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Junyi Ao

7 accepted papers

2026

EchoMind: An Interrelated Multi-level Benchmark for Evaluating Empathetic Speech Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Speech Language Models (SLMs) have made significant progress in spoken language understanding. Yet it remains unclear whether they can fully perceive non lexical vocal cues alongside spoken words, and respond with empathy that aligns with both emotional and contextual factors. Existing benchmarks t…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Scaling Speech Tokenizers with Diffusion Autoencoders

ICLR 2026poster

Speech tokenizers are foundational to speech language models, yet existing approaches face two major challenges: (1) balancing trade-offs between encoding semantics for understanding and acoustics for reconstruction, and (2) achieving low bit rates and low token rates. We propose Speech Diffusion To…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

SD-Eval: A Benchmark Dataset for Spoken Dialogue Understanding Beyond Words

NeurIPS 2024poster

Speech encompasses a wealth of information, including but not limited to content, paralinguistic, and environmental information. This comprehensive nature of speech significantly impacts communication and is crucial for human-computer interaction. Chat-Oriented Large Language Models (LLMs), known fo…

2023

Token2vec: A Joint Self-Supervised Pre-Training Framework Using Unpaired Speech and Text

ICASSP 2023accepted

Self-supervised pre-training has been successful in both text and speech processing. Speech and text offer different but complementary information. The question is whether we are able to perform a speech-text joint pre-training on unpaired speech and text. In this paper, we take the idea of self-sup…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Multi-View Self-Attention Based Transformer for Speaker Recognition

ICASSP 2022accepted

Initially developed for natural language processing (NLP), Transformer model is now widely used for speech processing tasks such as speaker recognition, due to its powerful sequence modeling capabilities. However, conventional self-attention mechanisms are originally designed for modeling textual se…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

SpeechT5: Unified-Modal Encoder-Decoder Pre-Training for Spoken Language Processing

ACL 2022long

Motivated by the success of T5 (Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer) in pre-trained natural language processing models, we propose a unified-modal SpeechT5 framework that explores the encoder-decoder pre-training for self-supervised speech/text representation learning. The SpeechT5 framework consists…

2022

SpeechUT: Bridging Speech and Text with Hidden-Unit for Encoder-Decoder Based Speech-Text Pre-training

EMNLP 2022main

The rapid development of single-modal pre-training has prompted researchers to pay more attention to cross-modal pre-training methods. In this paper, we propose a unified-modal speech-unit-text pre-training model, SpeechUT, to connect the representations of a speech encoder and a text decoder with a…