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Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to the long-dominant autoregressive (AR) paradigm, offering a parallelable decoding process that could yield greater efficiency. Yet, in practice, current open-source…

Language confusion -- where large language models (LLMs) generate unintended languages against the user's need -- remains a critical challenge, especially for English-centric models. We present the first mechanistic interpretability (MI)…

Large language models (LLMs) process entire input contexts indiscriminately, which is inefficient when the information required to answer a query is localized within the context. We present dynamic context cutoff, a novel method enabling…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has reached impressive accuracy for high-resource languages, yet its utility in linguistic fieldwork remains limited. Recordings collected in fieldwork contexts present unique challenges, including…

Autoregressive Transformers adopted in Large Language Models (LLMs) are hard to scale to long sequences. Despite several works trying to reduce their computational cost, most of LLMs still adopt attention layers between all pairs of tokens…

Spoken language understanding (SLU) is a fundamental task in the task-oriented dialogue systems. However, the inevitable errors from automatic speech recognition (ASR) usually impair the understanding performance and lead to error…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet aligning them efficiently and effectively with human expectations remains a critical challenge. This thesis advances LLM alignment by introducing novel…

Dysarthria, a common issue among stroke patients, severely impacts speech intelligibility. Inappropriate pauses are crucial indicators in severity assessment and speech-language therapy. We propose to extend a large-scale speech recognition…

Stuttering -- characterized by involuntary disfluencies such as blocks, prolongations, and repetitions -- is often misinterpreted by automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, resulting in elevated word error rates and making voice-driven…

Recently, deep end-to-end learning has been studied for intent classification in Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). However, end-to-end models require a large amount of speech data with intent labels, and highly optimized models are…

Natural Language Inference (NLI) models frequently rely on spurious correlations rather than semantic reasoning. Existing mitigation strategies often incur high annotation costs or trigger catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning. We…

Code-switching (CS) refers to the switching of languages within a speech signal and results in language confusion for automatic speech recognition (ASR). To address language confusion, we propose a language alignment loss (LAL) that aligns…

A central paradox in fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) is the frequent degradation of multi-attempt performance (Pass@k) despite improvements in single-attempt accuracy…

Large Language Model (LLM) based text-to-speech (TTS) systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling large speech datasets and generating natural speech for new speakers. However, LLM-based TTS models are not robust as the…

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have witnessed remarkable advancements, with the test-time scaling law consistently enhancing the reasoning capabilities. Through systematic evaluation and exploration of a diverse spectrum of…

Language models (LMs) have been commonly adopted to boost the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) particularly in domain adaptation tasks. Conventional way of LM training treats all the words in corpora equally, resulting in…

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their capacity to process long contexts. However, effectively utilizing this long context remains a challenge due to the issue of distraction, where irrelevant…

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) often suffer from audio-textual attention imbalance, prioritizing text over acoustic information, particularly in the multi-modal fusion layers of the Transformer architecture. This bias hinders their…

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based system that would automatically prescribe a hypothetical patient medication that may help the patient with their mental health-related speech disfluency, and adjust the medication and the…

LLMs serve as the backbone in SpeechLLMs, yet their behavior on spontaneous conversational input remains poorly understood. Conversational speech contains pervasive disfluencies -- interjections, edits, and parentheticals -- that are rare…