Multi-Task Learning for Audio-Visual Active Speaker Detection

This report describes the approach underlying our submission to the active speaker detection task (task B-2) of ActivityNet Challenge 2019. We introduce a new audio-visual model which builds upon a 3D-ResNet18 visual model pretrained for lipreading and a VGG-M acoustic model pretrained for audio-to-video synchronization. The model is trained with two losses in a multi-task learning fashion: a contrastive loss to enforce matching between audio and video features for active speakers, and a regular crossentropy loss to obtain speaker / non-speaker labels. This model obtains 84.0% mAP on the validation set of AVAActiveSpeaker. Experimental results showcase the pretrained embeddings’ abilities to transfer across tasks and data formats, as well as the advantage of the proposed multi-task learning strategy.