Related papers: Speech Codec Probing from Semantic and Phonetic Pe…

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have remarkably enhanced performances on a variety of tasks in multiple languages. However, tokenizers in LLMs trained primarily on English-centric corpora often overly fragment a text…

In this work, we provide a systematic and comprehensive empirical comparison of pretrained multilingual language models versus their monolingual counterparts with regard to their monolingual task performance. We study a set of nine…

Tokenization - the practice of converting strings of characters from an alphabet into sequences of tokens over a vocabulary - is a critical step in the NLP pipeline. The use of token representations is widely credited with increased model…

As opposed to general English, many concepts in biomedical terminology have been designed in recent history by biomedical professionals with the goal of being precise and concise. This is often achieved by concatenating meaningful…

Human vision is able to compensate imperfections in sensory inputs from the real world by reasoning based on prior knowledge about the world. Machine learning has had a significant impact on computer vision due to its inherent ability in…

In the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), considerable attention has been given to the quality of training datasets. However, the role of tokenizers in the LLM training pipeline, particularly for multilingual models, has received…

Neural Speech Codecs face a fundamental trade-off at low bitrates: preserving acoustic fidelity often compromises semantic richness. To address this, we introduce SACodec, a novel codec built upon an asymmetric dual-quantizer that employs…

Tokenization plays a critical role in language modeling, yet existing approaches such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) or WordPiece operate purely on frequency statistics, ignoring the underlying semantic structure of text. This leads to…

Recent advances in generative AI have been largely driven by large language models (LLMs), deep neural networks that operate over discrete units called tokens. To represent text, the vast majority of LLMs use words or word fragments as the…

Real-time speech enhancement (SE) is essential to online speech communication. Causal SE models use only the previous context while predicting future information, such as phoneme continuation, may help performing causal SE. The phonetic…

Recent efforts target spoken language models (SLMs) that not only listen but also speak for more natural human-LLM interaction. Joint speech-text modeling is a promising direction to achieve this. However, the effectiveness of recent speech…

The question of what kinds of linguistic information are encoded in different layers of Transformer-based language models is of considerable interest for the NLP community. Existing work, however, has overwhelmingly focused on word-level…

Tokenization is an understudied and often neglected component of modern LLMs. Most published works use a single tokenizer for all experiments, often borrowed from another model, without performing ablations or analysis to optimize…

Large language models (LLM) have demonstrated the ability to understand human language by leveraging large amount of text data. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are often limited by available transcribed speech data and benefit…

Large language models (LLMs) have become proficient at solving a wide variety of tasks, including those involving multi-modal inputs. In particular, instantiating an LLM (such as LLaMA) with a speech encoder and training it on paired data…

Tokenization is a necessary component within the current architecture of many language mod-els, including the transformer-based large language models (LLMs) of Generative AI, yet its impact on the model's cognition is often overlooked. We…

Although paralinguistic cues are often considered the primary drivers of speech emotion recognition (SER), we investigate the role of lexical content extracted from speech and show that it can achieve competitive and in some cases higher…

Speech translation models are increasingly capable of preserving speech-specific information (e.g., speaker gender, prosody, and emphasis), yet evaluation metrics remain blind to such phenomena. We meta-evaluate both text- and speech-based…

Discretized representations of speech signals are efficient alternatives to continuous features for various speech applications, including automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech language models. However, these representations, such…

Tokenization is the first - and often underappreciated - layer of computation in language models. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enables transformer models to approximate recurrent computation by externalizing intermediate steps, we…