The Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) challenge is designed to foster innovation in the area of noise suppression to achieve superior perceptual speech quality. This is the 4th DNS challenge, with the previous editions held at INTERSPEECH 2020 [1], ICASSP 2021 [2], and INTERSPEECH 2021 [3]. We open-source datasets and test sets for researchers to train their deep noise suppression models, as well as a subjective evaluation framework based on ITU-T P.835 to rate and rank-order the challenge entries. We provide access to DNS-MOS P.835 and word accuracy (WAcc) APIs to challenge participants to help with iterative model improvements. In this challenge, we introduced the following changes: (i) Included mobile device scenarios in the blind test set; (ii) Included a personalized noise suppression track with baseline; (iii) Added WAcc as an objective metric; (iv) Included DNSMOS P.835; (v) Made the training datasets and test sets fullband (48 kHz). We use an average of WAcc and subjective scores P.835 SIG, BAK, and OVRL to get the final score for ranking the DNS models. We believe that as a research community, we still have a long way to go in achieving excellent speech quality in challenging noisy real-world scenarios.

The INTERSPEECH 2020 Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) Challenge is intended to promote collaborative research in real-time single-channel Speech Enhancement aimed to maximize the subjective (perceptual) quality of the enhanced speech. A typical approach to evaluate the noise suppression methods is to use objective metrics on the test set obtained by splitting the original dataset. While the performance is good on the synthetic test set, often the model performance degrades significantly on real recordings. Also, most of the conventional objective metrics do not correlate well with subjective tests and lab subjective tests are not scalable for a large test set. In this challenge, we open-sourced a large clean speech and noise corpus for training the noise suppression models and a representative test set to real-world scenarios consisting of both synthetic and real recordings. We also open-sourced an online subjective test framework based on ITU-T P.808 for researchers to reliably test their developments. We evaluated the results using P.808 on a blind test set. The results and the key learnings from the challenge are discussed. The datasets and scripts can be found here for quick access https://github.com/microsoft/DNS-Challenge.

Web-scale applications can ship code on a daily to weekly cadence. These applications rely on online metrics to monitor the health of new releases. Regressions in metric values need to be detected and diagnosed as early as possible to reduce the disruption to users and product owners. Regressions in metrics can surface due to a variety of reasons: genuine product regressions, changes in user population and bias due to telemetry loss (or processing) are among the common causes. Diagnosing the cause of these metric regressions is costly for engineering teams as they need to invest time in finding the root cause of the issue as soon as possible. We presentLumos, a Python library built using the principles of A/B testing to systematically diagnose metric regressions to automate such analysis.Lumos has been deployed across the component teams in Microsoft's Real-Time Communication (RTC) applications Skype and Microsoft Teams. It has enabled engineering teams to detect 100s of real changes in metrics and reject 1000s of false alarms detected by anomaly detectors. The application ofLumos has resulted in freeing up as much as $95%$ of the time allocated to metric-based investigations. In this work, we open sourceLumos and present our results from applying it to two different components within the RTC group over millions of sessions. This general library can be coupled with any production system to manage the volume of alerting efficiently.

The Power Dominating Set (PDS) problem is the following extension of the well-known dominating set problem: find a smallest-size set of nodes S that power dominates all the nodes, where a node v is power dominated if (1) v is in S or v has a neighbor in S, or (2) v has a neighbor w such that w and all of its neighbors except v are power dominated. We show a hardness of approximation threshold of $2^{\log^{1-\epsilon}n}$ in contrast to the logarithmic hardness for the dominating set problem. We give an $O(\sqrt{n})$-approximation algorithm for planar graphs and show that our methods cannot improve on this approximation guarantee. Finally, we initiate the study of PDS on directed graphs and show the same hardness threshold of $2^{\log^{1-\epsilon}n}$ for directed acyclic graphs. Also we show that the directed PDS problem can be solved optimally in linear time if the underlying undirected graph has bounded tree-width.