13 accepted papers
The role of reasoning in Audio Large Language Models remains widely underexplored, as introducing a reasoning process often degrades rather than improves performance during inference, a phenomenon we term test-time inverse scaling, where longer reasoning chains yield progressively worse results. We…
While textless Spoken Language Models (SLMs) have shown potential in end-to-end speech-to-speech modeling, they still lag behind text-based Large Language Models (LLMs) in terms of semantic coherence and relevance. This work introduces the Align-SLM framework, which leverages preference optimization…
Large language models (LLM) have demonstrated the ability to understand human language by leveraging large amount of text data. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are often limited by available transcribed speech data and benefit from a second pass rescoring using LLM. Recently multi-modal l…
Retrieval is a widely adopted approach for improving language models leveraging external information. As the field moves towards multi-modal large language models, it is important to extend the pure text based methods to incorporate other modalities in retrieval as well for applications across the w…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior abilities in tasks such as chatting, reasoning, and question-answering. However, standard LLMs may ignore crucial paralinguistic information, such as sentiment, emotion, and speaking style, which are essential for achieving natural, human-like…
In the realm of spoken language understanding (SLU). numerous natural language understanding (NLU) methodologies have been adapted by supplying large language models (LLMs) with transcribed speech instead of conventional written text. In real-world scenarios, prior to input into an LLM. an automated…
End-to-end speech recognition models are improved by incorporating external text sources, typically by fusion with an external language model. Such language models have to be retrained whenever the corpus of interest changes. Furthermore, since they store the entire corpus in their parameters, rare…
End-to-End (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems used in voice assistants often have difficulties recognizing infrequent words personalized to the user, such as names and places. Rare words often have non-trivial pronunciations, and in such cases, human knowledge in the form of a pronunci…
End-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition models like Recurrent Neural Networks Transducer (RNN-T) are becoming a popular choice for streaming ASR applications like voice assistants. While E2E models are very effective at learning representation of the training data they are trained on, their ac…
In this work, we aim to enhance the system robustness of end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) against adversarially-noisy speech examples. We focus on a rigorous and empirical "closed-model adversarial robustness" setting (e.g., on-device or cloud applications). The adversarial noise is onl…
Second-pass rescoring is an important component in automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems that is used to improve the outputs from a first-pass decoder by implementing a lattice rescoring or n-best re-ranking. While pretraining with a masked language model (MLM) objective has received great succ…
As voice assistants become more ubiquitous, they are increasingly expected to support and perform well on a wide variety of use-cases across different domains. We present a domain-aware rescoring framework suitable for achieving domain-adaptation during second-pass rescoring in production settings.…
The recognition of personalized content, such as contact names, remains a challenging problem for end-to-end speech recognition systems. In this work, we demonstrate how first- and second-pass rescoring strategies can be leveraged together to improve the recognition of such words. Following previous…