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Unrolling training trajectories over time strongly influences the inference accuracy of neural network-augmented physics simulators. We analyze this in three variants of training neural time-steppers. In addition to one-step setups and fully differentiable unrolling, we include a third, less widely used variant: unrolling without temporal gradients. Comparing networks trained with these three modalities disentangles the two dominant effects of unrolling, training distribution shift and long-term gradients. We present detailed study across physical systems, network sizes and architectures, training setups, and test scenarios. It also encompasses two simulation modes: In prediction setups, we rely solely on neural networks to compute a trajectory. In contrast, correction setups include a numerical solver that is supported by a neural network. Spanning these variations, our study provides the empirical basis for our main findings: Non-differentiable but unrolled training with a numerical solver in a correction setup can yield substantial improvements over a fully differentiable prediction setup not utilizing this solver. The accuracy of models trained in a fully differentiable setup differs compared to their non-differentiable counterparts. Differentiable ones perform best in a comparison among correction networks as well as among prediction setups. For both, the accuracy of non-differentiable unrolling comes close. Furthermore, we show that these behaviors are invariant to the physical system, the network architecture and size, and the numerical scheme. These results motivate integrating non-differentiable numerical simulators into training setups even if full differentiability is unavailable. We show the convergence rate of common architectures to be low compared to numerical algorithms. This motivates correction setups combining neural and numerical parts which utilize benefits of both., Comment: Project Page: https://ge.in.tum.de/publications/how-temporal-unrolling-supports-neural-physics-simulators/ , Github Page: https://github.com/tum-pbs/unrolling

Simulating turbulent flows is crucial for a wide range of applications, and machine learning-based solvers are gaining increasing relevance. However, achieving temporal stability when generalizing to longer rollout horizons remains a persistent challenge for learned PDE solvers. In this work, we analyze if fully data-driven fluid solvers that utilize an autoregressive rollout based on conditional diffusion models are a viable option to address this challenge. We investigate accuracy, posterior sampling, spectral behavior, and temporal stability, while requiring that methods generalize to flow parameters beyond the training regime. To quantitatively and qualitatively benchmark the performance of a range of flow prediction approaches, three challenging scenarios including incompressible and transonic flows, as well as isotropic turbulence are employed. We find that even simple diffusion-based approaches can outperform multiple established flow prediction methods in terms of accuracy and temporal stability, while being on par with state-of-the-art stabilization techniques like unrolling at training time. Such traditional architectures are superior in terms of inference speed, however, the probabilistic nature of diffusion approaches allows for inferring multiple predictions that align with the statistics of the underlying physics. Overall, our benchmark contains three carefully chosen data sets that are suitable for probabilistic evaluation alongside various established flow prediction architectures., Comment: Source code available at https://github.com/tum-pbs/autoreg-pde-diffusion and further information and videos at https://ge.in.tum.de/publications/2023-acdm-kohl

Recent Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems trained on reading or acted corpora have achieved near human-level naturalness. The diversity of human speech, however, often goes beyond the coverage of these corpora. We believe the ability to handle such diversity is crucial for AI systems to achieve human-level communication. Our work explores the use of more abundant real-world data for building speech synthesizers. We train TTS systems using real-world speech from YouTube and podcasts. We observe the mismatch between training and inference alignments in mel-spectrogram based autoregressive models, leading to unintelligible synthesis, and demonstrate that learned discrete codes within multiple code groups effectively resolves this issue. We introduce our MQTTS system whose architecture is designed for multiple code generation and monotonic alignment, along with the use of a clean silence prompt to improve synthesis quality. We conduct ablation analyses to identify the efficacy of our methods. We show that MQTTS outperforms existing TTS systems in several objective and subjective measures., Comment: Accepted to AAAI 2023

We present a unified system to realize one-shot voice conversion (VC) on the pitch, rhythm, and speaker attributes. Existing works generally ignore the correlation between prosody and language content, leading to the degradation of naturalness in converted speech. Additionally, the lack of proper language features prevents these systems from accurately preserving language content after conversion. To address these issues, we devise a cascaded modular system leveraging self-supervised discrete speech units as language representation. These discrete units provide duration information essential for rhythm modeling. Our system first extracts utterance-level prosody and speaker representations from the raw waveform. Given the prosody representation, a prosody predictor estimates pitch, energy, and duration for each discrete unit in the utterance. A synthesizer further reconstructs speech based on the predicted prosody, speaker representation, and discrete units. Experiments show that our system outperforms previous approaches in naturalness, intelligibility, speaker transferability, and prosody transferability. Code and samples are publicly available., Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 2023

The lack of clean speech is a practical challenge to the development of speech enhancement systems, which means that there is an inevitable mismatch between their training criterion and evaluation metric. In response to this unfavorable situation, we propose a training and inference strategy that additionally uses enhanced speech as a target by improving the previously proposed noisy-target training (NyTT). Because homogeneity between in-domain noise and extraneous noise is the key to the effectiveness of NyTT, we train various student models by remixing 1) the teacher model's estimated speech and noise for enhanced-target training or 2) raw noisy speech and the teacher model's estimated noise for noisy-target training. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms several baselines, especially with the teacher/student inference, where predicted clean speech is derived successively through the teacher and final student models., Comment: Accepted by Interspeech 2023

In this paper, we train turbulence models based on convolutional neural networks. These learned turbulence models improve under-resolved low resolution solutions to the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations at simulation time. Our study involves the development of a differentiable numerical solver that supports the propagation of optimisation gradients through multiple solver steps. The significance of this property is demonstrated by the superior stability and accuracy of those models that unroll more solver steps during training. Furthermore, we introduce loss terms based on turbulence physics that further improve the model accuracy. This approach is applied to three two-dimensional turbulence flow scenarios, a homogeneous decaying turbulence case, a temporally evolving mixing layer, and a spatially evolving mixing layer. Our models achieve significant improvements of long-term a-posteriori statistics when compared to no-model simulations, without requiring these statistics to be directly included in the learning targets. At inference time, our proposed method also gains substantial performance improvements over similarly accurate, purely numerical methods., Comment: Published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics (JFM), code & data available at: https://github.com/tum-pbs/differentiable-piso

Simulations that produce three-dimensional data are ubiquitous in science, ranging from fluid flows to plasma physics. We propose a similarity model based on entropy, which allows for the creation of physically meaningful ground truth distances for the similarity assessment of scalar and vectorial data, produced from transport and motion-based simulations. Utilizing two data acquisition methods derived from this model, we create collections of fields from numerical PDE solvers and existing simulation data repositories. Furthermore, a multiscale CNN architecture that computes a volumetric similarity metric (VolSiM) is proposed. To the best of our knowledge this is the first learning method inherently designed to address the challenges arising for the similarity assessment of high-dimensional simulation data. Additionally, the tradeoff between a large batch size and an accurate correlation computation for correlation-based loss functions is investigated, and the metric's invariance with respect to rotation and scale operations is analyzed. Finally, the robustness and generalization of VolSiM is evaluated on a large range of test data, as well as a particularly challenging turbulence case study, that is close to potential real-world applications., Comment: Published at AAAI 2023, source code available at https://github.com/tum-pbs/VOLSIM and further information at https://ge.in.tum.de/publications/2022-volsim-kohl

While Wav2Vec 2.0 has been proposed for speech recognition (ASR), it can also be used for speech emotion recognition (SER); its performance can be significantly improved using different fine-tuning strategies. Two baseline methods, vanilla fine-tuning (V-FT) and task adaptive pretraining (TAPT) are first presented. We show that V-FT is able to outperform state-of-the-art models on the IEMOCAP dataset. TAPT, an existing NLP fine-tuning strategy, further improves the performance on SER. We also introduce a novel fine-tuning method termed P-TAPT, which modifies the TAPT objective to learn contextualized emotion representations. Experiments show that P-TAPT performs better than TAPT, especially under low-resource settings. Compared to prior works in this literature, our top-line system achieved a 7.4\% absolute improvement in unweighted accuracy (UA) over the state-of-the-art performance on IEMOCAP. Our code is publicly available., Comment: Accepted to ICASSP 2023

In this paper, we present a novel architecture to realize fine-grained style control on the transformer-based text-to-speech synthesis (TransformerTTS). Specifically, we model the speaking style by extracting a time sequence of local style tokens (LST) from the reference speech. The existing content encoder in TransformerTTS is then replaced by our designed cross-attention blocks for fusion and alignment between content and style. As the fusion is performed along with the skip connection, our cross-attention block provides a good inductive bias to gradually infuse the phoneme representation with a given style. Additionally, we prevent the style embedding from encoding linguistic content by randomly truncating LST during training and using wav2vec 2.0 features. Experiments show that with fine-grained style control, our system performs better in terms of naturalness, intelligibility, and style transferability. Our code and samples are publicly available., Comment: Accepted in ICASSP 2022

The present study investigates the accurate inference of Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes solutions for the compressible flow over aerofoils in two dimensions with a deep neural network. Our approach yields networks that learn to generate precise flow fields for varying body-fitted, structured grids by providing them with an encoding of the corresponding mapping to a canonical space for the solutions. We apply the deep neural network model to a benchmark case of incompressible flow at randomly given angles of attack and Reynolds numbers and achieve an improvement of more than an order of magnitude compared to previous work. Further, for transonic flow cases, the deep neural network model accurately predicts complex flow behaviour at high Reynolds numbers, such as shock wave/boundary layer interaction, and quantitative distributions like pressure coefficient, skin friction coefficient as well as wake total pressure profiles downstream of aerofoils. The proposed deep learning method significantly speeds up the predictions of flow fields and shows promise for enabling fast aerodynamic designs.

This paper focuses on using voice conversion (VC) to improve the speech intelligibility of surgical patients who have had parts of their articulators removed. Due to the difficulty of data collection, VC without parallel data is highly desired. Although techniques for unparallel VC, for example, CycleGAN, have been developed, they usually focus on transforming the speaker identity, and directly transforming the speech of one speaker to that of another speaker and as such do not address the task here. In this paper, we propose a new approach for unparallel VC. The proposed approach transforms impaired speech to normal speech while preserving the linguistic content and speaker characteristics. To our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end GAN-based unsupervised VC model applied to impaired speech. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms CycleGAN., Comment: Published as a conference paper at INTERSPEECH 2019