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Alexander Rudnicky

14 accepted papers

2025

A Variational Framework for Improving Naturalness in Generative Spoken Language Models

ICML 2025poster

The success of large language models in text processing has inspired their adaptation to speech modeling. However, since speech is continuous and complex, it is often discretized for autoregressive modeling. Speech tokens derived from self-supervised models (known as semantic tokens) typically focus…

2025

Exploring Prediction Targets in Masked Pre-Training for Speech Foundation Models

ICASSP 2025accepted

Speech foundation models, such as HuBERT and its variants, are pre-trained on large amounts of unlabeled speech data and then used for a range of downstream tasks. These models use a masked prediction objective, where the model learns to predict information about masked input segments from the unmas…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Language Models Can be Efficiently Steered via Minimal Embedding Layer Transformations

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly costly to fine-tune due to their size, with embedding layers alone accounting for up to 20% of model parameters. While Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods exist, they largely overlook the embedding layer. In this paper, we introduce TinyTE, a

2024

Advancing Regular Language Reasoning in Linear Recurrent Neural Networks

NAACL 2024short

In recent studies, linear recurrent neural networks (LRNNs) have achieved Transformer-level performance in natural language and long-range modeling, while offering rapid parallel training and constant inference cost. With the resurgence of interest in LRNNs, we study whether they can learn the hidde…

2024

Attention Alignment and Flexible Positional Embeddings Improve Transformer Length Extrapolation

NAACL 2024findings

An ideal length-extrapolatable Transformer language model can handle sequences longer than the training length without any fine-tuning. Such long-context utilization capability relies heavily on a flexible positional embedding design. Upon investigating the flexibility of existing large pre-trained…

2023

A Unified One-Shot Prosody and Speaker Conversion System with Self-Supervised Discrete Speech Units

ICASSP 2023accepted

We present a unified system to realize one-shot voice conversion (VC) on the pitch, rhythm, and speaker attributes. Existing works generally ignore the correlation between prosody and language content, leading to the degradation of naturalness in converted speech. Additionally, the lack of proper la…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

A Vector Quantized Approach for Text to Speech Synthesis on Real-World Spontaneous Speech

AAAI 2023technical

Recent Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems trained on reading or acted corpora have achieved near human-level naturalness. The diversity of human speech, however, often goes beyond the coverage of these corpora. We believe the ability to handle such diversity is crucial for AI systems to achieve human-leve…

2023

Dissecting Transformer Length Extrapolation via the Lens of Receptive Field Analysis

ACL 2023long

Length extrapolation permits training a transformer language model on short sequences that preserves perplexities when tested on substantially longer sequences.A relative positional embedding design, ALiBi, has had the widest usage to date. We dissect ALiBi via the lens of receptive field analysis e…

2023

Latent Positional Information is in the Self-Attention Variance of Transformer Language Models Without Positional Embeddings

ACL 2023short

The use of positional embeddings in transformer language models is widely accepted. However, recent research has called into question the necessity of such embeddings. We further extend this inquiry by demonstrating that a randomly initialized and frozen transformer language model, devoid of positio…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2023

Transformer Working Memory Enables Regular Language Reasoning And Natural Language Length Extrapolation

EMNLP 2023long findings

Unlike recurrent models, conventional wisdom has it that Transformers cannot perfectly model regular languages. Inspired by the notion of working memory, we propose a new Transformer variant named RegularGPT. With its novel combination of Weight-Sharing, Adaptive-Depth, and Sliding-Dilated-Attention…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

KERPLE: Kernelized Relative Positional Embedding for Length Extrapolation

NeurIPS 2022accept

Relative positional embeddings (RPE) have received considerable attention since RPEs effectively model the relative distance among tokens and enable length extrapolation. We propose KERPLE, a framework that generalizes relative position embedding for extrapolation by kernelizing positional differenc…

2021

Zero-Shot Dialogue Disentanglement by Self-Supervised Entangled Response Selection

EMNLP 2021main

Dialogue disentanglement aims to group utterances in a long and multi-participant dialogue into threads. This is useful for discourse analysis and downstream applications such as dialogue response selection, where it can be the first step to construct a clean context/response set. Unfortunately, lab…