← Search

Benjamin Van Niekerk

3 accepted papers

2025

Unsupervised Word Discovery: Boundary Detection with Clustering vs. Dynamic Programming

ICASSP 2025accepted

We look at the long-standing problem of segmenting unlabeled speech into word-like segments and clustering these into a lexicon. Several previous methods use a scoring model coupled with dynamic programming to find an optimal segmentation. Here we propose a much simpler strategy: we predict word bou…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

A Comparison of Discrete and Soft Speech Units for Improved Voice Conversion

ICASSP 2022accepted

The goal of voice conversion is to transform source speech into a target voice, keeping the content unchanged. In this paper, we focus on self-supervised representation learning for voice conversion. Specifically, we compare discrete and soft speech units as input features. We find that discrete rep…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2019

Composing Value Functions in Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2019oral

An important property for lifelong-learning agents is the ability to combine existing skills to solve new unseen tasks. In general, however, it is unclear how to compose existing skills in a principled manner. Under the assumption of deterministic dynamics, we prove that optimal value function compo…

Cited by 63SourcePDFScholar