28 accepted papers
Singing voice generation progresses rapidly, yet evaluating singing quality remains a critical challenge. Human subjective assessment, typically in the form of listening tests, is costly and time consuming, while existing objective metrics capture only limited perceptual aspects. In this work, we in…
Speech signal analysis poses significant challenges, particularly in tasks such as speech quality evaluation and profiling, where the goal is to predict multiple perceptual and objective metrics. For instance, metrics like PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality), STOI (Short-Time Objective In…
Multimodal foundation models, such as Gemini and ChatGPT, have revolutionized human-machine interactions by seamlessly integrating various forms of data. Developing a universal spoken language model that comprehends a wide range of natural language instructions is critical for bridging communication…
Advancements in audio foundation models (FMs) have fueled interest in end-to-end (E2E) spoken dialogue systems, but different web interfaces for each system makes it challenging to compare and contrast them effectively. Motivated by this, we introduce an open-source, user-friendly toolkit designed t…
We present ESPnet-SpeechLM, an open toolkit designed to democratize the development of speech language models (SpeechLMs) and voice-driven agentic applications. The toolkit standardizes speech processing tasks by framing them as universal sequential modeling problems, encompassing a cohesive workflo…
Recent advancements in text-to-speech (TTS) have shown that language model (LM)-based systems offer competitive performance to their counterparts. Further optimization can be achieved through preference alignment algorithms, which adjust LMs to align with the preferences of reward models, enhancing…
In this work, we introduce VERSA, a unified and standardized evaluation toolkit designed for various speech, audio, and music signals. The toolkit features a Pythonic interface with flexible configuration and dependency control, making it user-friendly and efficient. With full installation, VERSA of…
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition. Despite the recent success, current LLMs are not capable of processing complex audio information or conducting spoken conversations (lik…
Text language models have shown remarkable zero-shot capability in generalizing to unseen tasks when provided with well-formulated instructions. However, existing studies in speech processing primarily focus on limited or specific tasks. Moreover, the lack of standardized benchmarks hinders a fair c…
Speech signals, typically sampled at rates in the tens of thousands per second, contain redundancies, evoking inefficiencies in sequence modeling. High-dimensional speech features such as spectrograms are often used as the input for the subsequent model. However, they can still be redundant. Recent…
Recently, the usefulness of self-supervised representation learning (SSRL) methods has been confirmed in various downstream tasks. Many of these models, as exemplified by HuBERT and WavLM, use pseudo-labels generated from spectral features or the model’s own representation features. From previous st…
Large language models (LLMs) have successfully served as a general-purpose interface across multiple tasks and languages, while the adaptation of voice LLMs is mostly designed for specific purposes (either single-task or monolingual), where the advantages of LLMs especially for low-resource language…
Existing Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) models for speech typically process speech signals at a fixed resolution of 20 milliseconds. This approach overlooks the varying informational content present at different resolutions in speech signals. In contrast, this paper aims to incorporate multi-resolut…
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has helped extend speech technologies to more languages by reducing the need for labeled data. However, models are still far from supporting the world’s 7000+ languages. We propose XEUS, a Cross-lingual Encoder for Universal Speech, trained on over 1 million hours of d…
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…
Thousands of the world’s languages are in danger of extinction—a tremendous threat to cultural identities and human language diversity. Interlinear Glossed Text (IGT) is a form of linguistic annotation that can support documentation and resource creation for these languages’ communities. IGT typical…
Spoken language understanding (SLU) is a task aiming to extract high-level semantics from spoken utterances. Previous works have investigated the use of speech self-supervised models and textual pre-trained models, which have shown reasonable improvements to various SLU tasks. However, because of th…
It has been known that direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) models usually suffer from the data scarcity issue because of the limited existing parallel materials for both source and target speech. Therefore to train a direct S2ST system, previous works usually utilize text-to-speech (TTS) syst…
This paper describes the ESPnet Unsupervised ASR Open-source Toolkit (EURO), an end-to-end open-source toolkit for unsupervised automatic speech recognition (UASR). EURO adopts the state-of-the-art UASR learning method introduced by the Wav2vec-U, originally implemented at FAIRSEQ, which leverages s…
Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models have extended the usability of speech technologies to a wide variety of languages. With how many languages these models have to handle, however, a key to understanding their imbalanced performance across different languages is to examine if the…
Singing voice synthesis (SVS), as a specific task for generating the vocal singing voice from a music score, has drawn much attention in recent years. SVS faces the challenge that the singing has various pronunciation flexibility conditioned on the same music score. Most of the previous works of SVS…
As a special task of natural language generation, conditional lyrics generation needs to consider the structure of generated lyrics and the relationship between lyrics and music. Due to various forms of conditions, a lyrics generation system is expected to generate lyrics conditioned on different si…
Transfer learning has proven to be crucial in advancing the state of speech and natural language processing research in recent years. In speech, a model pre-trained by self-supervised learning transfers remarkably well on multiple tasks. However, the lack of a consistent evaluation methodology is li…
Speaker diarization consists of many components, e.g., front-end processing, speech activity detection (SAD), overlapped speech detection (OSD) and speaker segmentation/clustering. Conventionally, most of the involved components are separately developed and optimized. The resulting speaker diarizati…
Automatic song writing (ASW) typically involves four tasks: lyric-to-lyric generation, melody-to-melody generation, lyric-to-melody generation, and melody-to-lyric generation. Previous works have mainly focused on individual tasks without considering the correlation between them, and thus a unified…
Target-speaker speech recognition aims to recognize target-speaker speech from noisy environments with background noise and interfering speakers. This work presents a joint framework that combines time-domain target-speaker speech extraction and Recurrent Neural Network Transducer (RNN-T). To stabil…
In this study, we present recent developments on ESPnet: End-to- End Speech Processing toolkit, which mainly involves a recently proposed architecture called Conformer, Convolution-augmented Transformer. This paper shows the results for a wide range of end- to-end speech processing applications, suc…
The neural network (NN) based singing voice synthesis (SVS) systems require sufficient data to train well and are are prone to over-fitting due to data scarcity. However, we often encounter data limitation problem in building SVS systems because of high data acquisition and annotation cost,. In this…