Patents by Inventor Yifan Gong

Yifan Gong has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Publication number: 20210020166
    Abstract: Streaming machine learning unidirectional models is facilitated by the use of embedding vectors. Processing blocks in the models apply embedding vectors as input. The embedding vectors utilize context of future data (e.g., data that is temporally offset into the future within a data stream) to improve the accuracy of the outputs generated by the processing blocks. The embedding vectors cause a temporal shift between the outputs of the processing blocks and the inputs to which the outputs correspond. This temporal shift enables the processing blocks to apply the embedding vector inputs from processing blocks that are associated with future data.
    Type: Application
    Filed: July 19, 2019
    Publication date: January 21, 2021
    Inventors: Jinyu Li, Amit Kumar Agarwal, Yifan Gong, Harini Kesavamoorthy
  • Patent number: 10885900
    Abstract: Improvements in speech recognition in a new domain are provided via the student/teacher training of models for different speech domains. A student model for a new domain is created based on the teacher model trained in an existing domain. The student model is trained in parallel to the operation of the teacher model, with inputs in the new and existing domains respectfully, to develop a neural network that is adapted to recognize speech in the new domain. The data in the new domain may exclude transcription labels but rather are parallelized with the data analyzed in the existing domain analyzed by the teacher model. The outputs from the teacher model are compared with the outputs of the student model and the differences are used to adjust the parameters of the student model to better recognize speech in the second domain.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 11, 2017
    Date of Patent: January 5, 2021
    Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC
    Inventors: Jinyu Li, Michael Lewis Seltzer, Xi Wang, Rui Zhao, Yifan Gong
  • Patent number: 10839822
    Abstract: Representative embodiments disclose mechanisms to separate and recognize multiple audio sources (e.g., picking out individual speakers) in an environment where they overlap and interfere with each other. The architecture uses a microphone array to spatially separate out the audio signals. The spatially filtered signals are then input into a plurality of separators, so each signal is input into a corresponding signal. The separators use neural networks to separate out audio sources. The separators typically produce multiple output signals for the single input signals. A post selection processor then assesses the separator outputs to pick the signals with the highest quality output. These signals can be used in a variety of systems such as speech recognition, meeting transcription and enhancement, hearing aids, music information retrieval, speech enhancement and so forth.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: November 6, 2017
    Date of Patent: November 17, 2020
    Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC
    Inventors: Zhuo Chen, Jinyu Li, Xiong Xiao, Takuya Yoshioka, Huaming Wang, Zhenghao Wang, Yifan Gong
  • Publication number: 20200349925
    Abstract: Generally discussed herein are devices, systems, and methods for wake word verification. A method can include receiving, at a server, a message from a device indicating that an utterance of a user-defined wake word was detected at the device, the message including (a) audio samples or features extracted from the audio samples and (b) data indicating the user-defined wake word, retrieving or generating, at the server, a custom decoding graph for the user-defined wake word, wherein the decoding graph and the static portion of the wake word verification model form a custom wake word verification model for the user-defined wake word, executing the wake word verification model to determine a likelihood that the wake word was uttered, and providing a message to the device indicating whether wake was uttered based on the determined likelihood.
    Type: Application
    Filed: July 25, 2019
    Publication date: November 5, 2020
    Inventors: Khuram Shahid, Kshitiz Kumar, Teng Yi, Veljko Miljanic, Huaming Wang, Yifan Gong, Hosam Adel Khalil
  • Publication number: 20200349924
    Abstract: Generally discussed herein are devices, systems, and methods for custom wake word selection assistance. A method can include receiving, at a device, data indicating a custom wake word provided by a user, determining one or more characteristics of the custom wake word, determining that use of the custom wake word will cause more than a threshold rate of false detections based on the characteristics, rejecting the custom wake word as the wake word for accessing a personal assistant in response to determining that use of the custom wake word will cause more than a threshold rate of false detections, and setting the custom wake word as the wake word in response to determining that use of the custom wake word will not cause more than the threshold rate of false detections.
    Type: Application
    Filed: July 25, 2019
    Publication date: November 5, 2020
    Inventors: Emilian Stoimenov, Khuram Shahid, Guoli Ye, Hosam Adel Khalil, Yifan Gong
  • Publication number: 20200349927
    Abstract: Generally discussed herein are devices, systems, and methods for on-device detection of a wake word. A device can include a memory including model parameters that define a custom wake word detection model, the wake word detection model including a recurrent neural network transducer (RNNT) and a lookup table (LUT), the LUT indicating a hidden vector to be provided in response to a phoneme of a user-specified wake word, a microphone to capture audio, and processing circuitry to receive the audio from the microphone, determine, using the wake word detection model, whether the audio includes an utterance of the user-specified wake word, and wake up a personal assistant after determining the audio includes the utterance of the user-specified wake word.
    Type: Application
    Filed: July 25, 2019
    Publication date: November 5, 2020
    Inventors: Emilian Stoimenov, Rui Zhao, Kaustubh Prakash Kalgaonkar, Ivaylo Andreanov Enchev, Khuram Shahid, Anthony Phillip Stark, Guoli Ye, Mahadevan Srinivasan, Yifan Gong, Hosam Adel Khalil
  • Publication number: 20200335085
    Abstract: Embodiments are associated with a speaker-independent acoustic model capable of classifying senones based on input speech frames and on first parameters of the speaker-independent acoustic model, a speaker-dependent acoustic model capable of classifying senones based on input speech frames and on second parameters of the speaker-dependent acoustic model, and a discriminator capable of receiving data from the speaker-dependent acoustic model and data from the speaker-independent acoustic model and outputting a prediction of whether received data was generated by the speaker-dependent acoustic model based on third parameters.
    Type: Application
    Filed: July 2, 2019
    Publication date: October 22, 2020
    Inventors: Zhong MENG, Jinyu LI, Yifan GONG
  • Publication number: 20200335082
    Abstract: A CS CTC model may be initialed from a major language CTC model by keeping network hidden weights and replacing output tokens with a union of major and secondary language output tokens. The initialized model may be trained by updating parameters with training data from both languages, and a LID model may also be trained with the data. During a decoding process for each of a series of audio frames, if silence dominates a current frame then a silence output token may be emitted. If silence does not dominate the frame, then a major language output token posterior vector from the CS CTC model may be multiplied with the LID major language probability to create a probability vector from the major language. A similar step is performed for the secondary language, and the system may emit an output token associated with the highest probability across all tokens from both languages.
    Type: Application
    Filed: May 13, 2019
    Publication date: October 22, 2020
    Inventors: Jinyu LI, Guoli YE, Rui ZHAO, Yifan GONG, Ke LI
  • Publication number: 20200334527
    Abstract: According to some embodiments, a universal modeling system may include a plurality of domain expert models to each receive raw input data (e.g., a stream of audio frames containing speech utterances) and provide a domain expert output based on the raw input data. A neural mixture component may then generate a weight corresponding to each domain expert model based on information created by the plurality of domain expert models (e.g., hidden features and/or row convolution). The weights might be associated with, for example, constrained scalar numbers, unconstrained scaler numbers, vectors, matrices, etc. An output layer may provide a universal modeling system output (e.g., an automatic speech recognition result) based on each domain expert output after being multiplied by the corresponding weight for that domain expert model.
    Type: Application
    Filed: May 16, 2019
    Publication date: October 22, 2020
    Inventors: Amit DAS, Jinyu LI, Changliang LIU, Yifan GONG
  • Publication number: 20200334526
    Abstract: According to some embodiments, a machine learning model may include an input layer to receive an input signal as a series of frames representing handwriting data, speech data, audio data, and/or textual data. A plurality of time layers may be provided, and each time layer may comprise a uni-directional recurrent neural network processing block. A depth processing block may scan hidden states of the recurrent neural network processing block of each time layer, and the depth processing block may be associated with a first frame and receive context frame information of a sequence of one or more future frames relative to the first frame. An output layer may output a final classification as a classified posterior vector of the input signal. For example, the depth processing block may receive the context from information from an output of a time layer processing block or another depth processing block of the future frame.
    Type: Application
    Filed: May 13, 2019
    Publication date: October 22, 2020
    Inventors: Jinyu LI, Vadim MAZALOV, Changliang LIU, Liang LU, Yifan GONG
  • Publication number: 20200335108
    Abstract: To generate substantially domain-invariant and speaker-discriminative features, embodiments are associated with a feature extractor to receive speech frames and extract features from the speech frames based on a first set of parameters of the feature extractor, a senone classifier to identify a senone based on the received features and on a second set of parameters of the senone classifier, an attention network capable of determining a relative importance of features extracted by the feature extractor to domain classification, based on a third set of parameters of the attention network, a domain classifier capable of classifying a domain based on the features and the relative importances, and on a fourth set of parameters of the domain classifier; and a training platform to train the first set of parameters of the feature extractor and the second set of parameters of the senone classifier to minimize the senone classification loss, train the first set of parameters of the feature extractor to maximize the dom
    Type: Application
    Filed: July 26, 2019
    Publication date: October 22, 2020
    Inventors: Zhong MENG, Jinyu LI, Yifan GONG
  • Publication number: 20200335122
    Abstract: To generate substantially condition-invariant and speaker-discriminative features, embodiments are associated with a feature extractor capable of extracting features from speech frames based on first parameters, a speaker classifier capable of identifying a speaker based on the features and on second parameters, and a condition classifier capable of identifying a noise condition based on the features and on third parameters. The first parameters of the feature extractor and the second parameters of the speaker classifier are trained to minimize a speaker classification loss, the first parameters of the feature extractor are further trained to maximize a condition classification loss, and the third parameters of the condition classifier are trained to minimize the condition classification loss.
    Type: Application
    Filed: June 7, 2019
    Publication date: October 22, 2020
    Inventors: Zhong MENG, Yong ZHAO, Jinyu LI, Yifan GONG
  • Publication number: 20200335119
    Abstract: Embodiments are associated with determination of a first plurality of multi-dimensional vectors, each of the first plurality of multi-dimensional vectors representing speech of a target speaker, determination of a multi-dimensional vector representing a speech signal of two or more speakers, determination of a weighted vector representing speech of the target speaker based on the first plurality of multi-dimensional vectors and on similarities between the multi-dimensional vector and each of the first plurality of multi-dimensional vectors, and extraction of speech of the target speaker from the speech signal based on the weighted vector and the speech signal.
    Type: Application
    Filed: June 7, 2019
    Publication date: October 22, 2020
    Inventors: Xiong XIAO, Zhuo CHEN, Takuya YOSHIOKA, Changliang LIU, Hakan ERDOGAN, Dimitrios Basile DIMITRIADIS, Yifan GONG, James Garnet Droppo, III
  • Publication number: 20200334538
    Abstract: Embodiments are associated with conditional teacher-student model training. A trained teacher model configured to perform a task may be accessed and an untrained student model may be created. A model training platform may provide training data labeled with ground truths to the teacher model to produce teacher posteriors representing the training data. When it is determined that a teacher posterior matches the associated ground truth label, the platform may conditionally use the teacher posterior to train the student model. When it is determined that a teacher posterior does not match the associated ground truth label, the platform may conditionally use the ground truth label to train the student model. The models might be associated with, for example, automatic speech recognition (e.g., in connection with domain adaptation and/or speaker adaptation).
    Type: Application
    Filed: May 13, 2019
    Publication date: October 22, 2020
    Inventors: Zhong MENG, Jinyu LI, Yong ZHAO, Yifan GONG
  • Publication number: 20200320985
    Abstract: A method of enhancing an automated speech recognition confidence classifier includes receiving a set of baseline confidence features from one or more decoded words, deriving word embedding confidence features from the baseline confidence features, joining the baseline confidence features with word embedding confidence features to create a feature vector, and executing the confidence classifier to generate a confidence score, wherein the confidence classifier is trained with a set of training examples having labeled features corresponding to the feature vector.
    Type: Application
    Filed: April 8, 2019
    Publication date: October 8, 2020
    Inventors: Kshitiz Kumar, Anastasios Anastasakos, Yifan Gong
  • Publication number: 20200312307
    Abstract: A computer implemented method classifies an input corresponding to multiple different kinds of input. The method includes obtaining a set of features from the input, providing the set of features to multiple different models to generate state predictions, generating a set of state-dependent predicted weights, and combining the state predictions from the multiple models, based on the state-dependent predicted weights for classification of the set of features.
    Type: Application
    Filed: March 25, 2019
    Publication date: October 1, 2020
    Inventors: Kshitiz Kumar, Yifan Gong
  • Patent number: 10706852
    Abstract: The described technology provides arbitration between speech recognition results generated by different automatic speech recognition (ASR) engines, such as ASR engines trained according to different language or acoustic models. The system includes an arbitrator that selects between a first speech recognition result representing an acoustic utterance as transcribed by a first ASR engine and a second speech recognition result representing the acoustic utterance as transcribed by a second ASR engine. This selection is based on a set of confidence features that is initially used by the first ASR engine or the second ASR engine to generate the first and second speech recognition results.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: November 13, 2015
    Date of Patent: July 7, 2020
    Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC
    Inventors: Kshitiz Kumar, Hosam Khalil, Yifan Gong, Ziad Al-Bawab, Chaojun Liu
  • Publication number: 20200175335
    Abstract: Representative embodiments disclose machine learning classifiers used in scenarios such as speech recognition, image captioning, machine translation, or other sequence-to-sequence embodiments. The machine learning classifiers have a plurality of time layers, each layer having a time processing block and a depth processing block. The time processing block is a recurrent neural network such as a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network. The depth processing blocks can be an LSTM network, a gated Deep Neural Network (DNN) or a maxout DNN. The depth processing blocks account for the hidden states of each time layer and uses summarized layer information for final input signal feature classification. An attention layer can also be used between the top depth processing block and the output layer.
    Type: Application
    Filed: November 30, 2018
    Publication date: June 4, 2020
    Inventors: Jinyu Li, Liang Lu, Changliang Liu, Yifan Gong
  • Patent number: 10643602
    Abstract: Methods, systems, and computer programs are presented for training, with adversarial constraints, a student model for speech recognition based on a teacher model. One method includes operations for training a teacher model based on teacher speech data, initializing a student model with parameters obtained from the teacher model, and training the student model with adversarial teacher-student learning based on the teacher speech data and student speech data. Training the student model with adversarial teacher-student learning further includes minimizing a teacher-student loss that measures a divergence of outputs between the teacher model and the student model; minimizing a classifier condition loss with respect to parameters of a condition classifier; and maximizing the classifier condition loss with respect to parameters of a feature extractor. The classifier condition loss measures errors caused by acoustic condition classification. Further, speech is recognized with the trained student model.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 16, 2018
    Date of Patent: May 5, 2020
    Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC
    Inventors: Jinyu Li, Zhong Meng, Yifan Gong
  • Patent number: 10629193
    Abstract: Non-limiting examples of the present disclosure describe advancements in acoustic-to-word modeling that improve accuracy in speech recognition processing through the replacement of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) tokens. During the decoding of speech signals, better accuracy in speech recognition processing is achieved through training and implementation of multiple different solutions that present enhanced speech recognition models. In one example, a hybrid neural network model for speech recognition processing combines a word-based neural network model as a primary model and a character-based neural network model as an auxiliary model. The primary word-based model emits a word sequence, and an output of character-based auxiliary model is consulted at a segment where the word-based model emits an OOV token. In another example, a mixed unit speech recognition model is developed and trained to generate a mixed word and character sequence during decoding of a speech signal without requiring generation of OOV tokens.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 9, 2018
    Date of Patent: April 21, 2020
    Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC
    Inventors: Guoli Ye, James Droppo, Jinyu Li, Rui Zhao, Yifan Gong