Swapnil Bhosale

This talk addresses the challenge of improving user experience on e-commerce platforms by enhancing product ranking relevant to user's search queries. Queries such as 'S2716DG' consist of alphanumeric characters where a letter or number can signify important detail for the product/model. Speaker describes recent research where we curate samples from existing datasets at eBay, manually annotated with buyer-centric relevance scores, and centrality scores which reflect how well the product title matches the user's intent. We introduce a User-intent Centrality Optimization (UCO) approach for existing models, which optimizes for the user intent in semantic product search. To that end, we propose a dual-loss based optimization to handle hard negatives, i.e., product titles that are semantically relevant but do not reflect the user's intent. Our contributions include curating a challenging evaluation set and implementing UCO, resulting in significant improvements in product ranking efficiency, observed for different evaluation metrics. Our work aims to ensure that the most buyer-centric titles for a query are ranked higher, thereby, enhancing the user experience on e-commerce platforms.

Sound Event Detection (SED) aims to predict the temporal boundaries of all the events of interest and their class labels, given an unconstrained audio sample. Taking either the split-and-classify (i.e., frame-level) strategy or the more principled event-level modeling approach, all existing methods consider the SED problem from the discriminative learning perspective. In this work, we reformulate the SED problem by taking a generative learning perspective. Specifically, we aim to generate sound temporal boundaries from noisy proposals in a denoising diffusion process, conditioned on a target audio sample. During training, our model learns to reverse the noising process by converting noisy latent queries to the groundtruth versions in the elegant Transformer decoder framework. Doing so enables the model generate accurate event boundaries from even noisy queries during inference. Extensive experiments on the Urban-SED and EPIC-Sounds datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms existing alternatives, with 40+% faster convergence in training. Code: https://github.com/Surrey-UPLab/DiffSED.

Novel view acoustic synthesis (NVAS) aims to render binaural audio at any target viewpoint, given a mono audio emitted by a sound source at a 3D scene. Existing methods have proposed NeRF-based implicit models to exploit visual cues as a condition for synthesizing binaural audio. However, in addition to low efficiency originating from heavy NeRF rendering, these methods all have a limited ability of characterizing the entire scene environment such as room geometry, material properties, and the spatial relation between the listener and sound source. To address these issues, we propose a novel Audio-Visual Gaussian Splatting (AV-GS) model. To obtain a material-aware and geometry-aware condition for audio synthesis, we learn an explicit point-based scene representation with an audio-guidance parameter on locally initialized Gaussian points, taking into account the space relation from the listener and sound source. To make the visual scene model audio adaptive, we propose a point densification and pruning strategy to optimally distribute the Gaussian points, with the per-point contribution in sound propagation (e.g., more points needed for texture-less wall surfaces as they affect sound path diversion). Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our AV-GS over existing alternatives on the real-world RWAS and simulation-based SoundSpaces datasets.

Sound Event Detection (SED) aims to predict the temporal boundaries of all the events of interest and their class labels, given an unconstrained audio sample. Taking either the splitand-classify (i.e., frame-level) strategy or the more principled event-level modeling approach, all existing methods consider the SED problem from the discriminative learning perspective. In this work, we reformulate the SED problem by taking a generative learning perspective. Specifically, we aim to generate sound temporal boundaries from noisy proposals in a denoising diffusion process, conditioned on a target audio sample. During training, our model learns to reverse the noising process by converting noisy latent queries to the groundtruth versions in the elegant Transformer decoder framework. Doing so enables the model generate accurate event boundaries from even noisy queries during inference. Extensive experiments on the Urban-SED and EPIC-Sounds datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms existing alternatives, with 40+% faster convergence in training.

Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) aims to precisely outline audible objects in a visual scene at the pixel level. Existing AVS methods require fine-grained annotations of audio-mask pairs in supervised learning fashion. This limits their scalability since it is time consuming and tedious to acquire such cross-modality pixel level labels. To overcome this obstacle, in this work we introduce unsupervised audio-visual segmentation with no need for task-specific data annotations and model training. For tackling this newly proposed problem, we formulate a novel Cross-Modality Semantic Filtering (CMSF) approach to accurately associate the underlying audio-mask pairs by leveraging the off-the-shelf multi-modal foundation models (e.g., detection [1], open-world segmentation [2] and multi-modal alignment [3]). Guiding the proposal generation by either audio or visual cues, we design two training-free variants: AT-GDINO-SAM and OWOD-BIND. Extensive experiments on the AVS-Bench dataset show that our unsupervised approach can perform well in comparison to prior art supervised counterparts across complex scenarios with multiple auditory objects. Particularly, in situations where existing supervised AVS methods struggle with overlapping foreground objects, our models still excel in accurately segmenting overlapped auditory objects. Our code will be publicly released.

The introduction of the MUStARD dataset, and its emotion recognition extension MUStARD++, have identified sarcasm to be a multi-modal phenomenon -- expressed not only in natural language text, but also through manners of speech (like tonality and intonation) and visual cues (facial expression). With this work, we aim to perform a rigorous benchmarking of the MUStARD++ dataset by considering state-of-the-art language, speech, and visual encoders, for fully utilizing the totality of the multi-modal richness that it has to offer, achieving a 2\% improvement in macro-F1 over the existing benchmark. Additionally, to cure the imbalance in the `sarcasm type' category in MUStARD++, we propose an extension, which we call \emph{MUStARD++ Balanced}, benchmarking the same with instances from the extension split across both train and test sets, achieving a further 2.4\% macro-F1 boost. The new clips were taken from a novel source -- the TV show, House MD, which adds to the diversity of the dataset, and were manually annotated by multiple annotators with substantial inter-annotator agreement in terms of Cohen's kappa and Krippendorf's alpha. Our code, extended data, and SOTA benchmark models are made public.