21 accepted papers
Synthetic speech is a useful source for augmentation of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, but there is a "sim-to-real" gap between synthetic and real speech that can limit generalization. The natural variability of real speech is essential to the training of robust ASR systems. While synth…
Collecting high-quality studio recordings of audio is challenging, which limits the language coverage of text-to-speech (TTS) systems. This paper proposes a framework for scaling a multilingual TTS model to 100+ languages using found data without supervision. The proposed framework combines speech-t…
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have been shown to have large quality disparities between the language varieties they are intended or expected to recognize. One way to mitigate this is to train or fine-tune models with more representative datasets. But this approach can be hindered by lim…
Foundation models (FMs), that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks, have brought large interest in the research community. Benefiting from the diverse data sources such as different modalities, languages and application domains, foundation models h…
In end-to-end (E2E) speech recognition models, a representational tight-coupling inevitably emerges between the encoder and the decoder. We build upon recent work that has begun to explore building encoders with modular encoded representations, such that encoders and decoders from different models c…
This paper addresses the challenges of training large neural networks under federated learning settings: high on-device memory usage and communication cost. The proposed Online Model Compression (OMC) provides a framework that stores model parameters in a compressed format and decompresses them only…
End-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models are commonly trained over spoken utterances using optimization methods like Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). In distributed settings like Federated Learning, model training requires transmission of gradients over a network. In this work, we desi…
Federated learning can be used to train machine learning models on the edge on local data that never leave devices, providing privacy by default. This presents a challenge pertaining to the communication and computation costs associated with clients’ devices. These costs are strongly correlated with…
Transformer-based architectures have been the subject of research aimed at understanding their overparameterization and the non-uniform importance of their layers. Applying these approaches to Automatic Speech Recognition, we demonstrate that the state-of-the-art Conformer models generally have mult…
Fast contextual adaptation has shown to be effective in improving Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) of rare words and when combined with an on-device personalized training, it can yield an even better recognition result. However, the traditional re-scoring approaches based on an external language m…
Self- and semi-supervised learning methods have been actively investigated to reduce labeled training data or enhance model performance. However, these approaches mostly focus on in-domain performance for public datasets. In this study, we utilize the combination of self- and semi-supervised learnin…
This paper aims to address the major challenges of Federated Learning (FL) on edge devices: limited memory and expensive communication. We propose a novel method, called Partial Variable Training (PVT), that only trains a small subset of variables on edge devices to reduce memory usage and communica…
Distributed learning paradigms such as federated learning often involve transmission of model updates, or gradients, over a network, thereby avoiding transmission of private data. However, it is possible for sensitive information about the training data to be revealed from such gradients. Prior work…
We propose using federated learning, a decentralized on-device learning paradigm, to train speech recognition models. By performing epochs of training on a per-user basis, federated learning must incur the cost of dealing with non-IID data distributions, which are expected to negatively affect the q…
Training machine learning models on mobile devices has the potential of improving both privacy and accuracy of the models. However, one of the major obstacles to achieving this goal is the memory limitation of mobile devices. Reducing training memory enables models with high-dimensional weight matri…
We describe a large vocabulary speech recognition system that is accurate, has low latency, and yet has a small enough memory and computational footprint to run faster than real-time on a Nexus 5 Android smartphone. We employ a quantized Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) acoustic model trained with conn…
Pronunciations for words are a critical component in an automated speech recognition system (ASR) as mis-recognitions may be caused by missing or inaccurate pronunciations. The need for high quality pronunciations has recently motivated data-driven techniques to generate them [1]. We propose a data-…
The pronunciation dictionary, or lexicon, is an essential component in an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system in that incorrect pronunciations cause systematic misrecognitions. It typically consists of a list of word-pronunciation pairs written by linguists, and a grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) eng…
Grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) models are key components in speech recognition and text-to-speech systems as they describe how words are pronounced. We propose a G2P model based on a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN). In contrast to traditional joint-sequence based G2P approach…
We explore alternative acoustic modeling techniques for large vocabulary speech recognition using Long Short-Term Memory recurrent neural networks. For an acoustic frame labeling task, we compare the conventional approach of cross-entropy (CE) training using fixed forced-alignments of frames and lab…
Gesture typing is an efficient input method for phones and tablets using continuous traces created by a pointed object (e.g., finger or stylus). Translating such continuous gestures into textual input is a challenging task as gesture inputs exhibit many features found in speech and handwriting such…