Fast Black-Box Optimizers for Low Delay Audio Source Separation

Speaker

Gerald Schuller
Professor, Technische Universität Ilmenau, Germany.

Title

"Fast Black-Box Optimizers for Low Delay Audio Source Separation"

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to show that black box optimizers (also referred to as derivative free optimizers) recently made significant progress, such that they can also be used for signal processing applications, even for cases where only a limited time budget is available, as in online and real time applications, as shown in the presented audio source separation example.

Another advantage is that they can be used, e.g. for recurrent neural networks, which have the problem of vanishing gradients. These applications are used to compare a set of black box optimizers, all also suitable for higher dimensional problems. The results show that a suitable selection and adaptation of an optimizer for an application is crucial. For the presented applications, the presented optimizer of "Random Directions" consistently performs among the best for finding a good minimum of the objective- or loss-functions, and also for the shortest processing time.

About Speaker

I studied mathematics in Clausthal-Zellerfeld and Bonn, Germany, from 1981 to 1984, and Electrical Engineering at the Technical University of Berlin from 1984 to 1989. After finishing my studies with the "Diplom" (M.S.) degree in Berlin I obtained a scholarship for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, U.S.A., for the year 1989/90.  Then I was a research assistant at the Technical University of Berlin from 1990 to 1992, a graduate student and teaching assistant at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, U.S.A., in 1993, and a research assistant at the University of Bonn, Germany, in 1994.

I was with the University of Hannover, Germany, since 1995, where I received my Ph.D. degree, with Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and Agere Systems from 1998 to 2001, and am with the Fraunhofer Institute, Group for Electronic Media Technology (AEMT), Ilmenau, since 2001.  In January 2004 the Group for Electronic Media Technology became the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT.  

For the summer semester 2005 and winter semester 2005/06 I became temporary full professor at the Insitute of Media Technology of the Technical University of Ilmenau, Germany. Since summer semester 2008 I am a full professor of the Technical University of Ilmenau, and part time member of Fraunhofer IDMT.