Bartłomiej Marek1, Piotr Kawa2, Piotr Syga2
1CISPA – Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany
Abstract
Since the majority of audio DeepFake (DF) detection meth- ods are trained on English-centric datasets, their applicability to non-English languages remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce a benchmark for the multilingual audio DF detection challenge by evaluating various adaptation strategies.
Our experiments focus on analyzing models trained on English benchmark datasets, as well as intra-linguistic (same-language) and cross-linguistic adaptation approaches. Our results indi- cate considerable variations in detection efficacy, highlighting the difficulties of multilingual settings. We show that limiting the training dataset to English negatively impacts the efficacy, while using even a small amount of data in the target language proves more beneficial for detection than adding larger volumes of data from multiple non-target languages combined.
Index Terms: Audio DeepFakes, DeepFake detection, multi-
1. Introduction
The rapid growth of generative AI, especially in voice synthe- sis, has made it easier to create personalized voices. Technolo- gies such as text-to-speech (TTS) and voice cloning (VC) need only seconds of voice input to produce convincing replicas .
While useful for personal assistants, these tools can also be mis- used, such as for audio DeepFakes (DF). Malicious DFs can undermine media credibility and enable harmful manipulation, from political disinformation such as AI-generated Polish cam- paign ads 1 to financial fraud, such as a $25.6M scam in Hong Kong using executive impersonation 2.
Despite extensive research on DeepFake detection, a chal- lenge similar to spoofing countermeasures , key issues per- sist, including limited diverse data and poor generalization .
Recent advancements [4, 5, 6] have democratized voice tech- nology, enabling users to generate high-quality speech across languages. A Recorded Future Inc. report 3 found 82 Deep- Fakes of public figures in 38 countries (July 2023–July 2024), with 30 of them holding elections, underscoring DFs’ global impact. Mitigation may require localized strategies, yet most models remain trained primarily on English and Chinese due to dataset availability.
The recent Multi-Language Audio Anti-Spoofing Dataset (MLAAD) enables research on cross-language model gen- eralization. Our work introduces a benchmark to evaluate mul- tilingual DF detection, focusing on adaptation strategies: fine- 1https://notesfrompoland.com/2023/08/25/opposition-criticised- for-using-ai-generated-deepfake-voice-of-pm-in-polish-election-ad 2https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/04/asia/deepfake-cfo-scam-hong-
Kong-Intl-Hnk/Index.Html
3https://go.recordedfuture.com/hubfs/reports/ta-2024-0924.pdf tuning, training from scratch, or using English pre-trained mod- els to enhance performance across languages.
Our work extends prior studies [8, 9] by adding intra- and cross-lingual adaptations, language correlations, and investigat- ing language families while limiting potential biases from over- lapped synthesizers . Specifically, we take a broader per- spective by analyzing languages from three families: Germanic (English, German), Romance (French, Italian, Spanish), and Slavic (Polish, Russian, Ukrainian), with a focus on designing a benchmark that is as unbiased as possible using public data.
We aim to determine whether language-specific data are necessary for accurate detection and how to best adapt English- trained models when only a small dataset in the target language is available. We empirically explore three essential research questions (RQ) in this area. Specifically, our objective is to check to what extent the detection efficacy varies by language, whether English benchmark-trained models are sufficient for effective cross-linguistic detection, and which targeted strate- gies best support DF detection in specific languages, precisely intra- or cross-lingual adaptations, even assuming access to very limited resources in a specific language.
Models Generalize To Multilingual Scenarios?
Current, publicly available benchmarks are English-centric, po- tentially leaving detection models underprepared for real-world scenarios involving non-English audio. This explores the chal- lenges of relying solely on benchmark-trained models for di- verse linguistic contexts, focusing on their performance in spe- cific non-English languages.
RQ2: How does language choice influence DeepFake detec-
Tion Effectiveness?
Despite advances in audio DF detection, there is limited under- standing of how language influences detection efficacy. This an- alyzes how detection effectiveness varies across languages and whether multilingual training data enhance or degrade perfor- mance compared to language-specific approaches.
Which Is The More Effective Adaptation Strategy:
language-specific with limited data, or multilingual with
Larger Datasets?
We compare training a language-specific model with limited data, using an English-trained model, and fine-tuning it with language-specific or multilingual data. We aim to determine if a more targeted or diverse language dataset would be more ef- fective for our strategy. In the latter case, it would be necessary to determine which languages are most suitable for adaptation.
The codebase related to our research can be found in 4. 4https://github.com/bartlomiejmarek/are audio df polyglots
Arxiv:2412.17924V2 [Cs.Sd] 6 Aug 2025
Table 1: Hours of training data used for W2V+AASIST XLS-R 300m and Whisper medium .
2. Related Works
DeepFake detection has gained attention as TTS and VC al- gorithms create increasingly realistic audio fakes. A substan- tial portion of the research in this domain has used ASVspoof datasets [13, 14, 15, 16], considered a gold standard for the anti- spoofing domain. However, these datasets do not fully represent real-world scenarios in terms of language coverage, as they ex- clusively consist of English samples.
The discrepancy between generation methods in the train- ing and test sets leads to significant performance drops, espe- cially in real-world settings. While proposed a method for dealing with unseen methods of DF generation, showed that detection models have even greater difficulty in the correct clas- sification of real-world samples, publishing the ”In the Wild” dataset. Moreover, most published datasets contain only En- glish samples [18, 19, 20], with including some Japanese utterances and [21, 22, 23, 24] providing Chinese ones.
Recent publications indicate that the effectiveness of de- tection methods significantly degrades across linguistic bound- aries [25, 26]. The results suggest that detection systems ex- hibit substantial bias toward training language characteristics.
Specifically, performance drops significantly when evaluated using unfamiliar languages or accents (even within the same language). . On the other hand, the performance of detec- tion methods is also heavily dependent on the overlap between the speech generators seen during training and those used in testing, thus highlighting the inability of existing models to gen- eralize to unseen synthesis techniques [10, 26].
A recent Multi-Language Audio Anti-spoofing Dataset (MLAAD) attempts to address the gap, providing over 76,000 utterances in 23 languages, with DF generated using 54 systems to present samples with varied distributions. This publicly available, large-scale audio fake corpus spans over 160 hours and forms a complete dataset with the M-AILABS Speech Dataset, consisting of authentic audio recordings from public domain books. For this research, we used the third ver- sion of the MLAAD dataset 5.
Notably, due to the large number of languages in the dataset, the number of samples in each language is limited. Given the problem with the generalization of the models, we cannot be sure if the efficacies of the detection models rely on the target language, i.e., the language in which the utterance is spoken. This motivated this paper so that further research could focus on the most promising way to detect non-English DFs.
3. Experimental Setup
Throughout the article, we investigate the efficacy of English- trained detection models in detecting DFs for various languages and provide a strategy to improve the detection efficacy for DF utterances in languages with severely limited datasets that might be used to train or fine-tune the detection model. In this study, we concentrate on the languages represented in the M-AILABS Speech Dataset, which provides a comprehensive sample of au- 5https://owncloud.fraunhofer.de/index.php/s/tL2Y1FKrWiX4ZtP thentic language data in these languages. We have selected En- glish (en) and German (de) from the Germanic family, French (fr), Italian (it), and Spanish (es), which represent the Romance languages, and Polish (pl), Russian (ru), and Ukrainian (uk), which represent the Slavic languages.
3.1. Models
Audio DF detection methods are based on either direct wave- form analysis via end-to-end models [27, 28], or feature-based methods employing front-end extractors, which derive acoustic properties from raw audio for subsequent deep-learning [29, 30, 31]. Our research systematically examines the leading DF de- tection models [27, 30, 29, 32], assuming limited availability of non-English resources. Specifically, we evaluate the following scenarios: i) English-trained detection model on the target lan- guage, ii) training from scratch directly on the target language, iii) fine-tuning pre-trained English models on target languages, iv) fine-tuning with a single related or unrelated language, v) fine-tuning with multiple languages while excluding the target language. For all the experiments, we assume that non-English resources are severely limited. Given that two of our models utilize SSL architectures, we selected a pretrained W2V XLS-R
300M And Whisper Medium . In Table 1 We Can Ob-
serve the amount of data used to train the specific language.
3.2. Datasets
We establish a baseline by utilizing models trained on the entire English benchmark dataset ASVspoof2019 LA, consisting of the training, development, and evaluation sets, and treat them as a reference point for language-specific fine-tuning, as most researched audio DFs detection solutions used English or Chi- nese for training (some of the latter’s sets, e.g., ADD , were not publicly available during this research).
Several languages of MLAADv3 are generated using four architectures (XTTS v1.1, XTTS v2, Griffin-Lim, VITS) . To avoid any overlap between fine-tuning and evaluation architec- tures, we employ strict constraints. We perform fine-tuning of the models, initially pre-trained on ASVspoof 2019, with audio samples generated using VITS and Griffin-Lim, and later eval- uate on spoof samples synthesized with XTTS v1.1 and XTTS v2. To ensure fairness, we also reverse this setup, (XTTS archi- tectures are used for fine-tuning, whereas VITS and Griffin-Lim for testing). This guarantees no overlap between the methods in fine-tuning and test datasets. As shown recently , such over- lap could lead to incorrect conclusions on language transferabil- ity because the ease or challenge might stem from generator- specific artifacts rather than linguistic properties. This separa- tion across samples is essential to maintain the integrity of our comparisons. For evaluation assessment, we calculate the Equal Error Rate (EER) (in %) for both runs separately and report an average of them. Our approach focuses on conducting standard- ized comparisons within the available data resources.
Even for this limited number of languages and architec- tures, we took proactive steps to generate missing data to avoid potential bias. Specifically, we synthesized samples using XTTS Table 2: Edit-distance (ED) means ± standard deviations for fake and original transcriptions for MLAAD dataset .
6.1 ±11.3
v1.1 and XTTS v2 for English and VITS samples for Russian, which were not included in the original MLAAD. Moreover, it is important to note that the original MLAAD dataset does not contain Ukrainian samples generated using XTTS v1.1 and XTTS v2 due to the limitations of these generators. This led us to use GlowTTS and Facebook Massively Multilingual Speech instead of excluding this language from our study.
3.3. Hyperparameters
We train and fine-tune the models utilizing distinct hyper- parameter configurations depending on the model architec- ture.
For The Lightweight Architectures (Lfcc+Aasist,
LFCC+MesoNet, RawGAT-ST), we utilize a learning rate of 5e-03 and a weight decay of 2.5e-05. In contrast, for the larger models, W2V+AASIST and Whisper+AASIST, we utilize a learning rate of 5.0e-06 and a weight decay of 5e-07.
Due
to limited data resources, we use an unchanged hyperparam- eter configuration, as well as a more traditional, lower learn- ing rate and weight decay typically applied during fine-tuning.
Thus, for fine-tuning lightweight models, we use a learning rate of 1e-04, a weight decay of 5.0e-06, an learning rate of 5.0e- 06, and a weight decay of 5.0e-07.
Similarly, We Fine-Tune
W2V+AASIST and Whisper+AASIST using either a learning rate of 2.5e-6 or 5e-6, both with a weight decay of 2.5e-7. Fur- thermore, the SSL front-ends (W2V and Whisper) remain fully trainable during both training and fine-tuning, with all weights unfrozen. We do not apply any data augmentation techniques.
The evaluation results are the mean of 10 runs of 90% of the test dataset.
4. Results
In this section, we present the evaluation results of the scenario defined in Sect. 3 to determine the efficacies of the model in limited data availability across various languages and adapta- tion strategies. Firstly, we evaluate English-trained models on the target languages. Then, we train from scratch in the target language to verify the need for large-scale data training in mul- tilingual settings. We further explore fine-tuning with a single related or unrelated language and with multiple languages while omitting the specific language, thus examining the potential of cross- and intra-linguistic adaptations. Intralinguistic strat- egy, focusing on within-language fine-tuning, demonstrates that even a limited amount of data can meaningfully improve detec- tion accuracy in the target language. Cross-linguistic adapta- tions, that is the strategy that uses any other language(s) than the target one, offer a promising path for enhancing low-resource language performance through transfer from potential similar- ities between languages or similar models’ interpretations, but the results point out the challenges and limitations, thus leading to using unusual combinations of languages that are not related to each other.
In Tables bold values indicate the best performance for a specific language (across all models), while underlined values highlight the best performance for a specific pre-trained model within each language.
4.1. Baseline
The experiment shows that the performance of models trained on the entire ASVspoof2019 LA, comprising 97,168 training samples and 24,293 validation samples, varies very depending on language and model. As shown in Table 3, W2V+AASIST, pre-trained on an English benchmark dataset, achieves the high- est performance across nearly all tested languages, thus substan- tially outperforming the lowest EERs of other models for each language, presenting superior generalization capabilities across languages.
While The Best Lfcc-Based Model Varies Across
languages, these models trailed behind W2V+AASIST overall and far outperformed alternatives like Whisper+AASIST and RawGAT-ST, demonstrating insufficient cross-lingual general- ization capabilities.
The results show widely differing efficacies of audio DF detection across models and languages.
Notably, Specific
languages revealed more significant challenges for the pre- trained models.
In Particular, The Russian Language Exhibits
the highest challenge, achieving an EER of 15.74 ± 8.91% for W2V+AASIST and 17.89 ± 9.79% for LFCC+MesoNet. Analyzing the best-performing models trained on the English benchmark dataset, it is noteworthy that DFs in some languages are even more detectable than in English, despite being trained only with English samples. Specifically, LFCC+AASIST and LFCC+MesoNet detect DFs more effectively in French, Polish, and Ukrainian, while W2V+AASIST shows improved perfor- mance in these languages, as well as Italian. While Ukrainian’s performance can be explained by poorer sample quality com- pared to other languages, as visible in Table 2, the superior performance of the remaining languages relative to English re- quires additional analysis in subsequent works.
4.2. Language Training
To investigate the effectiveness of limited training data, we train models from scratch with a single language following the dataset partitioning described in Section 3. The aim is to assess whether even a small number of samples for a particu- lar language and training the model could be an alternative to long training on a large dataset. The SSL-based front-end is re-initialized as in previous experiments.
The results presented in Table 4 indicate that models trained from scratch generally perform poorly, especially compared to the pre-trained models, which overreach in every scenario.
However, LFCC+AASIST achieves the best results relatively across all models. Nevertheless, only Russian achieves slightly better performance than pre-trained models with the English benchmark. On the other hand, for the remaining languages, we observe a significant drop in detection efficacy. Therefore, we cannot replace large-scale pretraining with small, targeted data. Since W2V+AASIST and LFCC-based models signifi- cantly outperform RawGAT-ST and Whisper-AASIST in our experiments, we report only the results for the former models and place the latter in Appendix A.
These results confirm that having a large, language- independent amount of data enhances detection more than small, language-specific datasets, thus highlighting and rein- Table 3: The mean EER scores of baseline models trained with the large English dataset evaluated with the data split procedure described in Section 3. Bold values indicate the best performance for a specific language.
31.95 ± 6.43
Table 4: The mean EER scores of trained from scratch with a single language.
2.83 ± 2.98
forcing the value of extensive, even language-independent, data for DF detection.
4.3. Language Fine-Tuning
Fine-tuning pre-trained models with English benchmark data al- lows us to assess the need for fine-tuning to improve models’ detectability and potential cross-language generalization capa- bilities. Fine-tuning and further evaluation follow the data split described in Section 3.
We first assess whether fine-tuning with single-language data enhances audio DF detection by adding linguistic con- text, improving performance over English pre-trained mod- els. Based on the results in Table 5, we can distinguish two trends. In the first one, intra-linguistic adaptation is more ef- ficient and thus reduces the EER compared to pre-trained and cross-adaptation models. This group includes better-performing
Models: Lfcc+Aasist And W2V+Aasist. On The Other
hand, the second group shows a trend that fine-tuning with a specific language is most effective. Specifically, RawGAT- ST, fine-tuned with Polish, and Whisper+AASIST, as well as LFCC+MesoNet, fine-tuned with English, achieve the lowest EER across most languages for this specific model.
A deeper analysis reveals that W2V+AASIST consistently outperforms other architectures, achieving the lowest EER for most languages, confirming the effectiveness of intralinguistic adaptation. Cross-lingual adaptation remains crucial for mul- tilingual models, with W2V+AASIST showing competitive re- sults when the pre-trained model performs well. However, their performance remains comparable to or worse than the baseline for languages like Russian and some Germanic languages. Re- sults for LFCC+AASIST indicate similar trends with the best results on the diagonal, thus indicating that intra-language adap- tations are more effective. Notably, cross-linguistic fine-tuning of the LFCC+AASIST is effective in two scenarios: improving a well-performing pre-trained model (e.g., in the case of French or Polish) or fine-tuning with Italian, which indicates overper- forming other even intralinguistic adaptations.
The further investigation focuses on two key aspects of lin- guistic adaptability in DF detection: the impact of removing a single language from fine-tuning and the trade-off between language-specific and multilingual training. We fine-tune pre- trained models on all multilingual data except one language at a time, following the data split detailed in Section 3. Dur- ing these experiments, we assess whether combining multiple languages for training might provide comparable results, espe- cially in the context of cross-language adaptations. As shown in Table 6, fine-tuning with limited language-specific data gen- erally outperforms a larger multilingual dataset, excluding the target language, with Ukrainian as the only exception. Intrigu- ingly, our analysis reveals that if one language is excluded to optimize the system, German emerges as the most suitable can- didate for removal from the training set. This is only relevant for scenarios where German language detection is not a require- ment, as its exclusion demonstrated a positive effect on the over- all system performance for almost all other languages.
Our results suggest maximizing language coverage in train- ing data whenever feasible. For language-specific deployments, focus on using relevant language data, as even limited amounts demonstrate more usefulness than larger, more linguistically di- verse datasets that lack the target language.
Ai Adaptive Learning
This project focuses on ai adaptive learning using modern AI and machine learning techniques. The content below is adapted from research literature and practical implementation notes.
We propose a novel high-performance and interpretable canon-
addition, unlike tree learning, DNNs enable gradient descent- ical deep tabular data learning architecture, TabNet. TabNet based end-to-end learning for tabular data which can have a uses sequential attention to choose which features to reason multitude of benefits: (i) efficiently encoding multiple data from at each decision step, enabling interpretability and more types like images along with tabular data; (ii) alleviating the efficient learning as the learning capacity is used for the most need for feature engineering, which is currently a key aspect
salient features. We demonstrate that TabNet outperforms in tree-based tabular data learning methods; (iii) learning other variants on a wide range of non-performance-saturated from streaming data and perhaps most importantly (iv) end- tabular datasets and yields interpretable feature attributions to-end models allow representation learning which enables plus insights into its global behavior. Finally, we demonstrate many valuable application scenarios including data-efficient
self-supervised learning for tabular data, significantly improv- domain adaptation (Goodfellow, Bengio, and Courville 2016), ing performance when unlabeled data is abundant. generative modeling (Radford, Metz, and Chintala 2015) and
Introduction We propose a new canonical DNN architecture for tabular
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown notable success data, TabNet. The main contributions are summarized as: efficiently encode the raw data into meaningful representa- enabling flexible integration into end-to-end learning. tions, fuel the rapid progress. One data type that has yet to 2. TabNet uses sequential attention to choose which fea- see such success with a canonical architecture is tabular data. tures to reason from at each decision step, enabling in-
Despite being the most common data type in real-world AI terpretability and better learning as the learning capacity (as it is comprised of any categorical and numerical features), is used for the most salient features (see Fig. 1). This under-explored, with variants of ensemble decision trees for each input, and unlike other instance-wise feature se- Why? First, because DT-based approaches have certain bene- and van der Schaar 2019), TabNet employs a single deep
fits: (i) they are representionally efficient for decision mani- learning architecture for feature selection and reasoning. folds with approximately hyperplane boundaries which are 3. Above design choices lead to two valuable properties: (i) common in tabular data; and (ii) they are highly interpretable TabNet outperforms or is on par with other tabular learn- in their basic form (e.g. by tracking decision nodes) and there ing models on various datasets for classification and re-
are popular post-hoc explainability methods for their ensem- gression problems from different domains; and (ii) TabNet ble form, e.g. (Lundberg, Erion, and Lee 2018) – this is an enables two kinds of interpretability: local interpretability important concern in many real-world applications; (iii) they that visualizes the importance of features and how they are fast to train. Second, because previously-proposed DNN are combined, and global interpretability which quantifies
architectures are not well-suited for tabular data: e.g. stacked the contribution of each feature to the trained model. convolutional layers or multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) are 4. Finally, for the first time for tabular data, we show signif- vastly overparametrized – the lack of appropriate inductive icant performance improvements by using unsupervised bias often causes them to fail to find optimal solutions for tab- pre-training to predict masked features (see Fig. 2).
ular decision manifolds (Goodfellow, Bengio, and Courville
Why is deep learning worth exploring for tabular data?
One obvious motivation is expected performance improve- Feature selection: Feature selection broadly refers to judi- Copyright © 2021, Association for the Advancement of Artificial ciously picking a subset of features based on their useful-
Professional occupation related Investment related
Feedback from Feedback to
Feature selection Input processing Feature selection Input processing
previous step next step … …
Predicted output (whether the income level >$50k)
selection enables interpretability and better learning as the capacity is used for the most salient features. TabNet employs multiple decision blocks that focus on processing a subset of input features for reasoning. Two decision blocks shown as examples process features that are related to professional occupation and investments, respectively, in order to predict the income level.
Unsupervised pre-training Supervised fine-tuning
Age Cap. gain Education Occupation Gender Relationship Age Cap. gain Education Occupation Gender Relationship 5 2000 ? Exec-managerial F Wife 6 2000 Bachelors Exec-managerial M Husband 1 0 ? Farming-fishing M ? 2 0 High-school Farming-fishing M Unmarried
? 50 Doctorate Prof-specialty M Husband 4 50 Doctorate Prof-specialty M Husband 2 ? ? Handlers-cleaners F Wife 2 0 High-school Handlers-cleaners F Wife 5 3000 Bachelors ? ? Husband 5 3000 Bachelors Exec-managerial M Husband
3 0 Bachelors ? F ? 3 100 Bachelors Prof-specialty F Wife ? 0 High-school Armed-Forces ? Husband 2 0 High-school Armed-Forces M Husband
TabNet decoder Decision making
Age Cap. gain Education Occupation Gender Relationship Income > $50k
3 M False
level can be guessed from the occupation, or the gender can be guessed from the relationship. Unsupervised representation learning by masked self-supervised learning results in an improved encoder model for the supervised learning task.
ward selection and Lasso regularization (Guyon and Elisseeff performance with compact representations. 2003) attribute feature importance based on the entire training Tree-based learning: DTs are commonly-used for tabular data, and are referred as global methods. Instance-wise fea- data learning. Their prominent strength is efficient picking ture selection refers to picking features individually for each of global features with the most statistical information gain
to maximize the mutual information between the selected mance of standard DTs, one common approach is ensembling features and the response variable, and in (Yoon, Jordon, and to reduce variance. Among ensembling methods, random van der Schaar 2019) by using an actor-critic framework to forests (Ho 1998) use random subsets of data with randomly mimic a baseline while optimizing the selection. Unlike these, selected features to grow many trees. XGBoost (Chen and
sity in end-to-end learning – a single model jointly performs recent ensemble DT approaches that dominate most of the feature selection and output mapping, resulting in superior recent data science competitions. Our experimental results
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W: [$" , - $" , 0, 0] W: [0, 0, $# , - $# ] !" < % b: [-a $" , a $" , -1, -1] b: [-1, -1, -d $# , d $# ] !# < & !" > % !# < & [!" ] [!# ]
M: [1, 0] M: [0, 1]
(right). Relevant features are selected by using multiplicative sparse masks on inputs. The selected features are linearly transformed, and after a bias addition (to represent boundaries) ReLU performs region selection by zeroing the regions. Aggregation of multiple regions is based on addition. As C and C get larger, the decision boundary gets sharper.
for various datasets show that tree-based models can be out- constructs a sequential multi-step architecture, where each performed when the representation capacity is improved with step contributes to a portion of the decision based on the deep learning while retaining their feature selecting property. selected features; (iii) improves the learning capacity via non- Integration of DNNs into DTs: Representing DTs with linear processing of the selected features; and (iv) mimics
DNN building blocks as in (Humbird, Peterson, and McClar- ensembling via higher dimensions and more steps. ren 2018) yields redundancy in representation and ineffi- cient learning. Soft (neural) DTs (Wang, Aggarwal, and Liu Fig. 4 shows the TabNet architecture for encoding tabu- functions, instead of non-differentiable axis-aligned splits. mapping of categorical features with trainable embeddings.
However, losing automatic feature selection often degrades We do not consider any global feature normalization, but performance. In (Yang, Morillo, and Hospedales 2018), a soft merely apply batch normalization (BN). We pass the same D- binning function is proposed to simulate DTs in DNNs, by dimensional features f ∈ <B×D to each decision step, where 2019) proposes a DNN architecture by explicitly leveraging multi-step processing with Nsteps decision steps. The ith
expressive feature combinations, however, learning is based step inputs the processed information from the (i − 1)th step on transferring knowledge from gradient-boosted DT. (Tanno to decide which features to use and outputs the processed ing from primitive blocks while representation learning into sion. The idea of top-down attention in the sequential form edges, routing functions and leaf nodes. TabNet differs from is inspired by its applications in processing visual and text
these as it embeds soft feature selection with controllable data (Hudson and Manning 2018) and reinforcement learn- Self-supervised learning: Unsupervised representation relevant information in high dimensional input. learning improves supervised learning especially in small Feature selection: We employ a learnable mask M[i] ∈ has shown significant advances – driven by the judicious capacity of a decision step is not wasted on irrelevant
choice of the unsupervised learning objective (masked input ones, and thus the model becomes more parameter effi- prediction) and attention-based deep learning. cient. The masking is multiplicative, M[i] · f . We use an attentive transformer (see Fig. 4) to obtain the masks us- TabNet for Tabular Learning ing the processed features from the preceding step, a[i − 1]:
M[i] = sparsemax(P[i − 1] · hi (a[i − 1])). Sparsemax nor-
DTs are successful for learning from real-world tabular malization (Martins and Astudillo 2016) encourages sparsity datasets. With a specific design, conventional DNN building by mapping the Euclidean projection onto the probabilistic blocks can be used to implement DT-like output manifold, simplex, which is observed to be superior in performance and e.g. see Fig. 3). In such a design, individual feature selec- aligned with the goal of sparse feature selection for explain-
tion is key to obtain decision boundaries in hyperplane form, PD which can be generalized to a linear combination of features ability. Note that j=1 M[i]b,j = 1. hi is a trainable func- where coefficients determine the proportion of each feature. tion, shown in Fig. 4 using a FC layer, followed by BN. P[i] TabNet is based on such functionality and it outperforms DTs is the prior scale term, denoting how much a particular feature
Qi while reaping their benefits by careful design which: (i) uses has been used previously: P[i] = j=1 (γ − M[j]), where γ sparse instance-wise feature selection learned from data; (ii) is a relaxation parameter – when γ = 1, a feature is enforced
+ Softmax
Feature Feature …
transformer transformer
x Nsteps Features
+ Softmax
Feature …
transformer transformer Feature Feature Feature Feature transformer
Encoded representation
transformer transformer Attentive transformer … Mask transformer …
Step 2 Decision step dependent
transformer transformer
BN Feature Feature
FC BN transformer transformer
+ 0.5 0.5 0.5 Agg. Agg. Features Features FC FC + +
Reconstructed + … Feature attributes + … features
(a) TabNet encoder architecture (b) TabNet decoder architecture Feature transformer Feature Attentive transformer Shared across decision steps Decision step dependent transformer GLU
Decision step dependent Prior scales
+ 0.5 0.5 0.5
0.5 0.5 0.5
+ Attentive transformer (c) (d)
Prior scales
divides the processed representation to be used by the attentive transformer of the subsequent step as well as for the overall Attentive BN FC
output. For each step, the feature selection mask provides interpretable information about the model’s functionality, and the +
masks can be aggregated to obtain global feature transformer important attribution. (b) TabNet decoder, composed of a feature transformer block at each step. (c) A feature transformer block example – 4-layer network is shown, where 2 are shared across all decision
Prior scales
steps and 2 are decision step-dependent. Each layer is composed of a fully-connected (FC) layer, BN and GLU nonlinearity. (d) +
An attentive transformer block example – a single layer mapping is modulated with a prior scale information which aggregates Sparsemax
how much each feature has been used before the current decision step. sparsemax (Martins and Astudillo 2016) is used for BN FC
normalization of the coefficients, resulting in sparse selection of the salient features. +
to be used only at one decision step and as γ increases, more propose the aggregate.feature importance mask, Magg−b,j = flexibility is provided to use a feature at multiple decision PNsteps ηb [i]Mb,j [i]
PD PNsteps
ηb [i]Mb,j [i].2 i=1 i=1 steps. P is initialized as all ones, 1B×D , without any prior j=1
on the masked features. If some features are unused (as in self- Tabular self-supervised learning: We propose a decoder supervised learning), corresponding P entries are made 0 architecture to reconstruct tabular features from the Tab- to help model’s learning. To further control the sparsity of the Net encoded representations. The decoder is composed of selected features, we propose sparsity regularization in the feature transformers, followed by FC layers at each deci-
form of entropy (Grandvalet and Bengio 2004), Lsparse = sion step. The outputs are summed to obtain the recon-
PNsteps PB PD −Mb,j [i] log(Mb,j [i]+)
i=1 b=1 j=1 Nsteps ·B , where is a structed features. We propose the task of prediction of miss- small number for numerical stability. We add the sparsity reg- ing feature columns from the others. Consider a binary mask ularization to the overall loss, with a coefficient λsparse . Spar- S ∈ {0, 1}B×D . The TabNet encoder inputs (1 − S) · f̂ sity provides a favorable inductive bias for datasets where and the decoder outputs the reconstructed features, S · f̂ . We
most features are redundant. initialize P = (1 − S) in encoder so that the model em- Feature processing: We process the filtered features using phasizes merely on the known features, and the decoder’s last a feature transformer (see Fig. 4) and then split for the FC layer is multiplied with S to output the unknown features. decision step output and information for the subsequent We consider the reconstruction loss in self-supervised phase:
step, [d[i], a[i]] = fi (M[i] · f ), where d[i] ∈ <B×Nd and 2
PB PD (f̂b,j −fb,j )·Sb,j
a[i] ∈ <B×Na . For parameter-efficient and robust learning b=1 j=1
√ PB PB 2
. Normalization b=1 (fb,j −1/B b=1 fb,j ) with high capacity, a feature transformer should comprise layers that are shared across all decision steps (as the same with the population standard deviation of the ground truth features are input across different decision steps), as well as is beneficial, as the features may have different ranges. We decision step-dependent layers. Fig. 4 shows the implementa- sample Sb,j independently from a Bernoulli distribution with
tion as concatenation of two shared layers and two decision parameter ps , at each iteration. step-dependent layers. Each FC layer is followed by BN and eventually connected to a normalized residual √ connection We study TabNet in wide range of problems, that contain with normalization. Normalization with 0.5 helps to sta- regression or classification tasks, particularly with published bilize learning by ensuring that the variance throughout the benchmarks. For all datasets, categorical inputs are mapped
For faster training, we use large batch sizes with BN. Thus, bedding and numerical columns are input without and pre- except the one applied to the input features, we use ghost BN processing.4 We use standard classification (softmax cross (Hoffer, Hubara, and Soudry 2017) form, using a virtual batch entropy) and regression (mean squared error) loss functions size BV and momentum mB . For the input features, we ob- and we train until convergence. Hyperparameters of the Tab-
serve the benefit of low-variance averaging and hence avoid Net models are optimized on a validation set and listed in ghost BN. Finally, inspired by decision-tree like aggregation Appendix. TabNet performance is not very sensitive to most as in Fig. 3, we construct the overall decision embedding hyperparameters as shown with ablation studies in Appendix. as dout = i=1 PNsteps ReLU(d[i]). We apply a linear mapping In Appendix, we also present ablation studies on various de-
Wfinal dout to get the output mapping.1 sign and guidelines on selection of the key hyperparameters. Interpretability: TabNet’s feature selection masks can shed For all experiments we cite, we use the same training, val- light on the selected features at each step. If Mb,j [i] = 0, idation and testing data split with the original work. Adam optimization algorithm (Kingma and Ba 2014) and Glorot then j th feature of the bth sample should have no contribution uniform initialization are used for training of all models.5
to the decision. If fi were a linear function, the coefficient
Mb,j [i] would correspond to the feature importance of fb,j . Instance-wise feature selection
Although each decision step employs non-linear processing, their outputs are combined later in a linear way. We aim Selection of the salient features is crucial for high perfor- to quantify an aggregate feature importance in addition to mance, especially for small datasets. We consider 6 tabular requires a coefficient that can weigh the relative importance samples). The datasets are constructed in such a way that of each step in the decision. We simply propose ηb [i] = only a subset of the features determine the output. For Syn1-
PNd Syn3, salient features are same for all instances (e.g., the
c=1 ReLU(db,c [i]) to denote the aggregate decision con- tribution at ith decision step for the bth sample. Intuitively, if 2
Normalization is used to ensure D
P j=1 Magg−b,j = 1. db,c [i] < 0, then all features at ith decision step should have 3
0 contribution to the overall decision. As its value increases, prove the performance, but interpretation of individual dimensions
it plays a higher role in the overall linear combination. Scal- may become challenging. ing the decision mask at each decision step with ηb [i], we Specially-designed feature engineering, e.g. logarithmic trans- formation of variables highly-skewed distributions, may further
For discrete outputs, we additionally employ softmax during
training (and argmax during inference). An open-source implementation will be released.
Global: using only globally-salient features, Tree Ensembles (Geurts, Ernst, and Wehenkel 2006), Lasso-regularized model, L2X
Syn Syn Syn Syn Syn Syn
No selection .5 ± .0 .7 ± .0 .8 ± .0 .5 ± .0 .6 ± .0 .6 ± .0 Tree .5 ± .1 .8 ± .0 .8 ± .0 .6 ± .0 .7 ± .0 .7 ± .0 Lasso-regularized .4 ± .0 .5 ± .0 .8 ± .0 .5 ± .0 .6 ± .0 .7 ± .0
INVASE .6 ± .0 .8 ± .0 .9 ± .0 .7 ± .0 .7 ± .0 .8 ± .0
Global .6 ± .0 .8 ± .0 .9 ± .0 .7 ± .0 .7 ± .0 .8 ± .0 TabNet .6 ± .0 .8 ± .0 .8 ± .0 .7 ± .0 .7 ± .0 .8 ± .0
output of Syn depends on features X -X ), and global fea- Table 3: Performance for Poker Hand induction dataset. ture selection, as if the salient features were known, would give high performance. For Syn4-Syn6, salient features are Model Test accuracy (%) instance dependent (e.g., for Syn4, the output depends on ei- DT 50.0 ther X -X or X -X depending on the value of X ), which MLP 50.0
makes global feature selection suboptimal. Table 1 shows that Deep neural DT 65.1
TabNet outperforms others (Tree Ensembles (Geurts, Ernst, XGBoost 71.1
and Wehenkel 2006), LASSO regularization, L2X (Chen LightGBM 70.0 van der Schaar 2019). For Syn1-Syn3, TabNet performance TabNet 99.2 is close to global feature selection - it can figure out what Rule-based 100.0 features are globally important. For Syn4-Syn6, eliminating instance-wise redundant features, TabNet improves global feature selection. All other methods utilize a predictive model Poker Hand (Dua and Graff 2017): The task is classifica-
with 43k parameters, and the total number of parameters is tion of the poker hand from the raw suit and rank attributes of 101k for INVASE due to the two other models in the actor- the cards. The input-output relationship is deterministic and critic framework. TabNet is a single architecture, and its size hand-crafted rules can get 100% accuracy. Yet, conventional is 26k for Syn1-Syn and 31k for Syn4-Syn6. The compact DNNs, DTs, and even their hybrid variant of deep neural DTs
representation is one of TabNet’s valuable properties. (Yang, Morillo, and Hospedales 2018) severely suffer from the imbalanced data and cannot learn the required sorting and Performance on real-world datasets ranking operations (Yang, Morillo, and Hospedales 2018).
Tuned XGBoost, CatBoost, and LightGBM show very slight
as it can perform highly-nonlinear processing with its depth, Model Test accuracy (%) without overfitting thanks to instance-wise feature selection.
CatBoost 85.1 Table 4: Performance on Sarcos dataset. Three TabNet mod-
AutoML Tables 94.9 els of different sizes are considered.
Forest Cover Type (Dua and Graff 2017): The task is clas- MLP 2.1 0.14M
sification of forest cover type from cartographic variables. Adaptive neural tree 1.2 0.60M approaches that are known to achieve solid performance (AutoML 2019), an automated search framework based on TabNet-M 0.2 0.59M ensemble of models including DNN, gradient boosted DT, TabNet-L 0.1 1.75M with very thorough hyperparameter search. A single TabNet without fine-grained hyperparameter search outperforms it. Sarcos (Vijayakumar and Schaal 2000): The task is re-
gressing inverse dynamics of an anthropomorphic robot arm.
very small model is possible with a random forest. In the very and TabNet merely focuses on the relevant ones. For Syn4, small model size regime, TabNet’s performance is on par the output depends on either X -X or X -X depending parameters. When the model size is not constrained, TabNet feature selection – it allocates a mask to focus on the indi- achieves almost an order of magnitude lower test MSE. cator X , and assigns almost all-zero weights to irrelevant
features (the ones other than two feature groups). models are denoted with -S and -M. Real-world datasets: We first consider the simple task of mushroom edibility prediction (Dua and Graff 2017). Tab- Model Test acc. (%) Model size Net achieves 100% test accuracy on this dataset. It is indeed Sparse evolutionary MLP 78.4 81K known (Dua and Graff 2017) that “Odor” is the most discrim-
What is this project about?
This project covers practical implementation and research aspects of the topic using AI/ML techniques.