Related papers: Efficient Implementation of the Room Simulator for…

Reinforcement learning (RL) workloads take a notoriously long time to train due to the large number of samples collected at run-time from simulators. Unfortunately, cluster scale-up approaches remain expensive, and commonly used CPU…

Most deep neural networks deployed today are trained using GPUs via high-level frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch. This paper describes changes we made to the GPGPU-Sim simulator to enable it to run PyTorch by running PTX kernels…

Recent transformer-based ASR models have achieved word-error rates (WER) below 4%, surpassing human annotator accuracy, yet they demand extensive server resources, contributing to significant carbon footprints. The traditional server-based…

We introduce Air Learning, an open-source simulator, and a gym environment for deep reinforcement learning research on resource-constrained aerial robots. Equipped with domain randomization, Air Learning exposes a UAV agent to a diverse set…

We present a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based room impulse response generator (IR-GAN) for generating realistic synthetic room impulse responses (RIRs). IR-GAN extracts acoustic parameters from captured real-world RIRs and uses…

This report details MERL's system for room impulse response (RIR) estimation submitted to the Generative Data Augmentation Workshop at ICASSP 2025 for Augmenting RIR Data (Task 1) and Improving Speaker Distance Estimation (Task 2). We first…

Recent speaker verification (SV) systems have shown a trend toward adopting deeper speaker embedding extractors. Although deeper and larger neural networks can significantly improve performance, their substantial memory requirements hinder…

Achieving robust speech separation for overlapping speakers in various acoustic environments with noise and reverberation remains an open challenge. Although existing datasets are available to train separators for specific scenarios, they…

The scarcity of large-scale classroom speech data has hindered the development of AI-driven speech models for education. Classroom datasets remain limited and not publicly available, and the absence of dedicated classroom noise or Room…

Creating Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems that are robust and resilient to classroom conditions is paramount to the development of AI tools to aid teachers and students. In this work, we study the efficacy of continued pretraining…

Room Impulse Responses (RIRs) enable realistic acoustic simulation, with applications ranging from multimedia production to speech data augmentation. However, acquiring high-quality real-world RIRs is labor-intensive, and data scarcity…

We present results from Alexa speech teams on semi-supervised learning (SSL) of acoustic models (AM) with experiments spanning over 3000 hours of GPU time, making our study one of the largest of its kind. We discuss SSL for AMs in a small…

State-of-the-art deep-learning-based voice activity detectors (VADs) are often trained with anechoic data. However, real acoustic environments are generally reverberant, which causes the performance to significantly deteriorate. To mitigate…

The room impulse response (RIR) encodes, among others, information about the distance of an acoustic source from the sensors. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been shown to be able to extract that information for acoustic distance…

Neural language models (LMs) have been proved to significantly outperform classical n-gram LMs for language modeling due to their superior abilities to model long-range dependencies in text and handle data sparsity problems. And recently,…

Rendering immersive spatial audio in virtual reality (VR) and video games demands a fast and accurate generation of room impulse responses (RIRs) to recreate auditory environments plausibly. However, the conventional methods for simulating…

With the growing demand for deploying deep learning models to the "edge", it is paramount to develop techniques that allow to execute state-of-the-art models within very tight and limited resource constraints. In this work we propose a…

We present a frontend for improving robustness of automatic speech recognition (ASR), that jointly implements three modules within a single model: acoustic echo cancellation, speech enhancement, and speech separation. This is achieved by…

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been demonstrated to outperform many traditional machine learning algorithms in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). In this paper, we show that a large improvement in the accuracy of deep speech models can…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) trains agents to learn optimal behavior by maximizing reward signals from experience datasets. However, RL training often faces memory limitations, leading to execution latencies and prolonged training times. To…