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Zhaoheng Ni

13 accepted papers

2026

ICASSP 2026 URGENT Speech Enhancement Challenge

ICASSP 2026poster

The ICASSP 2026 URGENT Challenge advances the series by focusing on universal speech enhancement (SE) systems that handle diverse distortions, domains, and input conditions. This overview paper details the challenge's motivation, task definitions, datasets, baseline systems, evaluation protocols, an…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Adapting Whisper for Code-Switching through Encoding Refining and Language-Aware Decoding

ICASSP 2025accepted

Code-switching (CS) automatic speech recognition (ASR) faces challenges due to the language confusion resulting from accents, auditory similarity, and seamless language switches. Adaptation on the pre-trained multi-lingual model has shown promising performance for CS-ASR. In this paper, we adapt Whi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

An Empirical Study on the Impact of Positional Encoding in Transformer-Based Monaural Speech Enhancement

ICASSP 2024accepted

Transformer architecture has enabled recent progress in speech enhancement. Since Transformers are position-agostic, positional encoding is the de facto standard component used to enable Transformers to distinguish the order of elements in a sequence. However, it remains unclear how positional encod…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Folding Attention: Memory and Power Optimization for On-Device Transformer-Based Streaming Speech Recognition

ICASSP 2024accepted

Transformer-based models excel in speech recognition. Existing efforts to optimize Transformer inference, typically for long-context applications, center on simplifying attention score calculations. However, streaming speech recognition models usually process a limited number of tokens each time, ma…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Less Peaky and More Accurate CTC Forced Alignment by Label Priors

ICASSP 2024accepted

Connectionist temporal classification (CTC) models are known to have peaky output distributions. Such behavior is not a problem for automatic speech recognition (ASR), but it can cause inaccurate forced alignments (FA), especially at finer granularity, e.g., phoneme level. This paper aims at allevia…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

On the Open Prompt Challenge in Conditional Audio Generation

ICASSP 2024accepted

Text-to-audio generation (TTA) produces audio from a text description, learning from pairs of audio samples and hand-annotated text. However, commercializing audio generation is challenging as user-input prompts are often under-specified when compared to text descriptions used to train TTA models. I…

Cited by 6SourceScholar
2024

Stack-and-Delay: A New Codebook Pattern for Music Generation

ICASSP 2024accepted

Language modeling based music generation relies on discrete representations of audio frames. An audio frame (e.g. 20ms) is typically represented by a set of discrete codes (e.g. 4) computed by a neural codec. Autoregressive decoding typically generates a few thousands of codes per song, which is pro…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Ripple Sparse Self-Attention for Monaural Speech Enhancement

ICASSP 2023accepted

The use of Transformer represents a recent success in speech enhancement. However, as its core component, self-attention suffers from quadratic complexity, which is computationally prohibited for long speech recordings. Moreover, it allows each time frame to attend to all time frames, neglecting the…

Cited by 10SourceScholar
2023

Torchaudio-Squim: Reference-Less Speech Quality and Intelligibility Measures in Torchaudio

ICASSP 2023accepted

Measuring quality and intelligibility of a speech signal is usually a critical step in development of speech processing systems. To enable this, a variety of metrics to measure quality and intelligibility under different assumptions have been developed. Through this paper, we introduce tools and a s…

Cited by 124SourceScholar
2022

Time-Frequency Attention for Monaural Speech Enhancement

ICASSP 2022accepted

Most studies on speech enhancement generally don’t explicitly consider the energy distribution of speech in time-frequency (T-F) representation, which is important for accurate prediction of mask or spectra. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective T-F attention (TFA) module, where a…

Cited by 35SourceScholar
2022

Torchaudio: Building Blocks for Audio and Speech Processing

ICASSP 2022accepted

This document describes version 0.10 of TorchAudio: building blocks for machine learning applications in the audio and speech processing domain. The objective of TorchAudio is to accelerate the development and deployment of machine learning applications for researchers and engineers by providing off…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Towards Low-Distortion Multi-Channel Speech Enhancement: The ESPNET-Se Submission to the L3DAS22 Challenge

ICASSP 2022accepted

This paper describes our submission to the L3DAS22 Challenge Task 1, which consists of speech enhancement with 3D Ambisonic microphones. The core of our approach combines Deep Neural Network (DNN) driven complex spectral mapping with linear beamformers such as the multi-frame multi-channel Wiener fi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar