Speech emotion recognition (SER) faces two fundamental challenges: scarcity of labeled data and inter-speaker variability, both of which hinder generalization of emotion recognition systems. While prior adversarial approaches address speaker variability, they fall short in leveraging powerful pre-trained representations. We propose SISER (Speaker-Invariant Speech Emotion Recognition), integrating wav2vec 2.0 as a feature encoder and ECAPA-TDNN as a speaker discriminator within an entropy-based adversarial training scheme. wav2vec 2.0 provides rich self-supervised representations that alleviate dependency on large labeled datasets, while ECAPA-TDNN enables suppression of speaker identity via a stronger adversarial signal than shallow classifiers. Evaluated on IEMOCAP, SISER achieves a UA of 60.63%, outperforming the baseline (51.15%) and wav2vec 2.0 without speaker suppression (56.46%), with ablation emphasizing that the choice of speaker classifier architecture is a key factor.
Marco Pasini, Javier Nistal, Ben Hayes +3cs.SD cs.AI eess.AS
We present LiveBand, a real-time system that generates high-fidelity music accompaniments to live audio input, respecting strict causal constraints. Our method trains a causal transformer generator in the continuous latent space of a pre-trained causal audio autoencoder, using adversarial sequence-level supervision from a discriminator. At each timestep, the generator receives only the causally available mix context and Gaussian noise, and predicts accompaniment latents without access to future mix frames or ground-truth target latents. Training is performed in a single parallel forward pass under causal masking, while streaming inference proceeds autoregressively with a rolling attention state. The model's training and inference computations are matched by design, eliminating teacher forcing and the associated exposure bias. On a multi-instrument music accompaniment benchmark, LiveBand improves over prior work on objective measures of audio quality, beat alignment, and mix adherence, while enabling real-time streaming generation without lookahead into the future on consumer hardware.