Publications

In 2019, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) conducted a leaderboard style speaker recognition challenge using conversational telephone speech (CTS) data extracted from the unexposed portion of the Call My Net 2 (CMN2) corpus previously used in the 2018 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE). The SRE19 CTS Challenge was organized in a similar manner to SRE18, except it offered only the open training condition. In addition, similar to the NIST i-vector challenge, the evaluation set consisted of two subsets: a progress subset, and a test subset. The progress subset comprised 30% of the trials and was used to monitor progress on the leaderboad, while the remaining 70% of the trials formed the test subset, which was used to generate the official final results determined at the end of the challenge. Which subset (i.e., progress or test) a trial belonged to was unknown to challenge participants, and each system submission had to contain outputs for all of trials. The CTS Challenge also served as a prerequisite for entrance to the main SRE19 whose primary task was audio-visual person recognition. A total of 67 organizations (forming 51 teams) from academia and industry participated in the CTS Challenge and submitted 1347 valid system outputs. This paper presents an overview of the evaluation and several analyses of system performance for all primary conditions in the CTS Challenge. Compared to the CTS track of the SRE18, the SRE19 CTS Challenge results indicate remarkable improvements in performance which are mainly attributed to 1) the availability of large amounts of in-domain development data from a large number of labeled speakers, 2) speaker representations (aka embeddings) extracted using extended and more complex end-to-end neural network frameworks, and 3) effective use of the provided large development set.

In 2019, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) conducted the most recent in an ongoing series of speaker recognition evaluations (SRE). There were two components to SRE19: 1) a leaderboard style Challenge using unexposed conversational telephone speech (CTS) data from the Call My Net 2 (CMN2) corpus, and 2) an Audio-Visual (AV) evaluation using video material extracted from the unexposed portions of the Video Annotation for Speech Technologies (VAST) corpus. This paper presents an overview of the Audio-Visual SRE19 activity including the task, the performance metric, data, and the evaluation protocol, results and system performance analyses. The Audio-Visual SRE19 was organized in a similar manner to the audio from video (AfV) track in SRE18, except it offered only the open training condition. In addition, instead of extracting and releasing only the AfV data, unexposed multimedia data from the VAST corpus was used to support the Audio-Visual SRE19. It featured two core evaluation tracks, namely audio only and audio-visual, as well as an optional visual only track. A total of 26 organizations (forming 14 teams) from academia and industry participated in the Audio-Visual SRE19 and submitted 102 valid system outputs. Evaluation results indicate: 1) notable performance improvements for the audio only speaker recognition task on the challenging amateur online video domain due to the use of more complex neural network architectures (e.g., ResNet) along with soft margin losses, 2) state-of-the-art speaker and face recognition technologies provide comparable person recognition performance on the amateur online video domain, and 3) audio-visual fusion results in remarkable performance gains (greater than 85% relative) over the audio only or visual only systems.

The rise of graph analytic systems has created a need for new ways to measure and compare the capabilities of graph processing systems. The MIT/Amazon/IEEE Graph Challenge has been developed to provide a well-defined community venue for stimulating research and highlighting innovations in graph analysis software, hardware, algorithms, and systems. GraphChallenge.org provides a wide range of preparsed graph data sets, graph generators, mathematically defined graph algorithms, example serial implementations in a variety of languages, and specific metrics for measuring performance. The triangle counting component of GraphChallenge.org tests the performance of graph processing systems to count all the triangles in a graph and exercises key graph operations found in many graph algorithms. In 2017, 2018, and 2019 many triangle counting submissions were received from a wide range of authors and organizations. This paper presents a performance analysis of the best performers of these submissions. These submissions show that their state-of-the-art triangle counting execution time, Ttri, is a strong function of the number of edges in the graph, Ne, which improved significantly from 2017 (Ttri \approx (Ne/10^8)^4=3) to 2018 (Ttri \approx Ne/10^9) and remained comparable from 2018 to 2019. Graph Challenge provides a clear picture of current graph analysis systems and underscores the need for new innovations to achieve high performance on very large graphs

The MIT/IEEE/Amazon GraphChallenge.org encourages community approaches to developing new solutions for analyzing graphs and sparse data. Sparse AI analytics present unique scalability difficulties. The Sparse Deep Neural Network (DNN) Challenge draws upon prior challenges from machine learning, high performance computing, and visual analytics to create a challenge that is reflective of emerging sparse AI systems. The sparse DNN challenge is based on a mathematically well-defined DNN inference computation and can be implemented in any programming environment. In 2019 several sparse DNN challenge submissions were received from a wide range of authors and organizations. This paper presents a performance analysis of the best performers of these submissions. These submissions show that their state-of-the-art sparse DNN execution time, TDNN, is a strong function of the number of DNN operations performed, Nop. The sparse DNN challenge provides a clear picture of current sparse DNN systems and underscores the need for new innovations to achieve high performance on very large sparse DNNs.

Community detection can be an extremely useful data triage tool, enabling a data analyst to split a largenetwork into smaller portions for a deeper analysis. If, however, a particular node wanted to avoid scrutiny, it could strategically create new connections that make it seem uninteresting. In this work, we investigate theuse of a state-of-the-art attack against node embedding as a means of countering community detection whilebeing blind to the attributes of others. The attack proposed in [1] attempts to maximize the loss function beingminimized by a random-walk-based embedding method (where two nodes are made closer together the more often a random walk starting at one node ends at the other). We propose using this method to attack thecommunity structure of the graph, specifically attacking the community assignment of an adversarial vertex. Since nodes in the same community tend to appear near each other in a random walk, their continuous-space embedding also tend to be close. Thus, we aim to use the general embedding attack in an attempt to shift the community membership of the adversarial vertex. To test this strategy, we adopt an experimental framework as in [2], where each node is given a “temperature” indicating how interesting it is. A node’s temperature can be “hot,” “cold,” or “unknown.” A node can perturbitself by adding new edges to any other node in the graph. The node’s goal is to be placed in a community thatis cold, i.e., where the average node temperature is less than 0. Of the 5 attacks proposed in [2], we use 2 in our experiments. The simpler attack is Cold and Lonely, which first connects to cold nodes, then unknown, then hot, and connects within each temperature in order of increasing degree. The more sophisticated attack is StableStructure. The procedure for this attack is to (1) identify stable structures (containing nodes assigned to the same community each time for several trials), (2) connect to nodes in order of increasing average temperature of their stable structures (randomly within a structure), and (3) connect to nodes with no stable structure in order of increasing temperature. As in [2], we use the Louvain modularity maximization technique for community detection. We slightly modify the embedding attack of [1] by only allowing addition of new edges and requiring that they include the adversary vertex. Since the embedding attack is blind to the temperatures of the nodes, experimenting with these attacks gives insight into how much this attribute information helps the adversary. Experimental results are shown in Figure 1. Graphs considered in these experiments are (1) an 500-node Erdos-Renyi graph with edge probabilityp= 0.02, (2) a stochastic block model with 5 communities of 100nodes each and edge probabilities ofpin= 0.06 andpout= 0.01, (3) the network of Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG)—aviolent non-state Islamist group operating in the Philippines—where two nodes are linked if they both participatein at least one kidnapping event, with labels derived from stable structures (nodes together in at least 95% of 1000 Louvain trials), and (4) the Cora machine learning citation graph, with 7 classes based on subjectarea. Temperature is assigned to the Erdos-Renyi nodes randomly with probability 0.25, 0.5, and 0.25 for hot,unknown, and cold, respectively. For the other graphs, nodes with the same label as the target are hot, unknown,and cold with probability 0.35, 0.55, and 0.1, respectively, and the hot and cold probabilities are swapped forother labels. The results demonstrate that, even without the temperature information, the embedding methodis about as effective as the Cold and Lonely when there is community structure to exploit, though it is not aseffective as Stable Structure, which leverages both community structure and temperature information.

Seasonal data may display different distributions throughout the period of seasonality. We fit this type of model by determiningthe appropriate change points of the distribution and fitting parameters to each interval. This offers the added benefit of searching for disjoint regimes, which may denote the samedistribution occurring nonconsecutively. Our algorithm outperforms SARIMA for prediction.

Vertex classification—the problem of identifying the class labels of nodes in a graph—has applicability in a wide variety of domains. Examples include classifying subject areas of papers in citation net-works or roles of machines in a computer network. Recent work has demonstrated that vertex classification using graph convolutional networks is susceptible to targeted poisoning attacks, in which both graph structure and node attributes can be changed in anattempt to misclassify a target node. This vulnerability decreases users’ confidence in the learning method and can prevent adoption in high-stakes contexts. This paper presents the first work aimed at leveraging network characteristics to improve robustness of these methods. Our focus is on using network features to choose the training set, rather than selecting the training set at random. Our alternative methods of selecting training data are (1) to select the highest-degree nodes in each class and (2) to iteratively select the node with the most neighbors minimally connected to the training set. In the datasets on which the original attack was demonstrated, we show that changing the training set can make the network much harder to attack. To maintain a given probability of attack success, the adversary must use far more perturbations; often a factor of 2–4 over the random training baseline. This increase in robustness is often as substantial as tripling the amount of randomly selected training data. Even in cases where success is relatively easy for the attacker, we show that classification performance degrades much more gradually using the proposed methods, with weaker incorrect predictions for the attacked nodes. Finally, we investigate the potential tradeoff between robustness and performance in various datasets.

The SuiteSparse GraphBLAS C-library implements high performance hypersparse matrices with bindings to a variety of languages (Python, Julia, and Matlab/Octave). GraphBLAS provides a lightweight in-memory database implementation of hypersparse matrices that are ideal for analyzing many types of network data, while providing rigorous mathematical guarantees, such as linearity. Streaming updates of hypersparse matrices put enormous pressure on the memory hierarchy. This work benchmarks an implementation of hierarchical hypersparse matrices that reduces memory pressure and dramatically increases the update rate into a hypersparse matrices. The parameters of hierarchical hypersparse matrices rely on controlling the number of entries in each level in the hierarchy before an update is cascaded. The parameters are easily tunable to achieve optimal performance for a variety of applications. Hierarchical hypersparse matrices achieve over 1,000,000 updates per second in a single instance. Scaling to 31,000 instances of hierarchical hypersparse matrices arrays on 1,100 server nodes on the MIT SuperCloud achieved a sustained update rate of 75,000,000,000 updates per second. This capability allows the MIT SuperCloud to analyze extremely large streaming network data sets.

This paper proposes a method for Bayesian estimation of probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) when training labels are noisy. Label errors can be expected during e.g. large or distributed data collections, or for crowd-sourced data labeling. By interpreting true labels as latent random variables, the observed labels are modeled as outputs of a discrete memoryless channel, and the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate of the PLDA model is derived via Variational Bayes. The proposed framework can be used for PLDA estimation, PLDA domain adaptation, or to infer the reliability of a PLDA training list. Although presented as a general method, the paper discusses specific applications for speaker verification. When applied to the Speakers in the Wild (SITW) Task, the proposed method achieves graceful performance degradation when label errors are introduced into the training or domain adaptation lists. When applied to the NIST 2018 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE18) Task, which includes adaptation data with noisy speaker labels, the proposed technique provides performance improvements relative to unsupervised domain adaptation.

This paper proposes a novel approach to discrimina-tive training of probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) for speaker verification with x-vectors. Model over-fitting is a well-known issue with discriminative PLDA (D-PLDA) forspeaker verification. As opposed to prior approaches which address this by limiting the number of trainable parameters, the proposed method parameterizes the discriminative PLDA (D-PLDA) model in a manner which allows for intuitive regularization, permitting the entire model to be optimized. Specifically, the within-class and across-class covariance matrices which comprise the PLDA model are expressed as products of orthonormal and diagonal matrices, and the structure of these matrices is enforced during model training. The proposed approach provides consistent performance improvements relative to previous D-PLDA methods when applied to a variety of speaker recognition evaluations, including the Speakers in the Wild Core-Core, SRE16, SRE18 CMN2, SRE19 CMN2, and VoxCeleb1 Tasks. Additionally, when implemented in Tensorflow using a modernGPU, D-PLDA optimization is highly efficient, requiring less than 20 minutes.