47 accepted papers
The integration of audio modality into Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) significantly expands their attack surface. Existing jailbreak paradigms predominantly treat audio as a carrier for malicious payloads, relying on semantic optimization, acoustic parameter control, or additive perturbation to…
Extending pre-trained text Large Language Models (LLMs)’s speech understanding or generation abilities by introducing various effective speech tokens has attracted great attention in the speech research community. However, building a unified speech understanding and generation model still faces the
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…
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…
Current Text-to-audio (TTA) models mainly use coarse text descriptions as inputs to generate audio, which hinders models from generating audio with fine-grained control of content and style. Some studies try to improve the granularity by incorporating additional frame-level conditions or control net…
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…
Multi-talker speech recognition (MTASR) faces unique challenges in disentangling and transcribing overlapping speech. To address these challenges, this paper investigates the role of Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) in speaker disentanglement when incorporated with Serialized Output Train…
Controlling text-to-speech (TTS) systems to synthesize speech with the prosodic characteristics expected by users has attracted much attention. To achieve controllability, current studies focus on two main directions: (1) using reference speech as prosody prompt to guide speech synthesis, and (2) us…
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…
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized various domains, bringing significant progress and new opportunities. Despite progress in speech-related tasks, LLMs have not been sufficiently explored in multi-talker scenarios. In this work, we present a pioneering effort to…
Empathetic dialogue is crucial for natural human-computer interaction, allowing the dialogue system to respond in a more personalized and emotionally aware manner, improving user satisfaction and engagement. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized dialogue generation by harn…
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
The neural codec language model (CLM) has demonstrated remarkable performance in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. However, troubled by "recency bias", CLM lacks sufficient attention to coarse-grained information at a higher temporal scale, often producing unnatural or even unintelligible speech. This…
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…
End-to-end multi-talker speech recognition has garnered great interest as an effective approach to directly transcribe overlapped speech from multiple speakers. Current methods typically adopt either 1) single-input multiple-output (SIMO) models with a branched encoder, or 2) single-input single-out…
Dysarthric speech reconstruction (DSR) aims to transform dysarthric speech into normal speech by improving the intelligibility and naturalness. This is a challenging task especially for patients with severe dysarthria and speaking in complex, noisy acoustic environments. To address these challenges,…
Zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis aims to clone any unseen speaker’s voice without adaptation parameters. By quantizing speech waveform into discrete acoustic tokens and modeling these tokens with the language model, recent language model-based TTS models show zero-shot speaker adaptation cap…
How can we perform computations over natural language representations to solve tasks that require symbolic and numeric reasoning? We propose natural language embedded programs (NLEP) as a unifying framework for addressing math/symbolic reasoning, natural language understanding, and instruction follo…
Making moral judgments is an essential step toward developing ethical AI systems. Prevalent approaches are mostly implemented in a bottom-up manner, which uses a large set of annotated data to train models based on crowd-sourced opinions about morality. These approaches have been criticized for pote…
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have exhibited impressive performance in modeling graph data as exemplified in various applications. Recently, the GNN calibration problem has attracted increasing attention, especially in cost-sensitive scenarios. Previous work has gained empirical insights on the issue…
The expressive quality of synthesized speech for audiobooks is limited by generalized model architecture and unbalanced style distribution in the training data. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a self-supervised style enhancing method with VQ-VAE-based pre-training for expressive a…
Dysarthric speech reconstruction (DSR) systems aim to automatically convert dysarthric speech into normal-sounding speech. The technology eases communication with speakers affected by the neuromotor disorder and enhances their social inclusion. NED-based (Neural Encoder-Decoder) systems have signifi…
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…
We propose unifying one-shot voice conversion and cloning into a single model that can be end-to-end optimized. To achieve this, we introduce a novel extension to a speech variational auto-encoder (VAE) that disentangles speech into content and speaker representations. Instead of using a fixed Gauss…
As a common way of emotion signaling via non-linguistic vocalizations, vocal burst (VB) plays an important role in daily social interaction. Understanding and modeling human vocal bursts are indispensable for developing robust and general artificial intelligence. Exploring computational approaches f…
Although automatic speech recognition (ASR) can perform well in common non-overlapping environments, sustaining performance in multi-talker overlapping speech recognition remains challenging. Recent research revealed that ASR model’s encoder captures different levels of information with different la…
With the global population aging rapidly, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is particularly prominent in older adults, which has an insidious onset and leads to a gradual, irreversible deterioration in cognitive domains (memory, communication, etc.). Speech-based AD detection opens up the possibility of wide…
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…
With the development of deep learning, end-to-end neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems have achieved significant improvements in high-quality speech synthesis. However, most of these systems are attention-based autoregressive models, resulting in slow synthesis speed and large model parameter sizes.…
Speaker Change Detection (SCD) is a task of determining the time boundaries between speech segments of different speakers. SCD system can be applied to many tasks, such as speaker diarization, speaker tracking, and transcribing audio with multiple speakers. Recent advancements in deep learning lead…
A leaderboard named Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark (SUPERB), which aims at benchmarking the performance of a shared self-supervised learning (SSL) speech model across various downstream speech tasks with minimal modification of architectures and a small amount of data, has fueled…
Deep neural networks have brought significant advancements to speech emotion recognition (SER). However, the architecture design in SER is mainly based on expert knowledge and empirical (trial-and-error) evaluations, which is time-consuming and resource intensive. In this paper, we propose to apply…
Dysarthric speech reconstruction (DSR), which aims to improve the quality of dysarthric speech, remains a challenge, not only because we need to restore the speech to be normal, but also must preserve the speaker’s identity. The speaker representation extracted by the speaker encoder (SE) optimized…
This paper describes our speaker diarization system submitted to the Multi-channel Multi-party Meeting Transcription (M2MeT) challenge, where Mandarin meeting data were recorded in multi-channel format for diarization and automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks. In these meeting scenarios, the unce…
This work investigates the vulnerability of Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) i-vector based speaker verification systems to adversarial attacks, and the transferability of adversarial samples crafted from GMM i-vector based systems to x-vector based systems. In detail, we formulate the GMM i-vector syst…
Synthesizing fluent code-switched (CS) speech with consistent voice using only monolingual corpora is still a challenging task, since language alternation seldom occurs during training and the speaker identity is directly correlated with language. In this paper, we present a bilingual phonetic poste…
Techniques for accent conversion (AC) aim to convert non-native to native accented speech. Conventional AC methods try to convert only the speaker identity of a native speaker's voice to that of the non-native accented target speaker, leaving the underlying content and pronunciations unchanged. This…
Dysarthric speech reconstruction (DSR) is a challenging task due to difficulties in repairing unstable prosody and correcting imprecise articulation. Inspired by the success of sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) based text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis and knowledge distillation (KD) techniques, this paper…
The hidden activation functions inside deep neural networks (DNNs) play a vital role in learning high level discriminative features and controlling the information flows to track longer history. However, the fixed model parameters used in standard DNNs can lead to over-fitting and poor generalizatio…
State-of-the-art text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis models can produce monolingual speech with high intelligibility and naturalness. However, when the models are applied to synthesize code-switched (CS) speech, the performance declines seriously. Conventionally, developing a CS TTS system requires multi…
Identifying the emotional state from speech is essential for the natural interaction of the machine with the speaker. However, extracting effective features for emotion recognition is difficult, as emotions are ambiguous. We propose a novel approach to learn discriminative features from variable len…
Recurrent neural networks, such as gated recurrent units (GRUs) and long short-term memory (LSTM), are widely used on acoustic modeling for speech synthesis. However, such sequential generating processes are not friendly to today’s massively parallel computing devices. We introduce a fully convoluti…
Recurrent neural network language models (RNNLMs) have become an increasing popular choice for state-of-the-art speech recognition systems. RNNLMs are normally trained by minimizing the cross entropy (CE) using the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm. However, the SGD method doesn't consider…
Speech emotion recognition (SER) is a fundamental step towards fluent human-machine interaction. One challenging problem in SER is obtaining utterance-level feature representation for classification. Recent works on SER have made significant progress by using spectrogram features and introducing neu…
Speaking style plays an important role in the expressivity of speech for communication. Hence speaking style is very important for synthetic speech as well. Speaking style adaptation faces the difficulty that the data of specific styles may be limited and difficult to obtain in large amounts. A poss…