success rates for a wide variety of objects in clutter, and our recognition algorithm achieves high accuracy for both known and novel grasped objects. The approach was part of the MIT-Princeton Team system that took 1st place in the stowing task at the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge. All code, datasets, and pre-trained models are available online at http://arc.cs.princeton.edu, Comment: Project webpage: http://arc.cs.princeton.edu Summary video: https://youtu.be/6fG7zwGfIkI

Accurate and robust object state estimation enables successful object manipulation. Visual sensing is widely used to estimate object poses. However, in a cluttered scene or in a tight workspace, the robot's end-effector often occludes the object from the visual sensor. The robot then loses visual feedback and must fall back on open-loop execution. In this paper, we integrate both tactile and visual input using a framework for solving the SLAM problem, incremental smoothing and mapping (iSAM), to provide a fast and flexible solution. Visual sensing provides global pose information but is noisy in general, whereas contact sensing is local, but its measurements are more accurate relative to the end-effector. By combining them, we aim to exploit their advantages and overcome their limitations. We explore the technique in the context of a pusher-slider system. We adapt iSAM's measurement cost and motion cost to the pushing scenario, and use an instrumented setup to evaluate the estimation quality with different object shapes, on different surface materials, and under different contact modes.