High-Fidelity Audio Generation and Representation Learning with Guided Adversarial Autoencoder

Generating high-fidelity conditional audio samples and learning representation from unlabelled audio data are two challenging problems in machine learning research. Recent advances in the Generative Adversarial Neural Networks (GAN) architectures show great promise in addressing these challenges. To learn powerful representation using GAN architecture, it requires superior sample generation quality, which requires an enormous amount of labelled data. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing Guided Adversarial Autoencoder (GAAE), which can generate superior conditional audio samples from unlabelled audio data using a small percentage of labelled data as guidance. Representation learned from unlabelled data without any supervision does not guarantee its’ usability for any downstream task. On the other hand, during the representation learning, if the model is highly biased towards the downstream task, it losses its generalisation capability. This makes the learned representation hardly useful for any other tasks that are not related to that downstream task. The proposed GAAE model also address these issues. Using this superior conditional generation, GAAE can learn representation specific to the downstream task. Furthermore, GAAE learns another type of representation capturing the general attributes of the data, which is independent of the downstream task at hand. Experimental results involving the S09 and the NSynth dataset attest the superior performance of GAAE compared to the state-of-the-art alternatives.