27 accepted papers
Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) using numerical rewards have significantly enhanced the complex reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, we identify three fundamental limitations of purely numerical feedback: performance plateaus, ineffective spontaneous self-r…
Emotional information in speech plays a unique role in multimodal perception. However, current Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs), similar to conventional speech emotion recognition (SER) systems, still treat emotion understanding as a simple classification problem. This provides limited inte…
Current speech language models require their core component, the speech codec, to discretize continuous speech signals into tokens that not only capture high-level cues for autoregressive modeling but also preserve sufficient acoustic details for perceptual quality. To address this need, we propose…
Speech inherently contains rich acoustic information that extends far beyond the textual language. In real-world spoken communication, effective interpretation often requires integrating semantic meaning (e.g., content), paralinguistic features (e.g., emotions, speed, pitch) and phonological charact…
Recent advancements in audio language models have underscored the pivotal role of audio tokenization, which converts audio signals into discrete tokens, thereby facilitating the application of language model architectures to the audio domain. In this study, we introduce ALMTokenizer, a novel low-bit…
We present MELLE, a novel continuous-valued token based language modeling approach for text-to-speech synthesis (TTS). MELLE autoregressively generates continuous mel-spectrogram frames directly from text condition, bypassing the need for vector quantization, which is typically designed for audio co…
Knowledge Graphs (KGs) can serve as reliable knowledge sources for question answering (QA) due to their structured representation of knowledge. Existing research on the utilization of KG for large language models (LLMs) prevalently relies on subgraph retriever or iterative prompting, overlooking the…
Improving context faithfulness in large language models is essential for developing trustworthy retrieval augmented generation systems and mitigating hallucinations, especially in long-form question answering (LFQA) tasks or scenarios involving knowledge conflicts. Existing methods either intervene…
Robust evaluation is critical for deploying trustworthy retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. However, current LLM-based evaluation frameworks predominantly rely on directly prompting resource-intensive models with complex multi-stage prompts, underutilizing models’ reasoning capabilities an
Large language models (LLMs) often struggle to provide up-to-date information due to their one-time training and the constantly evolving nature of the world. To keep LLMs current, existing approaches typically involve continued pre-training on new documents. However, they frequently face difficultie…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed worldwide, yet their ability to navigate cultural nuances remains underexplored. Misinterpreting cultural content can lead to AI-generated responses that are offensive or inappropriate, limiting their usability in global applications such as cus…
With the rise of Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs), two dominant approaches have emerged for speech processing: discrete tokens and continuous features. Each approach has demonstrated strong capabilities in audio-related processing tasks. However, the performance gap between these two paradi
Query rewriting is a crucial technique for passage retrieval in open-domain conversational question answering (CQA). It decontexualizes conversational queries into self-contained questions suitable for off-the-shelf retrievers. Existing methods attempt to incorporate retriever’s preference during th…
Music is an integral part of human culture, embodying human intelligence and creativity, of which songs compose an essential part. While various aspects of song generation have been explored by previous works, such as singing voice, vocal composition and instrumental arrangement, etc., generating so…
Large Language models (LLMs) have demonstrated supreme capabilities in textual understanding and generation, but cannot be directly applied to cross-modal tasks without fine-tuning. This paper proposes a cross-modal in-context learning approach, empowering the frozen LLMs to achieve multiple audio t…
Audio generation is a major branch of generative AI research. Compared with prior works in this area that are commonly task-specific with heavy domain knowledge, this paper advocates building universal audio generation models that can handle various tasks in a unified manner. As recent research on l…
Dementia is a severe cognitive impairment that affects the health of older adults and creates a burden on their families and caretakers. This paper analyzes diverse hand-crafted features extracted from spoken languages and selects the most discriminative ones for dementia detection. Recently, the pe…
Building and maintaining end-to-end task bots using minimal human effort is a long-standing challenge in dialog research. In this work, we introduce SGP-TOD, Schema-Guided Prompting for building Task-Oriented Dialog systems effortlessly based on large language models (LLMs). Utilizing the predefined…
Large language models (LLMs) have been significantly improved by instruction fine-tuning, but still lack transparency and the ability to utilize up-to-date knowledge and information. In this work, we propose search-augmented instruction learning (SAIL), which grounds the language generation and inst…
Non-autoregressive (NAR) transformer models have achieved significantly inference speedup but at the cost of inferior accuracy compared to autoregressive (AR) models in automatic speech recognition (ASR). Most of the NAR transformers take a fixed-length sequence filled with MASK tokens or a redundan…
Syntactic structure of a sentence text is correlated with the prosodic structure of the speech that is crucial for improving the prosody and naturalness of a text-to-speech (TTS) system. Nowadays TTS systems usually try to incorporate syntactic structure information with manually designed features b…
Bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) has achieved state-of-the-art performance in many sequence processing problems given its capability in capturing contextual information. However, for languages with limited amount of training data, it is still difficult to o…
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and their bidirectional long short term memory (BLSTM) variants are powerful sequence modelling approaches. Their inherently strong ability in capturing long range temporal dependencies allow BLSTM-RNN speech synthesis systems to produce higher quality and smoother s…
Dysarthria is a kind of motor speech disorder due to neurological deficits. Understanding the articulatory problems of dysarthric speakers may help to design suitable intervention strategies to improve their speech intelligibility. We have developed an automatic articulatory characteristics analysis…
To solve the acoustic-to-articulatory inversion problem, this paper proposes a deep bidirectional long short term memory recurrent neural network and a deep recurrent mixture density network. The articulatory parameters of the current frame may have correlations with the acoustic features many frame…
This paper investigates the incorporation of hidden Markov model (HMM) based emphatic speech synthesis for audio exaggeration into an audio-visual speech synthesis framework for the corrective feedback in computer-aided pronunciation training (CAPT). To improve the voice quality of the synthetic emp…
This paper investigates the use of Deep Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory based Recurrent Neural Networks (DBLSTM-RNNs) for voice conversion. Temporal correlations across speech frames are not directly modeled in frame-based methods using conventional Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), which results in…