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 IDSS-11.5
Paper Title SPECIALIZED EMBEDDING APPROXIMATION FOR EDGE INTELLIGENCE: A CASE STUDY IN URBAN SOUND CLASSIFICATION
Authors Sangeeta Srivastava, Dhrubojyoti Roy, The Ohio State University, United States; Mark Cartwright, Juan Pablo Bello, New York University, United States; Anish Arora, The Ohio State University, United States
SessionSS-11: On-device AI for Audio and Speech Applications
LocationGather.Town
Session Time:Thursday, 10 June, 14:00 - 14:45
Presentation Time:Thursday, 10 June, 14:00 - 14:45
Presentation Poster
Topic Special Sessions: On-device AI for Audio and Speech Applications
IEEE Xplore Open Preview  Click here to view in IEEE Xplore
Virtual Presentation  Click here to watch in the Virtual Conference
Abstract Embedding models that encode semantic information into low-dimensional vector representations are useful in various machine learning tasks with limited training data. However, these models are typically too large to support inference in small edge devices, which motivates training of smaller yet comparably predictive student embedding models through knowledge distillation (KD). While knowledge distillation traditionally uses the teacher’s original training dataset to train the student, we hypothesize that using a dataset similar to the student’s target domain allows for better compression and training efficiency for the said domain, at the cost of reduced generality across other (non-pertinent) domains. Hence, we introduce Specialized Embedding Approximation (SEA) to train a student featurizer to approximate the teacher's embedding manifold for a given target domain. We demonstrate the feasibility of SEA in the context of acoustic event classification for urban noise monitoring and show that leveraging a dataset related to this target domain not only improves the baseline performance of the original embedding model but also yields competitive students with >1 order of magnitude lesser storage and activation memory. We further investigate the impact of using random and informed sampling techniques for dimensionality reduction in SEA.