Related papers: SLAM: A Unified Encoder for Speech and Language Mo…

Text-only and semi-supervised training based on audio-only data has gained popularity recently due to the wide availability of unlabeled text and speech data. In this work, we propose incorporating text-only and semi-supervised training…

Currently, large language models (LLMs) predominantly focus on the text modality. To enable more natural human-AI interaction, speech LLMs are emerging, but building effective end-to-end speech LLMs remains challenging due to limited data…

Large-scale pretraining and task-specific fine-tuning is now the standard methodology for many tasks in computer vision and natural language processing. Recently, a multitude of methods have been proposed for pretraining vision and language…

Pre-trained language models (PTLM) have achieved impressive results in a range of natural language understanding (NLU) and generation (NLG) tasks. However, current pre-training objectives such as masked token prediction (for BERT-style…

This paper investigates discrete unit representations in Speech Language Models (SLMs), focusing on optimizing speech modeling during continual pre-training. In this paper, we systematically examine how model architecture, data…

Language model (LM) pre-training has resulted in impressive performance and sample efficiency on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, it remains unclear how to best use pre-trained LMs for generation tasks such as abstractive…

Unsupervised single-channel overlapped speech recognition is one of the hardest problems in automatic speech recognition (ASR). Permutation invariant training (PIT) is a state of the art model-based approach, which applies a single neural…

Multiple pre-training objectives fill the vacancy of the understanding capability of single-objective language modeling, which serves the ultimate purpose of pre-trained language models (PrLMs), generalizing well on a mass of scenarios.…

Spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks involve diverse skills that probe the information extraction, classification and/or generation capabilities of models. In this setting, task-specific training data may not always be available. While…

Self-supervised Transformer based models, such as wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT, have produced significant improvements over existing approaches to automatic speech recognition (ASR). This is evident in the performance of the wav2vec 2.0 based…

Self-attention network (SAN) can benefit significantly from the bi-directional representation learning through unsupervised pretraining paradigms such as BERT and XLNet. In this paper, we present an XLNet-like pretraining scheme…

Recent studies have shown that the benefits provided by self-supervised pre-training and self-training (pseudo-labeling) are complementary. Semi-supervised fine-tuning strategies under the pre-training framework, however, remain…

Speech foundation models trained with self-supervised learning produce generic speech representations that support a wide range of speech processing tasks. When further adapted with supervised learning, these models can achieve strong…

Recent studies find existing self-supervised speech encoders contain primarily acoustic rather than semantic information. As a result, pipelined supervised automatic speech recognition (ASR) to large language model (LLM) systems achieve…

Recent speech language models (SLMs) typically incorporate pre-trained speech models to extend the capabilities from large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we propose a Descriptive Speech-Text Alignment approach that leverages speech…

We present our journey in training a speech language model for Wolof, an underrepresented language spoken in West Africa, and share key insights. We first emphasize the importance of collecting large-scale, spontaneous, high-quality…

Training Transformer-based models demands a large amount of data, while obtaining aligned and labelled data in multimodality is rather cost-demanding, especially for audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR). Thus it makes a lot of sense to…

In this paper, we propose a novel strategy for text-independent speaker identification system: Multi-Label Training (MLT). Instead of the commonly used one-to-one correspondence between the speech and the speaker label, we divide all the…

Recent work has shown that it is possible to train an $\textit{unsupervised}$ automatic speech recognition (ASR) system using only unpaired audio and text. Existing unsupervised ASR methods assume that no labeled data can be used for…

Whereas conventional spoken language understanding (SLU) systems map speech to text, and then text to intent, end-to-end SLU systems map speech directly to intent through a single trainable model. Achieving high accuracy with these…