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Ning Cheng

37 accepted papers

2026

Rethinking LLM-as-a-Judge: Representation-as-a-Judge with Small Language Models via Semantic Capacity Asymmetry

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as reference-free evaluators via prompting, but this “LLM-as-a-Judge” paradigm is costly, opaque, and sensitive to prompt design. In this work, we investigate whether smaller models can serve as efficient evaluators by leveraging internal representations…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

STOLA: Self-Adaptive Touch-Language Framework for Tactile Commonsense Reasoning in Open-Ended Scenarios

AAAI 2026technical

This paper explores the challenges of integrating tactile sensing into intelligent systems for multimodal reasoning, particularly in enabling commonsense reasoning about the open-ended physical world. We identify two key challenges: modality discrepancy, where existing touch-language models often tr

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Dynamic Attention-Guided Context Decoding for Mitigating Context Faithfulness Hallucinations in Large Language Models

ACL 2025finding

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit Context Faithfulness Hallucinations, where outputs deviate from retrieved information due to incomplete context integration. Our analysis reveals a strong correlation between token-level uncertainty and hallucinations. We hypothesize that attention mechanis…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

EffectiveASR: A Single-Step Non-Autoregressive Mandarin Speech Recognition Architecture with High Accuracy and Inference Speed

ICASSP 2025accepted

Non-autoregressive (NAR) automatic speech recognition (ASR) models predict tokens independently and simultaneously, bringing high inference speed. However, there is still a gap in the accuracy of the NAR models compared to the autoregressive (AR) models. In this paper, we propose a single-step NAR A…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

GRASP: Replace Redundant Layers with Adaptive Singular Parameters for Efficient Model Compression

EMNLP 2025

Recent studies have demonstrated that many layers are functionally redundant in large language models (LLMs), enabling model compression by removing these layers to reduce inference cost. While such approaches can improve efficiency, indiscriminate layer pruning often results in significant performa

2025

Improving Contextual ASR with Enhanced Phrase-Level Representation Based on MCTC Loss

ICASSP 2025accepted

Contextual biasing is essential for addressing scenario-specific challenges in End-to-End (E2E) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. Prior contextual E2E ASR methods, such as the contextual bias with CPP Network, have utilized bias CTC loss for explicit supervision of bias tasks, However, the…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

LEF-TTS: Lightweight and Efficient End-to-End Text-to-Speech Synthesis With Multi-Stream Generator

ICASSP 2025accepted

Recently, the field of Text-to-speech synthesis has been predominantly characterized by end-to-end models, with the quality of speech generated by these models becoming increasingly comparable to that of human speech. In this work, we propose a Lightweight and Efficient Text-to-speech model, a fast…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Multi-Stage LLM Fine-Tuning with a Continual Learning Setting

NAACL 2025findings

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in knowledge-intensive applications. However, when adapting them to specific domains, we may encounter a multi-stage continuous learning scenario, especially in cases where domain knowledge evolves rapidly.This issue severe…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Self-Enhanced Reasoning Training: Activating Latent Reasoning in Small Models for Enhanced Reasoning Distillation

ICASSP 2025accepted

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly enhanced their reasoning abilities, enabling increasingly complex tasks. However, these capabilities often diminish in smaller, more computationally efficient models like GPT-2. Recent research shows that reasoning distillation…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Token-Level Contextual Network with Ladder-Shaped Attention for End-to-End ASR

ICASSP 2025accepted

Contextual automatic speech recognition (ASR) plays an increasingly important role in addressing the long-tail issues of general ASR. In the past, contextual ASR mainly focused on phrase-level discussions, providing a convenient way to handle biasing phrases. This paper introduces a new contextual n…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

CollabKG: A Learnable Human-Machine-Cooperative Information Extraction Toolkit for (Event) Knowledge Graph Construction

COLING 2024main

In order to construct or extend entity-centric and event-centric knowledge graphs (KG and EKG), the information extraction (IE) annotation toolkit is essential. However, existing IE toolkits have several non-trivial problems, such as not supporting multi-tasks, and not supporting automatic updates.…

2024

ED-TTS: Multi-Scale Emotion Modeling Using Cross-Domain Emotion Diarization for Emotional Speech Synthesis

ICASSP 2024accepted

Existing emotional speech synthesis methods often utilize an utterance-level style embedding extracted from reference audio, neglecting the inherent multi-scale property of speech prosody. We introduce ED-TTS, a multi-scale emotional speech synthesis model that leverages Speech Emotion Diarization (…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

EmoTalker: Emotionally Editable Talking Face Generation via Diffusion Model

ICASSP 2024accepted

In recent years, the field of talking faces generation has attracted considerable attention, with certain methods adept at generating virtual faces that convincingly imitate human expressions. However, existing methods face challenges related to limited generalization, particularly when dealing with…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

From Quantity to Quality: Boosting LLM Performance with Self-Guided Data Selection for Instruction Tuning

NAACL 2024long

In the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs), the balance between instruction data quality and quantity is a focal point. Recognizing this, we introduce a self-guided methodology for LLMs to autonomously discern and select cherry samples from open-source datasets, effectively minimizing manual curat…

2024

Learning Disentangled Speech Representations with Contrastive Learning and Time-Invariant Retrieval

ICASSP 2024accepted

Voice conversion refers to transferring speaker identity with well-preserved content. Better disentanglement of speech representations leads to better voice conversion. Recent studies have found that phonetic information from input audio has the potential ability to well represent content. Besides,…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Leveraging Biases in Large Language Models: "bias-kNN" for Effective Few-Shot Learning

ICASSP 2024accepted

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant promise in various applications, including zero-shot and few-shot learning. However, their performance can be hampered by inherent biases. Instead of traditionally sought methods that aim to minimize or correct these biases, this study introduces a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Superfiltering: Weak-to-Strong Data Filtering for Fast Instruction-Tuning

ACL 2024long

Instruction tuning is critical to improve LLMs but usually suffers from low-quality and redundant data. Data filtering for instruction tuning has proved important in improving both the efficiency and performance of the tuning process. But it also leads to extra cost and computation due to the involv…

2023

Dynamic Alignment Mask CTC: Improved Mask CTC With Aligned Cross Entropy

ICASSP 2023accepted

Because of predicting all the target tokens in parallel, the non-autoregressive models greatly improve the decoding efficiency of speech recognition compared with traditional autoregressive models. In this work, we present dynamic alignment Mask CTC, introducing two methods: (1) Aligned Cross Entrop…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Efficient Uncertainty Estimation with Gaussian Process for Reliable Dialog Response Retrieval

ICASSP 2023accepted

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable performance in retrieval-based dialogue systems, but they are shown to be ill calibrated. Though basic calibration methods like Monte Carlo Dropout and Ensemble can calibrate well, these methods are time-consuming in the training or inference stages. To…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Improving EEG-based Emotion Recognition by Fusing Time-Frequency and Spatial Representations

ICASSP 2023accepted

Using deep learning methods to classify EEG signals can accurately identify people’s emotions. However, existing studies have rarely considered the application of the information in another domain’s representations to feature selection in the time-frequency domain. We propose a classification networ…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Improving Music Genre Classification from multi-modal Properties of Music and Genre Correlations Perspective

ICASSP 2023accepted

Music genre classification has been widely studied in past few years for its various applications in music information retrieval. Previous works tend to perform unsatisfactorily, since those methods only use audio content or jointly use audio content and lyrics content inefficiently. In addition, as…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Learning Speech Representations with Flexible Hidden Feature Dimensions

ICASSP 2023accepted

Non-parallel many-to-many voice conversion is a kind of style transfer task in speech. Recently, AutoVC has been applied in this field as a popular solution, as it can achieve distribution-matching style transfer by training only the re- construction loss. However, in order to strike a good balance…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

On the Calibration and Uncertainty with Pólya-Gamma Augmentation for Dialog Retrieval Models

AAAI 2023technical

Deep neural retrieval models have amply demonstrated their power but estimating the reliability of their predictions remains challenging. Most dialog response retrieval models output a single score for a response on how relevant it is to a given question. However, the bad calibration of deep neural…

2023

PRCA: Fitting Black-Box Large Language Models for Retrieval Question Answering via Pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter

EMNLP 2023long main

The Retrieval Question Answering (ReQA) task employs the retrieval-augmented framework, composed of a retriever and generator. The generators formulate the answer based on the documents retrieved by the retriever. Incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs) as generators is beneficial due to their ad…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

QI-TTS: Questioning Intonation Control for Emotional Speech Synthesis

ICASSP 2023accepted

Recent expressive text to speech (TTS) models focus on synthesizing emotional speech, but some fine-grained styles such as intonation are neglected. In this paper, we propose QI-TTS which aims to better transfer and control intonation to further deliver the speaker’s questioning intention while tran…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

VQ-CL: Learning Disentangled Speech Representations with Contrastive Learning and Vector Quantization

ICASSP 2023accepted

Voice Conversion(VC) refers to converting the voice characteristics of audio to another one as it is said by other people. Recently, more and more studies have focused on disentangle-based VC, which separates the timbre and linguistic content information from an audio signal to effectively achieve V…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Avqvc: One-Shot Voice Conversion By Vector Quantization With Applying Contrastive Learning

ICASSP 2022accepted

Voice Conversion(VC) refers to changing the timbre of a speech while retaining the discourse content. Recently, many works have focused on disentangle-based learning techniques to separate the timbre and the linguistic content information from a speech signal. Once successful, voice conversion will…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

DRVC: A Framework of Any-to-Any Voice Conversion with Self-Supervised Learning

ICASSP 2022accepted

Any-to-any voice conversion problem aims to convert voices for source and target speakers, which are out of the training data. Previous works wildly utilize the disentangle-based models. The disentangle-based model assumes the speech consists of content and speaker style information and aims to unta…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

nnSpeech: Speaker-Guided Conditional Variational Autoencoder for Zero-Shot Multi-speaker text-to-speech

ICASSP 2022accepted

Multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS) using a few adaption data is a challenge in practical applications. To address that, we propose a zero-shot multi-speaker TTS, named nnSpeech, that could synthesis a new speaker voice without fine-tuning and using only one adaption utterance. Compared with using a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2021

Joint Intent Detection and Slot Filling Based on Continual Learning Model

ICASSP 2021accepted

Slot filling and intent detection have become a significant theme in the field of natural language understanding. Even though slot filling is intensively associated with intent detection, the characteristics of the information required for both tasks are different while most of those approaches may…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2021

LVCNet: Efficient Condition-Dependent Modeling Network for Waveform Generation

ICASSP 2021accepted

In this paper, we propose a novel conditional convolution network, named location-variable convolution, to model the dependencies of the waveform sequence. Different from the use of unified convolution kernels in WaveNet to capture the dependencies of arbitrary waveform, the location-variable convol…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2021

Unidirectional Memory-Self-Attention Transducer for Online Speech Recognition

ICASSP 2021accepted

Self-attention models have been successfully applied in end-to-end speech recognition systems, which greatly improve the performance of recognition accuracy. However, such attention-based models cannot be used in online speech recognition, because these models usually have to utilize a whole acousti…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2020

Aligntts: Efficient Feed-Forward Text-to-Speech System Without Explicit Alignment

ICASSP 2020accepted

Targeting at both high efficiency and performance, we propose AlignTTS to predict the mel-spectrum in parallel. AlignTTS is based on a Feed-Forward Transformer which generates mel-spectrum from a sequence of characters, and the duration of each character is determined by a duration predictor. Instea…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2020

GraphTTS: Graph-to-Sequence Modelling in Neural Text-to-Speech

ICASSP 2020accepted

This paper leverages the graph-to-sequence method in neural text-to-speech (GraphTTS), which maps the graph embedding of the input sequence to spectrograms. The graphical inputs consist of node and edge representations constructed from input texts. The encoding of these graphical inputs incorporates…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2019

Rodent Sleep Assessment with a Trainable Video-based Approach

ICASSP 2019accepted

Assessment of sleep can reveal healthy physiology and behaviour, which are essential to study diseases and treatment. The primary approaches to quantify sleep in animal models are using invasive methods that require implantation of electroencephalogram (EEG) and electromyogram (EMG) electrodes. Thos…

Cited by 0SourceScholar