Related papers: Benchmarking Children's ASR with Supervised and Se…

Speech foundation models, trained on vast datasets, have opened unique opportunities in addressing challenging low-resource speech understanding, such as child speech. In this work, we explore the capabilities of speech foundation models on…

Adapting pretrained language models to novel domains, such as clinical applications, traditionally involves retraining their entire set of parameters. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques for fine-tuning language models…

Self-supervised models for speech processing emerged recently as popular foundation blocks in speech processing pipelines. These models are pre-trained on unlabeled audio data and then used in speech processing downstream tasks such as…

Speech impairments resulting from congenital disorders, such as cerebral palsy, down syndrome, or apert syndrome, as well as acquired brain injuries due to stroke, traumatic accidents, or tumors, present major challenges to automatic speech…

Text and vision foundation models can perform many tasks in a zero-shot setting, a desirable property that enables these systems to be applied in general and low-resource settings. There has been far less work, however, on the zero-shot…

Unsupervised and self-supervised learning methods have leveraged unlabelled data to improve the pretrained models. However, these methods need significantly large amount of unlabelled data and the computational cost of training models with…

Automatic detection of speaker confidence is critical for adaptive computing but remains constrained by limited labelled data and the subjectivity of paralinguistic annotations. This paper proposes a semi-supervised hybrid framework that…

We develop automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for stories told by Afrikaans and isiXhosa preschool children. Oral narratives provide a way to assess children's language development before they learn to read. We consider a range of…

Reasoning has emerged as the next major frontier for language models (LMs), with rapid advances from both academic and industrial labs. However, this progress often outpaces methodological rigor, with many evaluations relying on…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a standard approach to adapting large language models (LLMs) to new domains. In this work, we improve the statistical efficiency of SFT by selecting an informative subset of training examples. Specifically,…

In this paper, Whisper, a large-scale pre-trained model for automatic speech recognition, is proposed to apply to speaker verification. A partial multi-scale feature aggregation (PMFA) approach is proposed based on a subset of Whisper…

The adaptation of large language models (LLMs) to specialized reasoning tasks is fundamentally constrained by computational resources. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have emerged as a powerful solution, yet the landscape of…

In this work, we present the first study addressing automatic speech recognition (ASR) for children in an online learning setting. This is particularly important for both child-centric applications and the privacy protection of minors,…

This paper explores the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems to improve transcription accuracy. The increasing sophistication of LLMs, with their in-context learning capabilities and…

Speech emotion recognition (SER) has made significant strides with the advent of powerful self-supervised learning (SSL) models. However, the generalization of these models to diverse languages and emotional expressions remains a challenge.…

Foundation models have revolutionized artificial intelligence by providing robust, versatile architectures pre-trained on large-scale datasets. However, adapting these massive models to specific downstream tasks requires fine-tuning, which…

In this study, we aim to explore efficient tuning methods for speech self-supervised learning. Recent studies show that self-supervised learning (SSL) can learn powerful representations for different speech tasks. However, fine-tuning…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) models often experience performance degradation due to data domain shifts introduced at test time, a challenge that is further amplified for child speakers. Test-time adaptation (TTA) methods have shown…

Recent studies have augmented large language models (LLMs) with speech capabilities, leading to the development of speech language models (SpeechLMs). Earlier SpeechLMs focused on single-turn speech-based question answering (QA), where user…

Multilingual speech processing with self-supervised or supervised pre-trained Speech Foundation Models (SFM) has achieved strong performance on tasks like Language Identification (LID) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, these…