Lorenzo Olearo

For the last decade, there has been a push to use multi-dimensional (latent) spaces to represent concepts; and yet how to manipulate these concepts or reason with them remains largely unclear. Some recent methods exploit multiple latent representations and their connection, making this research question even more entangled. Our goal is to understand how operations in the latent space affect the underlying concepts. To that end, we explore the task of concept blending through diffusion models. Diffusion models are based on a connection between a latent representation of textual prompts and a latent space that enables image reconstruction and generation. This task allows us to try different text-based combination strategies, and evaluate easily through a visual analysis. Our conclusion is that concept blending through space manipulation is possible, although the best strategy depends on the context of the blend.

Speaker verification is the task of examining a speech signal to authenticate the claimed identity of a speaker as true or false. In order to deal with utterances having different lengths, and to accumulate information along the time dimension, different temporal aggregators have been proposed inside speaker verification pipelines. In this paper we investigate the behavior of five different temporal aggregators in the state of art, namely Temporal Average Pooling (TAP), Global Statistical Pooling (GSP), Self-Attentive Pooling (SAP), Attentive Statistical Pooling (ASP), and Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD) at varying lengths of the two utterances. Starting from a speaker verification method in the state of the art, the experimental results on the VoxCeleb2 dataset show that there is a sweet spot for utterance length where speaker verification performance is higher independently from the temporal aggregator used.